The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 131. Maps of Meaning 3： Marionettes & Individuals (Part 2)

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00:00:57.000 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 18 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:03.000 I'm Westwood One Podcast Network's Joey Salvia, and I help produce this series.

00:01:09.000 We thank you for joining us for these 2017 lectures based on Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

00:01:18.000 This week, we present Part 2 of a three-part lecture called Marionettes and Individuals.

00:01:24.000 In this lecture, Jordan continues with the analysis of the Disney film Pinocchio to illustrate the manner in which great mythological or archetypal themes inform and permeate both the creation and the understanding of narratives.

00:01:38.000 We'll be back in a moment with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

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00:02:53.000 Okay, so the last time we were here, we got about maybe a third of the way through this story,

00:03:15.000 this story of Pinocchio and the transformation of a marionette into something hypothetically real.

00:03:22.000 And I'm gonna backtrack a few slides, and it'll get us into it again.

00:03:28.000 So you remember that the Blue Fairy, so I would say the benevolent element of Mother Nature in the schemata that we're going to use to investigate mythology,

00:03:39.000 had more or less been allowed her entrance because Geppetto was a good guy and because he wished for the right thing.

00:03:46.000 And so, in some sense, here's a way of thinking about that.

00:03:50.000 You know, genetic studies, genetic slash environmental studies of children's temperament have revealed something quite interesting,

00:03:57.000 which is that the shared environment that children have within a family, so that would be what's the same about your environment and your brother's environment, to say,

00:04:08.000 doesn't have that much effect on your temperament or his temperament.

00:04:13.000 Because the presumption always was that within a family there is a shared environment, right?

00:04:17.000 That something was common about the environment to every child within that environment.

00:04:22.000 But there isn't much of a shared environmental effect on temperament.

00:04:26.000 So then you could say, well, that makes it appear as though parenting isn't that relevant in relationship to the development of temperament.

00:04:33.000 But you could also suggest something else.

00:04:37.000 I could suggest that if parenting is occurring properly, the effect of the shared environment should be very close to zero.

00:04:44.000 And the reason for that is that you establish an individual relationship with each child.

00:04:50.000 And the environment is actually a microenvironment that's composed of your observations of your child and that specific child's interaction with you.

00:04:58.000 And to some degree, if there's a shared environment, that means that you're enforcing the same principles on every child.

00:05:04.000 And so my suspicions are, although I don't know this because, and the research hasn't been done,

00:05:09.000 that in bad families there's a shared environmental effect, but in good families that minimizes.

00:05:15.000 And so that lets the child's biological predisposition, roughly, manifest itself with support and in some positive manner.

00:05:24.000 Well, I don't want to extend the analogy too far, but you could imagine that, and this is what this film proposes,

00:05:33.000 is that if you aim properly in relationship to your child, what you're trying to do is to establish an individual relationship

00:05:39.000 and to allow them to move towards whatever their particular expression of individuality happens to be.

00:05:46.000 And that's, well, that would be the same as allowing nature to take its course in some sense, at least nature in its positive guise,

00:05:52.000 and that's exactly what happens here.

00:05:54.000 Now, the other thing that happens, of course, is that the cricket, for reasons that aren't clear precisely,

00:06:01.000 is knighted by the blue fairy and serves as Pinocchio's conscience.

00:06:07.000 Although he isn't very good at it, which is a very peculiar thing, and quite a marked point that the film is making,

00:06:14.000 that that conscience actually has something to learn too.

00:06:17.000 And there's actually a Freudian element to that, you know, because Freud thought of the superego as the internalization, roughly speaking, of the father.

00:06:26.000 And it could be very severe, the superego, so it'd be like a really strict father, really tyrannical father inside your head.

00:06:32.000 Although I think it's better to think about the superego as the internalized representation of society at large,

00:06:39.000 mediated to some degree through your parents, because it's not as if your father, even assuming he's tyrannical,

00:06:45.000 is the inventor of all those tyrannical rules.

00:06:48.000 He's the propagator of them, but he's actually a proxy voice, even if it's just for the harsh side of society.

00:06:55.000 He's a proxy voice for society, and because we're social creatures, the utility of having an internal social voice to guide you,

00:07:04.000 although, again, you seem to be able to follow it or not follow it, which I also find spectacularly interesting,

00:07:10.000 because obviously if it was an unerring guide, you could just follow it.

00:07:14.000 And if it was an unerring guide, well, you wouldn't need free will either,

00:07:18.000 because you could just act out the dictates of this internal representation, and that isn't what you do.

00:07:24.000 So, anyways, the proposition here is that the conscience exists, but it's a relatively flawed entity,

00:07:30.000 and it needs to be modified as well by nature, which is quite interesting, because the blue fairy knights him,

00:07:37.000 because you also might think of the conscience as only something that's socially constructed, right?

00:07:42.000 Which is the more typical viewpoint, but I don't buy that for a second, because I believe firmly,

00:07:48.000 and I think the Piagetian interpretation of child development more or less bears this out,

00:07:54.000 is that there are parameters within which conscience has to operate, and it's sort of like this.

00:08:02.000 It's the same parameters that govern fair play, we'll say that.

00:08:06.000 And so you can say there's fair play within a game, and there's fair play across sets of games.

00:08:12.000 And the set of games is pretty much indistinguishable from the actual environment, right?

00:08:18.000 If you think about all the things you do as nested games, at some point,

00:08:22.000 the spread of that is large enough so it encompasses everything you do, which includes the environment.

00:08:28.000 And so I believe that you're adapted to the set of all possible games, roughly speaking,

00:08:34.000 all possible playable games, something like that.

00:08:37.000 And that you know the rules for that, which is why we talked about this a little bit,

00:08:41.000 why you're so good at identifying cheaters.

00:08:43.000 You have a module for that, according to the evolutionary psychologists.

00:08:46.000 And not only do you identify them, but you really remember them.

00:08:50.000 It really sticks in your mind.

00:08:52.000 And there's other evidence, too.

00:08:53.000 So one piece of evidence that I love, I think it's so...

00:08:57.000 Well, there's a couple.

00:08:58.000 One I would derive from Franz de Waal, who's a famous primatologist,

00:09:01.000 and he studied the prototype morality that emerges in chimpanzees.

00:09:07.000 And it's very much nested in their dominance structures.

00:09:10.000 You know, because you could think of morality, in some sense,

00:09:13.000 as the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates, right?

00:09:18.000 And so you could say, well, the biggest, ugliest, meanest chimp,

00:09:21.000 and the male dominance hierarchies in chimps seem to be the predominant ones,

00:09:24.000 although the females also have a dominance hierarchy in it.

00:09:26.000 It's not quite so clear in bonobos, which seem to be more female-dominated.

00:09:31.000 But in any case, the primary chimp dominance structure is male.

00:09:36.000 And you could think, well, it's like the caveman chimp who's biggest and toughest,

00:09:40.000 who necessarily rules and who rules longest.

00:09:43.000 But that isn't what de Waal found.

00:09:45.000 See, the problem with being mean, let's say, and not negotiating your social landscape,

00:09:54.000 and not trading reciprocal favors, is that no matter how powerful you are as an individual,

00:09:59.000 two individuals, three-quarters of your power can do you in.

00:10:04.000 And that happens with the chimps fairly regularly.

00:10:07.000 If the guy on top is too tyrannical and doesn't make social connections,

00:10:12.000 then weaker chimps, males, make good social connections.

00:10:15.000 And when he's not in such good shape, they take him down, and viciously, too.

00:10:19.000 De Waal has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of, let's call it regicide,

00:10:25.000 among the chimpanzee troops that he studied, mostly in the Arnhem Zoo.

00:10:29.000 They have a big troop there that's been there a long time.

00:10:33.000 But he's very interested in prototypical morality.

00:10:36.000 And here's some other examples of prototypical morality emerging among animals.

00:10:40.000 There's many of them.

00:10:41.000 But one is, you know, if two wolves have a dominance dispute,

00:10:45.000 again, that would be more likely among the male wolves.

00:10:47.000 But it doesn't really matter.

00:10:49.000 They basically display their size, and they grow ferociously and puff up their hair so they look bigger.

00:10:54.000 And, you know, you can see cats do that when they go into fight or flight, right?

00:10:58.000 Not only do they puff up, including their tail, but they stand sideways.

00:11:02.000 And the reason they do that is because they look bigger, right?

00:11:05.000 Because they're trying to put out the most intimidating possible front.

00:11:08.000 So anyways, if two wolves are going at it, what they're really trying to do is to size each other up.

00:11:13.000 And they're trying to scare each other into backing off, fundamentally.

00:11:17.000 Because, see, the worst case scenario is like, you're wolf number one, and I'm wolf number two.

00:11:23.000 And we tear each other to shreds, but I win.

00:11:25.000 But I'm so damaged after that that wolf number three comes in and takes me out.

00:11:29.000 So, like, there's a big cost to be paid even for victory in a dominance dispute if it degenerates into violence.

00:11:35.000 And animals, and human beings, but animals in particular, have evolved very, very specific mechanisms to escalate dominance disputes towards violence step by step so that the victor doesn't risk incapacitating himself by winning.

00:11:54.000 So what happens with the wolves is that, you know, they growl at each other in posture and display, and maybe they even snap at each other.

00:12:01.000 But the probability that they're going to get into a full-fledged fight is pretty low.

00:12:05.000 And what happens is one of the wolves backs off and flips over and shows his neck.

00:12:09.000 And that basically means, all right, tear it out, you know.

00:12:12.000 And the other wolf says, of course he doesn't, well, you're kind of an idiot, and you're not that strong, but we might need you to take down a moose in the future.

00:12:20.000 And so, you know, despite your patheticness, I won't tear out your throat.

00:12:24.000 And then they've established their dominance position.

00:12:26.000 And then from then on, at least for some substantial period of time, the subordinate wolf gives way to the dominant wolf.

00:12:33.000 But at least the subordinate wolf is alive, and, you know, he might be dominant over other wolves.

00:12:37.000 And so everyone in the whole hierarchy has sorted that out either through mock combat or through combat itself.

00:12:44.000 And, you know, the low-ranking members aren't in the best possible position, but at least they're not getting their heads torn off every second of their existence.

00:12:53.000 And so there's even some utility in the stability of the dominance hierarchy for the low-ranking members.

00:12:58.000 Because at least they're not getting pounded, they're getting threatened, which is way better.

00:13:03.000 I mean, it's not good, but it's way better than actual combat.

00:13:06.000 And then there's the example of rats, which I love.

00:13:09.000 This is Jak Panksepp's work, and he wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which I would highly, highly recommend.

00:13:15.000 I have a list of readings, recommended readings, on my website.

00:13:18.000 It's a brilliant book, and he's a brilliant psychologist, really.

00:13:21.000 One of the top psychologists, as far as I'm concerned, both theoretically and experimentally.

00:13:27.000 A real genius, huh?

00:13:29.000 He's the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them.

00:13:32.000 They laugh ultrasonically, so you can't actually hear them.

00:13:35.000 But if you record it and slow it down, then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an eraser,

00:13:40.000 which is sort of like their mother's tongue.

00:13:42.000 It's often what lab people use as a substitute for the licking of the little rat by the mother.

00:13:47.000 So, and he discovered the play circuit in mammals, which is like a major deal, right?

00:13:52.000 He should get a Nobel Prize for that.

00:13:54.000 That's a big deal, to discover an entire motivational circuit whose existence no one had really predicted,

00:14:00.000 you know, apart from the fact that obviously mammals play.

00:14:03.000 And even lizards, maybe.

00:14:05.000 Some of the more social lizards seem to play, you know.

00:14:08.000 So, anyhow, what Panksepp observed, and I think this is a brilliant piece of science,

00:14:13.000 is that, first of all, juvenile male rats, in particular, like to rough and tumble play.

00:14:19.000 They like to wrestle, and they actually pin each other, just like little kids do.

00:14:23.000 Or like adult wrestlers do.

00:14:25.000 They pin their shoulders down, and that basically means you win.

00:14:28.000 And so, okay, so that's pretty cool.

00:14:30.000 But what's even cooler, I think, well, there's three things.

00:14:33.000 One is, the rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur.

00:14:39.000 And so that's one of the scientific ways of testing an animal's motivation, right?

00:14:43.000 So imagine you have a starving rat, and it knows that it's got food down the end of a corridor.

00:14:49.000 You can put a little spring on its tail, and measure how hard it pulls, and that gives you an indication of its motivational force.

00:14:55.000 Now, imagine the starving rat that's trying to get to some food, and you have a little spring on its tail, and you waft in some cat odor.

00:15:02.000 So now that rat is starving and wants to get out of there.

00:15:06.000 He's going to try to pull even farther towards the food.

00:15:09.000 So getting away plus getting forward are separate motivational systems, and if you can add them together, it's real potent.

00:15:15.000 And part of the reason why in the future authoring exercise that you guys are going to do as the class progresses, you're asked to outline the place you'd like to end up, which is your desired future.

00:15:25.000 And also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart, is so that your anxiety chases you, and your approach systems pull you forward.

00:15:35.000 You're maximally motivated then.

00:15:37.000 And it's important, because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue, right?

00:15:43.000 And that's very common.

00:15:45.000 And so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward, but it makes you weak because you're afraid.

00:15:50.000 You want to get your fear behind you, pushing you.

00:15:53.000 And so what you want to be is more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them.

00:15:59.000 It's very, very helpful.

00:16:00.000 And lots of times in life, and this is something really worth knowing, and this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult, is you don't get to pick the best thing.

00:16:10.000 You get to pick your poison.

00:16:12.000 You have two bad choices, and you get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through.

00:16:17.000 And every choice has a bit of that element in it.

00:16:19.000 And so if you know that, it's really freeing.

00:16:22.000 Because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking, well, maybe there's a good solution to this, you know, compared to the bad solution.

00:16:28.000 It's like, no, no, sometimes there's just risky solution one and risky solution two.

00:16:34.000 And sometimes both of them are really bad, but you at least get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through.

00:16:40.000 And that actually makes quite a bit of difference, because you're also facing it voluntarily then, instead of it chasing you.

00:16:46.000 And that is an entirely different psychophysiological response.

00:16:51.000 Challenge versus threat, it's not the same, even if the magnitude of the problem is the same.

00:16:57.000 And so putting yourself in a challenging, let's call it mind frame, you can't just do that by magic.

00:17:02.000 Putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much easier on you psychophysiologically, because you don't produce, you don't go into the generalized stress response to the same degree.

00:17:12.000 And you're activating your exploratory and seeking systems, which are dopaminergically mediated, and that involve positive emotion.

00:17:19.000 So, if you can face something voluntarily, rather than having it chase you, it's way better for you psychophysiologically.

00:17:26.000 So, that's partly why, well, it's worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair, instead of waiting for it to come and eat you.

00:17:34.000 So, and especially when you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair, you might find it when it's a baby, instead of a full-fledged bloody monster that is definitely gonna take you down.

00:17:45.000 And so that's part of the reason why, well, there's a whole bunch of things that emerge out of that observation, like, don't avoid small problems that you know are there.

00:17:56.000 Face them, because they'll grow into big problems all by themselves.

00:18:01.000 And you can think about, imagine the tax department sends you a notification.

00:18:05.000 You owe them, like, $300.

00:18:07.000 Well, it's, you know, that's annoying.

00:18:10.000 Maybe you don't even wanna open the letter.

00:18:12.000 Or maybe if you do, you just put it on the shelf.

00:18:14.000 But that damn thing doesn't just sit there like a piece of paper on the shelf, right?

00:18:18.000 You ignore that for five or six years, it's gonna become attached to all sorts of horrible things.

00:18:23.000 And if you ignore it long enough, you get the idea.

00:18:26.000 It's gonna turn into something that is completely unlike the little piece of paper that it's written on.

00:18:31.000 And many, many problems in life are like that.

00:18:34.000 You'll see that they pop their ugly little head up, and you know.

00:18:39.000 And you might wanna turn away.

00:18:40.000 You might not want to think about it.

00:18:43.000 Which is the easiest way of turning away, right?

00:18:45.000 You just don't attend to it.

00:18:46.000 It's not like you repress it or anything like that.

00:18:49.000 You just fail to attend to it.

00:18:51.000 And that's a really, as a long-term strategy, it's dismal.

00:18:55.000 It's also something, I think, that's more characteristic of people who are high in neuroticism and high in agreeableness.

00:19:01.000 Because agreeable people don't like conflict.

00:19:03.000 And people who are high in neuroticism, who are high in negative emotion, are hit harder per unit of uncertainty or threat.

00:19:10.000 And so, you know, and that's partly why in psychotherapy, a lot of times the people you see need assertiveness training.

00:19:16.000 So that would be the opposite of agreeableness.

00:19:18.000 Or they need to help get their anxiety and emotional pain under control.

00:19:22.000 Those are not the only reasons.

00:19:24.000 There's antisocial behavior, but you can't fix that in therapy, in all likelihood.

00:19:27.000 There's alcoholism.

00:19:28.000 There's lots and lots of other reasons.

00:19:30.000 But those are two major reasons.

00:19:32.000 So anyways, there is a... that was all to tell you that... oh yes, back to the rats.

00:19:38.000 Okay, the rats are pulling on the... you can measure rat motivation by how hard they pull on the spring, let's say.

00:19:44.000 And they're more motivated if they're running away and running towards, but let's go back to play.

00:19:49.000 So you can take juvenile rats who haven't been able to play for a while.

00:19:52.000 Maybe they've been isolated.

00:19:54.000 Or maybe they just haven't been able to engage in physical activity, like many school children that you might be thinking about.

00:20:01.000 Neither allowed to play, nor allowed to engage in physical activity.

00:20:05.000 And there's a reason I'm telling you that.

00:20:07.000 So anyways, you get one of these little rats, and you can measure how hard he wants... how hard he'll pull to go out and play.

00:20:12.000 Or how many buttons he'll push, you know.

00:20:14.000 And that gives you an indication of his motivation.

00:20:16.000 So anyways, you can see that a play-deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than a non-play-deprived juvenile rat.

00:20:24.000 And so you can infer that the rat wants to go play.

00:20:29.000 And, you know, you do that.

00:20:31.000 You do the same measurement with everyone around you.

00:20:33.000 If they want to do something, you're going to poke and prod at them to see what sort of things they're willing to overcome in order to go and do that.

00:20:41.000 You'll object, even if you don't really object.

00:20:43.000 It's like, it's a measurement device.

00:20:45.000 And if they're willing to overcome a bunch of your objections, then you think, oh, well, maybe they really want to.

00:20:51.000 And that's another thing to really know.

00:20:53.000 If there's something you want, you need about five arguments about why you want it.

00:20:59.000 Because the probability that the person who's opposing you will have five arguments about why you shouldn't have it is very low.

00:21:05.000 They just won't have thought it through enough.

00:21:07.000 So the other thing that happens in the future authoring exercise is that you're asked to articulate the reasons for all the goals that come out of your vision of the future.

00:21:16.000 So you're asked, like, why would it be good for you? Why would it be good for your family? Why would it be good for broader society?

00:21:22.000 So that gives you three levels of argumentation right there.

00:21:25.000 And if you have it articulated down into detail and it's related to other important goals, then you're a hell of a thing to argue with.

00:21:33.000 Because people just aren't that deep, by which I mean they just don't have that many levels of explanation or objection.

00:21:40.000 And it's also really useful in relationship to your own mind, because if you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy,

00:21:47.000 a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections.

00:21:51.000 It's like, well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now.

00:21:53.000 Maybe you should be doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube.

00:21:58.000 If you're really sneaky, when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard,

00:22:05.000 so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to, because you're doing something else useful.

00:22:10.000 And if you give in to that temptation, which you often will, then it wins, and because it wins it gets a little dopamine kick and it grows stronger.

00:22:18.000 Anything you let win, the internal argument, grows.

00:22:23.000 And anything you let be defeated shrinks, because it's punished. It doesn't get to have its way.

00:22:29.000 So that's another thing, really, to remember. Don't practice what you do not want to become.

00:22:35.000 And because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man, they're not going anywhere.

00:22:41.000 You can build another little machine to inhibit them. That's the best you can do.

00:22:45.000 Once they're in there, you can't get them out.

00:22:48.000 And then the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress, and the old habits will come back up.

00:22:53.000 So you've got to be careful what you say and what you do, because you build yourself that way.

00:22:59.000 So, anyways, back to the rats. Okay, so the little rat gets to go out there and play.

00:23:03.000 Now imagine one little rat is paired with another rat, but the other little rat is 10% bigger.

00:23:08.000 10% in juvenile rats is enough to attain permanent dominance.

00:23:13.000 So the 10% bigger rat will win the first wrestling contest, okay?

00:23:18.000 And so that's what happens. And then, so the little rat gets pinned, and maybe they play a bit, and then they're done with it.

00:23:25.000 And so you separate them, then you let them play again.

00:23:27.000 And the next time what happens is that the subordinate rat does the invitation to play.

00:23:33.000 And that's like, you know, like a dog does when it wants to play.

00:23:36.000 You can recognize that. It kind of splays its feet apart, and it looks up and looks interested and sort of dances around.

00:23:42.000 And you can do it with any kid that has a clue, you know, that hasn't been destroyed by adults.

00:23:47.000 If you're a little three-year-old kid, or four-year-olds are better for this.

00:23:50.000 If you go like this, like, they know exactly what's gonna happen.

00:23:53.000 You know, they're ready to dart back and forth, and they'll usually smile.

00:23:56.000 And kids love rough and tumble play, which is now basically illegal in all daycares.

00:24:02.000 It seriously, it seriously is. Kids need it so desperately, because it teaches them the limits of their body, and your body.

00:24:09.000 And it teaches them what's painful and what isn't. And it teaches them the dance of play.

00:24:15.000 And without that, they're just little disembodied blobs. Like, they have no finesse.

00:24:20.000 That's what you're checking out when you dance with someone, you know.

00:24:23.000 You're seeing if they have that fluency and facility for mutual reciprocal action embodied in them.

00:24:30.000 And if they're kind of like this, you know, and just have no sense of rhythm and don't pay any attention to you, and all of that.

00:24:36.000 You have reason to question whether they actually inhabit their body.

00:24:40.000 And whether they can engage in a mutual interaction, a physical interaction that's going to be reciprocal and mutually satisfying.

00:24:48.000 It's really important to check out. And a lot of that rough and tumble play, even interactions between a child and its mother.

00:24:55.000 If you have a happy mother and a happy infant, and you videotape them, and you speed up the videotape, you'll see that they're dancing.

00:25:02.000 So one responds, then the other responds, then the other responds. It might just be with eye gaze and movement and all of that.

00:25:08.000 But there's a dynamic interplay, which you don't see with depressed mothers and their infants.

00:25:13.000 Okay, so back to play. So the little rat, who is the subordinate one, he has to do the invitation.

00:25:20.000 And then the big rat can agree to play, because he's in the dominant position.

00:25:25.000 But if you pair them repeatedly, and this is really worth thinking about, because morality emerges out of repeated interactions.

00:25:34.000 Because you might say, well, if you're only going to interact with someone once, you might as well just take advantage of them and run off.

00:25:40.000 That's what a psychopath does, by the way. And there is room in the environmental niche for psychopaths.

00:25:47.000 But they have to keep moving around, because otherwise people figure out who they are.

00:25:51.000 So they just move around, and they can take advantage of one person, you know, maybe five times or ten times or something.

00:25:56.000 And then the reputation spreads, and they've got to get the hell out of there.

00:25:59.000 So it's not a good long-term strategy, unless you can't think of a better one.

00:26:04.000 So anyways, if you repeatedly pair these rats, unless the big rat lets the little rat win at least 30% of the time,

00:26:12.000 the little rat will not ask the big rat to play.

00:26:15.000 And that is a staggering discovery. It's a staggering discovery, because you've got the emergence there of an implicit morality, essentially,

00:26:24.000 that's even incarnated in rats, that emerges across multiple play sessions.

00:26:29.000 It's like, yes, exactly, that's exactly what Piaget said about the emergence of morality.

00:26:34.000 It's exactly the same idea at the rat level.

00:26:37.000 So it's a massively, and the fact that there's a circuit, a separate neurophysiological circuit,

00:26:43.000 that's actually specialized for that sort of thing, is also a big deal.

00:26:47.000 Now, the other thing Panks have figured out is that if you deprive juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play,

00:26:54.000 their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly, and they become impulsive and restless.

00:26:59.000 And then you can fix them with methylphenidate or Ritalin.

00:27:03.000 And those are the drugs that are used to fix hyperactive kids, most of whom are male.

00:27:09.000 And that's because, well, really, you're gonna take your six-year-old, your five-year-old, you're gonna put them in a desk,

00:27:16.000 you're gonna get them to sit there for six hours, that's your plan, right?

00:27:20.000 That's a stupid plan.

00:27:22.000 And they're denied the opportunity to engage in play.

00:27:26.000 And that means that their ability to become social is being impaired.

00:27:31.000 It may cause neurological impairment, that's what the rat evidence suggests.

00:27:35.000 And then you suppress that with amphetamines, because amphetamines actually don't activate the play circuit,

00:27:41.000 they activate a different circuit, which will suppress the play circuit.

00:27:45.000 So, it's very, very, it's not very wise.

00:27:49.000 And I'm not gonna go off on that tangent, because I could tell you why the school systems were set up that way,

00:27:54.000 which I probably will at some point, because it's quite an interesting story in and of itself.

00:27:59.000 And it's the reason all you guys are sitting in desks right now, somebody laughingly referred to this once as grade 15,

00:28:06.000 which I thought was pretty funny, given a look at the bloody place, you know?

00:28:10.000 Oh, hideous.

00:28:12.000 And, okay.

00:28:14.000 So, now, this is an interesting thing.

00:28:17.000 So, you've got the emergence of morality in, say, chimps, you've got the emergence of morality in wolves,

00:28:21.000 you've got the emergence of morality in rats, and the morality governs sequential interactions or group interactions.

00:28:28.000 They have to repeat, because it's an emergent property of social or repetitive interactions.

00:28:34.000 That's why, you can't just localize it in one instance, it's repeated.

00:28:38.000 And there's been computer simulations of this to help you figure out how you might attain victory across games across time.

00:28:46.000 Maybe you need a strategy.

00:28:48.000 And there's a very simple strategy, which I believe is called modified tit for tat.

00:28:53.000 So, if you're nice to me, I'm nice back.

00:28:55.000 And if you do something bad to me, I do something bad back.

00:28:58.000 But imagine you run that out in sequences of behavior and see who does best with what strategy across time.

00:29:05.000 Or an alternative strategy.

00:29:06.000 Here's the best strategy.

00:29:07.000 I trust you.

00:29:09.000 You trust me.

00:29:10.000 We start interacting.

00:29:11.000 You screw up, I whack you.

00:29:13.000 And then I forgive you when we start again.

00:29:16.000 That's modified tit for tat.

00:29:18.000 And there hasn't been a very simple algorithm.

00:29:21.000 No one has come up with a better algorithm in the computerized simulation of game space than that particular strategy.

00:29:28.000 So it's like, trust, but don't be a pushover.

00:29:31.000 If someone violates the rules, you've got to nail them.

00:29:34.000 But then you don't hold a grudge.

00:29:35.000 You open the door to further interactions.

00:29:38.000 So, pretty smart.

00:29:39.000 Pretty smart.

00:29:40.000 Okay, so anyways.

00:29:43.000 So what this means, because rats can't talk, and wolves can't talk, and chimpanzees can't talk.

00:29:47.000 And what that means, just as Piaget suggested, was that the morality, the development of the morality, precedes the development of the linguistic ability to describe the rules for the morality.

00:29:58.000 He said exactly the same thing about kids, right?

00:30:00.000 Because they learn how to play games before they know what the rules are to the games.

00:30:05.000 And so you see that if you're playing peek-a-boo with a kid, they can pick that up like it's really young.

00:30:10.000 They get that right away.

00:30:11.000 And you can play with kids almost immediately after they're born if you play simple enough games.

00:30:16.000 And so they've got that deep, and they're unbelievably playful.

00:30:20.000 So they've got that circuitry ready to go right off the bat.

00:30:25.000 And it's one of the things that makes kids so much fun, because they just like to play all the time.

00:30:29.000 And so if the play circuit in you hasn't died, which is a bad thing, then you can use that a lot with your kids.

00:30:38.000 And it's one of the things that helps you love them.

00:30:40.000 So that's a good thing.

00:30:42.000 Okay, so the point is that the damn morality emerges before the representation of the morality.

00:30:50.000 It's a big deal to know that, and that it emerges as a consequence of repeated social interaction.

00:30:56.000 So it's not a top-down thing, it's a bottom-up thing.

00:30:59.000 Now, Piaget says, well, it's not just bottom-up.

00:31:02.000 Because what happens with human beings is that they learn to play the games.

00:31:06.000 One of his experiments was watch seven-year-olds, I think that's the right age, play marbles.

00:31:13.000 And then you notice that they can play with each other, and that they can follow the rules.

00:31:17.000 But then if you take the individual seven-year-olds out of the game, and you say, what are the rules?

00:31:21.000 They give incoherent and incomplete explanations of the rules.

00:31:25.000 So what that means is they don't really represent the rules, but they can act them out.

00:31:30.000 And they have a partial representation of what they're acting out.

00:31:33.000 Now, when they get older, the rule representation starts to fall into alignment with the actual rules of the game.

00:31:39.000 And you can imagine that's why.

00:31:41.000 Because when they're playing something like marbles, they're going to have discussions like,

00:31:44.000 you're cheating, or you're not allowed to do that.

00:31:47.000 Because they're always going to be pushing the envelope a little bit.

00:31:50.000 And then the group is going to render a judgment on whether or not that's appropriate.

00:31:54.000 And out of that, the rules are going to emerge.

00:31:56.000 But they're not rules to begin with. They're patterns of behavior.

00:32:00.000 It's not the same thing as a rule.

00:32:02.000 A rule describes a pattern of behavior.

00:32:04.000 But a pattern of behavior is a pattern of behavior.

00:32:06.000 It's something that's acted out.

00:32:08.000 So there's the individual within the group.

00:32:11.000 And then the interactions of the individuals within the groups produces a hierarchical arrangement,

00:32:16.000 or multiple hierarchical arrangements.

00:32:18.000 Those are games, roughly speaking, or stories nested inside an overarching story,

00:32:23.000 which is the fundamental culture.

00:32:25.000 And then that's nested in a whole bunch of competing cultures that have some commonalities,

00:32:30.000 or they would just be at war all the time.

00:32:33.000 Which, you know, to some degree they are.

00:32:37.000 So, okay.

00:32:39.000 Now, you see that, back to the movie.

00:32:41.000 You see that happening in this movie.

00:32:43.000 I mean, it's very, very quick.

00:32:45.000 But the blue fairy turns the bug into the conscience.

00:32:49.000 And then the bug tries to explain to Pinocchio what the rules of morality are.

00:32:54.000 But the thing is, the bug doesn't know, because he's just a bug.

00:32:57.000 And, you know, he's just not omniscient.

00:32:59.000 So the best he can do is to come up with, like, a propagandistic, semantic verbal representation

00:33:07.000 that's internally contradictory.

00:33:09.000 And when he tells Pinocchio, Pinocchio has no idea what he's talking about.

00:33:12.000 And neither does the bug.

00:33:14.000 That's the thing.

00:33:15.000 And so, well, so what happens is this.

00:33:17.000 The cricket says, well, Pinocchio, maybe you and I had better have a little heart-to-heart talk.

00:33:21.000 And the puppet says, why?

00:33:23.000 And the cricket says, well, you want to be a real boy, don't you?

00:33:28.000 All right, sit down, son.

00:33:30.000 Now you see the world is full of temptations.

00:33:33.000 Temptations?

00:33:34.000 Yes, temptations.

00:33:36.000 They're the wrong things that seem right at the time.

00:33:39.000 But even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time.

00:33:47.000 Or vice versa.

00:33:49.000 Understand?

00:33:51.000 No.

00:33:52.000 No.

00:33:53.000 No.

00:33:54.000 And neither did the cricket.

00:33:55.000 And that's actually very nicely done in that piece of the movie.

00:33:59.000 Because you just want to slap him as soon as he starts talking like that.

00:34:03.000 Because, well, he gets up on his little matchbox and lectures.

00:34:05.000 And he's dull and tyrannical, both at the same time.

00:34:09.000 And so there's nothing genuine about what he's saying.

00:34:12.000 He's sort of imitating.

00:34:13.000 He's imitating something that isn't him.

00:34:15.000 So he's really acting like a puppet at that point, too.

00:34:17.000 And it doesn't work at all.

00:34:19.000 And so Pinocchio says, I'm going to try to be a good boy.

00:34:22.000 And the cricket says, well, that's the spirit, son.

00:34:25.000 And then away they go.

00:34:27.000 So, alright, so then we're at the next day.

00:34:31.000 Because this all happens in one night.

00:34:33.000 We're at the next day.

00:34:34.000 And, you know, it's a nice day.

00:34:35.000 And there's these birds flying around.

00:34:37.000 That's actually, that's a bit of foreshadowing there, you know?

00:34:40.000 So, you have to remember, when you watch something like this movie, not a single bit of it is random or accidental.

00:34:49.000 None of it.

00:34:50.000 Because, you know, they had to draw, I don't remember how many frames per second these things are.

00:34:54.000 30, maybe.

00:34:55.000 Maybe it's a little less than that, but it's high-quality animation.

00:34:58.000 And so someone had to paint 30 pictures to get a second of this.

00:35:02.000 You're not doing that accidentally.

00:35:04.000 It's really expensive.

00:35:05.000 And everyone has to agree on exactly what's going to happen.

00:35:08.000 And you might say, well, do the people who are doing this consciously know what they're doing?

00:35:13.000 And the answer to that is, well, sort of, just like you do.

00:35:16.000 You know, it's yes, they know, and no, they don't.

00:35:19.000 And they know because they're really smart and gifted and all that.

00:35:22.000 But they don't know because it's not all articulated.

00:35:24.000 Plus, they're working in a group.

00:35:26.000 So, they know and don't know.

00:35:28.000 Just like you do when you're watching it.

00:35:30.000 And when you do anything else.

00:35:32.000 So, now, they're also guided by what you might call, they're guided by their unconscious in the Freudian and in the cognitive way.

00:35:41.000 Partly because your unconscious value structures determine the direction and content of your perceptions.

00:35:47.000 So, it's built right into the way you move your eyes.

00:35:50.000 Because you tend to look at things you value.

00:35:52.000 Right?

00:35:53.000 Or at things you're afraid of.

00:35:54.000 Like you look at things with valence.

00:35:56.000 And part of the decision about what has value is dependent on the implicit structure of your moral system.

00:36:02.000 Because morality is about what's good and what isn't.

00:36:05.000 And that's been partly a conscious construction of you, but it's partly something you've picked up by interacting with people like Matt ever since you were born.

00:36:14.000 You don't know all the rules any more than the damn cricket did.

00:36:17.000 You just don't.

00:36:18.000 And you can't.

00:36:19.000 Because you're too complicated.

00:36:20.000 But you act them out.

00:36:23.000 And then you also have representations of how people act in your imagination.

00:36:28.000 Dreams are...

00:36:29.000 That's what a dream is.

00:36:30.000 That's what a fantasy is.

00:36:31.000 That's what that little movie that plays inside your head when you remember what you did is.

00:36:35.000 And you only remember the gist, you know?

00:36:37.000 So even the imagistic representation of your behavior in your past, which is basically your episodic memory.

00:36:44.000 It's already selecting and molding and turning it into a relatable story.

00:36:50.000 It can't help but do that.

00:36:51.000 It's the only way you can represent it.

00:36:53.000 And so you don't know how you do that or why you do that.

00:36:56.000 But part of it's governed by this implicit morality that's part of your procedural memory system.

00:37:01.000 Part of the way you act and part of the way you move your eyes and listen to things and focus on them.

00:37:06.000 And that's all being instantiated inside of you because of this immense social...

00:37:10.000 Your biology, but also this immense social project that you're continually engaged in.

00:37:14.000 And so that informs what you remember.

00:37:17.000 It informs what you imagine.

00:37:19.000 It informs what we collectively imagine.

00:37:21.000 It informs what we can collectively understand.

00:37:24.000 And partly what you're doing while you become conscious of yourself is to map the implicit structures that already constitute you from society into explicit representation.

00:37:37.000 That's what self-understanding means.

00:37:40.000 And you know, when you have that moment of insight about something you've done, it's like you're watching this repetitive behavior that you've manifested, probably that got you in trouble.

00:37:48.000 You know, it's your characteristic way of falling accidentally into chaos.

00:37:52.000 And you talk about it and your problems.

00:37:54.000 You talk about them with your friends.

00:37:55.000 You talk about them.

00:37:56.000 And maybe you have dreams about them.

00:37:58.000 And you're trying to relate them.

00:37:59.000 And you have memories about them that you can't get rid of because they're negatively toned.

00:38:03.000 And so you talk about them.

00:38:04.000 And then someone comes up with a little statement that links them together causally.

00:38:08.000 And you think, aha, that's what I'm doing.

00:38:11.000 And then maybe you can stop doing it.

00:38:13.000 Or at least maybe then you can think up some strategies for not doing it anymore.

00:38:18.000 But it's not like you know.

00:38:20.000 It's like you're acting it out.

00:38:22.000 You know it that way.

00:38:24.000 But until the representation matches that pattern, that click of insight doesn't occur.

00:38:31.000 And that's like a revelation.

00:38:33.000 It's a really good way of thinking about it.

00:38:35.000 Because the knowledge is there in its implicit form.

00:38:38.000 And all of a sudden, bang, it's been made explicit.

00:38:41.000 As a fantasy maybe, or also as a set of semantic statements.

00:38:46.000 You know, maybe you have a crush on someone and you don't notice it.

00:38:49.000 And maybe you find yourself having a fantasy about them.

00:38:52.000 And you think, oh, that means something.

00:38:55.000 That indicates something.

00:38:56.000 Maybe you don't want to know that that's what you want.

00:38:59.000 But the fantasy will tell you.

00:39:01.000 And one of the things Jung suggested, and this is sort of out of the Freudian tradition of free associations, is watch yourself.

00:39:10.000 Watch your fantasies.

00:39:11.000 Because they're always happening.

00:39:12.000 And they'll tell you something.

00:39:14.000 And so one of the things I do when I'm interacting with my clients, is we'll have a discussion.

00:39:19.000 And then their eyes will drift a little bit.

00:39:21.000 And I'll know that something's flitted through their mind.

00:39:25.000 And that means we've touched on something that has a multiplicity of elements.

00:39:30.000 And so I'll stop and say, look, I noticed that maybe you teared up.

00:39:34.000 That's another thing to really watch.

00:39:35.000 Or maybe you laughed.

00:39:36.000 Or you drifted, at least.

00:39:38.000 It's because some other thought has entered your field of consciousness.

00:39:41.000 And then if you can get the person to grab those thoughts, to notice them, then you can often figure out the avenues along which that particular conversation might unfold.

00:39:51.000 That's a complex.

00:39:52.000 That's a Jungian complex or a psychoanalytic complex.

00:39:55.000 It's like there's an emotional core that produces a whole range of associated ideas.

00:40:00.000 And that thing's got a life.

00:40:01.000 It's like a micro-personality.

00:40:03.000 And it might have resentment in it.

00:40:05.000 It might have anger.

00:40:06.000 It's often negative emotion-tinged.

00:40:08.000 Because those negative emotion-tinged episodes are still problems.

00:40:13.000 And they will emerge automatically because your threat detection systems force them onto your consciousness, essentially.

00:40:20.000 So you watch.

00:40:21.000 And when you drift, you'll drift.

00:40:24.000 And the fantasy is partly a representation of the problem space.

00:40:28.000 You know that happens when you wake up at 3 in the morning and you're worried about things.

00:40:32.000 Right?

00:40:33.000 Because actually what happens is you wake up during threat processing.

00:40:36.000 And if you're depressed, actually that gets so intense you can't sleep.

00:40:39.000 So then you just lay there all night worrying.

00:40:41.000 Not fun.

00:40:42.000 And those are fantasies about the negative elements of your past, present, and future.

00:40:47.000 And the fantasies can also breed solutions.

00:40:50.000 And that's partly why Freud regarded dreams as wish fulfillments.

00:40:55.000 It's partly...

00:40:56.000 And he wasn't...

00:40:57.000 That was where he stopped.

00:40:59.000 It's not correct.

00:41:00.000 It's partially correct.

00:41:02.000 It's like the fantasy will provide you with a problem and a potential solution.

00:41:07.000 But they're more like problem identification mechanisms, the fantasies, with the possibility of a solution built in.

00:41:16.000 And so a way of thinking about that is that you can generate potential futures.

00:41:23.000 So they're like each segregatable environments according to the rules of your fantasy.

00:41:28.000 Then you can generate little avatars of yourself that inhabit each of those little universes.

00:41:32.000 And you can run them as simulations.

00:41:34.000 And then you can watch what happens in the simulation.

00:41:37.000 And if it's a catastrophe, then you don't have to act it out.

00:41:40.000 And that's exactly...

00:41:41.000 Not exactly.

00:41:42.000 That's akin to what you're doing when you go watch a movie.

00:41:45.000 Except that is much more coherent and well thought through than just a dream, which is often quite fragmentary.

00:41:53.000 And that's partly because the dream is willing to sacrifice coherence to play with category structures.

00:42:00.000 And that's why in dreams things can change from one thing into another really weirdly.

00:42:04.000 Or scenes can change from one scene into another without a logic.

00:42:07.000 The logic gets loosened so that the expanse of your thinking can widen.

00:42:13.000 And it's dangerous to do that.

00:42:15.000 And that's partly why you do it when you're asleep and paralyzed.

00:42:18.000 You know, you don't run around and act out your pseudopodal fantasies.

00:42:24.000 You know, where you're stretching yourself out into the world.

00:42:26.000 There's no risk exactly.

00:42:28.000 And so, although it can be bad enough so you wake up in terror.

00:42:31.000 You know, but that's better than being in a crocodile's mouth by a large margin.

00:42:35.000 Anyways, back to these birds.

00:42:37.000 These are used later in the movie as manifestations of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking.

00:42:43.000 And, of course, that's a standard Christian symbol.

00:42:45.000 Although, as I mentioned, the dove often represents the Holy Spirit.

00:42:50.000 And we'll talk about that later.

00:42:51.000 But this movie has very strong pagan elements in it, as I mentioned before.

00:42:57.000 As opposed to strictly Christian symbolism.

00:43:00.000 But that's a foreshadowing.

00:43:02.000 And what it foreshadows is that, well, a new day has dawned.

00:43:05.000 It's the emergence of new consciousness.

00:43:07.000 And everything last night went well, really well.

00:43:11.000 Everything in the, let's call it the unconscious, say, after time stops.

00:43:14.000 That all went well.

00:43:15.000 And so the new day is full of promise.

00:43:17.000 And so the birds are singing, and the sun is shining, and like, hooray.

00:43:21.000 And so that's exactly, so that sets, this is the next scene, right?

00:43:26.000 So it sets the tenor for that scene, just like the introductory song does.

00:43:30.000 So anyways, then you see all these kids playing and enthusiastic.

00:43:35.000 So they're off to school, which is presented in a positive light.

00:43:38.000 And so that's out where you get socialized.

00:43:40.000 So Pinocchio is ready to go beyond the boundaries of the familial home.

00:43:46.000 And he's ready because his father prepared him, and because his mother prepared him.

00:43:50.000 And so he goes off, and he's not going off alone.

00:43:52.000 He's going with his conscience, which is sort of the internal, you could think about it again,

00:43:56.000 as the internalized representation of nature and society.

00:43:59.000 And so he's not going out there alone, even though he's not very good at it.

00:44:03.000 And so he's pretty excited about this, and so is Geppetto.

00:44:06.000 See, Geppetto isn't standing there paralyzed with terror.

00:44:09.000 And the kid isn't phobic of the outside world.

00:44:12.000 And so that's, he's treating it as an adventure.

00:44:15.000 I mean, even though, well, it's an adventure, but adventures can be dangerous.

00:44:21.000 What if the other, you can imagine a kid, especially one who's like high neuroticism, who hasn't been encouraged sufficiently to overcome that, let's say.

00:44:31.000 Their primary idea might be, well, what if the other kids don't like me?

00:44:35.000 That's a big one.

00:44:36.000 What if the teachers don't like me?

00:44:37.000 What if the other kids won't play with me?

00:44:39.000 It's like, yeah, what if?

00:44:41.000 That's rough, man.

00:44:42.000 And if you're not a playful kid, it could easily be the case.

00:44:47.000 So, but that's not Pinocchio.

00:44:49.000 He's like spinning out, ready to go.

00:44:51.000 And so, good, good.

00:44:52.000 He's got naive, but enthusiastic.

00:44:56.000 Okay, well, that at least gets the ball rolling.

00:44:58.000 Now, you've got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat.

00:45:03.000 I think this one's based on one of the Marx Brothers, actually, Harpo Marx, who I believe never said anything.

00:45:09.000 But be that as it may, there are these ne'er-do-well characters, the fox in particular.

00:45:15.000 Now, fox is a standard trickster animal, right?

00:45:18.000 It's a classic animal, maybe because it's good at hiding and it's good at hunting.

00:45:26.000 I don't know exactly why, but it's, and coyotes are like that, too.

00:45:30.000 They're classic trickster animals.

00:45:32.000 He's kind of like Wile E. Coyote, in fact.

00:45:35.000 You know, the Warner Brothers character who's genius at large and, of course, whose arrogance continually gets him walloped.

00:45:43.000 And this character has a lot of features like that.

00:45:46.000 But he feigns being an English gentleman of, like, the 1890s and pretends to be educated.

00:45:53.000 And he has a kind of high-blown way of talking, and he's a fraud through and through.

00:45:58.000 And he's got this, you know, sidekick who is barely there at all.

00:46:05.000 And he doesn't treat him that well, but he's got someone to lord it over.

00:46:09.000 So that keeps his dominance hierarchy thing going well.

00:46:12.000 And the fact that he's like a second-rate companion, well, he never really notices that.

00:46:17.000 Although he'll treat him contemptuously whenever he gives a chance.

00:46:20.000 So anyways, they're walking down the street, and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he's done,

00:46:27.000 and how he pulled the wool over someone's eyes.

00:46:29.000 And he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence.

00:46:32.000 And one of the things that you see, this is worth knowing, too.

00:46:36.000 Because if you're preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life,

00:46:43.000 the psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you're stupid,

00:46:48.000 and that you deserve to be taken advantage of because you're naive and stupid.

00:46:52.000 So it's actually a good thing that he's doing it.

00:46:54.000 And his proof for, and I'm saying he because there are more male psychopaths,

00:47:01.000 the proof that you're stupid naive is that he can take advantage of you.

00:47:06.000 And so, like, if you were wiser, you'd know his tricks.

00:47:10.000 And then it wouldn't be morally necessary for him to show you just exactly who knows what about what.

00:47:17.000 And so, the psychopath will use his ability to fool you as proof of his own grandiose omnipotence, omniscience and narcissism.

00:47:28.000 And the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath.

00:47:32.000 And virtually anybody can.

00:47:34.000 So that Robert Hare, for example, who studied psychopaths for a long time, and interviewed a lot of them, like hundreds of them,

00:47:41.000 and videotaped many of the interviews, he said when he was talking to the psychopath, he always believed what they were saying.

00:47:46.000 And then he'd watch the video afterwards and see where the conversation went off the rails.

00:47:51.000 But, you know, the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong.

00:47:58.000 And if you're polite, you don't object to the way that the person unfolds their strategy, you know.

00:48:04.000 And psychopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate, obviously, how to manipulate people.

00:48:09.000 And the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low.

00:48:13.000 Go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on YouTube.

00:48:18.000 That's bloody... that's enlightening, man.

00:48:21.000 Paul Bernardo, he's like the CEO of a meeting in that video, you know.

00:48:25.000 He gives the cops hell, he gives the lawyers hell, he protests his innocence.

00:48:28.000 He basically tells them that they're rude and untrustworthy because they don't trust him because he did a few little things 17 years ago.

00:48:36.000 And he gets away with a few little things, right?

00:48:39.000 I mean, he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his girlfriend at the time.

00:48:44.000 And, you know, he was a repeat sexual offender and murderer.

00:48:47.000 It's like... but he basically goes, well, you know, that's a long time ago.

00:48:51.000 It's like, we're past that, aren't we?

00:48:53.000 I mean, I'm having a discussion with you.

00:48:55.000 I'm trying to solve... help you solve some crimes, which, by the way, I committed, but we won't bring that up.

00:49:00.000 You know, and you're accusing me of being a liar.

00:49:03.000 Like, you're not playing fair.

00:49:04.000 What's up with you?

00:49:05.000 And then when they answer, he looks at his fingernails, which is like... that's a lovely little manipulative thing.

00:49:10.000 Because it basically means whatever happens to be under my fingernail at the moment is a much higher priority than listening to your foolish story.

00:49:18.000 And you watch, you'll see people do that to you.

00:49:20.000 And then you get a little insight into what they're up to.

00:49:23.000 He's very good at that.

00:49:24.000 And so... or he looks outside, or he just looks at his hands, or he looks out the window, immediately dismissive in his nonverbal behavior.

00:49:32.000 It's brilliant.

00:49:33.000 The courts were forced to release that, by the way.

00:49:36.000 But look it up.

00:49:38.000 Paul Bernardo on YouTube.

00:49:39.000 Wow.

00:49:40.000 It's just mind-boggling.

00:49:42.000 He's so good at what he does.

00:49:44.000 And he's good-looking, and he's charismatic.

00:49:46.000 And, you know, he can really pull it off.

00:49:48.000 And you can't tell what's happening with the cops and the lawyers, whether they're just letting him play his routine to get some information from him.

00:49:55.000 Or whether he's actually setting them back on his heels.

00:49:57.000 And I suspect it's a bit of both.

00:49:59.000 But it's a masterful performance.

00:50:02.000 If you didn't know who he was, and you were watching it without the audio, you'd think he's the CEO of some company giving his employees hell for not being up to scratch.

00:50:11.000 That's all his body language, his eye contact, everything just speaks that.

00:50:16.000 It's amazing.

00:50:17.000 So anyways, you got these two-bit hoods here who think they're really something.

00:50:22.000 They also think they're tough and dangerous.

00:50:24.000 And they're not.

00:50:25.000 They're just, you know, cowardly and corner dwellers.

00:50:28.000 And they confuse their unwillingness to abide by reasonable rules as indication of their heroic courage, which is something else that low-rent hoods like to do.

00:50:39.000 And it's partly because lots of people who just attend to the law do do that because they're cowardly, which is a Nietzschean observation.

00:50:47.000 Are you good or are you just afraid?

00:50:49.000 Let's start with afraid first, before we proceed to good.

00:50:53.000 And that the reason that you follow the rules is because you're afraid of getting caught.

00:50:57.000 Yeah, well, you know those kids who, often university kids who are in like a hockey riot and they end up breaking windows and stealing things and, you know, they get nailed for it.

00:51:07.000 And afterwards, they're really blown away by their own behavior.

00:51:12.000 It's like, well, they're in that camp.

00:51:13.000 It's like they think they're good people, but they're not.

00:51:16.000 They're just never anywhere where you could be bad.

00:51:18.000 And as soon as you put them somewhere where they could be bad, it's like, out it comes, just like that.

00:51:23.000 And that's really worth thinking about.

00:51:26.000 Because most of you, many of you, but not all of you, I suspect, have never really been somewhere that you could be really bad and get away with it.

00:51:36.000 And so you might think, well, you wouldn't do it, but people do it all the time.

00:51:43.000 So anyways, they're talking about some exploits, and then they see that this character named Stromboli, who's a marionette, he has a puppet show, right?

00:51:52.000 And he's kind of a wheeler-dealer too.

00:51:55.000 Remember I showed you that mask that was glaring at Pinocchio when he got his voice?

00:52:01.000 It's like Stromboli is one of his manifestations.

00:52:05.000 The fox here is another one of his manifestations.

00:52:08.000 And all the negative characters throughout the movie are manifestations of the same thing.

00:52:12.000 It's partly the adversarial individual, and it's partly the tyrannical aspect of society.

00:52:17.000 It's the negative masculine.

00:52:18.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

00:52:20.000 And when men go bad, they often go bad by being antisocial and tyrannical.

00:52:25.000 So there's way more antisocial men than there are antisocial women, which is why there's 20 times as many men in jail as there are women.

00:52:32.000 So each gender, let's say each sex, has its own characteristic pathologies.

00:52:38.000 And there are some antisocial women, and there are some high neuroticism guys, or some guys who are really agreeable as well.

00:52:47.000 But they're rarer.

00:52:49.000 So anyways, he sees this poster advertising Stromboli's puppet show.

00:52:57.000 So Stromboli's a puppet master.

00:52:59.000 Now that's really worth thinking about, because that's an archetypal theme.

00:53:03.000 Or it's at least attached to an archetypal theme.

00:53:07.000 Something's behind the scenes pulling the strings.

00:53:11.000 And everybody always wonders what that is, right?

00:53:13.000 What's actually going on?

00:53:15.000 What's actually going on with Trump?

00:53:17.000 Who's actually in control?

00:53:19.000 Is it Putin?

00:53:20.000 I mean, that's the fantasies of the left.

00:53:23.000 It's Putin.

00:53:24.000 It's like, well, the question always is, what's going on behind the scene, right?

00:53:30.000 And the question is, that's the case certainly on the political landscape, business landscape, interpersonal relations.

00:53:36.000 What are you really up to?

00:53:38.000 Everyone's always wondering that, right?

00:53:40.000 That's why they're watching your eyes.

00:53:42.000 Because your eyes point at things.

00:53:44.000 And they can infer what you're interested in and what you're up to by looking at what you look at.

00:53:49.000 And that's why your eyes have whites.

00:53:51.000 So that we can see where you're pointing.

00:53:53.000 Because gorillas don't.

00:53:55.000 And so what that means, roughly speaking, is that all of your ancestors, whose eyes couldn't be reliably tracked,

00:54:03.000 were either killed or didn't mate.

00:54:06.000 It's a big deal for us to see where people's eyes are pointed.

00:54:09.000 And so we're always watching each other's eyes, constantly.

00:54:12.000 What are you up to?

00:54:13.000 What are you up to?

00:54:14.000 What are you looking at?

00:54:15.000 What do you want?

00:54:16.000 And I want to know because if I know what you want, I can predict how you're going to behave.

00:54:20.000 And that also means I can cooperate with you.

00:54:22.000 Or I can compete with you.

00:54:23.000 Or I can lie to you.

00:54:25.000 But all the information is in the eyes surrounded by the facial display, right?

00:54:30.000 Because that's also an indication of motivation and emotion.

00:54:33.000 And so we're trying...

00:54:34.000 Like, our eyes are so good at that, that for you guys sitting there in the back,

00:54:38.000 I can tell if you're looking at my eyes or at my chin.

00:54:41.000 And the deviation in your eyes is so tiny that it's a kind of miracle that we're capable of making that perceptual observation.

00:54:49.000 It's really important to us.

00:54:51.000 And we have really good eyes, so that's another thing about us.

00:54:54.000 So anyways, what's going on behind the scenes?

00:54:58.000 Well, if you look at Stromboli, you might be thinking, it's not clear he's someone you'd want to have pulling your strings.

00:55:06.000 Like, there's a little bit of forced enthusiasm, let's say, there.

00:55:11.000 And he's just not a very savory-looking character.

00:55:14.000 So anyways, the fox knows him, and they start talking about Stromboli, that old joker.

00:55:20.000 And then how they could possibly involve him in some sort of scam because he's back in town.

00:55:26.000 And then they see the puppet.

00:55:29.000 And the fox does his equivalent of thinking, which is, you know, pretty sad and nasty, but that's what he does.

00:55:36.000 And then they see this puppet with no strings, and they think,

00:55:39.000 hey, man, a puppet master would pay a lot for something that is capable of semi-autonomous movement like that.

00:55:46.000 It would be kind of a miracle.

00:55:47.000 And so they decide that they're going to take him to Stromboli.

00:55:50.000 And so they grab him, and he's got an apple to take to the teacher, which I think it's the cat promptly eats.

00:55:59.000 And the fox acts out this sort of false enthusiasm about what Pinocchio is up to, and pretends that he's his friend.

00:56:09.000 Which is, of course, what your typical pedophile will do.

00:56:12.000 And so this is in the same kind of category, and it truly is.

00:56:16.000 So one of the things that's interesting to know about pedophiles is that they're predatory, right?

00:56:22.000 And so they don't go after kids that are assertive and likely to be noisy.

00:56:29.000 They watch, and they watch to see if they can find a kid who's defeated, and that's good enough, who's defeated.

00:56:37.000 And who's going to need a friend, and who's not going to object.

00:56:41.000 And so when they check out, these are the ones who do the stranger abductions, which are, by the way, extraordinarily rare.

00:56:47.000 They look for a victim type.

00:56:49.000 They look for a kid who's going to be easy to take down.

00:56:52.000 And so, you know, that's one thing you don't want.

00:56:55.000 So you might think, well, one of the things that was really big, and it's probably even worse now, when I was a parent of young children, was to teach your kids how to be afraid of strangers.

00:57:05.000 It's like, no, wrong.

00:57:09.000 That is not what you teach them.

00:57:11.000 Because all you do is teach them then to be timid and fearful.

00:57:15.000 And the real predatory types, they're pretty much thrilled about that.

00:57:19.000 Because you'll also make them sheltered and naive.

00:57:22.000 You know, so that isn't... you make your kids courageous, and you get their damn eyes open, and that's the best thing you can do to protect them against people who are truly dangerous.

00:57:30.000 So, none of that terrifying.

00:57:33.000 It's not a good idea.

00:57:37.000 Anyways, the fox befriends the puppet.

00:57:40.000 And then they come up with this evil scheme to get them off to Stromboli, the puppet master, and away they go.

00:57:45.000 And they sing a little song about being an actor, an actor's life for me.

00:57:50.000 And this took me a long time to figure out.

00:57:52.000 I thought, they're taking Pinocchio away to be an actor.

00:57:57.000 Now, why in the world are actors getting such a rough time in this movie?

00:58:01.000 It's like, it's a Hollywood movie.

00:58:03.000 You know, it's acting, obviously, the voiceovers and all that are acting.

00:58:08.000 It's, what is this thing about being an actor?

00:58:11.000 And then I thought, oh, I get it.

00:58:13.000 I see what's going on.

00:58:15.000 They sing to Pinocchio about the delights of unearned celebrity.

00:58:21.000 So he doesn't have to go and get an education.

00:58:24.000 He doesn't have to take the difficult route.

00:58:26.000 He can take the easy way to dominance, to success, to dominant success.

00:58:32.000 He can circumvent all the hard work and go right to the top.

00:58:36.000 You know, and when you think about phenomena like the Kardashian family and how popular they are,

00:58:42.000 part of that is this desire that people have for unearned celebrity.

00:58:46.000 Because you can get to the top without any sacrifices and without any work.

00:58:50.000 And if you're really cynical, you know, you think that the people at the top are just there by accident anyways.

00:58:56.000 And it might as well be you.

00:58:57.000 And, of course, there's a lot of naivety in that as well.

00:59:00.000 And a fair lack of wisdom and all of that.

00:59:05.000 But the actor idea here is that you can pretend to be something you're not.

00:59:11.000 And that that's the proper route of anyone wise to success.

00:59:15.000 It's the ultimate in cynicism.

00:59:17.000 And it's a nihilistic perspective as well.

00:59:20.000 And that's how they entrap them.

00:59:22.000 They say, look, why are you going?

00:59:24.000 Why are you bothering to go to school?

00:59:25.000 That's going to take 18 years.

00:59:27.000 With all of your talents, you can just go on the stage.

00:59:29.000 Your name will be up in lights.

00:59:31.000 You'll be at the top in no time.

00:59:32.000 And what does the puppet know?

00:59:34.000 And plus, he does have some talents.

00:59:36.000 He is, after all, a semi-autonomous puppet.

00:59:39.000 Now, he doesn't exactly know how special that makes him.

00:59:42.000 But the fox can obviously see something in him.

00:59:45.000 And he's good at playing that naivety off and then offering these false promises.

00:59:50.000 See, the thing is, one of the things that Carl Jung said that I thought was really interesting when he was talking about the Oedipal situation in families.

00:59:58.000 I never forgot this.

00:59:59.000 So the Oedipal situation, roughly speaking, is when...

01:00:02.000 I'll lay out the classic story.

01:00:05.000 Is when a child is seriously overprotected, usually a male child, by his mother.

01:00:10.000 Now, the reverse can be the case, and it can be a female child by the mother and all of that.

01:00:14.000 But I'll just talk about the classic case to begin with.

01:00:17.000 Now, what Freud observed was that there were usually not very good boundaries in families like that.

01:00:22.000 And so the relationship between the husband and the wife was either strained or non-existent.

01:00:27.000 And the wife would often turn to the child to be what she isn't getting from the husband.

01:00:32.000 And so there's a great South Park episode about this.

01:00:36.000 A wonderful South Park episode where they...

01:00:39.000 I don't remember, that horrible little guy is the...

01:00:42.000 That's him, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:00:44.000 And his mother brings in the dog whisperer to train him.

01:00:49.000 And it's a brilliant episode.

01:00:51.000 If you want to learn about the Freudian-Oedipal situation, you watch that, you've got it down cold.

01:00:57.000 Because she brings in this expert who then she wants to have an affair with.

01:01:00.000 So that's a boundary issue.

01:01:01.000 And he basically separates her son from him and imposes the same discipline on him that he would impose on a bad dog.

01:01:10.000 Although he also trains the dog's owners all the time.

01:01:13.000 Because maybe it's not the dog, maybe it's the owner.

01:01:16.000 There's a horse whisperer movie, too, about the original horse whisperer that does a beautiful job of laying that out, too.

01:01:22.000 Because he's very good at fixing problem horses.

01:01:24.000 And unbelievably good at diagnosing psychopathology on the part of the owner.

01:01:30.000 He's got a gift for it.

01:01:32.000 But anyways, what happens in the South Park episode is that the dog whisperer gets Cartman straightened out.

01:01:39.000 And he starts, like, dressing properly and doing his homework.

01:01:42.000 And the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisperer.

01:01:46.000 But he's professional.

01:01:47.000 He keeps his distance.

01:01:48.000 Like, he keeps boundaries around him.

01:01:50.000 And then he leaves.

01:01:52.000 And then the first thing that she does when he leaves is bribe Cartman, basically, out of doing his homework.

01:01:59.000 So that he can accompany her to, I don't know, a fast food restaurant or something like that.

01:02:03.000 And so the reason she does that is because she's lonesome and doesn't have anybody else around.

01:02:07.000 And, you know, maybe she's also deeply, deeply, deeply terrified that if she helps that boy grow up, he will leave.

01:02:15.000 And she'll have nothing.

01:02:17.000 And so mothers who don't have something, say, outside their infants, not merely their children, are more likely to fall into that.

01:02:24.000 And it's no wonder.

01:02:25.000 You know, you've got to think that through.

01:02:27.000 And lots of women, really, most women, really fall in love with their babies, you know.

01:02:33.000 And so even if they start growing into larger children, that can be threatening.

01:02:37.000 Because when the infant turns into a toddler, the infant is dead.

01:02:45.000 The toddler is there now.

01:02:48.000 And you can radically interfere with that process.

01:02:50.000 That happens all the time.

01:02:52.000 All the time.

01:02:53.000 That's the classic Freudian Oedipal nightmare.

01:02:56.000 And that episode is brilliant.

01:02:57.000 It's bloody brilliant.

01:02:58.000 It just nails it.

01:02:59.000 And some of you have been in my personality class and watched Crumb, the documentary Crumb.

01:03:04.000 And that's another staggering exposition of exactly that kind of pathology.

01:03:09.000 Anyways, one of the things Jung pointed out.

01:03:12.000 So I knew this guy once who had a mother who basically was trying that trick.

01:03:17.000 And she was very smart and had lots of tricks up her sleeves.

01:03:21.000 And there's just no way he was going to go for it.

01:03:23.000 He rebelled at every possible moment.

01:03:25.000 And he basically became, I would say, somewhat hyper-masculine in response.

01:03:29.000 Which is an interesting lesson with regards to the hyper-masculinity that boys often develop if they're raised by single mothers.

01:03:36.000 Because they tend to go one of two ways.

01:03:38.000 And he just fought her at every step of the way.

01:03:41.000 And it didn't happen.

01:03:42.000 But one of the things Jung said, which I loved, and you can really see this in the Crumb documentary, is that

01:03:48.000 the Oedipal mother basically entices the child.

01:03:51.000 Says, look, here's the deal.

01:03:54.000 You don't have to do anything.

01:03:56.000 But you don't get to leave.

01:03:58.000 But if you don't leave, and you don't do these difficult things, then I'll take care of you.

01:04:02.000 And the child has a choice all the way along there.

01:04:04.000 I mean, obviously, he's outclassed in some sense.

01:04:07.000 But it's not as obvious as you'd think.

01:04:09.000 Little kids are tough.

01:04:10.000 And they make decisions all the time.

01:04:12.000 And so Jung thought about it more as a conspiracy than as something imposed on the child by the mother.

01:04:18.000 And I really like...

01:04:19.000 It's actually a conspiracy between mother, father, and child, actually.

01:04:22.000 And I think that's a good way of looking at it, even though it's really rough.

01:04:25.000 Because, well, should you hold the child responsible?

01:04:28.000 Well, yes.

01:04:30.000 But judiciously and not completely.

01:04:33.000 Because then if you deal with someone like that as an adult, and they're trying to escape from it,

01:04:37.000 you have to go all the way back and figure out how the hell it happened.

01:04:40.000 And then they have to adjust...

01:04:42.000 They have to figure out where they opened the door.

01:04:44.000 Like inviting a vampire in.

01:04:46.000 Because they can't come in unless you invite them in, you know.

01:04:49.000 So don't invite them in.

01:04:51.000 Because once they're in, they're really hard to get rid of.

01:04:53.000 And they'll take all your blood.

01:04:55.000 So that's a cautionary tale.

01:04:57.000 So anyways, Pinocchio doesn't know any better.

01:05:00.000 And he's got the egotism of, you know, of youth.

01:05:03.000 And he's offered the easy way to success, which is exactly what the fox tells them.

01:05:07.000 And off they go to see Stromboli.

01:05:10.000 So this is the song.

01:05:11.000 I'm not gonna read it all.

01:05:13.000 It's great to be a celebrity, an actor's life for me.

01:05:18.000 You sleep till after two.

01:05:23.000 You promenade a big cigar.

01:05:24.000 You tour the world in a private car.

01:05:26.000 You dine on chicken and caviar, an actor's life for me.

01:05:29.000 So it's all this idea of wealth and public exposure and zero attention whatsoever to anything regarding responsibility or discipline or learning.

01:05:40.000 And so it's a dual attraction, right?

01:05:42.000 You get everything you want and you don't have to do anything.

01:05:45.000 Jeez, what a deal.

01:05:46.000 And so that's what the actor represents.

01:05:48.000 It's a liar, fundamentally.

01:05:50.000 It's someone who's acting out a deception.

01:05:53.000 They're a persona in the Jungian sense.

01:05:56.000 So the persona is the mask you wear in public that you might even think you are, but you're not.

01:06:03.000 It's this mask.

01:06:04.000 And that's the actor.

01:06:05.000 That's the persona.

01:06:06.000 So the fox and the cat are inviting the puppet to only become a persona.

01:06:12.000 And that's...

01:06:14.000 See, for Jung, you start as a persona.

01:06:17.000 And then when you start to investigate the parts of you that don't really fit in that persona, that would be the shadow, then you start understanding who you really are.

01:06:26.000 And that's shocking.

01:06:27.000 Because the persona contains everything, roughly speaking, that you think is good and maybe even that your immediate culture thinks is good.

01:06:35.000 And then the shadow contains everything that's not part of that.

01:06:38.000 And some of that's really bad.

01:06:41.000 But some of it is good disguised as bad.

01:06:44.000 And you can't break out of the persona and transcend it until you incorporate a lot of what's in the shadow.

01:06:50.000 And so, for example, if you're an extraordinarily compassionate person, let's say, 98th percentile will say, you're going to be sacrificing yourself to other people all the time.

01:07:00.000 And there are people who will find that extraordinarily endearing.

01:07:04.000 And it will be under some circumstances, but the problem is that you will sacrifice yourself.

01:07:09.000 And that's a really bad attitude to have, for example, towards adult males.

01:07:13.000 It's a great thing for infants, but for adult males, it is the wrong approach.

01:07:17.000 And so, you will get taken advantage of continually by people who are looking for someone like you until you grow some teeth.

01:07:25.000 And you'll think, no, no. That's the opposite of compassion. Being able to bite hard is the opposite of compassion, which it is.

01:07:34.000 And so you'll have that pushed into the predator category. I'm not doing that. I'm not getting angry. I don't like conflict.

01:07:40.000 It's like, until you bring that out of the depths and put it on so you can use it, you're going to be in trouble.

01:07:47.000 And that's kind of Nietzsche's idea of the revaluation of good and evil.

01:07:51.000 You have a sense of what's good and a sense of what isn't with your conscience.

01:07:55.000 But it's not very smart. It's got things in the wrong boxes.

01:07:58.000 And a lot of the things that, even nature itself, a lot of the things that you accept as untrammeled goods, like compassion, let's say, have a very dark side, first of all.

01:08:08.000 And second, are not enough to get you through life. You need the opposite virtues, too.

01:08:13.000 And so you have to develop them. And so you get outside the persona to do that.

01:08:19.000 But anyways, Pinocchio is invited to be a false persona, to take the gains of celebrity without having to do anything to be educated.

01:08:28.000 He's just going to go right to the top from right where he is.

01:08:31.000 And people are kind of fascinated by that idea. That's why you watch America's Got Talent or The X Factor, which are shows I actually love, by the way.

01:08:40.000 You never see narcissism in its pure forms than you see it when you watch people who display an absolute lack of talent and become homicidal when someone dares point it out, right?

01:08:53.000 Accusatory and homicidal instantly. It's really something.

01:08:57.000 And then now and then you do see one of these people who's so introverted and so out of society and have this unbelievable gift, which is also something really remarkable to see.

01:09:09.000 And it's no wonder those things are so popular. They're psychologically extraordinarily interesting.

01:09:15.000 So okay, so that's the actor. First of Pinocchio's temptations.

01:09:19.000 And of course it's the first one, because he's entering the social world.

01:09:22.000 And the temptation in the social world is to be exactly what other people want you to be.

01:09:27.000 And the thing that's cool about that is that is what you should be doing, right?

01:09:31.000 When you go out in your peers, you should be not subjugating your individuality to your peers, because that's not exactly right.

01:09:39.000 That's kind of based on an inhibition model.

01:09:41.000 You know, you've got aggression, you've got bad habits, they have to be inhibited.

01:09:44.000 You learn that by interacting with your peers. It's not the right model.

01:09:48.000 Piaget, that's a Freudian model. Piaget was correct about that.

01:09:52.000 He basically pointed out that what should happen is, let's say with your aggression, and hopefully you have some, is that it gets socialized.

01:09:59.000 And so you learn how to play games, but you don't drop your drive to win.

01:10:04.000 You integrate that in the games. And so you try to win, you try to play hard, but if you're defeated or you hit something negative, you don't respond negatively.

01:10:12.000 And you can keep that all bounded within being a fair, a good player, a fair player.

01:10:18.000 And that means what's happened is you've learned how to play a game or a set of games that also includes the darker parts of you.

01:10:26.000 And they actually become part of your force of character.

01:10:29.000 It's way better if you can pull that off.

01:10:31.000 And that's what you definitely want to do as an adult.

01:10:33.000 Like, all you people are going to have to learn to negotiate on your own behalf.

01:10:37.000 And that's really hard. It means that you have to know what you want.

01:10:42.000 You have to be able to communicate it. And you have to be able to say no.

01:10:46.000 And to say no, you have to be built on a solid foundation. You have to have options.

01:10:51.000 So you've got to remember that as you go through your life.

01:10:54.000 It's like, if you don't have options, you can't negotiate with someone.

01:10:57.000 And if you're not willing to use them, they win, period.

01:11:00.000 Because if you're asking your boss for more money, say, the answer is no.

01:11:06.000 Because he doesn't have any spare money lying around that he can just give to you.

01:11:10.000 And lots of other people are asking.

01:11:12.000 So some of that's zero-sum stuff, you know.

01:11:15.000 Not all of it, because often you cooperate with people and the whole pot can grow.

01:11:19.000 But some of it's zero-sum.

01:11:21.000 And so you better have a case made.

01:11:23.000 It's like, here's how much money I should have. Here's why.

01:11:27.000 Here's the benefit to you that will accrue if you do it.

01:11:31.000 Here's the consequences that you don't.

01:11:33.000 They're actually real. They will cost you, and I will do them.

01:11:37.000 It's like, then you can negotiate.

01:11:39.000 And you don't do that rudely.

01:11:41.000 But those arguments, you better have them in order.

01:11:43.000 Like, so for example, if you're gonna negotiate for a raise or a status shift,

01:11:48.000 you better have your resume at hand, all polished up, and know where else you're gonna look for a job.

01:11:53.000 And you better be able to get one.

01:11:55.000 Because otherwise, you're weak, and you will not win the negotiation.

01:11:59.000 And if you're too agreeable, so you're conflict-avoidant, you will make less money across time.

01:12:06.000 That's already been well-established.

01:12:08.000 And that's because you don't have teeth. Not enough.

01:12:11.000 And so, in the little micro-contest that you're going to have every day, you're going to incrementally lose to people who are more aggressive, who have bigger teeth.

01:12:23.000 And that's what happens.

01:12:25.000 So, don't let that happen.

01:12:28.000 You want to, you place yourself so you can negotiate.

01:12:32.000 Because otherwise, you're just a facade.

01:12:35.000 And in a real battle, a facade is just torn down right away.

01:12:39.000 So, yes, well, say no more, right?

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01:15:34.000 Well, the cricket, he's supposed to be helping the puppet out, but he overslept.

01:15:39.000 It's like, that's just another indication that he's not everything he could be yet.

01:15:43.000 And that's really, ah, that took me a long time to puzzle out with regards to interpreting this movie.

01:15:48.000 I could not figure out.

01:15:49.000 All right, I told you this.

01:15:50.000 If the bug is the person who opens the hero narrative and who can guide the transformations of time,

01:15:56.000 and who has the same initials as Jesus Christ, and is like knighted by nature herself, why is he such an idiot?

01:16:05.000 It's a very difficult thing to figure out.

01:16:07.000 But the idea that the conscience isn't omniscient, even though it has that sort of voice of, let's say, common sense.

01:16:15.000 And that fits very nicely in with the Freudian idea of the superego, again, because the superego can be flawed.

01:16:21.000 It can be too harsh.

01:16:22.000 It cannot be properly developed.

01:16:25.000 You see that often with people who are orderly.

01:16:27.000 So they're high in conscientiousness.

01:16:29.000 Conscientiousness fragments into industriousness and orderliness.

01:16:32.000 Orderly people like willpower.

01:16:34.000 They're very judgmental, and they like things to be exactly where they're supposed to be.

01:16:38.000 But they're also very self-punitive.

01:16:40.000 So, conservatives are much more likely to be orderly, by the way.

01:16:44.000 It's one of the best predictors of conservative.

01:16:47.000 Low openness is the best predictor.

01:16:49.000 But right after that is high orderliness.

01:16:52.000 And it's associated with disgust sensitivity, which is really an amazing thing.

01:16:58.000 We'll talk about that later.

01:17:00.000 Anyways, this cricket...

01:17:03.000 Well, he falls down his first day on the job.

01:17:06.000 He's not as conscientious a conscience as he should be.

01:17:13.000 So, he's feeling pretty stupid.

01:17:14.000 He's got his little millionaire clothes on there.

01:17:16.000 But he's really not living up to them.

01:17:18.000 So, he does catch up to the fox and the puppet, however.

01:17:23.000 And tries to dissuade Pinocchio from going down this road.

01:17:28.000 And, of course, the cat...

01:17:30.000 Well, you can see what the cat's doing there.

01:17:32.000 He's got a big hammer.

01:17:34.000 A big mallet.

01:17:35.000 And he's gonna...

01:17:36.000 He also shows you just exactly how much of a clue he has.

01:17:39.000 He's gonna wallop the bug who's sitting on the fox's hat.

01:17:42.000 Which I think he actually does.

01:17:43.000 And, you know, then the fox can't get out of his hat.

01:17:46.000 And has to talk through his hat.

01:17:47.000 Which, basically, is what he's doing the whole time anyways.

01:17:50.000 So, this I really like.

01:17:52.000 So, you see on the left here, the cricket is speaking inside this flower.

01:17:58.000 You know?

01:17:59.000 And, like I said, there's nothing accidental in these representations.

01:18:04.000 So, these are artists who are coming up with these compositions.

01:18:07.000 And their fantasy has a structure.

01:18:09.000 And so, the cricket is speaking out of this flower that has...

01:18:13.000 Well, you could think about it as...

01:18:15.000 It has a sexualized element.

01:18:16.000 So, you could think about that as a phallic part of it.

01:18:18.000 And that part of the feminine part of it...

01:18:21.000 Well, they are flowers, after all.

01:18:23.000 They are the sex organs of plants.

01:18:25.000 And so, and that's very much the same over here.

01:18:28.000 This is the Yodi and Lingam.

01:18:30.000 This is from Hindu cultures.

01:18:32.000 And so, and you see there's a snake wrapped around that.

01:18:35.000 And so, that's masculine and feminine.

01:18:37.000 With a snake wrapped around it.

01:18:39.000 And that's a holy representation.

01:18:41.000 You know?

01:18:42.000 A sacred representation.

01:18:43.000 And it represents the deepest reality.

01:18:47.000 That's one way of thinking about it.

01:18:48.000 Like chaos and order surrounded by the snake.

01:18:50.000 It's the same, exactly the same idea.

01:18:52.000 And so, the cricket speaks out of that.

01:18:54.000 We already know that.

01:18:56.000 Because the cricket is the conscience.

01:18:58.000 And he's been awakened in part by Geppetto and the good father.

01:19:02.000 And awakened in part by the good fairy in nature.

01:19:05.000 And so, he speaks with those voices.

01:19:07.000 And he's also a manifestation of the underlying chaos itself.

01:19:12.000 Because nature and culture spring out of chaos.

01:19:15.000 You know, I already showed you that schematic representation.

01:19:19.000 Okay.

01:19:20.000 So, I'll just end this scene.

01:19:24.000 And then we'll have like a 15 minute break.

01:19:26.000 Okay?

01:19:27.000 So, anyways.

01:19:28.000 The cricket tries to make a case for why Pinocchio shouldn't go off to be a celebrity.

01:19:33.000 But, you know, it's a hard case to make.

01:19:37.000 Because the fox is very manipulative.

01:19:40.000 And Pinocchio is naive.

01:19:42.000 And it sounds like a good offer.

01:19:44.000 And also, the fox is actually quite forceful.

01:19:46.000 You know, he basically takes him by the hand.

01:19:48.000 So, the temptation is...

01:19:50.000 And this is something else I like about the movie.

01:19:53.000 You can't just say, well, the puppet gets what he deserves.

01:19:56.000 Because he's little.

01:19:57.000 Naive.

01:19:58.000 And what he's facing is really malevolent.

01:20:01.000 Truly malevolent.

01:20:02.000 And physically overpowering.

01:20:04.000 And so, the movie does a nice job of not minimizing the threat that's posed by this particular temptation.

01:20:11.000 And that's part of what makes it art.

01:20:13.000 Okay, good.

01:20:14.000 So, we'll stop there.

01:20:15.000 We'll have a break for 15 minutes.

01:20:16.000 And then we'll start with the stage.

01:20:17.000 So.

01:20:19.000 All right.

01:20:20.000 So, here we are at the big event.

01:20:22.000 And Pinocchio is off to be a celebrity.

01:20:27.000 And the cricket is watching.

01:20:32.000 And Pinocchio basically...

01:20:35.000 Well, he's got some natural talent.

01:20:37.000 Because he's a puppet.

01:20:38.000 He doesn't have strings.

01:20:39.000 And he goes on stage with strings.

01:20:41.000 And then he drops the strings.

01:20:43.000 And the whole crowd is amazed.

01:20:45.000 And the crowd should be amazed when that happens.

01:20:47.000 Right?

01:20:48.000 You can imagine when a kid goes to school and shows some independence, that that's actually going to...

01:20:57.000 People are going to notice that.

01:20:59.000 His peers are going to notice that.

01:21:01.000 The teachers are going to notice that.

01:21:02.000 Maybe it's too much independence, even.

01:21:04.000 Right?

01:21:05.000 But it's still a...

01:21:06.000 It is a remarkable thing, too.

01:21:07.000 Like, it's so interesting.

01:21:09.000 You know, you can see marked signs of independence in children.

01:21:12.000 Well, right from the time they're born, basically.

01:21:15.000 Because what's one of the things that's really funny about infants is that, you know, when they're crying, you always think, oh, the baby's...

01:21:21.000 Well, you're crying.

01:21:22.000 It's...

01:21:23.000 The baby's sad.

01:21:24.000 It's like, no.

01:21:25.000 A lot of the time that baby is angry.

01:21:27.000 And the way that we know that is because you could do facial expression coding on infants, just like on adults, and you can tell what emotion they're expressing.

01:21:38.000 And very frequently, like, when the kid starts to recognize his mom explicitly, because he or she knows the smell right away, pretty much in the sound of the voice.

01:21:47.000 But visually, if someone comes in, and it isn't who the baby wants, so generally, it isn't mom, the baby will start to cry.

01:21:56.000 But it's not because the baby's sad, generally.

01:21:58.000 It's because it's angry that mom didn't show up.

01:22:01.000 And that's an early sign of will.

01:22:03.000 Like, this kid has... This kid wants things, like, and it's perfectly willing to tell you about that.

01:22:09.000 And, of course, a two-year-old who's having a temper tantrum is, in some sense, doing the same thing.

01:22:13.000 It's poorly integrated will and independence, obviously.

01:22:17.000 But it certainly runs contrary to what you want.

01:22:20.000 You don't want your two-year-old having a temper tantrum in the middle of the toy store.

01:22:23.000 It's extraordinarily embarrassing for you and...

01:22:26.000 Well, for you.

01:22:27.000 But it's also embarrassing for the two-year-old.

01:22:29.000 This is one of the reasons I think that that sort of thing should be carefully socialized rapidly.

01:22:35.000 Because it's actually humiliating for the kid, because other people don't like that.

01:22:39.000 And they're very judgmental about... Like, they won't say anything, usually.

01:22:42.000 But sometimes they will.

01:22:44.000 But they're not happy about the fact that that's happening.

01:22:46.000 And they will judge the child negatively.

01:22:48.000 And so you don't want your child to be behaving in a way, in public, that makes other people think badly of them.

01:22:55.000 It's really not good.

01:22:58.000 And so part of your job as a parent is to not expose your child to that sort of experience.

01:23:05.000 Especially not repeatedly.

01:23:06.000 It's really hard on them.

01:23:08.000 Or they get narcissistic, which is also really hard on them.

01:23:12.000 It just takes a lot longer to manifest itself.

01:23:14.000 So anyways, he's off on stage and Stromboli introduces him and talks about how wonderful this is going to be.

01:23:20.000 And Pinocchio comes out on stage with the strings on and drops them.

01:23:24.000 And then he falls down the steps and puts his nose in a hole.

01:23:27.000 Makes a fool out of himself.

01:23:28.000 And that's when Stromboli...

01:23:29.000 The first time Stromboli shows his true character.

01:23:31.000 Because he just really yells and screams at him.

01:23:36.000 And he has his back to the audience, Stromboli, while he's doing this.

01:23:40.000 So he's not noticing how the audience is reacting.

01:23:42.000 Typical tyrannical parent, right?

01:23:44.000 Who's not noticing that society is reacting a different way than him.

01:23:49.000 And he's not happy about it.

01:23:51.000 And Pinocchio, of course, is dazed and feels like a fool.

01:23:54.000 And he is a fool.

01:23:55.000 So that's appropriate.

01:23:57.000 But then Stromboli hears the crowd laughing.

01:24:00.000 And as soon as he turns around, he's like all smiles again.

01:24:03.000 And so that's the first time you get insight into what sort of puppet master he is.

01:24:07.000 He's there to please the crowd, and that's all.

01:24:09.000 And he's there to look good in public.

01:24:11.000 But fundamentally, he's a tyrant.

01:24:13.000 And I guess that's the problem with false celebrity.

01:24:16.000 Is that the negative spirit of the crowd becomes your master, right?

01:24:20.000 Because to be a celebrity, you have to be a crowd pleaser.

01:24:23.000 And if you're pleasing the kind of crowd who likes a celebrity like you, which is...

01:24:30.000 And there's not much reason for that.

01:24:32.000 Then it's not exactly like you're appealing to the proper side of the crowd.

01:24:36.000 And you've become its puppet one way or another.

01:24:38.000 And maybe it's rewarding you with wealth, perhaps, and with attention.

01:24:42.000 But fundamentally, it's not something I would recommend if you want to stay reasonably psychologically healthy for any reasonable amount of time.

01:24:52.000 You're gonna sell yourself out.

01:24:54.000 And I don't mean that in any casual way, you know.

01:24:57.000 All right, so anyways, Stromboli changes from the tyrant to the good father.

01:25:03.000 In half a second, he gives Pinocchio a pat on the head, despite the fact that he's made a mistake.

01:25:08.000 Looks all kind.

01:25:09.000 And the show continues.

01:25:10.000 Now, the cricket is not very happy about this.

01:25:13.000 He's sitting in the stage watching.

01:25:15.000 He's very angry and, let's say, disgusted by what's happening.

01:25:19.000 Partly because Pinocchio is making a fool of himself.

01:25:23.000 Now, that's an interesting thing, you know.

01:25:25.000 Human beings blush.

01:25:27.000 In fact, if I remember correctly, the name Adam, like Adam and Eve, is related to the capacity to blush.

01:25:35.000 Now, that comes from something I read a long time ago, and that might be wrong.

01:25:39.000 But Adam does manifest shame in the sight of God.

01:25:43.000 So, there is a relationship there.

01:25:45.000 But anyways, people do make fools of themselves for public display.

01:25:51.000 And you can tell you've done that in some sense.

01:25:54.000 Not always, if you blush.

01:25:56.000 Because you've either said something you shouldn't have, and, you know, you realize that.

01:26:01.000 Which is more like you've tried to be funny and gone a little bit too far.

01:26:05.000 And sometimes that can be really funny.

01:26:07.000 Or, you've said something that you know to be false.

01:26:11.000 Manipulative, deceitful, beneath you, any of those things.

01:26:15.000 And you'll have an automatic response to it.

01:26:17.000 You'll be ashamed and blush.

01:26:19.000 And one theory about that is that you can trust people who blush.

01:26:22.000 And so, because you know that their conscience will betray them.

01:26:26.000 And so that even if they are lying, they tell you.

01:26:29.000 And so, it's an interesting theory, you know.

01:26:31.000 Because blush is definitely, like, it's a facial display.

01:26:34.000 You know, it's right out there where people can see it.

01:26:36.000 So, you know, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't.

01:26:40.000 But it's kind of an interesting idea.

01:26:42.000 Anyways, the cricket is not happy with what's going on.

01:26:44.000 He's not happy about Stromboli.

01:26:46.000 And he's not happy about the willingness of Pinocchio to make a fool of himself to support this false celebrity.

01:26:52.000 And so, I actually think that's why the celebrity types like that often get narcissistic and arrogant.

01:27:00.000 You know, it's because they aren't paying attention.

01:27:04.000 They're not paying attention, really, to what's happening inside of them.

01:27:08.000 They drown it out because the glory and the money and all that is so attractive and enticing.

01:27:14.000 They don't notice, they refuse to notice what price they're paying for it.

01:27:18.000 And they magnify up their grandiosity and their arrogance to keep that stuff all under control.

01:27:23.000 And then, of course, they get surrounded by sycophants, which is a really bad thing, right?

01:27:27.000 They get surrounded by people who will tell them exactly what they want to hear.

01:27:32.000 And that's really bad if what you want to hear from other people is not good for you.

01:27:36.000 To surround yourself with people who won't offer you genuine criticism or even genuine reward.

01:27:42.000 It's the same thing.

01:27:43.000 Like, you want from me that I differentially reward and punish you in approximately the way that the good part of the crowd will.

01:27:51.000 That's what you want from all your friends.

01:27:53.000 Because then, your interactions with them can generalize out to the broader community in a productive way.

01:27:59.000 And so, a good friend, you know, I mean, your friends tend to be on the supportive side.

01:28:03.000 And perhaps that's appropriate, assuming there's reciprocity.

01:28:06.000 But a good friend will also tell you when, one way or another, when your behavior is starting to tilt in a direction that's going to make you unpopular with them.

01:28:14.000 And likely unpopular with other people.

01:28:17.000 And, of course, that's what a parent is supposed... that's the prime job of a parent, in my estimation.

01:28:21.000 It's like, don't do that.

01:28:24.000 Other people will hurt you if you do that.

01:28:27.000 By exclusion, by threat, by failure to offer you an opportunity, bad things will happen to you.

01:28:34.000 So you can't do that.

01:28:36.000 And then you're a representative of the social situation, which is exactly what you should be.

01:28:41.000 Not a friend.

01:28:43.000 So...

01:28:47.000 Or at least, not precisely a friend.

01:28:49.000 That doesn't make you an enemy. It makes you better than a friend.

01:28:51.000 Well, so Pinocchio's on stage making a fool of himself.

01:28:55.000 And then he gets all tangled up in other puppet strings.

01:28:58.000 That's what happens to him.

01:29:00.000 And then it all ends rather badly with everything being a tangled mess on stage.

01:29:05.000 But it also turns out to be rather funny.

01:29:07.000 It's funny, because he's surrounded by angry Russians.

01:29:11.000 Which, you know, you could kind of view that as a potential lesson.

01:29:16.000 If you're a puppet on a stage and you mess around too much, you just might get tangled up with a bunch of angry Russians.

01:29:22.000 These are Cossacks. That's exactly what happens.

01:29:25.000 So, anyways.

01:29:26.000 Of course, no. That's not what's happening here.

01:29:29.000 But it's still funny.

01:29:31.000 So...

01:29:34.000 Stromboli is not happy with the tangled mess.

01:29:36.000 But then the crowd reacts very positively.

01:29:38.000 And then that confuses the conscience, because he thinks, well, look, this is horrible.

01:29:41.000 This guy's a tyrant.

01:29:43.000 Like, Pinocchio's making a fool of himself.

01:29:45.000 Everything turns into a tangled mess.

01:29:47.000 But the crowd goes crazy.

01:29:49.000 And, well...

01:29:51.000 Being a fool, that can be entertaining, right?

01:29:54.000 So it's hard to tell when the crowd, especially at a spectacle, because this crowd is at a spectacle.

01:30:00.000 You just don't know exactly why it is that they're responding positively.

01:30:04.000 But you definitely give them what you want.

01:30:06.000 And you can see this look on Stromboli's face.

01:30:08.000 It's like this false...

01:30:09.000 Again, this false kindness and generosity.

01:30:12.000 Public facing.

01:30:14.000 And...

01:30:15.000 Well, anyways, the conscience is very confused.

01:30:17.000 And I really think this is an important thing.

01:30:19.000 Because I've often thought...

01:30:20.000 I spent a lot of time thinking about Hitler.

01:30:22.000 And I was thinking...

01:30:24.000 Well, how do you get into a state like that?

01:30:26.000 You know?

01:30:27.000 And you think, well...

01:30:28.000 He's a dictator.

01:30:29.000 And he led his people down a bad path.

01:30:32.000 It's like, that's not right.

01:30:33.000 That is not what happened.

01:30:35.000 They...

01:30:36.000 Had a conspiracy together.

01:30:38.000 And went down a bad path.

01:30:40.000 Now, think about it this way.

01:30:43.000 If one person thinks something about you.

01:30:46.000 It's like, whatever.

01:30:47.000 Right?

01:30:48.000 But if five people tell you that.

01:30:50.000 Well, what?

01:30:51.000 Then...

01:30:52.000 To start not taking that seriously is kind of narcissistic.

01:30:56.000 Right?

01:30:57.000 And if it isn't five, let's say it's 15 people.

01:30:59.000 Tell you the same thing.

01:31:00.000 Or act the same way towards you.

01:31:01.000 It's like...

01:31:02.000 Probably you should clue in.

01:31:04.000 Well, what if you're a politician.

01:31:07.000 And you're trying out a bunch of different ideas.

01:31:09.000 And you're good at interacting with the crowd.

01:31:12.000 You're charismatic.

01:31:13.000 You watch the crowd.

01:31:14.000 But you're not necessarily all that articulate.

01:31:17.000 You don't have your values all straightened out.

01:31:19.000 But you're kind of angry too.

01:31:20.000 And maybe that's because you spent a bunch of time in World War I in the trenches.

01:31:25.000 Which was like no joke.

01:31:26.000 And all your friends got blown up.

01:31:28.000 And then you were unemployed.

01:31:30.000 And then you tried to be an artist.

01:31:31.000 And that didn't work out.

01:31:32.000 Even though you were moderately talented.

01:31:34.000 And then maybe the economy fell apart completely.

01:31:37.000 On you.

01:31:38.000 Hyperinflation.

01:31:39.000 And then maybe there was a communist menace coming in from the East.

01:31:42.000 And there genuinely was.

01:31:43.000 And so, you're not the world's happiest clam at that point.

01:31:47.000 And you're talking to people who aren't that happy either.

01:31:50.000 Because they were also badly defeated in World War I.

01:31:52.000 And then they had a terrible treaty they had decided.

01:31:54.000 They lost part of their territory.

01:31:56.000 And so, the crowd's not happy.

01:31:58.000 And neither are you.

01:31:59.000 And there's reason for it.

01:32:01.000 And so you start talking to them.

01:32:02.000 You don't know what you're upset about.

01:32:04.000 And neither does the crowd.

01:32:06.000 So you start to articulate some things about why you might be upset.

01:32:09.000 And some of them fall flat.

01:32:11.000 But you're paying attention to the crowd.

01:32:13.000 So you stop saying those things.

01:32:15.000 And some of the things make the crowd really wake up and listen.

01:32:19.000 And so you start saying more of those things.

01:32:21.000 It's an unconscious dialectic between you and the crowd.

01:32:25.000 It's mediated by consciousness.

01:32:27.000 But it's not like you're sitting there saying.

01:32:29.000 Although you might be.

01:32:30.000 I'm going to tell this crowd more what it wants to hear.

01:32:33.000 It's more sophisticated than that.

01:32:35.000 And so you do that a thousand times.

01:32:37.000 And you do that to ever increasing crowds.

01:32:40.000 And the crowd really starts to go mad.

01:32:43.000 And they basically tell you that you're the savior of the nation.

01:32:46.000 It's like at what?

01:32:48.000 How many bloody people have to tell you that before you start to believe it?

01:32:53.000 You know, I would say with a typical person, a hundred will do it.

01:32:58.000 That'll get you going, man.

01:33:00.000 A hundred people tell you specifically why you're special.

01:33:03.000 You're going to be thinking.

01:33:04.000 Even if you're kind of humble to begin with.

01:33:06.000 You're going to be thinking, geez, there's got to be something to this, man.

01:33:09.000 But if it's a million people and they're roaring their approval.

01:33:13.000 Well, and then when it's a whole nation, it's like, good luck withstanding that.

01:33:18.000 There's just not a chance.

01:33:19.000 How are you going to withstand that?

01:33:22.000 Now, you could be like Gandhi.

01:33:24.000 And you could have taken that into account beforehand.

01:33:27.000 Because he did.

01:33:28.000 He read Tolstoy, by the way.

01:33:30.000 He was a student of Tolstoy.

01:33:31.000 And that's very interesting.

01:33:33.000 Because Tolstoy was the person who developed the techniques of nonviolence that Gandhi used.

01:33:37.000 And Tolstoy was also a deeply religious writer.

01:33:41.000 Apart from his novels.

01:33:43.000 Which are not, I wouldn't say, really in the religious category.

01:33:47.000 Although they're profound.

01:33:49.000 Tolstoy stressed humility with nonviolence.

01:33:55.000 He really stressed it.

01:33:56.000 And that's what Gandhi took to heart.

01:33:58.000 So he lived a very, very, very, very simple, bare bones, ascetic life.

01:34:03.000 And that was to kind of see if he could keep his damn ego tamped down.

01:34:07.000 While the groundswell was building behind him.

01:34:10.000 And he dressed really simply.

01:34:11.000 And he didn't own much.

01:34:12.000 And he ate very simply.

01:34:14.000 And he just tried to stay away from the whole materialistic success element.

01:34:18.000 That would be an element of what would turn him into an actor.

01:34:20.000 And also inflate his ego.

01:34:22.000 And he seemed to do that pretty well.

01:34:24.000 He certainly...

01:34:26.000 Well, he led a nonviolent revolution that resulted in the independence of India.

01:34:32.000 It also produced a terrible civil war.

01:34:34.000 And the separation of the Muslim Indians from the Hindu Indians.

01:34:38.000 But I don't think you can precisely lay that at the feet of Gandhi.

01:34:43.000 Right?

01:34:44.000 But what I'm saying is that you have to be an extraordinary person.

01:34:47.000 You have to be extraordinarily wise.

01:34:48.000 And you have to take ridiculous precautions.

01:34:50.000 If you're going to put yourself in the public sphere like that.

01:34:53.000 And expose yourself to that kind of adulation.

01:34:56.000 Without becoming a puppet of the crowd.

01:34:58.000 And that's what happened to Hitler.

01:35:00.000 I mean, it's not like he wasn't also a conscious manipulator.

01:35:03.000 And surrounded himself by people who were propagandists.

01:35:06.000 And all of that.

01:35:07.000 So there was a conscious element.

01:35:08.000 But you've got to think these things through.

01:35:11.000 And see how that dialectic develops.

01:35:13.000 Like, he learned how to appeal to the darkest fantasies of the crowd.

01:35:17.000 He was really, really good at it.

01:35:19.000 And that was a dialectic process, right?

01:35:22.000 The crowd told him what they wanted to hear.

01:35:24.000 And the crowd's a mob at that point.

01:35:27.000 So I don't have to take responsibility for the fact that I'm screaming my approval.

01:35:31.000 When I'm surrounded by a million people.

01:35:34.000 So I can scream my approval for whatever I want.

01:35:36.000 For whatever dark, revengeful fantasy might be playing out in my imagination.

01:35:41.000 Because I'm not going to be held accountable for it.

01:35:46.000 Anyways, the cricket's confused.

01:35:48.000 And it's no wonder.

01:35:49.000 It's like the public has rendered its judgment.

01:35:52.000 And the judgment is positive.

01:35:54.000 So, when I wrote the book on which this course is based.

01:35:58.000 I was thinking, how am I going to judge its success?

01:36:01.000 And then I thought, well, there's sort of four...

01:36:03.000 There's a two-by-two matrix of success.

01:36:06.000 You could say, it's a great book.

01:36:08.000 No one reads it.

01:36:09.000 That happens.

01:36:10.000 So what do you do about that?

01:36:12.000 It's like, Nietzsche sold virtually nothing in his lifetime, right?

01:36:16.000 And you know that's happened to lots of artists, so...

01:36:18.000 Then it's a terrible book and everyone loves it.

01:36:21.000 That happens, too.

01:36:22.000 And then it's a great book and everyone loves it.

01:36:24.000 And then it's a terrible book and everyone hates it.

01:36:27.000 That's probably a better category, actually, that, like, it's a terrible book and everyone loves it.

01:36:32.000 I mean, you wouldn't pick a terrible book that everyone hates if you had a choice.

01:36:36.000 But at least the quality and the response match, at least it's truthful, like great book, good response.

01:36:44.000 But the problem with those four categories is you can't really tell which category your production falls into, right?

01:36:51.000 Because how do you know?

01:36:53.000 And you know, I think you should assume horrible book, bad response, because that's the most likely...

01:36:58.000 Of all four of those categories, that's the one that's most likely to be true.

01:37:01.000 But just, you know, purely on actuarial grounds, let's say.

01:37:05.000 So, alright, so anyways, the cricket wanders away because he obviously...

01:37:10.000 Not only was he late for work that day, but he turned out to be wrong about everything.

01:37:14.000 So he lets Pinocchio go off on his adventure, and Stromboli puts him in this little, kind of like a traveling, a touring wagon, you know.

01:37:24.000 And away they go.

01:37:27.000 And the cricket thinks, well, the conscience isn't needed anymore on this journey towards unearned celebrity.

01:37:34.000 Well, meanwhile, back at the ranch, as they say, the puppet is supposed to come home after school.

01:37:47.000 But he doesn't.

01:37:50.000 He doesn't show up.

01:37:52.000 And the kitten and the fish and Geppetto are all waiting there for him, ready to eat.

01:38:03.000 Excuse me.

01:38:05.000 But he doesn't show up.

01:38:07.000 And so Geppetto goes out into the rain to look for him.

01:38:12.000 And he can't find him.

01:38:15.000 And then we see the inside of the traveling show cart.

01:38:20.000 And Stromboli is having a snack, and counting all the money that he's made from tonight's performance.

01:38:27.000 And hypothetically dividing it up with a puppet.

01:38:30.000 So he's got this little stack of gold, and some of it's false.

01:38:34.000 So somebody paid with a, looks like a little washer, like a mechanical washer, and it's bent.

01:38:39.000 And so he curses about that for a while.

01:38:42.000 Even though it's interesting, because he's made all this money, it's been really successful.

01:38:46.000 But this one little error is enough to enrage him, which is very ungrateful and tyrannical.

01:38:53.000 It's like, look, you got 100 gold pieces.

01:38:56.000 Someone slipped you a fake one.

01:38:59.000 It's like, you could have had 101.

01:39:02.000 It's still a pretty good day, all things considered.

01:39:04.000 You know, you've got to make a bit of allowance for error, which is something a tyrant does not do.

01:39:09.000 So, and that's perfect, because if you don't make allowance for error at all, then people are always guilty of something.

01:39:18.000 And if you're a tyrant, that's exactly what you want.

01:39:22.000 And people are always guilty of something.

01:39:24.000 So, the tyrant who's willing to exploit that is always on solid ground.

01:39:29.000 So, anyways, he doesn't share with Pinocchio.

01:39:36.000 And he puts him in a birdcage, a jail.

01:39:38.000 And then he also shows him this other puppet that has an axe through him that was the previous puppet who didn't precisely perform as he was supposed to.

01:39:48.000 And so there's a big threat there.

01:39:51.000 It's like, you stay in that jail, you do exactly what I want.

01:39:54.000 Or it's off to the woodpile for you to be burned.

01:39:59.000 And so, well, that's just worth thinking about, because that's kind of what happens with tyrants.

01:40:06.000 And so, and literally, not just metaphorically.

01:40:15.000 So, the cricket is basically wondering what in the world he should do.

01:40:19.000 And then the cart rolls by and he gets an inkling or hears, and I don't quite remember this, that Pinocchio is in there and might be in trouble.

01:40:27.000 Or he thinks that up.

01:40:28.000 I'm sorry, I can't remember that.

01:40:29.000 But he ends up, anyways, he ends up inside the cart.

01:40:31.000 He finds the traveling cart and he goes inside.

01:40:34.000 And then he tries to pick the lock.

01:40:36.000 Because he's a bug, he can climb inside.

01:40:38.000 He tries to pick the lock.

01:40:39.000 He tries to get Pinocchio out of the jail that he's sort of collaborated himself into.

01:40:44.000 And it's interesting, because if you read, for example, if you read Solzhenitsyn Skulag Archipelago, which I would highly recommend.

01:40:56.000 One of the things you find is that if you were arrested by the KGB, by the secret police in the Soviet Union, and you were hauled off to a tribunal before a judge.

01:41:14.000 They wanted you to admit that you were guilty.

01:41:18.000 You had to.

01:41:19.000 Like, they torture you until you confessed.

01:41:21.000 Or you could just confess.

01:41:23.000 And I always found that so mysterious.

01:41:25.000 It's like, they kick down your door.

01:41:27.000 They know perfectly well that they haven't got any more on you than they've got on anyone else.

01:41:32.000 And yet, you have to go through the damn trial, and you have to admit that they're right.

01:41:36.000 It's like, why do they even bother with that?

01:41:38.000 Why don't they just throw your sorry ass into the camp?

01:41:42.000 Which is essentially what's going to happen anyways.

01:41:44.000 Why do they need your collaboration?

01:41:46.000 You know, I've never quite figured that out.

01:41:50.000 I think it's partly because they're not willing to let you stand in opposition to the rules.

01:41:57.000 Because the mere fact that you'll do that means that you exist as something that is allowed to exist outside the rules.

01:42:05.000 And they're not having any of that.

01:42:07.000 So that's part of it.

01:42:10.000 But there's more to it.

01:42:12.000 There's more to it than that.

01:42:13.000 It's like the drama of collaboration.

01:42:15.000 So, one of the things I learned about societies like the Soviet Union, and this is true of all tyrannical societies,

01:42:20.000 is that the idea that that's top-down and that people are just following orders.

01:42:25.000 They're good people, but they're just following orders.

01:42:27.000 It's like, you can forget about that.

01:42:28.000 That's a stupid theory.

01:42:30.000 When a society becomes tyrannical like that, the tyranny exists at every single level of the society.

01:42:36.000 You tyrannize your own conscience.

01:42:38.000 So let's say you're a true believer.

01:42:40.000 You're a true believer in Marxist utopia, let's say, or National Socialist Third Reich that's going to last a thousand years and be racially pure.

01:42:47.000 You really believe that.

01:42:49.000 And that's supposed to be a perfect state.

01:42:51.000 And that's already been delivered to you.

01:42:53.000 And so what that means is that insofar as you're a true believer, your own suffering becomes heretical.

01:42:59.000 Because to the degree that you're suffering, you're living proof of the fact that the system is not delivering what it promised to deliver.

01:43:05.000 And so you have to suppress that.

01:43:07.000 You have to become your own tyrant.

01:43:09.000 You can't admit that anything's gone wrong.

01:43:11.000 And, of course, you can't talk about it to your family, because one out of three of them are government informers, just like one out of three of everyone.

01:43:17.000 And you're certainly not going to mention it in the workplace, because unless you're a devout Communist Party member, you're not going anywhere.

01:43:24.000 And if any of your ancestors were, like, landowners or bourgeoisie, it's like, you're done.

01:43:30.000 You're done.

01:43:31.000 Class guilt, man.

01:43:32.000 You're not going anywhere.

01:43:33.000 And then every single level of the bureaucracy is exactly the same as that.

01:43:38.000 And on the top, there's a tyrant.

01:43:39.000 But the tyrant is everywhere.

01:43:41.000 Everywhere.

01:43:42.000 From the peak to the soul.

01:43:44.000 It's all tyranny.

01:43:46.000 And everyone participates in that by lying about everything.

01:43:50.000 And that's why you see what happens next in the movie.

01:43:53.000 So Pinocchio's in jail.

01:43:55.000 And he's there because he was naive, and he allowed himself to be enticed, and because he did something that would have run contrary to his conscience.

01:44:02.000 But the movie doesn't put up straw men.

01:44:05.000 You know, the poor damn puppet got tangled into this.

01:44:07.000 His conscience wasn't even around.

01:44:09.000 So you have to have some sympathy for him.

01:44:12.000 But it doesn't matter.

01:44:13.000 It doesn't matter.

01:44:14.000 Because he ends up in jail, and he can't get out.

01:44:21.000 And the fact that it, in some ways, wasn't his fault, doesn't change the fact that he's in jail and he can't get out.

01:44:28.000 And then his...

01:44:30.000 I was watching Louis C.K. the other night.

01:44:33.000 And he was talking about children lying.

01:44:36.000 He was talking about his nine-year-old daughter lying.

01:44:38.000 And he said, well, it's no wonder your children lie.

01:44:42.000 And it's no wonder it's impossible for you to stop them.

01:44:45.000 Because, you know, you're talking to someone whose head would scrape the roof.

01:44:51.000 They weigh like three times as much as you.

01:44:53.000 And they're capable of force.

01:44:55.000 And they're intimidating.

01:44:57.000 And they say to you something like, did you take that last cookie after I told you not to?

01:45:03.000 And you're thinking, oh no, I took the cookie.

01:45:06.000 What am I going to do?

01:45:08.000 And then you get a genius idea in your head, which children, smarter children learn to lie earlier.

01:45:14.000 Children with high IQs learn to lie younger.

01:45:17.000 And C.K. says, well, it's like you've just been handed a magic get-out-of-jail-free card.

01:45:23.000 You can just say, no, I didn't take that cookie.

01:45:26.000 And worse than that, it works in every single situation if you get away with it.

01:45:31.000 And now you're supposed to learn not to do that.

01:45:35.000 You said, well, great, that's the thing about comedians, you know, they'll tell you the underlying truth.

01:45:42.000 Which is why people think they're so funny, like the jester in a king's court, right?

01:45:45.000 He's the only one who's allowed to tell the king the truth, because he's beneath contempt.

01:45:49.000 That's what comedians do.

01:45:51.000 And so, well, so what happens is, well, Pinocchio's not very happy about this, right?

01:45:55.000 It's really breaking him up.

01:45:57.000 And the blue fairy appears again, from the star, same way.

01:46:01.000 And what this means is, and I think this is right, this is something Jung talked about.

01:46:07.000 And it was also extraordinarily brilliant.

01:46:09.000 He said that it's one thing to break a rule when you don't really know the rule.

01:46:15.000 You can, for whatever reason, you seem to get a bit of a free pass for that.

01:46:20.000 But if then you know the rule, and then you break it anyways, you get hit a lot harder.

01:46:27.000 And I know that's true.

01:46:28.000 And I even think I figured out why it was true at one point.

01:46:31.000 But I can't remember at the moment.

01:46:33.000 But there's something about, it's like the severity of a moral error isn't quite as massive if you're genuinely ignorant and unconscious about the rule.

01:46:42.000 And maybe it's because you're not violating your own belief system as much when you engage in the misactivity.

01:46:48.000 It's something like that.

01:46:50.000 So, anyways, Pinocchio's in there, and he's partly at fault, at least because he's naive.

01:46:57.000 And he's very desperate about it.

01:47:00.000 But it's also because his conscience isn't functioning very well.

01:47:05.000 So he has his reasons.

01:47:07.000 And so whatever, the blue fairy shows up again.

01:47:09.000 Mother Nature steps in to aid him.

01:47:12.000 And that is true, I would say, because it's not like you get walloped or killed every time you make a mistake.

01:47:22.000 Right?

01:47:23.000 It's kind of interesting.

01:47:25.000 And especially that's the case with kids.

01:47:27.000 It's like we have more leeway for them.

01:47:30.000 Whether nature does, that's a different issue.

01:47:32.000 But I would say yes, because, you know, kids are really cute and they're appealing.

01:47:36.000 And they're naive and they're kind of helpless.

01:47:39.000 They have those motions even that indicate helplessness.

01:47:42.000 And that's associated with the natural apprehension of cuteness.

01:47:45.000 Right?

01:47:46.000 So cuteness is big eyes, small nose, symmetrical features, baby-like features, helpless movements.

01:47:53.000 That elicits sympathy and compassion.

01:47:56.000 And it doesn't cross species.

01:47:58.000 And so does the cry.

01:47:59.000 And my roommate, when I was in college, had a niece who was quite young.

01:48:05.000 About a year and a half old, I think.

01:48:07.000 And we had a cat.

01:48:08.000 A wild cat.

01:48:09.000 And it was a really fighty cat.

01:48:12.000 Partly because of me.

01:48:13.000 Because I would always play with it.

01:48:14.000 And I let it fight with me quite a lot.

01:48:17.000 So it was a fighty cat.

01:48:18.000 And that little girl would come over and, you know, maybe she'd cry.

01:48:23.000 That cat was, like, there right now trying to figure out what was wrong.

01:48:26.000 And, like, the cat would use its claws on me.

01:48:29.000 But it would never use its claws on the little kid, you know.

01:48:32.000 And I thought, well, that's indication of that cross species cuteness.

01:48:36.000 You know, and you're all attracted to that, more or less.

01:48:39.000 And the more maternal you are, the more you're attracted to such things.

01:48:42.000 But, you know, you see something on YouTube and you go, ah!

01:48:45.000 And that's like, that's so cute.

01:48:47.000 It's like, yeah, it is.

01:48:48.000 It appeals to exactly this concomitation of infantile features.

01:48:59.000 And it brings out compassion.

01:49:02.000 Unless you're psychopathic.

01:49:04.000 So, it's a good thing.

01:49:06.000 But, you know, it can be manipulated, that's for sure.

01:49:09.000 Women actually manipulate it with makeup.

01:49:12.000 Which is quite sneaky and good of them.

01:49:16.000 So, anyways.

01:49:19.000 So the blue fairy shows up.

01:49:21.000 So that's nature.

01:49:22.000 So what I'm saying is that nature will cut kids a break.

01:49:25.000 If you think of nature in the guise of, well, their mother, for example.

01:49:28.000 But even the biology of other people.

01:49:31.000 Because we're wired to accept behavior from children that we wouldn't accept from other people.

01:49:36.000 So, nature will forgive.

01:49:38.000 So she shows up in her heavenly guise and says, what's going on?

01:49:45.000 And Pinocchio, again, because he's naive, but also because he's not good.

01:49:50.000 He's not evil either.

01:49:51.000 He's neither, or both.

01:49:52.000 It depends on how you look at it.

01:49:54.000 And he also has no idea how smart he is and how smart he isn't.

01:49:58.000 Or how smart the person he's talking to is.

01:50:00.000 And instead of admitting what he's done, he lies about it.

01:50:05.000 And that's interesting because it does suggest that he understands at some level that he set himself up for this.

01:50:13.000 Because, you know, he could have just told the truth.

01:50:16.000 This horrible fox kidnapped me and sold me to this slave holder.

01:50:23.000 Which is true.

01:50:25.000 It's a lot more true than the story he tells.

01:50:27.000 He tells a story about some monster.

01:50:29.000 You know, a fictional monster.

01:50:31.000 He could have told even three quarters of the truth and had it work, but he doesn't.

01:50:35.000 He just obscures the story entirely.

01:50:38.000 And this is the part of the movie that people remember.

01:50:40.000 And I'd edited this out for years when I was talking about this movie.

01:50:44.000 I forgot why it was so significant.

01:50:47.000 His nose grows, right?

01:50:49.000 And it grows to ridiculous length.

01:50:53.000 And why is that?

01:50:59.000 I think it was Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, I think, who said,

01:51:03.000 One of the advantages to telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you said.

01:51:08.000 And that, God, that's worth listening to.

01:51:11.000 Because...

01:51:15.000 So there's a bunch of things I've learned as a clinician.

01:51:18.000 And one of them is because you're often in really weird situations with people if you're a clinician.

01:51:22.000 Because things happen that don't happen normally.

01:51:24.000 And you don't know what to do.

01:51:26.000 And so what I've learned is I just say what's happening.

01:51:29.000 Whatever it is.

01:51:30.000 Regardless of what it is.

01:51:31.000 You know, I'll just try to describe it as accurately as I can.

01:51:34.000 And not worry about, in some sense, not worry about the consequences.

01:51:38.000 You know, like I'm not going out of my way to cause trouble.

01:51:40.000 But if you're in a really...

01:51:42.000 And I'm telling you, this can save your life at times.

01:51:44.000 Especially if you're dealing with someone who's paranoid, who's really paranoid.

01:51:47.000 You do not lie to someone who's paranoid and violent.

01:51:51.000 Because as soon as you lie, you're aligned with the forces that are persecuting them.

01:51:55.000 And they're going to be...

01:51:56.000 Because paranoia makes people hypervigilant, like they're on amphetamines.

01:51:59.000 In fact, you can make people paranoid by giving them enough amphetamines.

01:52:04.000 And you can make paranoid people more paranoid by giving them amphetamines.

01:52:08.000 So they're hypervigilant.

01:52:10.000 Because they feel that everything is predatory and against them.

01:52:13.000 And so they're watching you like you would not believe.

01:52:15.000 Way more than you're watching them.

01:52:17.000 And if you flicker a lie while you're talking to them.

01:52:21.000 And they're really on the edge.

01:52:23.000 You're done.

01:52:25.000 So it's one thing to really know.

01:52:27.000 If you're ever in a really bad situation.

01:52:29.000 And you don't know what to do.

01:52:31.000 You tell the truth minimally.

01:52:33.000 You don't disclose too much.

01:52:35.000 That's just another lie.

01:52:36.000 You tell the truth minimally.

01:52:38.000 And carefully.

01:52:40.000 And hopefully.

01:52:41.000 And you might get out of it.

01:52:44.000 You might get out of it.

01:52:45.000 But if you falsify it.

01:52:48.000 Look the hell out.

01:52:50.000 So the truth is a real mechanism of protection in dangerous situations.

01:52:55.000 You know, so if someone's trying to intimidate you.

01:52:58.000 And you think they might get violent.

01:53:00.000 And they ask you if you're afraid.

01:53:02.000 Then you tell them that you're terrified.

01:53:04.000 And that you hope that things will go okay.

01:53:07.000 Or you say.

01:53:10.000 I'll give you an example.

01:53:13.000 One time I was in an airport.

01:53:15.000 And we were in this lineup to fly back to Canada.

01:53:19.000 That said international flights.

01:53:21.000 And so it was a long lineup.

01:53:22.000 Like 50 people.

01:53:23.000 And I got about three from the front.

01:53:26.000 And there was still like 40 people behind me.

01:53:28.000 And the guy behind the counter decided that he was just going to shut down the line.

01:53:31.000 And that we could all go to this other line.

01:53:33.000 Which was like 300 people long.

01:53:35.000 And I suggested that he not do that.

01:53:38.000 Because we'd been standing there for half an hour.

01:53:40.000 And that he could just deal with the 20 of us that were left.

01:53:43.000 And like have a clue.

01:53:45.000 And so he called the sheriff.

01:53:46.000 Right away.

01:53:47.000 And this was down in Florida.

01:53:49.000 And it wasn't that long after 9-11.

01:53:51.000 And so these guys came up.

01:53:52.000 And they were armed.

01:53:53.000 And they came and said.

01:53:55.000 Looked at me.

01:53:56.000 Because of course he told them that I was causing trouble.

01:53:58.000 Which I wasn't.

01:53:59.000 I was just trying to not let...

01:54:04.000 What would you say?

01:54:06.000 An arrogant bureaucratic scum rat take advantage of me.

01:54:10.000 So...

01:54:11.000 Which is not the same as causing trouble.

01:54:13.000 So anyways, as soon as the cops came up, I said.

01:54:15.000 Look.

01:54:16.000 I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do.

01:54:18.000 Right now.

01:54:19.000 And I'm not going to cause any trouble.

01:54:21.000 But I would like you to hear what actually happened.

01:54:24.000 And so that's a good example of a situation like that.

01:54:27.000 It's like...

01:54:28.000 If someone's got you.

01:54:30.000 No bravado.

01:54:31.000 It's a very bad idea.

01:54:33.000 And I was going to do exactly what they told me.

01:54:35.000 Because, you know...

01:54:37.000 They didn't know who I was.

01:54:39.000 And I didn't know what they had been told.

01:54:41.000 So, anyhow.

01:54:43.000 The problem with lying is that it's a hydra.

01:54:47.000 And kids find this out very early.

01:54:49.000 Because you tell one lie.

01:54:51.000 And what happens is it has one of the consequences that you expect.

01:54:54.000 Maybe you get away with it.

01:54:55.000 But it has three or four others that you don't expect.

01:54:57.000 And so it's like it grows some complexity.

01:55:01.000 And then you have to tack a lie on each of those little complexity outcrops.

01:55:05.000 And then they grow three more complexities.

01:55:07.000 And soon, this little lie turns into a great big ball of lies.

01:55:11.000 And at some point, it becomes painfully evident to everyone.

01:55:14.000 And by that time, you're in such...

01:55:16.000 You see this with politicians.

01:55:17.000 Like that guy who was sexting.

01:55:19.000 Anthony Weiner.

01:55:20.000 Anthony Weiner.

01:55:21.000 Yeah.

01:55:22.000 Perfect name for him, man.

01:55:23.000 It's so funny.

01:55:24.000 I shouldn't make that comment.

01:55:26.000 Because it's so obvious.

01:55:27.000 But it's still funny.

01:55:28.000 But, you know, he...

01:55:30.000 That's exactly what happened to him.

01:55:31.000 It's like...

01:55:32.000 It wasn't even so much the event.

01:55:34.000 Because, you know, people are stupid.

01:55:36.000 They make mistakes.

01:55:37.000 And actually, the public is somewhat forgiving if you say, yeah, geez, I'm a real moron.

01:55:42.000 And, you know, like, really?

01:55:44.000 Seriously?

01:55:45.000 How could I do that?

01:55:46.000 But I did.

01:55:47.000 And, like, I'll try not to do it again.

01:55:49.000 But what happens with politicians is...

01:55:51.000 And I'm not speaking specifically of politicians.

01:55:54.000 They'll make an error.

01:55:55.000 And it gets exposed.

01:55:56.000 And then they make three others trying to cover it up.

01:55:58.000 It happened with Nixon, for example.

01:56:00.000 And then the whole thing just turns into a complete scandal.

01:56:03.000 And maybe they could have got out of it at the beginning by just telling the truth.

01:56:08.000 It's like, yes.

01:56:09.000 I'm an idiot.

01:56:10.000 You know?

01:56:11.000 I'll try not to do it again.

01:56:13.000 Well, that isn't what happens in this case.

01:56:16.000 And Pinocchio grows this elaborate series of lies.

01:56:21.000 And the fairy is willing to be a little generous to him.

01:56:25.000 Because he's little and cute.

01:56:26.000 And he's still a puppet.

01:56:27.000 And she tells him not to do that.

01:56:31.000 And that she's going to give him a pass this time.

01:56:34.000 But that she isn't going to be able to intervene on his behalf again.

01:56:38.000 And that's partly...

01:56:39.000 One of the things that's quite interesting about people who have Rousseauian ideas about children.

01:56:43.000 So, children are all good.

01:56:45.000 And they get corrupted by society.

01:56:47.000 Which is half true.

01:56:49.000 Because they're also not good.

01:56:51.000 And they get shaped and disciplined by society.

01:56:54.000 But the Rousseauian types often are very interesting when their kids hit teenage years.

01:57:00.000 Or when they're judging, like, say, criminal teenagers.

01:57:05.000 It's like, the child is perfect until they hit, like, 11.

01:57:08.000 Then they turn into a teenager.

01:57:09.000 And then they're like thugs.

01:57:11.000 So they go from good to thug in one move, you know?

01:57:14.000 And you often see that in families, too.

01:57:16.000 That have treated, especially their daughters, like a princess.

01:57:19.000 You know?

01:57:20.000 And then they hit puberty.

01:57:21.000 And the parents who have princessed them to death have no idea what to do with them.

01:57:26.000 And so then they become demonized.

01:57:28.000 And so the overly good child turns into the overly wicked teenager.

01:57:34.000 And sometimes they'll act that out, too.

01:57:36.000 One of the things I've seen with girls who are held in princess esteem when they're little.

01:57:42.000 And their parents have too tight a grip on them.

01:57:45.000 And too much of a demand for good behavior.

01:57:47.000 They'll find some nasty character to associate with who will tear them out of the family.

01:57:51.000 You know, bikers are really good for that sort of thing.

01:57:54.000 And especially if you have some vengeful thoughts towards your parents.

01:57:58.000 Nice biker is your perfect solution to that problem.

01:58:02.000 Okay, we'll go through this scene.

01:58:04.000 And then I think we'll call it a day.

01:58:06.000 Okay, so now Pinocchio's gone free.

01:58:08.000 He's been united with his conscience.

01:58:10.000 He's learned a couple of lessons.

01:58:12.000 Don't be an actor.

01:58:14.000 And don't lie.

01:58:15.000 Those things are quite similar, right?

01:58:17.000 And especially once you're caught in your actor trap, don't lie to get out.

01:58:21.000 Because that will just make it worse.

01:58:23.000 So that's the first of his trials.

01:58:25.000 His moral trials on the road to becoming real.

01:58:28.000 All right, now here we're in a different place.

01:58:30.000 We're at this, I think it's called the Red Lobster Inn.

01:58:33.000 And it's a shadowy place, right?

01:58:35.000 And it's kind of cave-like.

01:58:36.000 So it's like an underground entrance to somewhere that's not good.

01:58:40.000 And it's a foggy night, and you can't really see.

01:58:44.000 So everything's murky and gloomy there.

01:58:47.000 And so inside, we see the coachman and the fox and the cat.

01:58:55.000 And the coachman, the coachman's a bad guy.

01:58:59.000 He's that mask that we saw first of all.

01:59:01.000 He's the archetype of that mask that was judgmental about Pinocchio having a voice.

01:59:06.000 And it's like, one of the things Jung said about the shadow.

01:59:09.000 And this is, I would say, one of the primary impediments to enlightenment.

01:59:13.000 Is that if you start looking at your motives for misbehaving.

01:59:18.000 And I mean by that something very specific.

01:59:21.000 I don't mean that you're misbehaving by someone else's standards.

01:59:25.000 I don't mean that.

01:59:26.000 I mean, when you know by your own standards that you're doing something that's devious or malevolent or underhanded.

01:59:32.000 You know it, and you still do it.

01:59:34.000 So it's your own judgment you're bringing to bear on yourself.

01:59:38.000 If you look at why you're doing that, the longer you look at it, the deeper a hole you dig.

01:59:45.000 And so this is the motif of Dante's Inferno, fundamentally.

01:59:49.000 So Dante's Inferno is a story about...

01:59:53.000 I can't remember his name, unfortunately.

01:59:56.000 It might be Dante, in fact.

01:59:58.000 Although I don't remember.

01:59:59.000 He's led into hell by Virgil, who's an ancient philosopher, thinker.

02:00:06.000 And hell has levels.

02:00:08.000 And so the outer level is...

02:00:10.000 And this is a Christianized version of hell.

02:00:12.000 Because there's hells of all sorts.

02:00:14.000 But this is a Christianized version.

02:00:16.000 And so the...

02:00:17.000 On the outermost levels of hell, which is sort of like normal life, are the ancient philosophers.

02:00:23.000 And they're still in hell because they weren't Christian.

02:00:25.000 But it's kind of like...

02:00:27.000 It's like cheap motel hell, instead of the full pit thing.

02:00:31.000 And so then Dante goes deeper and deeper into hell until he gets right to the bottom of it.

02:00:38.000 And it's been a while since I read it.

02:00:40.000 But if I remember correctly, Satan himself is encased in ice at the bottom of hell.

02:00:45.000 Surrounded by people who betray others.

02:00:47.000 And so Dante's notion was that the worst of all possible violations of moral behavior was betrayal.

02:00:55.000 And that they're in the deepest levels of hell.

02:00:57.000 And I really like that idea.

02:00:59.000 I think it's true.

02:01:01.000 Because if you trust me, then you're manifesting the necessary courage that puts someone through life.

02:01:06.000 If you're smart, you don't trust me because you're naive.

02:01:09.000 You trust me knowing that I'm full of snakes and so are you.

02:01:13.000 But maybe we could cooperate and move things along nicely.

02:01:17.000 And we could reduce each other to the word.

02:01:20.000 To our word.

02:01:21.000 And we could cooperate.

02:01:22.000 But you're awake.

02:01:23.000 And then I betray that.

02:01:25.000 Then I'm undermining your necessary faith in life and humanity.

02:01:31.000 And you can really hurt someone that way.

02:01:33.000 Like, sometimes it's self-betrayal.

02:01:36.000 But you can really do someone in that way.

02:01:38.000 You can really traumatize them.

02:01:39.000 So that they can't recover.

02:01:41.000 And so it's a really terrible thing to do to someone.

02:01:44.000 And maybe it's the worst thing.

02:01:45.000 And that was Dante's idea.

02:01:46.000 And it's tied in.

02:01:48.000 That makes very interesting reading if you read it at the same time as Milton's Paradise Lost.

02:01:53.000 Because those are metaphysical explorations.

02:01:56.000 This is what they are.

02:01:57.000 They're metaphysical explorations of the terrible places you can end up.

02:02:01.000 And that people do end up.

02:02:03.000 And also a metaphysical explanation of what spirit takes you there.

02:02:08.000 So, because you might ask, well, why do you betray someone?

02:02:11.000 And that is a deep question.

02:02:14.000 And so you'll have your specific reasons.

02:02:16.000 But under that, there'll be some other reasons.

02:02:18.000 And under that, there'll be some other reasons.

02:02:20.000 And under that, there'll be some other reasons.

02:02:22.000 And if you go all the way to the bottom, you come up with the ultimate reasons why you betrayed someone.

02:02:26.000 And when you look at that, that will not be pretty.

02:02:29.000 That's when your proclivity for evil, let's say, unites with the general human proclivity for evil.

02:02:36.000 And you discover just exactly what you're capable of.

02:02:39.000 And so, Jung's notion was that, well, that was a full encounter with the shadow.

02:02:44.000 Which is, I suppose, partly what this course is about.

02:02:46.000 Because one of the things that I believe I told you at the beginning was that I was going to try to help you understand how it might be that you could be an Auschwitz guard.

02:02:56.000 And to really understand that, that's a horrifying thing to understand.

02:03:01.000 But I'll tell you, if you want to grow some teeth, that's a really good thing to understand.

02:03:07.000 So we were talking about your capacity to negotiate before.

02:03:10.000 Like, if you aren't a monster, you cannot negotiate.

02:03:15.000 But if you've got that under control, then you don't have to be a monster.

02:03:22.000 It's really paradoxical. So if you're just naive, well, you end up in jail and a marionette master has control over you.

02:03:30.000 That's not helpful. So that's not good. That just means you're useless and you can be manipulated.

02:03:35.000 You won't go out of your way to be malevolent.

02:03:37.000 But it's mostly because you just don't have the skills, the organizational skills, or even the depth to do that.

02:03:44.000 You're good because you're harmless. That's not good. That's easily manipulated.

02:03:50.000 And so you think, well, how do you get out of that?

02:03:52.000 Well, partly, you watch people because you know what they're like, because you know what you're like.

02:03:57.000 But you also know what you could do and would do if you were pushed.

02:04:02.000 And so you don't have to show much of that when you're negotiating with someone for them to take you really seriously.

02:04:08.000 So it's a strange thing, you know. But one of the things Jung pointed out, too, was that what you most need to know will be found where you least want to look.

02:04:18.000 And that's because you haven't already looked there. And so it's a little different for everyone, right?

02:04:23.000 Because your particular place you don't want to look isn't going to be the same as your place.

02:04:27.000 But you're going to have a place you don't want to look. And what you haven't discovered, that's where it is.

02:04:32.000 And so that's all partly going to be discovered by you looking at what you're capable of, what you're truly capable of.

02:04:39.000 And, you know, people, especially on the compassionate end, say, well, no, I could never be, like, brutal like that.

02:04:46.000 And that could be true. But you can kill people with compassion, no problem.

02:04:50.000 That's the Freudian Oedipal situation. So think about working in a nursing home.

02:04:55.000 So there's actually a rule of thumb, which I also use to guide my interactions with children and also with my clients.

02:05:01.000 And I would say with people in general, do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves.

02:05:07.000 All you do is steal. You just steal it from them.

02:05:10.000 So imagine you're working with really elderly people, you know, they have Alzheimer's.

02:05:13.000 It's like really easy to do things for them because, well, it isn't because it's really a hard job.

02:05:18.000 But it might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it.

02:05:24.000 But you just speed their demise, right, by taking away the last vestiges of their independence.

02:05:29.000 And you do the same thing with kids. It's like struggle through it, man.

02:05:33.000 Did you ever see my left foot?

02:05:35.000 That's a great movie. It's about this author whose name escapes me at the moment.

02:05:40.000 Brilliant. It's a brilliant movie. And the person who played the part is Daniel Day-Lewis.

02:05:46.000 I think he won an Academy Award for it. But it's about this author in Ireland who was, I think he had cerebral palsy.

02:05:54.000 And all he could really do was use his left foot. That was it. The rest of him was pretty spastic and not controllable.

02:06:01.000 But he was there. He was very intelligent. He was with it. And his dad would not help him.

02:06:06.000 He had to drag himself up the damn stairs with his left foot. He just would not help him.

02:06:12.000 And what happened was, he learned how to live. You know, he actually, he could function.

02:06:18.000 And the movie does, the book, which is called My Left Foot, and the movie does a lovely job of laying that out.

02:06:23.000 You have to be one hard-hearted son of a bitch to let your son crawl up the stairs with his left foot over and over.

02:06:29.000 Think about that.

02:06:31.000 But what's the alternative? You know, if he would have been, and of course he lays this out in the book, if he would have been catered to,

02:06:39.000 he would have ended up just like you'd expect someone who was always catered to.

02:06:45.000 So, it's a very nice lesson in the triumph of fostering independence over too casual compassion.

02:06:54.000 That's what I would say.

02:06:55.000 Well, so you look at the coachman here.

02:06:57.000 Kind of looks like a demented Santa Claus, you know.

02:07:00.000 He doesn't have a beard, but it's a nice touch on the animator's part.

02:07:04.000 He's even got the pipe and the red suit.

02:07:06.000 And so he's listening to the fox and the cat brag about how much money they made selling Pinocchio to the puppet master,

02:07:12.000 and how evil and terrible they are, and their bragging way.

02:07:15.000 And he's the real thing, eh?

02:07:17.000 He's the real thing.

02:07:19.000 And he can see through their little petty, narcissistic, grandiose tales of quasi-criminality,

02:07:25.000 and has nothing but contempt for it.

02:07:27.000 And you can see that in his facial expressions.

02:07:29.000 Like he's sitting back a bit thinking,

02:07:31.000 keep talking bucko, pretty soon I'm going to have you right where I want you.

02:07:35.000 And so the fox and the cat are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking about how evil they are,

02:07:40.000 and bragging about how they got one over on the, what, like a four-year-old.

02:07:45.000 Real impressive guys.

02:07:47.000 Real impressive.

02:07:48.000 And the coachman is thinking up his own nefarious schemes right now,

02:07:53.000 what he might do with that puppet if he got his hands on him.

02:07:56.000 And so that's when he reveals himself, right?

02:07:58.000 So what you see, filmmakers just do it for a second.

02:08:01.000 And that's an archetypal trip.

02:08:03.000 It's like, you've got the fox and the cat.

02:08:05.000 They're sort of petty examples of criminality and evil.

02:08:08.000 And then you've got the coachman, and he's the real thing.

02:08:10.000 But he's not really showing anybody who he is.

02:08:13.000 And then at one scene in the bar, he lets his guard down and he lets them see what he's really like.

02:08:18.000 And so you see this all teeth and predatory eyes and glee all at the same time, right?

02:08:25.000 That's a bad combination.

02:08:27.000 I'm going to eat you, and it's going to make me very happy.

02:08:30.000 That's insanity.

02:08:31.000 You do not want to see that look on someone's face.

02:08:34.000 And so that's the look.

02:08:36.000 And the fox is traumatized by that.

02:08:38.000 He just, like, he thinks he's a bad guy.

02:08:41.000 And he's not.

02:08:43.000 He just can't be a good guy.

02:08:45.000 He hasn't got the talent to be a bad guy.

02:08:48.000 And then he's talking to the coachman and bragging.

02:08:51.000 And the coachman's had enough of it and shows his real face.

02:08:53.000 And it's like, that's not good.

02:08:56.000 The fox gets a real glimpse into hell.

02:08:58.000 And that just terrifies him.

02:09:00.000 And the other thing the coachman does is reveal his plans.

02:09:04.000 And his plans are to kidnap Pinocchio along with a bunch of other boys.

02:09:09.000 And to take them to this place called Pleasure Island.

02:09:12.000 And the fox knows what's going on there.

02:09:14.000 And so it's the foreshadowing of the next stage of the adventure.

02:09:21.000 And so after the fox and the cat are terrified, the coachman, who takes you along with him,

02:09:30.000 has a little chat with him.

02:09:32.000 And they describe exactly what they're going to do next.

02:09:34.000 And the fox and the cat know perfectly well that they're over their head.

02:09:38.000 But at this point in their misadventures, there's no pulling back.

02:09:43.000 And I think we'll stop there even though it's a little early because that was a lot of material.

02:09:48.000 And this is a really good place to stop.

02:09:50.000 So we'll see you in a week.

02:09:52.000 We'll return next week with part three of Marionettes and Individuals.

02:09:57.000 Mikaela?

02:09:58.000 Consider picking up Dad's latest book, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos,

02:10:03.000 or his first book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

02:10:06.000 Available in text, ebook, and audiobook format wherever you buy books.

02:10:10.000 Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson.

02:10:14.000 On Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson.

02:10:17.000 On Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

02:10:20.000 And at Instagram, at jordan.b.peterson.

02:10:23.000 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events,

02:10:29.000 and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanbpeterson.com.

02:10:35.000 My online writing programs, designed to help people straighten out their pasts,

02:10:40.000 understand themselves in the present, and develop a sophisticated vision and strategy for the future,

02:10:45.000 can be found at selfauthoring.com.

02:10:48.000 That's selfauthoring.com.

02:10:51.000 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 09, 2020

131. Maps of Meaning 3： Marionettes & Individuals (Part 2)

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