The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 132. Maps of Meaning 4： Marionettes & Individuals (Part 3)

00:00:00.940 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

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00:00:57.420 Welcome to Season 3, Episode 19 of the Jordan B. Peterson Podcast.

00:01:02.160 I'm Westwood One Podcast Network's Joey Salvia, and I help produce this series.

00:01:07.040 We thank you for joining us for these 2017 lectures based on Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

00:01:15.360 This week, we present Part 3 of Marionettes and Individuals.

00:01:19.420 In this lecture, Dr. Peterson concludes his analysis of the Disney film Pinocchio, which he conducted to illustrate how archetypal, mythological themes permeate popular culture.

00:01:32.580 Maps of Meaning 4, Marionettes and Individuals, Part 3, for Jordan B. Peterson Lecture.

00:01:39.540 My plan is to finish this today.

00:01:44.440 So, and then we'll go into the more concrete details, now that you've got some sense of the way that a narrative like this can unfold.

00:01:52.400 So, if you remember, we were just leaving this terrible little bar, which I think was called the Red Lobster, or something like that,

00:02:00.800 where the fox and the cat had met the coachman.

00:02:04.140 And the coachman is obviously someone who takes you somewhere, he takes you on a trip, and the coachman basically revealed himself.

00:02:13.220 First, he kind of looks like a, I guess, a somewhat jolly old man, although his expression doesn't precisely read as jolly.

00:02:21.840 And then he reveals himself as something positively satanic, and that's enough to terrify these two-bit thugs, the fox and the cat,

00:02:31.280 who think they're tough, but really aren't tough at all.

00:02:34.500 And so, they see, at some point, what they're really tangled up in.

00:02:39.000 And I think I mentioned to you that that was something akin.

00:02:42.060 Jung had this idea that people's shadows reach all the way down to hell, which is actually a very frightening concept.

00:02:49.400 And what he meant by that is that if you take a look at the impulses that drive you,

00:02:54.320 that are actually malevolent, if you can admit to such impulses, that if you basically follow those all the way down to their origin,

00:03:03.200 you find some very nasty things.

00:03:04.920 And what you find down there, basically, is what allies you with people who've done terrible things.

00:03:10.300 And that's not a very pleasant experience, I would say, although one thing that's worth thinking about is that

00:03:19.800 it is something that can protect you against being very, very badly hurt.

00:03:25.980 Because one of the things that characterizes people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder is that they're often naive.

00:03:33.020 And then they encounter something that's really not within their framework of thinking, and it's usually something bad.

00:03:39.800 And because there isn't anything in their philosophy, their way of looking at the world that has prepared them for that,

00:03:45.820 they end up fragmented and devastated.

00:03:48.040 And so, it's actually protective to you if you can figure out what your full range of capabilities is.

00:03:57.300 Because that can help you understand other people a lot better.

00:04:00.720 And to be wiser and more careful in your actions.

00:04:05.540 It's also useful, I think, if you want to convince yourself to act properly.

00:04:10.460 Because if you regard yourself as harmless, which is a big mistake, then nothing you can do is really that bad, right?

00:04:20.120 Because you're harmless, after all.

00:04:21.880 But if you understand that you're seriously not harmless, then that can make you a lot more careful with yourself.

00:04:28.300 And I would say that that's especially true maybe when you're dealing, when you have kids and you start dealing with your kids.

00:04:34.320 If you know that what you're capable of, because you're human, then that can motivate you to be much more careful with what you say and do.

00:04:44.060 And I don't mean cautious.

00:04:45.440 I don't mean timid.

00:04:47.100 I don't mean any of that.

00:04:48.320 I just mean that you want to keep things pristine between you and your children, let's say.

00:04:52.820 Because that way, they're on your good side.

00:04:55.800 And you want them on your good side.

00:04:57.520 Because children who get on their parents' bad side suffer very badly for it.

00:05:02.660 And sometimes it's because they're literally abused.

00:05:05.560 But more often it's because they get...

00:05:09.340 Well, they get abused, let's say, or neglected in much more subtle ways.

00:05:13.120 And you're definitely capable of that.

00:05:15.620 I mean, all you have to do is think about the way that you've interacted with someone that you've decided to not like.

00:05:20.820 Or maybe someone you genuinely don't like, you know.

00:05:23.520 And that can range from just not paying any attention to them, especially if they're doing something good,

00:05:28.160 to really pursuing them and making their life miserable.

00:05:31.180 And you can certainly do that with your family members.

00:05:33.580 And you can do that with your intimate partners.

00:05:35.980 And you can do that with your friends.

00:05:37.280 And you can do it with yourself.

00:05:38.580 And so it's really worth knowing that.

00:05:40.500 And so, well, the fox thinks he's a royal rule breaker, but he's really just a two-bit thug.

00:05:49.200 And this is where he learns that.

00:05:52.240 So the coachman's got these guys in his grasp now, regardless.

00:05:58.000 And partly because they're already down this road and they can't back off.

00:06:01.740 And partly because he also offers them more money than they've seen before.

00:06:04.700 And so as bad as they are, they're going to get worse.

00:06:08.280 Because many of you, I presume, have seen Breaking Bad.

00:06:11.740 And that's a really good example of the incorporation, at least in part, or maybe the possession by the shadow from the Jungian perspective, right?

00:06:20.560 Because you have this ordinary high school teacher who really thinks that he's an axe, and his family as well.

00:06:26.280 You know, like your typical persona, roughly speaking.

00:06:30.340 He's just a normal guy.

00:06:32.360 But part of the reason that he's a normal guy is because he actually hasn't been put in abnormal circumstances.

00:06:37.020 And then all of a sudden he is.

00:06:38.520 And he has a genuine moral conundrum, right?

00:06:40.500 He's going to die of lung cancer.

00:06:41.660 And he has a son who's got a lot of health problems.

00:06:46.000 And he's terrified that he's going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing.

00:06:51.800 And then, of course, has the story.

00:06:53.400 And so he decides to do something that temporarily that he regards as what they would normally regard as reprehensible.

00:07:00.900 And, of course, he just gets tangled up in that.

00:07:02.660 But then, as the story unfolds, you see that it's more complicated.

00:07:06.420 Because it's not that he was just innocent good guy and he decided to turn bad.

00:07:10.940 He's also very resentful and angry.

00:07:13.400 And it's partly because he's a bit of a pushover at the beginning, or maybe more than a bit of a pushover.

00:07:17.900 And also that he didn't really fulfill his own potential.

00:07:21.220 And that, you know, he had friends who walked down the entrepreneurial path.

00:07:26.700 And maybe they weren't quite fair to him, but whatever.

00:07:30.240 He ends up not very successful as a high school teacher.

00:07:33.700 And so he's really angry about that.

00:07:35.120 And so there's more motivation for him opening up the door to the terrible elements of his personality

00:07:41.840 than just the fact that he's got good motivations to do so.

00:07:45.920 And that unfolds, you know.

00:07:47.740 And so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character increasingly manifest themselves

00:07:53.820 as he walks down this road to really total brutality.

00:07:57.500 And it's quite good.

00:07:59.300 There's a book called Ordinary Men that's a lot like that.

00:08:03.680 I don't think I've mentioned that to you before, but Ordinary Men is a book about...

00:08:07.820 It's the best book of its type.

00:08:09.460 Maybe it's the only book of its type.

00:08:12.060 It's possible.

00:08:12.820 But it's plotted much like Breaking Bad in some sense.

00:08:15.440 It's a story about these German policemen in early stages of World War II.

00:08:22.580 And they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian

00:08:27.020 propaganda came out in full force.

00:08:30.000 You know, if you were a teenager, say, in the 1930s, you were going to be pulled right

00:08:33.200 into the propaganda machine.

00:08:34.440 And maybe you were part of the Hitler youth.

00:08:35.960 And like, you were raised in that, you know.

00:08:37.920 But if you were older, then you were raised before that.

00:08:40.840 And you're not as amenable to propaganda once you're older than about...

00:08:44.800 Well, I would say about 22 or something like that.

00:08:47.960 It's pretty young, actually.

00:08:50.040 If you're going to make a soldier, you have to get a soldier young.

00:08:52.500 Because once people are in their early 20s, say, they're kind of...

00:08:56.460 They already have their personality developed.

00:08:58.720 Anyways, these policemen were sent into Poland after the Germans marched through.

00:09:04.960 And, you know, it was wartime.

00:09:07.780 And there was this hypothesis in Germany that the Jews in particular were operating as a fifth

00:09:13.620 column and undermining the German war effort.

00:09:15.620 Because, of course, the Germans blamed the Jews and a variety of other people for actually

00:09:19.520 setting up the conditions that made the war necessary.

00:09:22.780 And so when the police were sent into Poland, they were also required to make peace, roughly

00:09:28.140 speaking.

00:09:28.800 And so they started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 65 and gathering

00:09:36.220 them in stadiums and then shipping them off on the trains.

00:09:39.280 But that isn't where they ended.

00:09:40.900 They ended in a very, very dark place.

00:09:43.520 I mean, these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women and shooting

00:09:47.820 them in the back of the head by the end of their training.

00:09:50.500 And what's really interesting about that is that their commander told them that they

00:09:56.580 could go home at any time.

00:09:58.900 So this is not one of those examples of people following orders.

00:10:03.100 And the reason they didn't, roughly speaking, there's many reasons, but one of the reasons

00:10:07.640 they didn't is because they didn't think it was comradely, so to speak, to leave

00:10:12.280 their, the guys they were working with to do all the dirty work and run off.

00:10:16.640 You know, and that's really, that's really an interesting fact, you know, because you'd,

00:10:20.760 in different circumstances, you wouldn't think about that as reprehensible, right?

00:10:24.800 You'd think, well, that's part of teamwork and under rough circumstances.

00:10:28.960 And that's at least in part how they viewed it.

00:10:31.120 And they were also made physically ill multiple times, physically and psychologically ill by the

00:10:36.280 things that they had to do.

00:10:37.380 But they kept doing them anyways, so it's one step at a time.

00:10:42.080 And that's the thing, is that you end up in very bad places one step at a time, so you've

00:10:46.720 got to watch those steps.

00:10:49.280 Anyways, Pinocchio has now decided, after his latest misadventure, to return to the proper

00:10:57.560 pathway.

00:10:58.120 He's off to school again.

00:10:59.760 And he's still pretty naive, although perhaps not as much so as he was before.

00:11:03.920 And so he decides that he's going to do things right.

00:11:06.160 He's going to go get educated, he's going back to school, he's going to take the conventional

00:11:09.920 route to discipline and be a good boy, roughly speaking.

00:11:13.740 And so he's off to school, and the fox waylays him again.

00:11:18.500 This is a really interesting scene.

00:11:22.000 It took me quite a long time to unpack this, too.

00:11:24.360 And so the fox, first of all, starts out by acting like he's sympathetic, again, sympathetic

00:11:30.120 towards Pinocchio.

00:11:32.280 And so he's empathetic, you could say.

00:11:35.140 And so this is an interesting analysis of empathy.

00:11:38.380 So what happens is, is the fox convinces Pinocchio, through a variety of maneuvers, that he's

00:11:45.960 actually not feeling very well, that he's sick.

00:11:48.540 He really convinces him that he's a victim.

00:11:50.440 And one of the things, I had a graduate student named Maya Djikic, who had worked with the

00:11:57.660 UN in Bosnia, and she had toured some of the mass grave sites there.

00:12:02.360 And we wrote a paper one time called, You Can Neither Remember Nor Forget What You Don't

00:12:07.200 Understand.

00:12:07.620 And it was a paper about the idea, for example.

00:12:12.520 It was partly about the idea that we should never forget the Holocaust.

00:12:15.660 And the idea there is that, well, we should never forget it, and we shouldn't repeat it.

00:12:19.580 But the thing is, if you don't understand how those things come about, you can't really

00:12:23.640 remember them, right?

00:12:24.580 You think about them as a set of historical facts, but that's not the kind of remembering

00:12:29.580 that actually makes any difference.

00:12:31.520 You have to understand the causal pathways.

00:12:33.840 You have to understand how a society would transform in that manner.

00:12:37.020 And more importantly, you have to understand the role of the individuals within that society,

00:12:42.500 unless you're going to assume that they're so completely unlike you that there's no

00:12:46.320 connection whatsoever, in which case you haven't remembered it at all.

00:12:50.000 You haven't learned anything at all, because the right lesson from what happened in the

00:12:53.600 20th century is, this is what human beings are like.

00:12:57.860 That's the correct lesson.

00:12:59.720 And you can say, well, not me, but probably you too.

00:13:04.700 That's the thing.

00:13:05.620 Probably.

00:13:06.020 And probably me too, at least under normal circumstances.

00:13:10.080 Anyways, the fox convinces Pinocchio that he's sick.

00:13:16.520 He performs a lot of tricks to do this.

00:13:19.300 Now, you could say that Pinocchio is susceptible to this, because maybe there's still part of

00:13:25.420 him that's looking for the easy way out.

00:13:27.120 And so, one of the things that Maya and I found when we were writing this paper, we were looking

00:13:32.720 at the discourse that precedes genocide in genocidal states, and the enhancement of a sense of

00:13:39.060 victimization on the part of one of the groups, usually the group that's going to commit the

00:13:43.280 genocide, first of all, their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues

00:13:49.780 who are trying to stir up this sort of hatred.

00:13:51.500 So they basically say, look, you've been oppressed in a variety of ways, and these are the people

00:13:56.100 who did it, and they're not going to stop doing it, and this time we're going to get them

00:13:59.200 before they get us.

00:14:00.840 It's something like that.

00:14:02.360 And so, there's something very pathological about the enhancement of victimization, which

00:14:06.500 is, well...

00:14:08.620 See, the problem, as far as I'm concerned with it, is it's not thought through very well.

00:14:16.940 Because there's a point that's being made, and the point is that people have been oppressed

00:14:23.100 and they suffer.

00:14:24.660 And that's true, that point.

00:14:26.400 But that's...

00:14:29.400 But then, the proper framework from within which to interpret that, I believe, is that

00:14:35.760 that's characteristic of life.

00:14:39.580 You can't take it personally in some sense, and you can't divide the world neatly into

00:14:44.680 perpetrators and victims, and you certainly can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators

00:14:48.500 and victims, and then assume that you're only in the victim class, and then assume that

00:14:52.760 that gives you certain, like, access to certain forms of redress, let's say.

00:14:58.880 It gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing.

00:15:01.680 So, for example, one of the things that characterized the Soviet Union, and this was particularly true

00:15:07.860 in the 1920s, but afterwards, so...

00:15:10.860 The Soviets were very much enamored of the idea of class guilt.

00:15:16.600 So, for example, although it was only about 40 years previously that the serfs had been

00:15:22.860 emancipated, they weren't much more than slaves, right?

00:15:26.540 And so that was the bulk of the Russian population.

00:15:29.080 They were bought and sold along with the land.

00:15:31.820 So, they had been emancipated, and some of them, many of them, had turned into independent

00:15:37.640 farmers, and some of them had become reasonably prosperous, because, at least in principle,

00:15:43.920 I presume a certain proportion of them from being crooked, but I presume a larger proportion

00:15:48.600 from actually being able to raise food.

00:15:50.480 And, of course, at that time, the bulk of the Russian food population was produced by

00:15:55.840 these relatively successful peasant farmers, and relatively successful would mean maybe

00:16:02.740 they had a brick house or something, and maybe they had a couple of cows, and maybe they

00:16:06.140 were able to hire a few people, and so, you know, it wasn't like they were massive landowners

00:16:11.320 or anything, but I've talked to you a little bit about the Pareto Principle, and the notion

00:16:16.760 that in any domain of activity, a small proportion of people end up producing most of what's

00:16:21.460 in that domain of activity.

00:16:22.920 The same was true in Russia with regards to these peasant farmers.

00:16:27.500 Some of them were extraordinarily efficient, and they produced most of Russia's food.

00:16:32.540 When the Communists came in, they described those landholders as parasites, essentially,

00:16:39.860 predicated on the Marxist idea that if someone had extracted profit from an enterprise, that

00:16:46.460 they had basically stolen that profit from the people, say, that they had employed or

00:16:52.140 otherwise oppressed, and so you could be a member of the KULAK, K-U-L-A-K, K-U-L-A-K,

00:16:58.480 you could be a member of the KULAK class.

00:17:01.960 And then, because you were a member of that class, you were automatically guilty.

00:17:05.120 And so what happened was... and you've got to think this through to really understand

00:17:08.240 what happened.

00:17:09.240 What happened was the intellectual Communists were sent out in cadres out into these little

00:17:15.180 towns to find people who would help them round up the KULAKs.

00:17:19.880 Now you've got to think about what a small town is like, because... so imagine you're

00:17:24.120 in a town and there's three or four people, or maybe ten people, or something like that,

00:17:27.480 who are a little more successful than everyone else.

00:17:30.240 And a certain number of people are going to be fine with that, and maybe even happy about

00:17:33.860 it, because they regard those people as particularly productive.

00:17:36.260 And, you know, as stalwart members of the community, regardless of their flaws.

00:17:40.740 But there's going to be some people who are not happy about it at all, that are going

00:17:44.260 to be very resentful about that and jealous.

00:17:47.080 And so those are going to be people whose characters, I would say, are of the less positive

00:17:51.540 type.

00:17:52.640 And so when the intellectuals came in and described the reason that these people should be treated

00:17:57.480 as parasites and profiteers, then it was the resentful minority in those towns, and that

00:18:02.260 would be the kind of guy that hangs around in the bar all the time and is completely unconscientious

00:18:06.140 and fails at everything, and then blames everyone else for it.

00:18:10.120 The intellectuals came in and said, here's... this is unfair that this happened to you.

00:18:15.060 You've actually been victimized, and now it's your opportunity to go have your revenge.

00:18:19.560 And so that's exactly what happened.

00:18:21.020 Now, in some of the villages, sometimes the peasants would actually surround the farmsteads

00:18:28.620 of these more successful people and try to defend them, but that never worked out for

00:18:32.560 very long.

00:18:33.600 And so then these mobs, these angry mobs would go into the farmhouses and strip the place

00:18:39.140 right down to nothing.

00:18:41.160 And they packed these people up and sent them on trains with no food out to Siberia, where

00:18:46.380 there was no place to live.

00:18:47.600 And so they were packed into houses, you know, maybe they had a square meter each to live

00:18:51.920 in, and all their children died of typhoid, and many of them froze to death.

00:18:56.980 Many, many people died, millions of people died, as a consequence of the de-kulakization.

00:19:02.980 At least as a consequence of its total effect.

00:19:06.320 So what happened then was that there wasn't any food produced.

00:19:11.940 And so then six million Ukrainians starved to death in the 1920s, which is something

00:19:16.400 you never hear about, right?

00:19:18.040 You never hear about that.

00:19:19.260 Why do you never hear about that?

00:19:21.180 That's a question worth asking.

00:19:22.180 You know, it was an absolute catastrophe.

00:19:24.940 They used to...

00:19:26.220 So these people were starving, right to the point of cannibalism, right?

00:19:30.060 I mean, it was ugly, as ugly as anything you could possibly imagine.

00:19:34.140 If you were a mother and...

00:19:35.680 So you're supposed to hand all your grain into the central committee, mostly for distribution

00:19:39.700 into the cities.

00:19:40.740 And you didn't get to keep any for yourself.

00:19:42.640 And so maybe then afterwards, if you were a mother, you'd go out in the fields that had

00:19:45.500 already been harvested, and you'd pick up individual grains of wheat.

00:19:51.460 And if you didn't turn those in, that was death for you.

00:19:55.120 So that's how far it was pushed.

00:19:57.540 So that's a little story about how victimization, how the idea of victimization and perpetration

00:20:06.880 can get out of hand extraordinarily rapidly.

00:20:09.820 And so whenever people are beating the victim drum, you know, they'll cover that up with

00:20:17.580 empathy, roughly speaking.

00:20:19.580 We're speaking on behalf of the oppressed.

00:20:21.720 It's like, maybe you are, but maybe you're no saint, because, you know, you're so sure

00:20:27.720 that you're a saint and you're only speaking from the position of good.

00:20:31.480 It's highly unlikely.

00:20:32.480 Anyway, so Pinocchio is enticed into believing that he's a victim.

00:20:36.480 Now, the logical part of that is that it is the case that, you know, you can make a very

00:20:41.700 strong case that every human being is, in some sense, involved in a tragic enterprise.

00:20:47.480 Right?

00:20:48.480 Because you're biologically vulnerable, you're not what you could be as a biological specimen,

00:20:53.240 right?

00:20:54.240 You're full of imperfections, and plus, you're going to be sick, and those you love are going

00:20:57.700 to be sick, and everything ends up in death.

00:21:00.080 And so that, there's a very tragic element to that.

00:21:02.940 And then, by the same token, you're also subject to the tyrannical aspect of your culture,

00:21:09.240 right?

00:21:10.240 Because it's forcing you to be a certain way all the time.

00:21:16.080 Socialization does that.

00:21:17.080 You're required to modify your own intrinsic nature in order to come into conformity with

00:21:23.480 the broader community.

00:21:24.480 And you can think about that from the Piagetian sense, which is that socialization makes you

00:21:28.740 a more and more sophisticated person.

00:21:31.360 And there's some truth in that, but you can also be subject just to tyranny, you know?

00:21:35.440 And you see, I see people in my practice, for example, who've had very tyrannical fathers,

00:21:41.320 for example.

00:21:42.320 Sometimes they have tyrannical mothers as well.

00:21:44.160 But they're not so much encouraged to integrate properly into the social community, as they

00:21:50.260 are harassed and abused, and made to feel insufficient, and, you know, basically subject to tyranny.

00:21:56.660 And so it's quite, and that's true of everyone to some degree.

00:22:00.960 You know, you come to university, and there's a tyrannical aspect to it.

00:22:05.160 You know, especially in a big institution like this, you're not really marked out as

00:22:10.160 an individual in any sense, you know?

00:22:12.880 You're a number, along with 60,000 other people, and, you know, there's something cold

00:22:17.880 and impersonal about that, which is well represented in the design of this classroom, say.

00:22:23.700 But by the same token, you know, the university provides you with an identity while you're exploring

00:22:29.620 an intellectual landscape.

00:22:30.620 You know, you have a lot of freedom compared to the vast majority of people.

00:22:37.140 Perhaps you don't have as much freedom as you might if you compared it to some utopian notion

00:22:42.300 of freedom.

00:22:43.300 But in any real-world sense, you're unbelievably well-protected by the university, partly because

00:22:48.620 it stamps you with the identity student, which is a respectable identity.

00:22:53.620 And so you can go off and educate yourself as much as you can.

00:22:57.620 Well, and everyone in society says that's okay.

00:23:00.100 They carve out a protected space for you.

00:23:01.900 So at the same time as you're being tyrannized by the institution and forced in some ways also

00:23:08.420 to adopt the viewpoint, say, of the professors, depending on the professor, you're also the

00:23:14.100 beneficiary of that, just like you're the beneficiary of this huge industrial infrastructure

00:23:18.460 that underlies everything we do.

00:23:20.540 So anyways, the fact that your life is tragic, necessarily, and that you are subject to oppression

00:23:28.060 makes the victimization story really easy to swallow.

00:23:32.040 But then there's a dark side of that, too.

00:23:34.380 And this is actually what happens with Pinocchio, so what happens here is that he's told that

00:23:40.740 he's ill, and convinced that he's ill, and they do use trickery, and so again you could

00:23:46.560 look at him in some sense as an innocent victim, but the innocence... the filmmakers do a good

00:23:53.160 job of hedging against the innocent interpretation, because what he's offered and accepts because

00:24:01.660 he's ill is an easy way out.

00:24:04.640 And so what the fox basically tells him is that he needs to have a vacation because he's

00:24:08.880 sick and he can go off to Pleasure Island, which is this place of impulsivity, roughly

00:24:13.280 speaking, and whim.

00:24:14.900 It's like reversion to being two years old in some sense, and that he really needs that

00:24:18.840 because otherwise he's not going to be able to live properly, he's not going to be able

00:24:23.520 to recover his health.

00:24:24.520 And so what Pinocchio has offered is the opportunity to abandon responsibility as a reward for adopting

00:24:35.520 the guise of victim.

00:24:37.480 And that's really worth thinking about, because one of the things I've thought about for a

00:24:40.500 long time is that I've been trying to figure out what gives people's lives meaning.

00:24:45.420 And tragedy gives life its negative meaning, and nobody disputes that.

00:24:51.040 Even if you're nihilistic, you're not going to dispute the fact that tragedy gives life

00:24:54.720 negative meaning.

00:24:55.720 So when nihilists say that life is meaningless, that isn't exactly what they mean.

00:25:00.100 They mean that life is suffering, but there isn't anything transcendent about it that you

00:25:03.620 could set against that suffering.

00:25:05.580 That's nihilism.

00:25:06.760 It's not that life is meaningless.

00:25:08.480 That would just be neutral.

00:25:09.480 It's like... no one believes that, and they certainly don't act like they believe it.

00:25:15.420 If you look at it technically, and we will as we progress through this class, that in order

00:25:19.340 to have any positive meaning in your life, you have to have identified a goal, and you

00:25:24.260 have to be working towards it, and there is a technical reason for that, and the technical

00:25:28.720 reason, as far as I can tell, is that the circuitry that produces the kind of positive emotion that

00:25:33.360 people really like is only activated when you notice that you're... when you're proceeding

00:25:39.820 towards a goal that you value.

00:25:43.460 And so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value, you can't have any

00:25:46.220 positive emotion.

00:25:47.180 So technically that's the incentive reward system, and it's... the underlying circuitry

00:25:51.700 is dopaminergic, and when that circuitry is activated, then it's part of the exploratory

00:25:56.640 circuit.

00:25:57.640 It makes you... it gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile.

00:26:02.460 And that's... you know, you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward.

00:26:07.240 But there's two kinds of positive emotion.

00:26:09.440 One is the reward that's associated with satiation, and that's consumatory reward, and that's

00:26:14.280 the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat.

00:26:17.080 But the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which

00:26:21.760 you are operating.

00:26:22.760 Right?

00:26:23.760 It's time to eat.

00:26:24.760 Well, you eat, and then that framework's no longer relevant.

00:26:26.800 So the consumatory reward eliminates the value framework.

00:26:30.340 And then you're stuck with, well, what are you going to do next?

00:26:32.860 And so, the consumatory reward has with it its own problems, but the incentive reward

00:26:37.560 is constantly what keeps you moving forward.

00:26:40.400 And incentive reward, because it's dopaminergic, also is analgesic.

00:26:45.320 Literally analgesic.

00:26:46.320 So, if you're in pain, you take opiates, and that will cut the pain, but so will psychomotor

00:26:51.240 stimulants like cocaine or amphetamines.

00:26:54.140 And so, it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging,

00:26:58.860 and you're working towards a goal, that you're going to feel less pain, and you can see this

00:27:02.400 happening with athletes who, you know, they'll break their thumb or something, or maybe sometimes

00:27:06.140 even their ankle, and they'll keep playing the game.

00:27:08.360 Of course, afterwards, they're suffering like mad, but the fact that they're so filled

00:27:12.420 with goal-directed enthusiasm means that, well, the pain systems are in some sense shut off.

00:27:19.720 So that's an interesting thing, because what it suggests, I mean, then you could imagine,

00:27:24.840 I might say, well, how happy are you that you've made a certain amount of progress?

00:27:29.760 And if you think about it, what you'd say is, well, it depends on how much progress,

00:27:34.460 and in relationship to what.

00:27:36.400 So hypothetically, you're going to be happier if you've made quite a bit of progress towards

00:27:40.080 a really important goal.

00:27:42.660 And then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important,

00:27:45.680 because that's not obvious.

00:27:46.840 Now, you could say, you're in this class, and you're listening to some information,

00:27:52.960 and maybe there's two reasons for that.

00:27:55.160 You might find the information interesting, per se, but let's forget about that for a minute.

00:28:00.420 You need to listen to the information so that you can do well on the assignments, so that

00:28:04.300 you can do well in the class.

00:28:06.040 You need to do well in your classes so that you can finish up your degree.

00:28:09.660 You need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world.

00:28:12.960 You need to do that so that you're financially stable, and maybe you can start a family and

00:28:16.920 have a life, and that's all part of being a good person, something like that.

00:28:20.920 And so, that's a hierarchy of goals, and you might say that being a good person would

00:28:27.300 be the thing, however vaguely thought through, that's at the top of that hierarchy.

00:28:31.900 And then, when you're doing things that serve that ultimate purpose, then you're going

00:28:37.200 to find those more meaningful, and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the

00:28:41.160 engagement of this exploratory circuit that's nested right down in your hypothalamus.

00:28:45.940 It's really, really old.

00:28:48.200 It's as old as thirst, and it's as old as hunger.

00:28:50.400 It's really an old system.

00:28:52.520 And so, you want to have that thing activated.

00:28:55.000 I mean, at least from a, from a, from a, well, it isn't only from a hedonic point of view.

00:29:02.040 You know, it isn't a matter of being happy.

00:29:03.820 It's the wrong way of thinking about it.

00:29:05.040 It's much more complicated than that.

00:29:07.160 Yes?

00:29:08.160 I was actually, I was just about to ask, like, bring up, like, the hedonic element.

00:29:11.940 Yeah.

00:29:12.940 Because I'm just trying to understand this, this, I guess, not relationship, but the differentiation

00:29:20.940 between hedonism and satiation.

00:29:22.940 And you, like, going back to when you mentioned that it's not that life is meaningless.

00:29:28.720 Yeah.

00:29:29.720 But hedonism isn't exactly, like, it's not satiation, because at that point, people are

00:29:35.560 just doing what they're doing for the sake of doing.

00:29:38.140 It's not just for activation of the dopaminergy, sorry, dopaminergy system.

00:29:44.720 System.

00:29:45.720 Yeah.

00:29:46.720 So, I'm just trying to understand...

00:29:48.720 Well, what I would say, we're going to go into that a lot, once we're done this.

00:29:54.720 Like, a lot.

00:29:55.720 But I'll go over it briefly.

00:29:57.720 I mean, it's not merely hedonism, because there's an analgesic and, and also a fear-reducing

00:30:03.720 element to pursuing the proper path.

00:30:05.720 Right?

00:30:06.720 So there's control of negative emotion.

00:30:08.880 But there's not just control of negative emotion, and generation of positive emotion

00:30:12.420 in the immediate future, which is kind of what you'd think about with regards to hedonism.

00:30:15.720 Actually, Pinocchio takes a hedonic root next.

00:30:19.200 The problem with the hedonic root is that...

00:30:21.920 So the pursuit of pure happiness, let's say, is that what makes you happy in the next minute

00:30:27.320 might not be something that will make you happy in the next hour.

00:30:30.500 Well you know that.

00:30:31.440 There's this comic, what's his name, they called him King of the One-Liners.

00:30:35.500 He talked about drinking wine.

00:30:37.500 He said, don't you know that's going to cause a hangover?

00:30:39.500 And he said, yeah, at the end.

00:30:41.500 But the beginning and middle are excellent.

00:30:43.500 And so that's really the problem with hedonism, right, is that to pursue something that makes

00:30:49.260 you happy in the immediate present risks sacrificing your, well, many things, but at least, let's

00:30:56.260 say, your hedonism in the medium to long term.

00:30:58.820 And of course, that is one of the major problems with drug use, and alcohol is a really good example

00:31:02.980 of that, because whatever hedonic kick you might get from it that moment at night, you're

00:31:08.580 going to pay for almost completely, or maybe even more so, because the next day you're

00:31:15.580 much more jittery and anxious, and that's a direct consequence of withdrawing from the

00:31:19.980 drug.

00:31:20.980 So when you have a hangover, you're in alcohol withdrawal.

00:31:23.980 So that's how fast you get, roughly speaking, addicted to it.

00:31:29.580 And so if you take another drink when you're hungover, it'll cure it.

00:31:32.700 But it's not a very useful cure, because all you do is push the inevitable hangover one

00:31:37.140 more step into the future.

00:31:38.680 And so part of the problem with the hedonic answer is, happy when?

00:31:43.580 Exactly, and over what period of time?

00:31:46.140 And also, who's happy?

00:31:47.340 Because maybe something makes you happy, but makes your family miserable.

00:31:50.760 Now you could say, well, I don't care, but you do care if you have to live with your family,

00:31:54.880 because they're going to take it out on you.

00:31:57.080 So the impulse of hedonism, which is also fostered, say, by a positive emotion, it tends to put

00:32:03.820 people into a state of the pursuit of short-term hedonism.

00:32:07.640 It's not a good long-term, or medium-to-long-term solution.

00:32:12.040 I actually think that's why people evolved conscientiousness, right?

00:32:16.300 Because conscientiousness is not happy.

00:32:19.600 Conscientious people aren't conscientious because it makes them happy.

00:32:23.620 We're starting to think that they're conscientious because they actually feel terrible if they're

00:32:27.500 just sitting around doing nothing, and so it's a way of staving off stress, the stress

00:32:33.620 that's related to enforced leisure, something like that.

00:32:36.540 You know, if you know industrious people, some of you are industrious, some of you will have

00:32:42.020 industrious parents, they just can't sit around and do nothing, they have to be working.

00:32:46.020 They don't feel good unless they're working.

00:32:48.200 So one thing about conscientiousness is that it involves continual sacrifice, right?

00:32:53.640 You're doing difficult things in the present, hypothetically, to make the future better,

00:32:57.960 but that's not driven by hedonism, by any stretch of the imagination, and conscientiousness

00:33:01.760 is actually a pretty good predictor of long-term life success in stable societies.

00:33:07.240 Because there's also no point in being conscientious and saving things up and storing things if

00:33:12.200 a bunch of thugs are gonna just come in randomly and take it all away.

00:33:16.400 So conscientiousness actually only works intelligently in societies that have some medium to long-term

00:33:21.240 stability.

00:33:22.240 You know, because you can get wiped out by hyperinflation, too, because hyperinflation kills off the conscientious people.

00:33:27.720 The people who accrue debts are thrilled when hyperinflation kicks in, because it wipes out their debts.

00:33:32.080 But, of course, those debts are the things they owe to people who were conscientious enough to save.

00:33:37.520 So anyways, Pinocchio is transformed into a victim, and he's offered this, he's offered this identity, and he takes it.

00:33:45.360 Now, it's partly because he's deceived and manipulated, but it's also partly because the fox offers him

00:33:51.920 the abandonment of responsibility as payment for adopting the victim identity.

00:33:59.680 So this is where his own lack of morality, let's say, because this is all about Pinocchio's development

00:34:06.000 as a character, plays a role in his demise.

00:34:10.080 So if I'm a victim, then everyone else owes me something, and I don't have to take any responsibility.

00:34:16.560 And so one of the things I've wondered, here's something to think about.

00:34:21.400 It might be that the sense of meaning that life can provide to you is proportionate to the

00:34:26.320 amount of responsibility you decide to take on.

00:34:29.760 That'd be very strange if it was the case, you know, because responsibility, of course,

00:34:33.120 is a kind of weight, obviously, and it's difficult to take on responsibility.

00:34:37.760 But if any positive emotion that you feel, and your control of anxiety, and the control over pain,

00:34:45.840 is dependent on the activation of these systems that watch you move towards a desired goal,

00:34:51.440 then the more complete and weighty the goal is, the more kick there's going to be in the observation

00:34:58.320 that you're moving towards it.

00:34:59.840 And, you know, you kind of already know this, because you'll have observed in your own life

00:35:04.800 that when you're engaged in something that you believe in, that the time passes properly.

00:35:12.160 You know, you can see this even if you're, maybe you're reading a paper, and it's actually related in some

00:35:17.840 intelligible manner to something that you want to learn. So, even though it's difficult,

00:35:22.800 you get engaged in it, you can remember it better, you can process it better, and you don't,

00:35:27.600 you're not so likely to fall asleep, and you're not so likely to want to find distractions,

00:35:31.600 all of that, you can get into it. And it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the

00:35:37.200 degree of responsibility that you're willing to shoulder, and I think you can make a strong case for

00:35:41.440 that. I've also often wondered, imagine you could offer people a choice.

00:35:47.040 Here's the choice, you could say, well, your life isn't meaningful, the nihilists have got it right,

00:35:52.640 there's no meaning in your life. And because of that, there's no reason for you to accept any

00:35:57.120 responsibility. So, you can live a responsibility-free life, and maybe one of impulsive pleasure-seeking,

00:36:04.160 but a responsibility-free life, but the price you pay is that it doesn't get to be meaningful.

00:36:09.120 Or you could say to someone, no, we're going to do the opposite, we're going to say,

00:36:12.560 you can live a meaningful life, but it's only going to be as meaningful as the amount of

00:36:17.520 responsibility that you're willing to bear. And then you might say, well, what would people

00:36:22.080 choose? Because everybody also always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life.

00:36:28.000 But if the price you pay for that is the adoption of responsibility, then it's not so obvious that

00:36:32.400 people would choose meaning over, you know, over pointless pursuits, if they had to, if the benefit

00:36:41.200 they got for choosing the pointless pursuits was that they really didn't have to care about anything

00:36:45.600 they ever did, right? There's no responsibility. And that's really what Pinocchio is offered.

00:36:50.240 And that's what the coachman offers them. And that's interesting, because

00:36:55.120 you know, so far it's been the fox and the cat, and they're kind of two-bit hoods, and so

00:36:59.920 the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways.

00:37:05.840 But here, at least as far as the imagination, the collective imagination that created this movie

00:37:11.040 is concerned, is this is where you get to the most pathological form of, let's call it temptation,

00:37:17.120 and that's the temptation to engage in, to abandon responsibility, and to engage in impulsive

00:37:24.960 pleasure-seeking, short-term pleasure-seeking. So here's the fox pretending to be a doctor investigating

00:37:33.840 Pinocchio's illness, and he makes some notes, which is all just meaningless,

00:37:41.600 scribble, right? It's like white noise. And it doesn't matter that the arguments that he's making

00:37:48.000 are completely incoherent, and it doesn't matter that he actually doesn't know anything. What he's

00:37:52.560 selling is easy to buy, and so Pinocchio buys it. And by the end of the conversation with the fox,

00:38:01.840 he's pretty convinced that he's useless, and that he needs a vacation. You know,

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00:42:23.820 Let's imagine that you have a child that is a little on the neurotic side, so high negative emotion,

00:42:28.500 and maybe one that's also a little bit on the sickly side, so has a variety of, let's say,

00:42:33.800 relatively minor ailments, but ailments nonetheless. And so what that means as a parent, we'll say

00:42:41.260 mother for this example, because I want to use the Oedipal example, you have to make a decision

00:42:46.040 all the time about exactly how you're going to treat that child. One decision is, well, I'm not

00:42:52.040 going to, you don't have to go to school today because you're not feeling well. It's like,

00:42:55.780 fair enough. But do you make the same decision the next day? And do you make the same decision the next

00:43:04.120 day? And let's imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of

00:43:10.380 capitalizing on their illness. Well, then that's not going to be very good for the child. The rule

00:43:15.540 with a sickly child has to be something like, I'm going to push you right to your limit.

00:43:19.860 Because otherwise, how is the person going to figure out what they can do? And if they can't

00:43:25.920 figure out what they can do, then they're not going to be able to make their way in the world

00:43:29.720 at all. And then that gets muddied very badly if you're not exactly sure that you want them to make

00:43:34.980 their way in the world, you know? Maybe you're just as happy because you'd be sitting at home alone

00:43:39.180 if your child was there with you. And maybe you'd be just as happy at some level if they never grew

00:43:44.640 up at all. Because then they won't leave. And so, and maybe that's because you have a terrible

00:43:50.340 marriage and you're lonesome, you know? Maybe it's an abusive marriage and your husband has chased

00:43:54.780 away all your friends. And so you don't have anything at all. And maybe that's because he didn't stand up

00:43:58.940 for yourself very well. Apart from the fact that he was, you know, tyrannical in his central nature.

00:44:04.960 And so then, all those little warps and bends in your psyche are going to manifest themselves right

00:44:10.960 right in the background of every single one of those decisions.

00:44:17.140 My daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent. And they were very serious. And

00:44:23.100 it was very difficult to figure out what to do about that because you couldn't exactly apply

00:44:28.760 normative rules, right? And we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us,

00:44:36.260 how seriously to take those. And the answer was, the least amount of serious possible.

00:44:42.400 It's something like that. Because we needed to know, and she needed to know, what she could do

00:44:48.280 in spite of the fact that she had problems. And one of the things I really tried to instill in her,

00:44:54.400 and I think it worked, is that you don't ever want to use your illness as an excuse for not doing

00:44:59.760 anything. Not consciously. You know, sometimes you might not know. I'm not feeling well. What can I do?

00:45:04.780 Well, you don't know, right? Because sometimes when you're not feeling well, you can do more than you

00:45:09.560 think. And sometimes you can do less than you think. It's not like it's obvious. But sometimes

00:45:13.560 it's obvious, you know, this little temptation flits through your mind, and you think, well,

00:45:17.320 I don't really want to do what I'm doing today, and I'm not feeling very well, so I don't have to do it.

00:45:21.580 You do that a hundred times, then you don't know how sick you are anymore.

00:45:25.520 And then you're in real trouble. Because not only are you sick, but you actually have,

00:45:30.220 you've muddied the waters. And so you have both problems, then, is you're actually ill, and

00:45:36.320 you've betrayed yourself by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities.

00:45:43.700 And that, I think, if you do both of those, if both of those things happen to you at the

00:45:47.300 same time, you're in real trouble. And it's really hard not to have that happen.

00:45:50.360 So anyways, Pinocchio gets enticed into believing that he's a victim.

00:45:57.080 The fact that he's insufficient is used as an excuse by the fox and the cat to offer him

00:46:04.160 a trip to Pleasure Island. And this is, I think, where the movie gets particularly dark.

00:46:10.260 And so off they go, singing away. They have to carry him.

00:46:13.040 So you could say, in some sense, he's carried by societal pathology and his own trouble.

00:46:20.820 He's carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island. And so the cricket, the cricket is again left

00:46:28.720 behind. He's not the world's best conscience at this point. So Pinocchio goes off to meet

00:46:33.480 the coachman. And the coachman has already said he's collecting bad little boys. And he's got

00:46:42.240 them all on the coach. They're all delinquent types here. And the ticket on the coach was the

00:46:46.780 ace of spades, which is what Pinocchio is holding. And he's with this character here called Lampwick.

00:46:53.960 That's an interesting name. So he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light, Lampwick.

00:46:59.980 And that's interesting, because it's a play on Lucifer. Because Lucifer means bringer of light.

00:47:05.020 And so Lampwick is a play on that. And Lampwick is really a nasty piece of work. He's got this

00:47:11.420 false arrogance about him. He's got this like cynical voice, really deeply cynical voice.

00:47:16.360 And he's only, I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this, maybe 12 or something

00:47:19.940 like that, or 13. And so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical.

00:47:27.400 I'll tell you a story about that. So I used to live in Montreal. I lived in a poor neighborhood.

00:47:33.500 And one day I was out in the back alley building a fence, because I was putting a little fence

00:47:40.120 around my little tiny backyard. And there was a house across the alley down the street a ways

00:47:45.820 where there was a lot of, like, not good partying. A lot of bikers were hanging around there.

00:47:52.140 And I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well. Anyways, I was out there in the back alley

00:47:56.780 pounding away on my fence. And these little kids came up. And they were little. They were like

00:48:00.200 three and four years old, hey. And they spoke Joual, right, kind of really heavily accented

00:48:07.700 Quebecois French. And my French isn't good. So I could hardly understand them. But they were

00:48:13.160 watching me hammer. And they got a little closer. And they had one kid who was clearly the leader,

00:48:18.680 had a real scowl on his face, hey. And so they were watching. And I kind of motioned to one of them

00:48:23.220 that they could use the hammer. And that kid said, and I'm gonna mangle this, but he said

00:48:28.660 Je voulais, or something like that. And what it meant is, I'll steal that. And so I thought, you know,

00:48:34.660 and then he came over and he tugged on it. And he wanted me to take it. And he was quite angry. And

00:48:38.980 well, I wasn't gonna let him take it. And then, so I couldn't engage him. I couldn't get him to play,

00:48:44.740 you know. And his buddies were sort of hanging around behind him. And they wouldn't come and play,

00:48:48.900 because he wouldn't. And so he was hostile right away to me. And then, so the fence piece was laying

00:48:56.980 out in the alley. And these little monsters started running across it, which I thought was really

00:49:02.180 remarkable, you know. But it was terrible at the same time, because they were really little kids.

00:49:07.700 That shouldn't be happening when you're like three or four. If that's happening at that age,

00:49:11.460 things are not good. And so that kid was already, like, seriously not happy with the world.

00:49:18.020 And, you know, I'd been studying anti-social behavior for a long time by that point. And I knew that

00:49:23.780 the kids who are destined to jail later in their lives are kids who are rough and tough when they're

00:49:28.980 two years old, but then don't get socialized. Or maybe worse, they get anti-socialized, which is

00:49:33.860 exactly what happened to this kid. He'd obviously been ignored and abused. Certainly no one had ever played

00:49:40.740 with him in any real way, because he wouldn't play. And it's not good if a kid is that little,

00:49:46.420 and you can't get them to play. Something's gone seriously wrong. Because they're so playful at

00:49:50.900 that age that, like, it's like 90% of them. Anyway, so they were running back and forth on this fence,

00:49:56.180 I thought, stomping on it, you know. And I was right there! I thought... well, first of all,

00:50:01.220 I thought that was remarkable. But I also thought it was absolutely horrifying, because, you know,

00:50:06.100 in some sense, I could see where this kid was headed and why at that early stage in his life. It's really...

00:50:11.620 it's not a pleasant thing to behold, you know. But there was nothing that could be done about it.

00:50:16.740 And that's kind of what this Lampwick is like. He's prematurely cynical. This kid was already

00:50:21.700 cynical, and he was, like, four years old. You know, most kids don't get cynical until they're

00:50:26.100 teenagers. You know, and then often they don't get completely cynical, and usually they more or

00:50:30.980 less grow out of it. But it had happened to him much earlier. So this Lampwick character,

00:50:36.020 he's already decided that he knows everything, that everyone else's opinion is worth nothing,

00:50:42.820 and that there's nothing in culture or society that holds any utility whatsoever

00:50:48.580 for someone like him. Now, you can imagine developing that way if you were raised in a

00:50:53.620 family where people were generally lying to you, and that they randomly treated you or neglected you,

00:50:59.940 and that you couldn't discern anything about them that was admirable or positive. You know,

00:51:05.620 of course you'd assume that the whole structure is corrupt, and that you had to take care of yourself

00:51:11.700 and no one else. Well, not of course. Not everyone assumes that under those situations.

00:51:16.020 I shouldn't say of course. But it's a logical set of conclusions. So...

00:51:21.780 And of course, it's proportionate to some degree to how much abuse you take. Although there are lots of

00:51:26.580 stories of people who've been terribly abused as children who grew up to be, you know, kind,

00:51:31.700 remarkable, responsible, thoughtful people who were absolutely opposed to abuse instead of

00:51:38.980 propagating it. There's no direct causal pathway. Anyways, Lampwick is pretty happy to be on this

00:51:47.220 on this coach way to Pleasure Island, which he's heard about. He said, well, it's all you can eat,

00:51:52.820 it's all you can smoke, you don't have to do any work, and you can do anything you want. So,

00:51:58.020 you might say, well, it's too good to be true. Like the gingerbread house in the Hansel and Gretel story.

00:52:03.540 Right? The kids are lost. There's a gingerbread house. It's a house, which is something they need,

00:52:08.740 and it's made out of cookies. It looks like it's a little bit too good to be true. And of course,

00:52:13.540 in the house, there's the negative part of that, which is the old witch who wants to eat children.

00:52:18.820 And that's a story about what happens to people if they're offered more than they should be offered.

00:52:27.780 So, anyways, Lampwick is firing off, he has a little slingshot, and he's firing off pebbles at the

00:52:36.900 horses who are pulling the carriage, and that's just kind of the guy that he is. So he takes Pinocchio

00:52:43.140 under his wing, and the cricket is down there in the dust. He's caught back up to the carriage, but

00:52:49.860 he's having a rough time at this point. This is also a story to some degree about the transition

00:52:55.780 into adolescence. You know, because adolescence is a time people are still pretty impulsive, and

00:53:01.140 their view is quite short-term, and they're more likely to pursue immediate pleasures and all of that,

00:53:06.260 and that can get really out of hand. So, anyways, they separate from the mainland and go on a boat,

00:53:14.420 and so they're off to Pleasure Island, dark place. And the coachman opens the gates and lets the

00:53:24.740 delinquents into Pleasure Island, and they basically have a riot.

00:53:29.700 And this is Pleasure Island here. It's full of amusement park rides, and you know, one of the

00:53:39.700 things that's kind of interesting about horror movies, I'm sure you've noticed this, is that they're

00:53:43.700 often set in amusement parks, and clowns are often characters of horror. We'll leave the clowns aside for

00:53:50.580 now, but the amusement park thing, that's pretty interesting. It's like, why in the world would an

00:53:54.340 amusement park be a place of horror? And the first question might be, well, have you ever been to

00:54:00.660 an amusement park? Because there is something about them that's really... they have a dark side,

00:54:07.140 a clear dark side. And part of it is that people with nothing better to do are spending money stupidly,

00:54:14.500 and they're being fleeced by the people who operate the amusement park. You know, and they have,

00:54:20.340 let's say, a stereotypically dark reputation. And they're moving around all the time, which is also

00:54:28.420 something that psychopaths do. And all they're doing is moving from community to community, and taking

00:54:33.060 the money from the rubes, fundamentally. And so, the amusement park, well, if you walk through an

00:54:41.060 amusement park with that sort of thing in mind, maybe that's also coloring your vision, of course, but

00:54:47.860 it's something that you can see very immediately. So there's something about them that's sort of

00:54:51.620 deeply sad, but there's also that under... there's an underlying horror that characterizes them, that

00:54:56.260 it's easy for horror movie and... or horror novel writers to immediately expand upon, and there's

00:55:01.860 something about it that... that makes sense to people. So... it's too easy, maybe that's... and it's also all

00:55:10.260 short-term gratification, that's the other thing. So you spend your money very rapidly, and it's gone. Yep?

00:55:15.140 Well, it seems like a sort of a celebration of meanings divorced from reality.

00:55:21.380 Yes, exactly. Well, that's the impulsive element. The comment was, it's a celebration of

00:55:26.020 of meanings divorced from reality. Yeah, that's... well, it's also outside of reality, right? That's why

00:55:30.500 it's on an island. It's a separate universe, and it's a universe where nothing that's happening is

00:55:36.180 connected to anything outside. And you're spending your hard-earned money, let's say, but it isn't that

00:55:42.340 much... it's certainly not an investment. It's not that much different than burning it. Well, it is,

00:55:47.220 because, of course, you get some pleasure out of it, but... but... it isn't... going there every day is

00:55:53.620 probably not the wisest move that you could make. So...

00:55:56.980 the animators do a good job of... of... well, of presenting the... what would you call it? The

00:56:08.740 enforced hedonism, I guess I would say, of a place like that. This is a place where you're going to

00:56:12.660 have fun. That's what it's for. So... anyways, Lampwick, who's got this very arrogant look on his face,

00:56:21.140 in this kind of strut. It's a... it's a bravado. That's what that's called. It's a false confidence. And...

00:56:27.140 it's... it's... it's the sort of thing that people do when they're trying to impress upon others that

00:56:31.300 they're high in the dominance hierarchy. But really, they're not. So it's a mimicry of... of dominance.

00:56:36.980 But it's something that can... that can be intimidating. There's no doubt about it.

00:56:41.140 I had a friend... he... he... he didn't come to a good end, this... this person. He was a real

00:56:52.420 good friend of mine when I was in junior high and high school. And he was kind of crazy. And... he was tall.

00:56:59.620 He was about six foot seven. And he was pretty thin. And... we used to go out to the bar now and then. And...

00:57:05.700 in many of the bars that we were in, we lived in this little town, there were bullies. And these

00:57:11.060 were guys. And I worked in the bars. And I used to watch these guys. And they'd basically...

00:57:15.300 there was a handful of them in town. Pretty psychopathic types. And they'd go to the bar.

00:57:19.540 And all they do is sit there and wait for someone to come in who they could beat up.

00:57:23.060 And they knew who it was as soon as they walked in. That's actually why they were at the bar.

00:57:27.300 And so they'd wait till someone came in who didn't look very confident. And...

00:57:30.660 who could likely be intimidated by... by this sort of thing. And then they'd...

00:57:35.780 tell them to come outside for a fight. And if they didn't, well, then they'd of course make fun of them.

00:57:39.540 And if they did, well, generally they'd beat them up. My friend kind of cottoned on to this trick.

00:57:44.740 And he started going to bars. And every time that someone like that came near him, he'd go outside

00:57:49.780 and fight with them. And one of the things he observed right away is that almost inevitably,

00:57:54.100 when he went outside with them, they'd shake hands and make friends. So as soon as he... and it was really

00:57:59.540 remarkable watching him, because he wasn't... he wasn't a particularly physically powerful person,

00:58:04.500 although he was extraordinarily tall. But he had started to play this game. And he did it for a long

00:58:09.620 time. And I don't remember him ever actually having to fight. He just stared them down fundamentally.

00:58:17.300 So it was a very interesting thing to watch. But it was an indication to me of exactly how shallow this

00:58:22.820 kind of bravado bullying actually is. But people don't... people don't find that out,

00:58:29.540 because they won't stand up. And it's not surprising, but...

00:58:35.460 Anyways, they load up on food. Pinocchio's carrying a pie and an ice cream cone simultaneously,

00:58:41.300 and then they're off to have a fight. And Lampwick says something like,

00:58:46.900 it's good to punch someone in the nose sometimes just for the... I think he says heck of it.

00:58:51.940 And so Pinocchio adopts this strut, and in they go to the rough house. And then in the next scene,

00:58:57.220 you see this model home up for destruction. It's quite an interesting scene symbolically. You see...

00:59:04.420 in the middle of this house here, there's a stained glass window that has a Mandela on it. We'll see it

00:59:10.580 more clearly in a minute. And Mandela is a sacred symbol of the self. That's the Jungian interpretation.

00:59:17.060 It's a symbol. It's very difficult to describe, but it's a symbol. Music is a Mandela, except it's

00:59:23.140 played out across time. So you could say that that thing is the same as music, but it's kind of like

00:59:27.940 a slice of music. It's the same idea. You know, sometimes you see those slow motion or sped up

00:59:35.140 motion videos of a flower unfolding? That's the same... it's the same idea. You can imagine that being set

00:59:40.900 to music, and somehow that would make sense. And the Mandela is like a symbol of the unfolding of being.

00:59:46.740 And... or the source of meaning, or something like that. And it's also a symbol of the self.

00:59:53.700 From the Jungian perspective, and so there you see it more clearly. The kids are starting to burn this

00:59:59.220 place, and to trash it, and they're dragging a grand piano down the stairs. The destruction of high

01:00:05.620 culture, about which they're nothing but cynical. Because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice

01:00:10.660 can produce something of any value, and they want to bring it down and destroy it. And that's partly

01:00:16.020 because... you can see this in the story of Cain and Abel. Abel is hardworking, and everyone likes him, and

01:00:25.220 he makes the proper sacrifices, and so his life goes really well. And that's part of the reason that Cain

01:00:30.020 hates him. And he's jealous and resentful. But worse than that, if you're around someone, if you're not

01:00:35.540 doing very well, especially if that's your own fault, if you're not doing very well, and you're

01:00:40.580 around someone who's doing very well, it's very painful. Because the mere fact of their being judges

01:00:46.340 is you. And so it's very easy to want to destroy that, to destroy that ideal, so that you don't have

01:00:52.100 to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you. And so part of the

01:00:59.380 reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves

01:01:04.660 against, and to feel bad. And that's exactly what's happening here. The kids are destroying all of this

01:01:09.220 culture, roughly speaking, because it judges them. The fact that it exists judges them. And I've often

01:01:19.620 thought this about Michelangelo's statue of David, which is this heroic... so David was a shepherd,

01:01:24.980 obviously, and it doesn't sound like much, but back in those times, being a shepherd was a big deal,

01:01:30.980 because there were lions, and you had a slingshot. And so, like, you got to defend your sheep from lions

01:01:36.980 with a slingshot. So you weren't exactly this, like, 19th-century English guy dressed in a, you know,

01:01:42.820 frilly blue suit. You were tough as a bloody... well, as someone who would go after a lion with a slingshot.

01:01:49.700 It's no joke. Anyways, the statue is very heroic, and, you know, you look at that, and you think, well,

01:01:54.260 that's the possibility of humankind, but by the same token, it's also what you're not. And so, as well as

01:02:01.220 being an ideal, it's a judge, and every ideal is a judge. So, yes? Going back to your example of Cain and Abel.

01:02:08.660 Yeah. So you're using that as an example to illustrate becoming bitter as a result of

01:02:17.860 not being able to achieve... Sure. ...status as a result... Success, even. ...success as a result of hard work.

01:02:25.860 But in the example of Cain and Abel, like, one was a shepherd, and the other was a farmer, and the one who...

01:02:32.500 No, no. One is... yes, that's right. One... yes. And the one who was a shepherd was the one who was favored.

01:02:37.060 Yes, that's right. So was that a result of the hard work, or was that a result of... Good question.

01:02:44.980 Well, that's a good question. Those stories are very, very complicated. And the story is very ambivalent

01:02:49.940 about whether Cain is not rewarded because he makes bad sacrifices or because God's just in a bad mood.

01:02:56.180 And I like that... If you read the story, I've read multiple translations of the story,

01:03:01.780 and when Cain comes to God to complain, God basically tells him, look, buddy,

01:03:09.540 before you go about criticizing the structure of reality, you should look to your own inadequacies.

01:03:14.420 He says, sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal, and you invited it in to

01:03:21.060 have its way with you, and something has emerged as a consequence. So don't be bothering me about my

01:03:26.340 creation before you look to yourself. So there's a very strong hint that the reason that God has

01:03:32.980 not favored Cain's sacrifices is because they weren't of particularly good quality.

01:03:38.260 So, but it is ambivalent in the story, and there is the shepherd versus farmer motif as well.

01:03:44.260 And of course, that motif runs through the entire corpus of stories to some degree, especially the

01:03:48.980 shepherd motif. So it's only about a paragraph long, that whole story, and it packs all that into

01:03:54.340 that tiny little amount of space. But the idea that Cain kills Abel to get rid of his ideal and also to

01:04:02.340 punish God, roughly speaking. It's a brilliant story. I mean, these guys who go around shooting

01:04:08.660 up high schools or shooting up high schools in particular, but, you know, they're definitely

01:04:13.540 out for revenge, and what they're revenging themselves against or to who is not exactly clear.

01:04:19.780 Anyway, so these kids are just tearing down this model home, tearing down Western civilization,

01:04:25.220 I suppose is another way of looking at it, or just tearing down civilization, period.

01:04:28.740 And Pinocchio's having a pretty good time. He's got his axe, and he's looking a little malevolent

01:04:33.620 there, and happy to be destroying things, which is, of course, a pretty simple thing to do.

01:04:39.540 So there's that image that I told you about the Mandela, and that's a flower in this image.

01:04:44.820 And so what happens is that I think it's Lampwick throws a brick through it. And so what that means

01:04:52.100 symbolically is the self is a symbol of your potential, among very many other things. But

01:04:58.740 by engaging in this sort of impulsive destructive activity, Lampwick and Pinocchio are making it

01:05:04.180 impossible for them to further their development. And they're doing that to some degree consciously,

01:05:08.260 you know, they basically say to hell with it, and toss a brick through this highest ideal,

01:05:12.660 the thing through which light shines. So also that harkens back to the star as well.

01:05:18.580 So, anyways, the coachman is paying attention to all this, and he's actually pretty happy about the

01:05:26.100 fact that these boys are so involved in their stupid amusements that they're not paying any

01:05:33.300 attention to what's actually going on. And he calls these people out of the darkness,

01:05:37.060 these creatures out of the darkness. So you get these black, you can hardly see them there,

01:05:41.380 but they're black cloaked figures with glowing eyes, and they're shutting the door of the

01:05:48.020 amusement park. And that's very interesting. It's an extraordinarily interesting

01:05:53.140 happening. It's like, okay, so all of a sudden the amusement park is associated, we already know

01:05:56.900 that the coachman is up to no good. But now he's got these minions that are faceless in some sense,

01:06:02.020 they're clearly creatures of the night, and they're up to no good. And so you have the sense that

01:06:07.780 the boys are being offered bread in circuses, roughly speaking. But there's something,

01:06:13.140 there's a real reason for it, there's a manipulative reason for it. They're being enticed into a trap,

01:06:18.420 and the doors are closed, and these underground beings are involved in the plot. And obviously the

01:06:25.860 coachman understands this perfectly well. And so one of the ways to understand this is to

01:06:31.860 think about what totalitarian states have to offer their populace, and what they offer them. And this

01:06:36.980 happened particularly as Rome declined, let's say. That's where the term bread and circuses

01:06:41.380 originally came from, is that as the situation degenerates, then people have to be offered stupid

01:06:47.860 amusements more and more frequently in order for them to ignore what's actually going on in the

01:06:53.460 background. And, you know, a war can be that kind of stupid amusement. Anyways, later that night,

01:07:00.660 the entire place is completely devastated, and all we see is the wreckage of everything that was there

01:07:05.940 before. And again, the cricket has got separated from Pinocchio, and so he's trying to find him,

01:07:11.140 and Pinocchio ends up in this bar that's shaped like an eight ball. The eight ball is kind of the

01:07:19.140 random ball in Poole. And anyways, he's inside the eight ball, and he's shooting Poole with Lampwick,

01:07:26.020 and that's just another indication of wasting his time, basically. And you can see in the forefront

01:07:31.940 there, there's some cards for gambling. And so he's engaged in these sort of, you might say,

01:07:38.340 pointless hedonic pursuits. And he's enticing Pinocchio along the same route. And so he teaches him to

01:07:47.300 smoke first. That doesn't go very well. So Pinocchio takes a huge drag on a cigar, and it just about

01:07:55.700 kills him. And when Lampwick asks him how he likes it, he shakes his head and says, you know, that it

01:08:01.620 was really quite good, but he's so sick that he can hardly stand up. And he's hallucinating double balls

01:08:08.340 on the pool table. And then the cricket shows up and stands on the eight ball and kind of gives one of

01:08:12.980 those declamatory speeches again, you know, because he still hasn't quite figured out that standing up

01:08:19.380 proud and spouting off the rules isn't exactly the right way for the conscience to behave. And Lampwick

01:08:26.740 picks him up by the scruff of the neck, roughly speaking, and first of all asks who he is,

01:08:32.340 so obviously he's divorced from his own conscience, and then makes fun of Pinocchio for paying attention

01:08:38.180 to this little bug. And that's kind of a nice indication of what happens in adolescence, you

01:08:44.100 know, because, of course, as children move away from their parents and into their groups,

01:08:50.340 especially when the groups are misbehaving, often what happens is that the other members of the group

01:08:55.060 will torture a person who isn't willing to try something dangerous or foolish by making fun of the

01:09:00.660 fact that they're, you know, too attached to their conscience. And there's a positive element to that,

01:09:06.340 because you should take some risks when you're a teenager, and also later in life. And so if you

01:09:12.500 won't take any risks, there's actually something wrong with you. But there's a negative element in that,

01:09:17.060 well, you know, teenagers do all sorts of stupid things, and perhaps it's amazing that we all live

01:09:23.300 through it, actually, as far as I'm concerned. And some people take extraordinary risks and they

01:09:31.220 don't make it through at all, or they end up in the permanently antisocial population. And then they're,

01:09:38.180 you know, basically career criminals. 5% of the criminals commit 95% of the crimes.

01:09:45.380 It's another Pareto distribution. So...

01:09:47.940 Anyways, Lampwick isn't gonna listen to Pinocchio, or to the Cricket. He laughs at him with this kind of

01:09:55.380 braying laugh, which is some foreshadowing, and the Cricket gets all upset, puts his coat on backwards,

01:10:01.620 and ends up dumped down a pool table hole, and otherwise abused. And so he stomps on out of there.

01:10:09.780 He tells Pinocchio that he can take care of himself, and he stomps on out of there. And so Pinocchio is left

01:10:14.260 without the guidance of conscience, and the Cricket is trying to figure out how to get

01:10:18.420 off Pleasure Island. But he goes through the gates, and he sees what's actually going on.

01:10:25.940 And what's going on is that the coachman has this, like, slave boat down in the bowels of the island,

01:10:33.220 and he's got all these black-suited minions with the glowing eyes working for him, and they're rounding up

01:10:40.740 what look like donkeys. And so they're beasts of burden, right? And so there's an idea here that

01:10:47.140 if you pursue impulsive pleasure to the detriment of the development of your character,

01:10:53.140 you're going to end up a beast of burden. You're going to end up a slave to a tyrant.

01:10:57.700 And that's exactly right. And so, anyways, the Cricket doesn't, you can see one of those black-suited

01:11:03.860 horrors here, hauling donkeys out of this crate, and one of them has a hat on.

01:11:09.300 And they look very sad, and they're in different crates, and one of them says,

01:11:14.100 sold to the salt mines, and one says, sold to the circus. And so they're shipped off to be

01:11:19.940 slaves, roughly speaking. And they look very sad. And then one of them gets hauled out of a crate,

01:11:26.100 and he's still got a hat, he has a hat on and a sweater, and he can still talk. He's a boy,

01:11:31.700 it turns out, that's been half transformed into a jackass, a braying jackass, prior to being enslaved.

01:11:38.660 And so that's another thing that's quite interesting about the story. You know, it also

01:11:43.300 makes the case that if you replace your voice with stupid braying, that the probability that you're

01:11:49.540 going to become enslaved by a tyrant is extraordinarily high. And I always can't help but think about

01:11:56.340 ideologues in that manner. You know, Solzhenitsyn wrote about the radical left ideologues that got

01:12:03.460 thrown in the gulag archipelago, you know, so they were party stalwarts, this happened to a lot of people,

01:12:08.180 true believers, who were vacuumed up by the Stalinist machine and thrown into the gulag anyways. And

01:12:15.220 he said that those people suffered in some ways more than everyone else, because, what did he say,

01:12:20.340 they were bit by the beloved hand that fed them. And so the first while, when they were in the camps,

01:12:24.980 Solzhenitsyn really didn't know what to do with people like that, because on the one hand,

01:12:28.740 well, they were in the camps and wasn't that awful, and they've been torn away from their families,

01:12:32.580 and, you know, stripped of all their identity and their status, and so that's pretty rough.

01:12:37.540 But on the other hand, they were writing letters protesting their innocence and assuming that

01:12:41.700 everyone else in the camp was guilty, but they were innocent, and they were still

01:12:45.460 strident believers in the communist process. And so, you know, it was a conundrum. Here they are

01:12:52.660 being terribly punished, but by the same token, they're also the perpetrators of their own demise,

01:12:57.220 so how do you deal with them? And they used to play comrades, he said they used to play comrades with

01:13:02.260 people like that, and invite them into an ideological discussion about the camp situation and the

01:13:07.940 situation in the country as a whole, and let them rattle out their ideological justifications for

01:13:15.620 everything that had happened, in trying to make them parody themselves, roughly speaking,

01:13:21.060 it was a rough game. And Solzhenitsyn also concluded that

01:13:28.420 there was no helping someone like that when they were still ensconced inside that

01:13:33.460 braying ideology. You could predict everything they were going to say. It's like someone had a crank,

01:13:38.500 you could just crank it, and out would come the proper ideological formulas.

01:13:42.260 But then he realized that as soon as they, let's call it, repented of that, and started to realize

01:13:48.500 their own role in it, or the error of the system, then he would start communicating with them,

01:13:54.900 you know, as if they were people who you could communicate with. Yeah.

01:14:00.900 So that was very interesting, as far as I'm concerned. Anyways, this kid is still a little bit

01:14:05.060 human, he starts to cry for his mom, and the coachman basically throws him back into the crate,

01:14:10.900 and says that he's not ready yet, and the reason for that is that he could still, he still had the

01:14:15.220 power of independent speech. You remember, right at the beginning of the movie, when the mouth was

01:14:20.980 painted on Pinocchio, we saw that mask that was really glaring at the process, and I said that character

01:14:27.540 recurs continually throughout the movie, and this is a good example of that, because the coachman is the

01:14:32.340 enemy of anything that has its own voice. So he's the anti-Geppetto, that's a good way of thinking

01:14:37.460 about it. He's the tyrannical aspect of the culture. But insofar as one of these mostly donkeys,

01:14:45.620 mostly jackasses, can still talk, then they're not completely fit for slavery.

01:14:51.140 And you remember, this movie was also being made at about the same time that

01:14:54.260 the Nazi transformation of Germany was taking place, and so all these terrible underground things,

01:15:01.940 you know, this process whereby people were being reduced to ideological slaves, say, and in this

01:15:09.940 terrible process, that was all playing out in Europe in a very big way. And it's not like people weren't

01:15:16.340 aware of that, you know, it was in the air. So...

01:15:24.260 Anyways, the donkeys, the jackasses that can still talk are crying and complaining and repenting, and

01:15:31.540 the coachman turns into a full tyrant again and cracks a whip, if I remember correctly, and says,

01:15:36.340 you've had your fun, and now you're going to pay for it. So the cricket gets word of all this,

01:15:41.220 he gets wind of it, he starts to understand what's happened, is that all these bad kids were

01:15:45.860 enticed out onto this island so that they could be enslaved. And he's really taken aback by that,

01:15:52.020 to say the least. But he realizes what's going on, so he runs back to find Pinocchio. And then the scene

01:15:57.620 switches back to the eight ball bar where Lampwick is drinking beer and complaining about what the

01:16:05.140 conscience said. You know, because he's kind of guilty and ashamed, but he won't admit it,

01:16:09.060 because he doesn't admit anything. He knows everything. He's not going to admit anything

01:16:12.020 about himself that isn't perfect. He's a real totalitarian in training. And he drinks this

01:16:18.180 beer and he's laughing about the conscience and putting him down, and then he says, well, what

01:16:22.900 what does he say exactly? What does he think I am, a jackass or something like that? Maybe that's not

01:16:28.500 the words exactly. And then he grows these ears. And Pinocchio sees that and immediately takes a look at

01:16:35.380 the beer and stops drinking it. And then Lampwick transforms one more time and his face turns into

01:16:41.940 the face of a donkey. And he's laughing still. And then his hands, oh yes, he laughs and he starts to

01:16:48.340 bray like a jackass. And he's horrified by that. And then Pinocchio laughs and the braying comes out

01:16:55.940 as well. And so now they're absolutely horrified. And Lampwick actually figures out what's going on.

01:17:00.580 He figures out that he's been tricked and that he's transforming. And he's completely horrified

01:17:05.380 by it. He becomes conscious of what's happening to him. And there's one particularly, I would say,

01:17:10.180 dramatic scene where his hands have transformed into hooves. And he's kicking and leaping around the

01:17:19.620 room in panic. And he comes up to a mirror and sees himself as a jackass. And then he turns around and

01:17:24.340 breaks the mirror. And so, you know, he's self-conscious for a moment. Then he destroys his capacity for

01:17:29.300 self-consciousness. Then he transforms entirely into a jackass. He's farther down the road than

01:17:34.420 Pinocchio. And he comes crawling to Pinocchio to save him and asks that the conscience comes back

01:17:40.580 so that he can get out of this. But, of course, it's a bit too late. And so then Pinocchio grows

01:17:46.260 jackass ears. And he's absolutely terrified by it as well. He knows what's coming. And the cricket

01:17:53.780 comes back and guides him off Pleasure Island. And so then they end up on a cliff,

01:18:00.260 because this is an island, after all. And they have to jump into the unknown, right, out of this

01:18:05.140 impulsive adolescent hedonic playground into the unknown. And that's how they escape. So that's the

01:18:12.980 first time that Pinocchio has to leave. This is the first scene where he has to jump into the water

01:18:21.060 to make a clean break from something pathological. So tyranny, you see this echoed, you see echoes of

01:18:26.980 this in the story of Moses leading his people from Egypt, because Moses is a master of water,

01:18:33.540 right? He hits this rock with a stick and water comes out of it. And he's floating on water when he's an

01:18:39.300 infant. And he parts the Red Sea. And so he's a master of water and transformation. And the Pharaoh is,

01:18:45.060 and the Pharaoh's kingdom is represented as a desert stone, roughly speaking. And so the idea

01:18:50.980 there is that, well, the kingdom is solid ground, but it can be a tyranny. And the water is chaos,

01:18:57.940 but it can be the thing that you have to leap into to free yourself from the tyranny. It's not like in

01:19:03.220 the Moses story that that comes easy, right? Because the Hebrews leave Israel, or leave Egypt, which is a

01:19:09.300 terrible tyranny. And you think, well, that's good. They've escaped from the tyranny. But that isn't what

01:19:13.860 happens. They escape from the tyranny. They actually end up somewhere arguably worse,

01:19:18.020 because they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years. And it's a brilliant element of that

01:19:23.220 story, because it states clearly that when you go from a bad place to a better place, you go to a

01:19:28.420 worse place first. And that's a great thing to know, because it also tells you why you might be

01:19:36.660 unwilling to take the next step. You know, you're aiming up, but in order to aim up, you have to let go

01:19:42.500 of something you already have. And then that'll put you into a state of chaos. And unless you're

01:19:47.780 willing to undergo that intermediary state of chaos, and you might not recover from it,

01:19:52.260 you're not going to get to the next level. So that's rough. Well, so Pinocchio, he decides that

01:19:59.620 chaos is better than tyranny, and guided by his conscience, jumps into the water. And then we don't

01:20:06.100 see anything happening in the water in this particular scene. They come back to shore, all

01:20:12.340 half drowned, and exhausted by their adventure. And they go back home. And I think maybe we'll take

01:20:20.820 a break now. Let's see, this is a good time to take a break. 1.30. Perfect. So let's break for 15 minutes, okay?

01:20:27.940 All right. All right, so… Carl Jung talked about this phenomena, he cried, phenomenon, he described as retrogressive

01:20:51.300 restoration of the persona. And so it's a complicated idea, but basically what it means is that sometimes

01:21:00.820 you take a leap forward, and you learn some things, but you can't catalyze a new identity,

01:21:05.700 so you try to go back and hide in your old identity. And that actually doesn't work, because, well,

01:21:13.620 things have changed, and you've learned something, and that isn't who you are anymore.

01:21:17.780 And so it's like you have to cut parts of yourself off in a destructive manner to fit back into the

01:21:24.020 person that you were. Now what happens here is that Pinocchio escapes from this tyrannical situation

01:21:31.860 and undergoes this descent into chaos, but he tries to go back home. He tries to go back to what he was,

01:21:37.140 and he can't do that anymore. His father isn't at home anymore.

01:21:41.140 And so when he goes home, he finds that there's no home there. Now, this happens to people sometimes,

01:21:53.060 and it's often a shock to them. So one of the things I've noticed about Peter Pan type, I'm going to speak

01:22:01.060 about men here, because I've observed it more in men, is that they'll often stay under the thumb of their

01:22:08.020 father. And you think, well, why would someone do that? Because it means they're subject to the tyrannical judgment

01:22:14.820 of their father. They're always concerned about what their father would think, or whether their father

01:22:18.340 approves of them, and so forth. And you think, well, that's got to be an unpleasant place to be.

01:22:25.780 Why would you do that? One of the things that I've suggested to my clients and to other people

01:22:33.540 sometimes is that here's a weird little exercise that you can undertake, a little thought experiment.

01:22:40.900 So you have your parents, and of course your parents have friends who are about their age, and

01:22:45.700 maybe some of them are people you only know peripherally. And I might ask you, well,

01:22:50.500 do you care more about what your parents think than you care about what these peripheral people

01:22:55.940 who know your parents think? And then the answer to that is, well, of course. And then the question

01:23:01.460 that arises out of that is, why? I mean, for someone else, your parents are the peripheral people,

01:23:10.260 and their parents are central. Like, why is it logical that your parents make,

01:23:15.220 opinion makes any more difference to you than the appearance, than the opinion of some randomly

01:23:22.420 selected people who are approximately that age? Why is it the case that you would consider that

01:23:27.300 they would know more than someone else? I mean, I know they know you better, and fair enough,

01:23:30.900 but that's not the point. And then another point there is that to the degree that your parents'

01:23:37.460 opinion about you matters more than some randomly selected people of approximately the same age,

01:23:42.660 Jung would say, well, you haven't exactly separated out the god image from your parents,

01:23:48.180 and so you're still under that combination. It's like, it's a complicated thing to talk about,

01:23:55.220 but think about the Harry Potter series. Harry has two sets of parents, right? He's got the Dursley

01:24:00.980 parents, and then he's got these, like, magical parents that sort of float behind, and he should know

01:24:05.860 the difference between them. They shouldn't be one and the same. They're not for him.

01:24:09.540 And it's like, well, you have your parents, and you have nature and culture as parents,

01:24:14.500 and you shouldn't be thinking that your parents are nature and culture as well.

01:24:17.860 They shouldn't have final dominion over you. It means that you're not an individual yet,

01:24:22.100 if that's the case. Freud said, for example, that no one could be a man unless his father had died,

01:24:29.780 and Jung said, yes, but that death can take place symbolically.

01:24:34.020 Okay, so there's that part of the idea. And then another part of the idea is

01:24:39.300 one of the times in your life when you actually realize that you're an individual is when you'll go

01:24:44.420 and ask your parents something, and you'll realize they actually don't know any more about

01:24:48.180 what you should do than you do. And that sucks.

01:24:52.660 And that's partly why people are often willing to maintain a tyrant-slave relationship with their

01:24:58.100 fathers. Like, on the one hand, you have to be inferior in a relationship like that.

01:25:03.460 You know, you've always got the judge watching you. But on the other hand, there's always someone

01:25:07.620 who knows what to do. There's always someone standing between you and the unknown that you can go ask,

01:25:13.300 what should I do? Well, at some point, you'll realize that the reason you can't ask that anymore is

01:25:17.860 because they actually don't know any more than you do. And then that's a pain. Like, that is a symbolic

01:25:23.940 death. And that's also when you establish a more individual relationship with your parents.

01:25:29.220 It's at that point that you could conceivably start taking care of them instead of the reverse.

01:25:33.940 And that's a time that should come. But you have to let that image of perfection go,

01:25:38.820 and that exposes you. Well, that's what happens here. You know, Pinocchio goes home, and he wants

01:25:45.700 things to be the way they were, and he wants to stay under the careful care of the benevolent father.

01:25:51.700 But that's no longer possible. He's past that point, and that's why the father has disappeared.

01:25:58.180 And so, Geppetto has gone off to look for Pinocchio because he also needs a son, but

01:26:02.980 in any case, the house is abandoned. And so then we see inside the house that everything's covered

01:26:12.260 with cobwebs, and everything's gone, and Pinocchio and the crickets sit on the steps,

01:26:15.860 and they're very concerned. First of all, they wonder where he went, so they're actually concerned

01:26:19.940 that he's gone. But they also don't know what to do because there's just no going home. And so,

01:26:25.140 you know, that's also the case that once you hit a certain point in your development,

01:26:29.700 well, it's the same thing we already talked about. The answers that you're looking for are not going

01:26:35.140 to be found in your parents' house. It's as simple as that. Now, you could artificially maintain your

01:26:40.580 dependency, but, you know, if you do that for too long, things get pretty ugly. So you get pretty

01:26:47.300 stale, and, you know, you're like bread that's been on the shelf for too long. So now they're wondering

01:26:53.620 what to do, and where he could be. And then something very strange happens. The star shows up again,

01:27:00.100 and it turns into a dove, and the dove flies down and puts a piece of paper

01:27:08.180 bathed in light with gold writing on it in front of the cricket and the puppet.

01:27:15.860 So what in the world's going on there? Well, we know what the star is. We've seen it multiple times,

01:27:20.660 right? It's also the place that the Blue Fairy came from. But it's this transcendent place. It's this

01:27:26.900 place that occurs sort of as the ultimate ideal. And this time it delivers a message. So what's

01:27:34.180 happening here is that... Pinocchio is fundamentally oriented by the wish that his father made so long

01:27:43.380 ago, right? And the wish was that he would become a fully functioning individual.

01:27:48.020 And so that's that transcendent place. And Jung would say...

01:27:51.460 When you orient your vision, different things appear to you in the world.

01:28:00.820 So, and I mean this literally. So, because you can't see everything,

01:28:05.860 your vision calculates what's necessary, your brain calculates what's necessary for you to see so

01:28:12.500 that you get to the point that you're aiming at. And I don't mean that metaphorically.

01:28:16.260 I mean it literally. Things that aren't relevant to what you're seeking won't... You won't see them.

01:28:26.740 Unless they get in your way. And they have to... They have to really block your pathway before

01:28:32.020 they'll be literally visible. So you orient yourself towards something. And that makes some things

01:28:39.220 visible that wouldn't be visible and makes other things invisible that you might have seen. And so when

01:28:43.700 you change your orientation, what manifests itself in the world also changes. Now, Pinocchio is in

01:28:50.580 despair here. And he asks himself, where could my father have gone? And so the question is,

01:28:59.220 what exactly is he asking under those circumstances? And what he's asking is something like...

01:29:05.220 I had a structure that was orienting me properly in relationship to the world.

01:29:14.900 And as far as it was embodied in my actual father, it's now gone.

01:29:20.020 Is there any possibility that I can find that again? And that is what you want. You see, like,

01:29:26.180 if you're in a chaotic circumstance, maybe you've escaped, let's say, from a bad relationship or

01:29:30.660 something like that, and you're out of it, but now you don't know what to do. What you're hoping is that

01:29:37.300 you can get your life back together, right? That you can put the pieces that have fallen apart back

01:29:42.820 together. And so you're automatically going to generate a fantasy about producing another,

01:29:47.700 let's call it, stable state. You're going to be looking for the spirit that would enable that

01:29:52.180 stable state to be generated. Because really what it is, in some sense, is your new personality.

01:29:58.100 You're in chaos, you have to become something new in order to get out of chaos. And so

01:30:02.020 you're hoping for that, you're hoping that you'll see it. And so...

01:30:08.660 that's going to make certain things visible to you. That's the proper way of thinking about it.

01:30:14.180 You know, when you get curious about something, and maybe you're curious about something,

01:30:18.020 and you walk into a bookstore, that curiosity is going to guide you to a certain set of books.

01:30:23.540 The fact that you have the question in mind is going to open your eyes to certain kinds of

01:30:27.460 possibilities. And so if your goal is to reestablish your union with the positive father, let's say,

01:30:35.460 then certain things are going to appear, and other things aren't. And that's really what this

01:30:39.220 represents. The transcendent star is the goal, which is this developmental process.

01:30:46.100 It's capable of, let's say, delivering a message to you. In some sense, that's what's happening when

01:30:50.820 you're thinking. You know, because you have a problem you want to solve, you have somewhere you

01:30:55.780 want to go with your thoughts, and as a consequence of that, information reveals itself to you in the

01:31:02.340 interior landscape. It's a very strange thing. You know, in some sense it feels as if you're producing the

01:31:08.100 thoughts, but it could equally be said that you're watching the thoughts reveal themselves.

01:31:13.860 And which of those is the more accurate description is by no means obvious. You can certainly have

01:31:18.020 thoughts that surprise you, which is very strange. It's like, they're your thoughts. How in the world

01:31:23.140 can they surprise you? But they do. So it's like you didn't know them before you thought them up,

01:31:27.780 and then the question is, well, where did they come from if you didn't know them before you thought

01:31:31.060 them up? They sort of spring out of the void. That's one way of thinking about it. Anyways,

01:31:39.540 this is a holy ghost symbol, this dove as well, so that puts some Christian imagery in here again.

01:31:47.460 You could think of it as a manifestation of the spirit of transformation.

01:31:51.140 That's another way of looking at it. Anyways, it's the conscience that interprets the letter.

01:31:55.380 So it's sort of figuring out what the next thing should be, and weirdly enough, what the letter says is that

01:32:01.780 Geppetto was out looking for Pinocchio, and he got swallowed by a whale, which makes very little sense,

01:32:10.260 to put it bluntly. Geppetto went to search for Pinocchio, and now he's at the bottom of the sea

01:32:17.140 in a giant whale, and we leap right over that tremendous gap in logic and follow the story nonetheless.

01:32:27.700 Okay, so what's the idea here? The idea is that if you're, if you fall into a chaotic state and

01:32:34.100 everything falls apart, there's the possibility that things can come back together,

01:32:44.420 including what you've just learned in a new state. And so you can conceptualize that symbolically as

01:32:53.300 the existence of the dead father at the bottom of the chaotic landscape. That's the proper way,

01:33:02.340 as far as I can tell, to think about it. It's like there's something down there that's capable of

01:33:06.980 reforming and reemerging that incorporates the previous state, but that takes it farther.

01:33:15.300 And you're not going to find that unless you descend into this chaotic place where it

01:33:19.380 feels like all order is gone. While you generate order, it's going to be akin to the order that

01:33:24.580 you had before, but there's going to be something new about it as well. So it's down to the bottom of

01:33:28.500 the chaotic state to bring up what you're missing. And that's one level of analysis. Another level of

01:33:36.580 analysis, you think, is, well, that's also what you're doing, that's what you should be doing

01:33:41.140 in principle when you're going to university. You know, you're, you come to university in roughly the

01:33:48.180 same state as Padokio. You know, you're a bit of a puppet, and you're kind of a jackass, and what

01:33:53.380 the hell do you know? And it's chaotic because you haven't found your place in the world properly.

01:33:58.180 And I don't mean merely for career, not that that's not relevant, because it is, but it's more important

01:34:04.100 than that. It's because you're a historical creature, because you are a product of history,

01:34:09.780 unless you are inculturated properly, which means you understand your past in the sense that the

01:34:18.740 humanities can allow for that, then you haven't been able to incorporate the wisdom of your ancestors

01:34:28.820 into your day-to-day pursuits, and that's going to make you weak. That's the idea anyways. And so when

01:34:34.020 you come to university, this is what university is for. It's so that you can go into the chaos,

01:34:41.700 and you can pull something out of it that's truly of value, and you can incorporate that in your own

01:34:46.980 personality, and that makes you much, much stronger, like literally stronger, not more educated. But

01:34:54.500 it's not like you know more facts. It's that you literally are a better person, and better means

01:35:00.420 you can do far more things. You can articulate your... that's something that's of crucial importance,

01:35:04.660 is that you can articulate yourself properly, which is more useful than anything else you could

01:35:09.780 possibly manage. Like if you guys come out of university capable of making coherent arguments,

01:35:17.220 and using language properly, you're so powerful that it's ridiculous. You always...

01:35:23.380 you can lay out a strategy and pursue it successfully. And maybe the strategy is actually oriented towards

01:35:31.140 something good, something that will actually work, work for you and work for other people as well.

01:35:35.380 And I don't really understand why people aren't told this when they come to university, is that

01:35:40.820 your goal is to make yourself as articulate in writing and thinking and speaking as you possibly can,

01:35:49.220 because that opens the door to everything that you'll want to do in the future, no matter what it is.

01:35:55.140 The more articulate person always rises. Always. Because

01:36:02.500 they lay out strategies more effectively. They lay out the reasons for doing something or for not doing

01:36:10.420 something more particularly. They convince people, and properly so, that they can grapple with

01:36:18.260 potentials that lies ahead effectively. And they can defend themselves when they're challenged.

01:36:24.980 And so, all of that is going into the past, into the chaos of the past, you could even say, and pulling up the spirit

01:36:34.900 that inhabits that from the bottom and uniting with it. And if you don't do that, well,

01:36:43.300 you're defenseless in the case of, in the face of the tragedy of life. And then that's not so good,

01:36:51.460 because if you're defenseless in the face of the tragedy of life, then you get way more hurt than you

01:36:56.740 would otherwise get. And so do the people around you. And then the probability that you're going to be

01:37:01.060 resentful and bitter about that is really high, because no one likes to fail continually.

01:37:07.860 And then you get bitter and resentful. And then once you're bitter and resentful, well, being vengeful

01:37:14.020 and mean is the next step. It doesn't take much of a transformation to move you from that place to the next.

01:37:21.700 So now Pinocchio has to face the thing that he's afraid of most. And that's a complicated

01:37:30.660 idea as well. So Jung had this phrase that he liked, that he took from the alchemists, which was

01:37:36.980 insterquilinus infinitur. And what it meant was, what you most want to find will be found where you

01:37:42.900 least want to look. There's this old story that's from King Arthur, and King Arthur has these knights,

01:37:48.900 right? They all sit around a round table, which means they're roughly equal. That's what the round

01:37:53.220 table means. And they're off to find the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is the most valuable

01:37:57.620 object. That's what it means. So they're off to find the most valuable thing. But they don't know

01:38:02.260 what it is, and they don't know where it is. But they know that there's a most valuable thing,

01:38:06.180 so in some sense it's akin to them orienting themselves by the star. And they don't know where to

01:38:11.780 look. And so what they decide is, they have the castle in the middle of a forest, and so each knight

01:38:17.860 decides to start looking for the Holy Grail by entering the forest at the point that looks darkest

01:38:22.900 to him. And so what's the idea there? Well, imagine there are things that come easy to you,

01:38:32.660 and that you're fond of pursuing, and that you're happy about pursuing. So you've found those and pursued

01:38:38.900 them, and you've mastered them. So you know all that, but then there's another place that you

01:38:44.740 don't want to go. And so you haven't gone there, and you haven't mastered it, and you're very small

01:38:50.740 in comparison to it because you haven't mastered it, and so it has this monstrous aspect. And, but it has,

01:38:58.020 if what you're working, where you, if what you're doing isn't working, it's where you haven't gone

01:39:04.740 that you need to go. And so I can give you another example of this. So let's say you're an agreeable

01:39:11.300 person. And so you don't like conflict, and you won't stand up for yourself, and you regard anger

01:39:17.940 and the proclivity to provoke and to engage in conflict as something that's positively terrible.

01:39:24.260 It's not only that you're not good at it, it's actually that it's wrong. So that's where you have to

01:39:29.620 go if you're going to learn how to stand up for yourself. And imagine that you're afraid. Maybe

01:39:34.660 you have something like agoraphobia. And so there's a whole bunch of things that you're afraid of,

01:39:39.060 and you don't want to go there. But if you want to put yourself together, then that's exactly where

01:39:43.780 you have to go. And so it's frequently the case that what you want to find is to be found

01:39:49.780 where you least want to find it. And that idea is echoed in the prominent stories of dragons and gold.

01:40:00.340 It's exactly the same idea, is that the dragon is this terrible thing, it's this terrible predatory

01:40:05.300 thing that lives forever and is very, very wise. And it lives underground, and it'll kill you,

01:40:11.060 it'll burn you up in a second, but it hoards gold. And so you have to go there into the dragon's lair if

01:40:18.500 you're going to get the gold. And that's a representation of people's paradoxical relationship

01:40:23.540 with reality. It's like, you have to go out there and confront it in order to incorporate

01:40:28.260 what it has to offer to you. But the probability that that's going to be intensely dangerous and

01:40:33.940 push you right to the limit, first of all, those are actually the same thing. If it didn't push you to

01:40:40.100 the limit, you wouldn't gain anything valuable from it. So you don't get one without the other.

01:40:45.940 You don't get the gold without the dragon. That's a very strange, very, very strange idea.

01:40:51.540 But it seems to be accurate. So all of that's lurking underneath this, in this imagery of the whale.

01:40:59.300 The thing that's at the bottom of... Now, the whale, you can think of the story of Jonah.

01:41:06.180 What happens with Jonah is that, roughly speaking,

01:41:10.500 he's a prophet. And God tells him that he has to, if I remember correctly, God tells him that he has

01:41:15.620 to go to this city and straighten it out because it's veered off the path and it's heading towards

01:41:23.300 doom. And Jonah thinks, I'm not going to that city to tell those people anything like that because

01:41:28.180 they're not going to be very happy with me just showing up there and telling them, you know,

01:41:32.420 everything they're doing wrong. And so he hops on a boat and tries to get out of there. And then God

01:41:38.020 conjures up this huge storm and the boat is about to be swamped. And the sailors, they're worried,

01:41:44.900 I think, about making the boat lighter, something like that. They all draw lots to see who gets tossed

01:41:50.180 overboard. And Jonah admits that it's actually his fault because God's upset with him because he got this

01:41:55.780 direct command to go straighten out the city and he ran off. And so the sailors throw, they're not

01:42:01.460 happy about this, but they throw Jonah overboard and the sea's calm and a great fish comes up,

01:42:05.940 a whale, and swallows him. And then he's down in the fish for three days and it throws him up on the

01:42:10.020 dry land. And then he's learned his lesson by that time and he goes off to have this,

01:42:14.740 pursue the proper destiny, to pursue his proper destiny. So that's echoed in this story as well,

01:42:19.780 that if you don't follow the pathway that you're supposed to follow, that the seas will become

01:42:30.660 stormy for you and something will come up and pull you down and you'll be in a terrible place

01:42:36.420 for some length of time until you learn your lesson. And if you're lucky, you'll get spit

01:42:40.420 back up on shore and then you can go do what you should do. Well, I mean, that's not a lesson that

01:42:45.780 anybody needs to have interpreted, I think everybody understands that. Anyways, the cricket tells

01:42:54.580 Pinocchio what he has to do, and then something kind of paradoxical happens. Pinocchio decides he's

01:43:00.820 gonna go do this, and then the cricket has got this weird paradoxical response to that. On the one

01:43:06.500 hand, he's sort of pulling Pinocchio back, saying, look, you know, this is foolhardy. You're gonna go all

01:43:13.300 the way down to the ocean, you're gonna confront this terrible whale. This is really, really dangerous.

01:43:17.780 But at the same time, when Pinocchio's on the edge of the cliff, the cricket helps him tie his

01:43:23.940 tail around a rock, and he holds his finger in place so that Pinocchio can tie the knot. It's like

01:43:28.980 the conscience is conflicted about this. It's really dangerous and foolhardy, but it's also necessary.

01:43:35.140 And so he plays this dual role. But Pinocchio's leading at this point, so into the ocean he goes.

01:43:44.980 I guess partly what this means is that if you're not oriented properly in the world, you should take

01:43:49.060 your doubts and the chaos that you're enveloped in seriously. You should face it and think it through.

01:43:56.580 You should go into it as far as you can go into it, because maybe you'll find something at the bottom

01:44:00.420 of it. I mean, the alternative is to pretend that it doesn't exist.

01:44:10.100 So then Pinocchio is at the bottom of the water. He can actually breathe down there, it turns out, so

01:44:15.140 you could think that he's gone into the unknown, he's outside of dry land, he's in the unconscious,

01:44:20.980 all of those things are true. And you might think, well, why would it be the world outside of what's known

01:44:28.500 and the unconscious at the same time? This weird intermingling of those two things, and as far

01:44:34.100 as I can tell, that's because when you're in chaos and you don't know what's going on, then you start

01:44:40.180 imagining what might be going on. And that imagination is partly the world, as it might be, but it's also

01:44:47.620 partly the structure of your unconscious mind, which is producing the fantasies. And so when you're truly in

01:44:53.620 chaos, then the distinction between your fantasies and reality isn't clear, that's actually part of

01:44:58.180 what constitutes the chaos. So imagine this, so you're in a relationship and the person betrays you,

01:45:06.340 and you knew who they were, or at least you thought you did, before that moment.

01:45:10.500 But now you're looking at them and you don't know who they are, and you don't know what the past was,

01:45:16.820 and you don't know what the present is, and you don't know what the future is going to be.

01:45:20.580 All of that's been thrown up into the air in a major way. That's traumatic. So much has fallen apart

01:45:26.180 that it's traumatic. So what do you start to do? You start to imagine what might be the situation.

01:45:32.740 Well then the reality, like, the reality is your imagination, and the reality at the same time,

01:45:37.300 they're not pulled apart at all. You cannot distinguish between them. And so

01:45:42.820 it was a Jungian idea. I could say that's the snitch that Harry Potter's chasing, by the way.

01:45:51.460 I know that's a terrible leap, but that is what it is. It's that weird intermingling of

01:45:56.980 potential and reality that can manifest itself as the world if you pursue it. It's roughly that.

01:46:03.700 So Pinocchio is in this situation that's half fantasy and half reality, in this chaotic state. And he

01:46:12.420 has to go down to find the thing that he least wants to find. And he's hoping that he's got this

01:46:17.860 intuition that in facing that thing, that chaos, that life really is that chaos, that he's going to

01:46:24.660 find his father and reunite with him.

01:46:31.540 So you could also say that in some sense it's a decision of faith, I suppose, because

01:46:38.340 you might ask yourself, well, why bother confronting chaos? If chaos is the ultimate reality, then

01:46:42.900 what the hell use is there in facing it? Because it's just going to reveal itself as the ultimate

01:46:48.180 reality and drown you. But the myths always say the same thing. They say, no, no, if you confront what's

01:46:53.540 really disturbing you, if you really confront it, you do it voluntarily, you're going to find order

01:46:58.020 in it eventually. Or at least that's the only way you're going to find order. Now, it's not like

01:47:03.140 these stories are optimistic. And it's not as if they give you a sure guide to success. That's the

01:47:08.420 other thing. It's not like they're unerringly accurate, because you can be subsumed by chaos that's

01:47:15.540 so total that even if you face it, you're not going to prevail. I mean, that's why people die.

01:47:22.740 That's one way of looking at it anyways. But the mythology basically says this is your best bet.

01:47:28.580 If there's a process that's going to work, this is it. And so, and then you might think, well,

01:47:35.620 the better you do it, the better the chances are of success, or the more consistently you do it,

01:47:40.660 the better the chances of success are. And I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at

01:47:45.060 it. Okay, so anyways, Pinocchio's down at the bottom of the ocean, and every time he says,

01:47:50.900 he's trying to find out where Monstro is. And they ask questions to the fish that are down there,

01:47:56.500 but every time they mention Monstro's name, all the fish disappear. And it's like Voldemort, right?

01:48:02.420 He's the guy whose name you cannot say. And Monstro is precisely that. It's the thing that frightens

01:48:07.780 everyone. And so asking questions down there isn't helping very much. And so Pinocchio, what he does,

01:48:15.380 is he's calling for his father, and he keeps going deeper and deeper into the depths.

01:48:18.820 And we're in a scene, there's a scene where the darkness of the ocean turns into an even more profound

01:48:27.700 darkness, and that's what Pinocchio disappears into. And then we see Monstro, he's in this sort of foggy

01:48:33.300 representation, this huge thing that lies very much at the bottom. And there's no life or anything

01:48:39.700 around him, except I think these are mackerel, but maybe they're tuna. They're animated anyway,

01:48:44.900 so it doesn't matter. But there's no life down there. He's so far down at the bottom of the ocean

01:48:49.540 that there's nothing that's alive down there. So, and then we go inside the whale, which is of

01:48:54.980 course absurd, and we see that the whale has eaten a boat at some point in the past. This is one whopping

01:49:00.180 whale. And Geppetto is sitting with the kitten, of all things. He's also got that little goldfish bowl

01:49:06.740 full of goldfish with him, too, which is quite the feat. Anyways, he's sitting there, and he knows that

01:49:12.580 he's trapped in the belly of the whale, too, and that he can't get out. And so that's an interesting

01:49:17.860 issue. It's because not only is Pinocchio lacking his father, which isn't a good thing,

01:49:22.180 but the father is lacking the son. And there's some indication that the father can't get out of

01:49:27.460 the whale without the son. And so it's like the possibility for order is down there in this chaotic

01:49:33.860 state, but unless there's an active agent to go seek it out, it can't pull itself... it's not animated

01:49:39.940 enough to get out by itself. You know, and you could say, well, there's wisdom in the libraries,

01:49:44.180 but it's not going to... like, without you going in there and gathering it and embodying it,

01:49:49.060 all it does is sit there in potential in all of that... in all of that implicit form.

01:49:55.380 That's a good way of thinking about it. So anyways, Geppetto is feeling pretty hopeless because

01:50:00.900 he can't figure out any way of getting out of the whale, and he's also starving.

01:50:05.140 He's starving in the belly of the whale. And here's a way of thinking about that.

01:50:16.660 Geppetto's a good guy, but he's old. And that means his way of doing things is no longer fruitful.

01:50:23.380 That's why he's starving. And it's especially not fruitful because he's missing his son. He's missing

01:50:28.500 the active element that the child represents, say, the playful and transformative element

01:50:32.820 that the child represents. And so if you get stuck doing something the same old way,

01:50:37.620 at some point it's no longer going to work, even if it was good at some point.

01:50:41.380 It has to be updated, and it's updated by, let's call it the spirit of youth or the spirit of

01:50:46.420 attention or the spirit of play, something like that. The willingness to break boundaries and

01:50:50.740 take risks. And Geppetto is very, very skilled, but he doesn't have that. And that's symbolized by the

01:50:57.780 loss of his son. That's why he was out looking for his son, too. He needs him.

01:51:01.380 And so they're in despair down there, trying to fish and not getting anything. And so

01:51:07.780 Monster wakes up.

01:51:11.780 A mackerel happens to swim by, and Monster wakes up. And so

01:51:15.140 then he starts... I think they're tuna, actually. They look like tuna to me. And so Monster wakes up,

01:51:22.180 and he opens his mouth, and a bunch of water starts to come in. And so... And then you see Pinocchio with

01:51:28.740 the fish. Now... There's very intense, implicit Christian symbolism in this part of the film, and I'm

01:51:38.820 gonna lay it out point by point. So you may remember, and perhaps you don't, perhaps you don't

01:51:45.060 know, that one of the symbols for Christ is a fish, ichthys, right? And that's a play on the Greek

01:51:51.300 representation of Christ's name. But there's more to it than that, because all of Christ's followers

01:51:56.260 are fishermen. And he performs a bunch of miracles with fish. And fish are strange things, because,

01:52:02.180 well, you can pull them up out of the depths. That's part of it. And so there are things that can be

01:52:06.580 pulled out of the depth. And you could say that... It's going to be very difficult for me to take this

01:52:12.740 apart. But you could say, in some sense, that Christ is a meta-fish. A fish is something that

01:52:19.780 you can dine on, but a way of being is something that provides you with something to dine on on a

01:52:26.820 continual basis. And so you might say, well, is it better to have a fish or to be a fisherman?

01:52:33.380 That's another way of thinking about it. And obviously it's better to be a fisherman,

01:52:36.500 because then you can get more fish. And so it's one thing to have something, but it's another way,

01:52:42.180 it's another thing completely to know how to generate good things. And so if you had any sense,

01:52:48.420 you'd take the latter over the former, even though the former is more instantaneously gratifying and

01:52:53.700 requires less work and responsibility. And so anyways, the whale opens his mouth and goes chasing these fish.

01:53:01.620 And Pinocchio tries... he's trying to get the hell out of there, even though he wants to find the whale.

01:53:06.260 When he actually sees the whale, he leaves. And that's also a very common mythological...

01:53:14.180 What would you call it? Plot element. It's very frequently that what happens when the hero first

01:53:18.980 sees the terrible thing, the dragons say, the terrible thing that he's come to conquer, he like

01:53:23.060 freezes and gets the hell out of there, because it's far worse than he thought it was going to be.

01:53:28.020 And so Pinocchio is like, no way, man, I'm not going near that whale, the way he swims. And he's

01:53:32.820 actually at the forefront of all the fish, which is quite interesting, too. So in the meantime,

01:53:39.380 Monstro has opened his mouth, and the fish are pouring in, and Geppetto is fishing like mad,

01:53:42.980 and he's catching fish like crazy. And so the little cat is... Geppetto is flinging the fish backwards

01:53:50.100 into this, like, box, and the little cat is there whacking them to kill them while they're flopping

01:53:57.220 around. And so they're pretty excited about this, because they have a problem. The problem is how

01:54:02.660 to get out of the whale. That's the actual problem. But a nested problem inside that is how not to starve

01:54:08.580 to death. And so Geppetto is pretty happy that even though he's not getting out of the whale, that he

01:54:13.460 gets to have something to eat. So you could say, as well, that he's not exactly focused on the right

01:54:18.420 thing. He's focused on the micro-problem instead of the macro-problem. And that makes him kind of blind.

01:54:23.220 So anyways, the whale swallows up Pinocchio, and Geppetto keeps fishing. And then he snags Pinocchio.

01:54:34.500 Now this is cool, because... and this is another example of that meta-fish idea. It's like...

01:54:42.500 Geppetto is actually looking not for a fish. He's looking for a way out of the damn whale.

01:54:47.140 And then he catches a bunch of fish, and he's, like, focused on that, like mad. And then he catches

01:54:51.380 Pinocchio. And Pinocchio represents what would get him out of the whale, but he's so bloody obsessed

01:54:56.740 with the fish that he doesn't even notice. So he catches Pinocchio and flings him into the fish

01:55:01.220 basket. And so it signifies the blindness of Geppetto's orientation when he's inside the whale.

01:55:08.980 And that's kind of a comment on his aged and insufficient nature. He's solving the wrong...

01:55:15.380 He's solving the problem very well, but it's the wrong problem. So anyways, he fires Pinocchio into

01:55:20.500 the fish bin. And, uh... Pinocchio says, Father, I'm here. And Geppetto says, Don't bother me right now,

01:55:27.620 Pinocchio. I'm busy fishing. So...

01:55:32.180 Well, then that's fine. So then he kind of wakes up. He has this little moment of insight,

01:55:35.780 this little revelation that... Well, he's caught Pinocchio, so who cares about the damn fish?

01:55:40.020 So then he runs over to the fish box to grab Pinocchio, and instead he grabs a fish and gives

01:55:44.820 it a kiss. And so it's another way of hammering home the fact that there's this confusion that he's

01:55:50.260 suffering from. He can't distinguish the local truth from the transcendent truth. And so anyways,

01:55:57.460 he does figure it out. He tosses the fish aside and he grabs Pinocchio, and they're all thrilled to

01:56:02.500 death to see each other, and so they're united. So Pinocchio has found his father. But they're still

01:56:08.180 trapped in the belly of the whale. Now, Pinocchio takes off his hat, he gets covered with a blanket,

01:56:13.540 he takes off his hat, and he reveals his jackass ears. And so he's found his father, but he's

01:56:20.580 damaged and not... Pinocchio. He's damaged and not in good shape. He isn't becoming what he was

01:56:25.860 supposed to be. In fact, he's actually degenerated since... since Geppetto saw him last. And so he

01:56:31.460 becomes embarrassed, and he says he has a tail. He says, That's nothing. I have a tail, too. And then he

01:56:36.820 spins that around, kind of laughing. Then he brays and gets really embarrassed. And so that's what you

01:56:41.380 see here. He looks like, well, he's revealed himself as a jackass to his father. But you know,

01:56:47.540 that's actually a good thing, because...

01:56:52.980 he is a jackass. And if he was unwilling to admit his insufficiency,

01:56:59.380 he wouldn't have ever gone on this pursuit. So it's this perverse willingness to note that he

01:57:14.340 isn't all that he could be that's part of what drives him to find everything that his father

01:57:19.060 represents. It's a mission of... it's a humility, and it's an admission of insufficiency.

01:57:25.860 And you need that before you're going to learn anything, because before you learn anything,

01:57:29.380 you have to admit that there are things that are important that you don't know.

01:57:33.860 And that you're a fool. And maybe that you're a brain jackass.

01:57:38.180 And so that's why there are injunctions in many religious writings that are positively... that

01:57:44.660 portray humility positively as the antidote to arrogance. That's the right way of thinking about

01:57:49.620 it. Is that humility means I still have something to learn. I still have something to learn.

01:57:54.100 I'm insufficient. I still have something to learn. It's exactly the opposite, say, of Lampwake's attitude.

01:58:00.180 Anyways, Geppetto decides that a sun puppet who's half-jackass is better than no sun at all,

01:58:06.740 which is another indication of his relatively positive orientation towards the world, and they reunite.

01:58:13.220 And then Pinocchio immediately sets his eyes on the main problem. It's like, hey, we're stuck in this whale.

01:58:18.580 We need to get out of here. And it turns out that Geppetto's already built a raft, but there's a problem.

01:58:23.300 And the problem is, is that, as Geppetto says,

01:58:27.380 Pinocchio says, well, we'll wait for his mouth to open. And Geppetto says, that doesn't work, because when

01:58:32.020 he opens his mouth, monster opens his mouth, everything comes in and nothing goes out. So

01:58:36.020 raft, fine, but there's no way of using it. And so Geppetto decides that they're not going to bother

01:58:43.140 with that problem, and they're gonna go have some fish. But Pinocchio, his eye is still on the main

01:58:49.860 prize. He thinks, no way, man, we're getting out of this whale. That's the fundamental thing. We're not

01:58:54.660 going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. We're going to attend to the fact that it's sinking.

01:58:59.620 We're going to keep our eye on the primary problem. So he's a little more awake by now. So Pinocchio says,

01:59:06.020 we'll make a fire. Now that's cool, I think, because he's down in chaos, where his father is trapped,

01:59:12.340 and the first thing he does is to use fire. And of course, that's exactly what people do,

01:59:16.260 right? Because we're fire users. And so this, and Shaman, for example, are masters of fire. But

01:59:22.420 there's this really primordial element to the story right here, and it's an indication that the

01:59:29.220 thing that can transform chaos into productive order is also the same spirit that mastered fire.

01:59:36.020 And so Pinocchio lays that out, and he says, we're going to build a fire. And

01:59:41.060 Geppetto says, and we'll fill him up with smoke. And Geppetto says, great, smoked fish. So he's

01:59:48.260 still stuck on this whole fish thing. And so Pinocchio runs around gathering up

01:59:53.300 all the spare wood on the boat, including the furniture, which he starts to break. And Geppetto says,

01:59:59.060 well, what are we going to sit on while we eat our smoked fish? And Pinocchio basically says,

02:00:04.500 politely, you know, enough with the damn fish thing. I'm going to fill the whale with smoke,

02:00:10.180 and that's going to make him sneeze, and then we can get the hell out of here. And

02:00:14.180 and Geppetto says, that's going to make him mad. It's not a good idea. And

02:00:20.020 well, I would say that that's the stance of the benevolent state against innovation.

02:00:27.060 You know, even if the innovation is positive, and even if it's transformative and freeing,

02:00:31.380 the old state, even if it's good, is going to stand in opposition to that.

02:00:35.540 And so that's also something that's very useful to know, because otherwise you can get bitter about

02:00:39.300 that. Anyways, Pinocchio makes this big fire, Geppetto's pretty worried about it,

02:00:43.220 and he starts to fill the whale up with smoke. And so this is where the whale turns into a fire

02:00:47.540 breathing dragon, which is quite cool. It's like in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent turns into a fire

02:00:54.100 spewing dragon as well. And if you watch the Little Mermaid, that what's her name, Ursula,

02:01:00.900 she turns into a gigantic snake-like creature as well, although she doesn't exactly spew fire. But

02:01:06.100 the transformation of the ultimate monster into something like a dragon is very, very common,

02:01:12.740 because it's the ultimate symbol of the unknown, for a variety of reasons that we'll discuss later.

02:01:17.540 So anyways, yes, it's a symbol of chaos.

02:01:24.580 Anyways, and this is quite a horrifying scene. When my son watched, he watched Pinocchio when he was about

02:01:29.300 four, and he watched this scene over and over and over and over. I don't know how many times he

02:01:33.220 watched that movie, but it must have been a hundred times. But he was really fascinated by this scene,

02:01:39.380 and you know, he was like locked onto it. It was frightening, but there was something in it that

02:01:43.780 he was processing and cottoning onto. So anyways, you see the whale is starting to prepare to sneeze,

02:01:51.300 and it's belching out huge quantities of smoke and fire. And Pinocchio and Geppetto and the cat

02:01:57.540 and the goldfish bowl are all on the raft, trying desperately to get out of the whale,

02:02:04.580 which inhales and pulls them back, and then sneezes and pushes them forward. And

02:02:08.340 at some point they actually break free. And there's a good

02:02:11.540 Gates of Hell image there, with the whale belching out smoke like mad, and its jaws open.

02:02:16.580 And so they're paddling madly away to get away from this whale. And the whale is very angry,

02:02:24.420 just as Geppetto suggested. And there's interesting sound effects that go along with this. The whale

02:02:31.780 actually turns into a... That's what happens when your phone is smarter than you are.

02:02:39.620 The whale actually turns into something that's like a locomotive, and the sound effects become

02:02:44.100 industrial. So it's this monstrous, machine-like locomotive dragon that's bent on the destruction of

02:02:54.500 Pinocchio. And you could say it's an amalgam of natural and social forces completely unleashed.

02:03:00.420 Everything's unleashed against Pinocchio and his father. And so they're having a hell of a time,

02:03:06.260 there's big waves, and they end up... The whale actually abandons them, but before it does that,

02:03:11.540 it nails them with its tail and blows the raft into smithereens. And so then they're both in the

02:03:15.460 water, and Geppetto and Pinocchio are drowning. And Geppetto actually goes down for the third time,

02:03:22.020 so to speak. And as he's going down, he says to Pinocchio, save yourself, save yourself.

02:03:27.940 And so that's kind of Pinocchio's last temptation, because Geppetto's had it, and he could just get to

02:03:33.140 shore on his own, but he would have abandoned his father. And so that's the thing, and that's one of the

02:03:40.260 issues that this movie grapples with, is what exactly is your responsibility? And you could say,

02:03:44.580 well, it's to save yourself. But the myth that underlies this says, no, it's not. That's not

02:03:49.700 exactly right. It's to rescue your father from the chaotic depths, and integrate with that, and to save

02:03:55.620 both. And that's your duty to your culture. But more than that, it's also your duty to your soul.

02:04:01.380 It isn't gonna work if you just save yourself, because you're still gonna be a jackass puppet,

02:04:06.500 even though you're gonna be back on shore. So anyways, Pinocchio grabs Geppetto, and carries

02:04:12.820 him to shore, and the whale shows back up, and gives him one more good wallop. And then we see

02:04:18.500 everybody on shore, and it's peaceful again. Geppetto is on his back on the dry land, and the kitten

02:04:24.820 washes up, and the goldfish bowl washes up, and the cricket washes up. He's been outside the whale all

02:04:30.900 of this time. And we see the cricket calling for Pinocchio, and then we see him lying in a pool of

02:04:38.020 water, dead. So he's died. Rescuing his father, he died. Well, why? Well, he is a jackass puppet, and

02:04:47.860 maybe he was supposed to die if he rescued his father. Because that insufficiency that characterized

02:04:53.780 him is something that's destroyed by the process of encountering the chaos, which was so difficult

02:05:00.100 it reforms the personality. And the same occurs when he rescues his father and incorporates that.

02:05:05.940 So it's like Bilbo in the first part of the, what is it called, the Lord of the Rings? The Hobbit.

02:05:19.460 He's this sort of jackass puppet guy, a little overprotected shire-dweller at the beginning,

02:05:25.220 and he goes on this tremendous adventure, and he has to develop the negative parts of his character. He

02:05:30.740 actually has to become a professional thief, and he has to develop his bravery, and so they

02:05:35.700 old personality in some sense has to die to give life to the new one. And so

02:05:44.820 you see in Harry Potter series too, at the very end, Potter dies, and then is resurrected, right?

02:05:52.660 And that actually happens to a slightly lesser degree in the second movie where

02:05:57.060 the resurrection is aided by the phoenix tears after he gets eaten by that, or he gets chomped by

02:06:02.180 that big snake, which is roughly speaking the same thing that's happening here. Sorry about that.

02:06:08.500 Okay, so anyways, Pinocchio's dead. That's not good. So, the next scene we see them back at home,

02:06:14.500 and he's lying dead on the bed, and Geppetto and everyone else are mourning his loss, and then

02:06:22.500 the blue... then we see this magic transformation, and we hear the blue fairy's voice. And so it's like

02:06:30.580 he's pushed himself to his limits, and the natural process kicks back in, and revivifies him. But now

02:06:36.420 he's no longer a jackass puppet, he's actually something that's real. And so then he tells... he wakes up,

02:06:44.660 and he notices that now, you know, he's undergone this proper transformation, he notices his hands in

02:06:50.660 particular, and then he... and then he tells Geppetto, who refuses to even notice, he says, no, no,

02:06:57.940 Pinocchio, you're dead, lie down. So, you know, Pinocchio convinces him that he's not dead, and then

02:07:04.340 in celebration they start the clocks again, and so time kicks back in at that point,

02:07:08.900 and so then they have a big celebration, music happens again, because this is a celebratory moment,

02:07:17.060 and they dance, and the harmony is restored. The good old guy has his son, and so the house is

02:07:24.660 properly set up, and the old state has its vision and its capacity for transformation, and the thing that

02:07:30.660 transforms has the stability of the culture behind it, and so perfect. And then the cricket goes outside, and

02:07:38.500 he's talking to the star and the blue fairy, and he says he's pretty happy about how this has gone,

02:07:43.140 and so then she gives him this little medal, which is made out of gold, and it's a sun, and it's a

02:07:49.620 mandela, all at the same time, and so it's... and it's made out of gold, and gold is a noble metal, it doesn't

02:07:56.100 mate indiscriminately with other metals, it doesn't tarnish, and so it's... it's a metal that represents

02:08:02.900 the sun, and then he flashes his little badge at the star, establishing a relationship between

02:08:10.100 his function as the proper conscience, and his orientation towards the highest good.

02:08:14.260 And... that's it there, so he's got this little sun, he's wearing this little sun,

02:08:20.500 so he's also transformed and developed as a consequence of this entire process, and

02:08:25.540 now his... now Pinocchio's conscience is properly oriented, it's oriented towards the highest value.

02:08:30.980 And then the movie closes, and that's Pinocchio. So does anybody have any questions?

02:08:40.900 Yes?

02:08:41.300 So you did use the vaguely psychoanalytic approach to kind of extracting the inarticulated messages

02:08:48.340 from these... the mythology and the stories and the religion that's developed over time,

02:08:52.420 so could you almost say that those are... um... kind of constructing this to a societal level,

02:08:58.740 out of an individual level, these are kind of the dreams of the collective unconscious?

02:09:02.820 Sure, that's exactly what they are. They're a collective fan... they're the fantasies of the

02:09:08.180 collective unconscious, that's one way of looking at it. I mean, they also take a social...

02:09:12.580 social... socially determined form, right, because it's animated, and that's... that's a technology,

02:09:19.300 and... and it's obviously something that exists in a particular time and place, but yeah, they're...

02:09:26.820 it's a collective attempt to give voice to the oldest of... of behavioral patterns, and so here's a...

02:09:32.580 one way of thinking about that, which we'll talk about in some detail, which you should have read about

02:09:37.220 at least to some degree already, the question is, where is that knowledge represented?

02:09:43.700 And Jung would say, well, it's... it's part of the collective unconscious, and it's... it's got a biological

02:09:48.100 origin, but his... his description of the biological nature of the collective unconscious is quite

02:09:55.300 ambiguous, and I think that that's because it actually is ambiguous, like...

02:09:58.980 for example, we know that primates, and humans in particular, are at least biologically predisposed

02:10:07.860 to be afraid of snakes, so we can learn that very easily.

02:10:11.460 Now, you could make a case that it's more than biological predisposition, that it's actually built in, but

02:10:16.900 I would say the predisposition idea is actually a better one, because you at least need the exposure to the

02:10:22.100 snake to... to get it going, so... so that would take place as a consequence of your experience,

02:10:28.100 so it's not purely biological, although it is the case that snake fear tends to become more intense

02:10:34.580 as you get older, which is not necessarily what you would expect, and the... I just read a paper this week

02:10:41.700 localizing snake fear in primates, and it was hypothalamic.

02:10:44.900 It's really old, so because the hypothalamus is a very, very old part of the brain, it's older than the amygdala,

02:10:50.100 and amygdala is involved in snake fear as well, so it's really, really old.

02:10:55.780 So you could say, well, you're prepared to develop snake fear, like you're prepared to

02:11:00.180 develop language, and like you're prepared to walk by your biological structure.

02:11:05.700 Now, whether that actually constitutes the contents of your memory, which is what Jung seems to imply,

02:11:12.180 is an open question, but it doesn't really matter, because one time when I went to visit my nephew,

02:11:17.060 he was running around in a night suit, he was only about four or five, so he's acting out this

02:11:26.180 mythological pattern, roughly speaking, and you'd say, well, how did he know how to do that?

02:11:30.660 And the answer would be, well, it was represented all around him in the culture, in fragments,

02:11:35.540 and like, kids are pretty good at putting fragments of stories together, that's really what

02:11:41.540 understanding is, is to put fragments into story form, and so he'd watch Disney movies, and his

02:11:47.700 parents had read him stories, and he did pretend play with the other kids, and all of those were like

02:11:52.980 exemplars of this underlying narrative, there are variants of it, and because he can abstract and

02:11:58.980 generalize, he's pulling out the central features of those narratives, the heroic features, and then

02:12:04.500 embodying them, so you could say, well, the central features of these narratives are fragmented and

02:12:10.340 distributed around, across the entire culture, and so they don't have to be exactly inside your head,

02:12:18.260 they don't have to be part of your memory, they're distributed in the behavior and the actions and

02:12:23.860 the stories of the entire culture, and they just, you can put them together out of that, so, and

02:12:30.340 people do that, that's why they're so hungry for stories like, well, like this one, or like Star Wars,

02:12:35.780 or like Star Trek, or like the Marvel movies, or like Harry Potter.

02:12:41.060 Yeah, what you said about the last scene, your son watching it over and over again,

02:12:45.860 my little brother did the same thing with the last scene of the first Harry Potter movie,

02:12:48.900 the guy with the two faces, he watched that probably 20 or 30 times.

02:12:52.820 Yeah, it's really interesting watching little kids interact with, like, because movies are

02:12:56.740 unbelievably complex, I mean, you know, by the time you're your age and you've seen,

02:13:01.300 you know, several hundred of them at minimum, the impact wears off, but it's really something

02:13:07.220 sitting down with a four-year-old who hasn't watched very many movies and walking through

02:13:11.300 one with them, I mean, they're so turned on, it's just, I took my daughter, when she was too young,

02:13:16.820 actually, I took her to see The Mask, the Jim Carrey movie, Jesus, I mean, she survived it,

02:13:23.060 I don't think I traumatized her, but she was sitting on my lap, and it was really like gripping

02:13:28.340 a bundle of barbed wire, she was just like that the entire movie, you know, and halfway through,

02:13:35.620 I thought, well, that's probably a little too much psychophysiological intensity for one small body,

02:13:40.180 you know, but she, those movies, they just have a massive impact on little kids, and they will do

02:13:45.220 exactly that, they'll watch it over and over and over, and you think, what is, what are they doing

02:13:48.820 exactly? Well, they're trying to understand, they're gripped by, they're gripped by it somehow,

02:13:54.500 right? And it's like, they're deeply curious, they know there's something in it, and they're trying

02:13:59.860 to extract out what it is, and they'll repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it,

02:14:04.740 so they're hungry for the information, because it's part of rescuing their father from the chaos,

02:14:10.580 that's one way of thinking about it. So, other questions? Well, good enough then, let's call it

02:14:17.300 a day. There is one more question. So in maps of meaning, there's the idea that you keep returning to

02:14:26.340 about, like, when you first encounter the unknown, it's like, it's first fearful, and then Jung has the

02:14:32.580 idea of archetypes. So are there other kinds of meaning that people will find in new information

02:14:40.820 that's already patterned into them? That's patterned into them or into the new information?

02:14:46.340 That's patterned into them, like, like, by the art to do people actually...

02:14:51.060 Sure, well, they project, they project the contents of their fantasy onto the unknown thing,

02:14:57.380 and that's partly, partly a process of self-discovery. You know, so, for example,

02:15:04.420 let's say that you, you know, you're gripped by love at first sight or something like that.

02:15:10.500 Now, you don't know anything about the person that you're tremendously attracted to,

02:15:14.100 but you'll have fantasies about them, and that fan... in fact, your image of them is a fantasy,

02:15:20.580 and if you take that fantasy apart, you'll find out what you value.

02:15:25.220 So you are projecting... you're projecting yourself into the world, and you can discover...

02:15:28.900 I mean, you may also discover something about them, because there may be elements of them that

02:15:32.340 match the ideal quite nicely, if you're fortunate, and if your ideal is, you know, of a reasonable sort.

02:15:39.060 But you can... you definitely encounter yourself when you look at the unknown,

02:15:43.620 because you use your fantasy to structure the contact.

02:15:48.740 You know, and the fundamental structuring is the heroic encounter with the unknown,

02:15:53.460 because that's the pathway... that's the fundamental pathway of human beings,

02:15:56.980 because we're information foragers, fundamentally.

02:16:00.580 So it's... it's that automatic response, then the fantasies as well, that are part of the first...

02:16:07.060 Sure. Sure. Well, that's also... yes, absolutely. That's exactly right. Yes.

02:16:12.580 I mean, you imagine this. Imagine that you're attracted to someone, and you're too terrified to go speak to her.

02:16:17.380 Well, what's happening? Well, you have a fantasy of a judge, and that's your imagined representation of your own insufficiency in relationship to the ideal.

02:16:26.900 And you project that on this person as a judge, and then you're too paralyzed to even open your mouth around her.

02:16:32.820 Very common experience.

02:16:34.580 Okay. Let's call it a day. We'll... we'll see you in a week.

02:16:38.420 We hope you're enjoying this podcast series that was only available on YouTube until now.

02:16:44.260 We'll be back next week with Maps of Meaning 5, Story and Metastory, Part 1.

02:16:50.260 Michaela?

02:16:50.660 If you found this conversation meaningful, you might consider picking up Dad's books, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief,

02:16:57.380 or his newer bestseller, 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos. Both of these works delve much deeper into the topics covered in the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

02:17:05.540 See jordanbpeterson.com for audio e-book and text links, or pick up the books at your favorite bookseller.

02:17:11.560 Remember to check out jordanbpeterson.com slash personality for information on his new course.

02:17:16.860 I hope you enjoyed this podcast. If you did, please let a friend know or leave a review.

02:17:21.520 Follow me on my YouTube channel, jordanbpeterson, on Twitter, at jordanbpeterson, on Facebook, at drjordanbpeterson, and at Instagram, at jordan.b.peterson.

02:17:34.720 Details on this show, access to my blog, information about my tour dates and other events, and my list of recommended books can be found on my website, jordanbpeterson.com.

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02:18:00.020 That's selfauthoring.com.

02:18:02.720 From the Westwood One Podcast Network.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 16, 2020

132. Maps of Meaning 4： Marionettes & Individuals (Part 3)

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