The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 145. Carl Jung (Part 2)

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00:00:57.540 Hey everyone, real quick before you skip, I want to talk to you about something serious and important.

00:01:02.640 Dr. Jordan Peterson has created a new series that could be a lifeline for those battling depression and anxiety.

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00:01:43.640 Let this be the first step towards the brighter future you deserve.

00:01:47.140 I hope you enjoy this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

00:01:54.000 I'm Michaela Peterson, Jordan's daughter.

00:01:56.140 This is Carl Young Part 2.

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00:03:49.440 So we'll continue with our Jungian analysis of the Lion King today.

00:04:08.660 We ended at the point where, remember, Mufasa had taken Simba up to the top of Pride Rock

00:04:17.060 and described to him the fact that his kingdom essentially constituted everything that the light touched.

00:04:25.160 And you can think about that as the domain of the, roughly speaking, of the great father

00:04:30.360 with the domain of the great mother on the outside of that,

00:04:33.260 that being symbolically equivalent to the underworld, or to death, or to nature.

00:04:37.980 All of those things seem to be approximately equally true.

00:04:41.820 And he forbade Simba from going to investigate what was beyond the confines of the light.

00:04:48.220 And in some sense, that's exactly what a tradition does for you.

00:04:51.700 Because the tradition is precisely what defines the domain of the light.

00:04:56.180 And to be moral from the perspective of the tradition,

00:04:59.960 it's akin to playing a Piagetian game, but only adhering to the rules.

00:05:04.820 You know how Piaget described the fact that when kids first master a game,

00:05:08.600 they learn how to act it out.

00:05:10.420 And then they learn what the rules are.

00:05:12.260 And then they regard the rules in some sense as sacred.

00:05:15.280 You can't go outside the rules.

00:05:16.920 And then later in moral development, if they get to that stage,

00:05:20.100 then they start to recognize themselves also as formulators of the rule,

00:05:24.300 or formulators of the game.

00:05:26.240 And culture tells you, don't go beyond the rules.

00:05:29.200 That's the definition of morality within the box of culture.

00:05:31.900 And you don't go outside of that.

00:05:33.700 And so that's why Mufasa plays that particular role.

00:05:37.060 And it's wise, because if you go outside the domain of what you already understand,

00:05:41.740 then it's dangerous out there.

00:05:43.220 Clearly, it's dangerous out there.

00:05:44.680 But the downside of that particular message,

00:05:48.660 and this is perhaps, this is the mythological reason why Mufasa

00:05:52.020 isn't as aware as he could be of Scar.

00:05:54.960 You know, his knowledge is bounded.

00:05:56.940 And he's not aware enough of what lies outside of that,

00:06:00.720 in this realm, let's say, of death and destruction.

00:06:03.580 And so Scar is able to overcome his brother.

00:06:10.580 You see this sort of thing happening to people very frequently, for example,

00:06:14.320 who develop post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:06:16.800 And one of the things that's not as well known about post-traumatic stress disorder

00:06:20.360 as might be known is,

00:06:22.300 A, it happens to you if you encounter an experience that sort of blows out the axioms

00:06:27.320 of your knowledge system.

00:06:28.620 That's one way of looking at it.

00:06:30.020 It's so unexpected that you can't account for it

00:06:33.660 within the confines of the system that you're using to interpret the world.

00:06:37.800 And that often happens to people when they encounter something that's truly malevolent.

00:06:42.760 And that can be within them, or it can be in the form of someone else

00:06:46.300 who is genuinely out to hurt them.

00:06:48.100 They're often, people who develop PTSD are often, but not always,

00:06:53.120 somewhat naive.

00:06:54.440 And they're not aware of the full catastrophe of the world.

00:06:59.100 That might be one way of looking at it.

00:07:00.480 And then they encounter someone who's truly out to hurt them.

00:07:06.520 And they can detect that even in the way the person's face looks.

00:07:09.660 Or they encounter a part of them that's much more malevolent

00:07:13.500 than they had ever imagined it could possibly be.

00:07:16.480 And then they do something terrible.

00:07:18.220 And then they don't know what to do about it.

00:07:20.660 So, Dallaire, the Canadian general, wrote a book called Shake Hands with the Devil.

00:07:26.660 And it was about what happened to him in Rwanda

00:07:29.160 when he was stationed there as a UN warrior, or a UN soldier.

00:07:35.340 And, I mean, Dallaire was not naive.

00:07:37.340 But what he encountered was truly malevolent.

00:07:40.160 And it just blew him into pieces.

00:07:42.100 And that's what happens.

00:07:44.140 And so, there's real utility in staying within the bounded domain.

00:07:49.520 But the problem is, is that there may be information that's outside of that domain

00:07:52.880 that you absolutely need to know.

00:07:54.560 And so, part of the problem with being alive is that you have to continually determine

00:07:59.700 how much you're going to maintain your stability,

00:08:02.860 and how much you're going to explore.

00:08:05.020 And you have to explore because the stable part of you gets outdated.

00:08:09.380 But if you explore too much, or too unwisely,

00:08:14.340 then you can encounter things that flip you upside down.

00:08:17.380 It's actually one of the problems with being high in trade openness,

00:08:19.980 especially if you're also high in neuroticism.

00:08:21.920 Because if you're open, you're creative, you're always looking for ideas

00:08:25.500 that are outside of your current systematic way of thinking.

00:08:28.500 But if you're high in neuroticism, so you experience a lot of anxiety and emotional pain

00:08:32.380 and that sort of thing, you can continually upset your own apple cart.

00:08:36.400 Now, the other thing that you might want to think about,

00:08:38.640 this is really useful as far as I'm concerned,

00:08:40.760 is you might want to think about this politically.

00:08:42.920 And we've been doing a lot of work.

00:08:44.680 I'm going to have one of my graduate students actually come and talk to you

00:08:46.860 about the work we've been doing on personality and political belief.

00:08:49.800 So what happens with political belief is that

00:08:52.460 if you're high in openness and low in conscientiousness,

00:08:55.240 you tend to be a liberal.

00:08:56.620 The openness being the particularly important part of that.

00:08:59.180 And if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness,

00:09:02.040 especially orderliness, you tend to be a conservative.

00:09:05.080 Now, it's kind of strange because openness and conscientiousness

00:09:07.820 aren't very highly correlated.

00:09:09.280 So it's not obvious why those two traits would combine

00:09:12.380 to determine political belief.

00:09:15.120 And the relationship is actually quite strong

00:09:17.100 between temperament and political belief.

00:09:18.520 If you measure political belief comprehensively.

00:09:20.780 But it seems to me that the fundamental distinction,

00:09:23.960 and this is the political game,

00:09:25.560 at least along the liberal conservative axis,

00:09:27.840 boils down to one thing.

00:09:29.620 It boils down to how open borders should be

00:09:32.220 compared to how closed they should be.

00:09:34.620 And, you know, you can see that reflected, for example,

00:09:37.560 in the attractiveness of Trump

00:09:39.620 to a large part of the general population

00:09:41.500 because he's going to close the borders,

00:09:43.900 build a wall, and fortify the borders.

00:09:46.440 And conservatives like that.

00:09:48.460 They like to have borders between things stay tight.

00:09:51.540 And they don't even care if it's state borders

00:09:53.780 or political borders or town borders

00:09:55.920 or ethnic borders or borders between ideas

00:09:58.880 or borders between sexual identities.

00:10:01.680 Conservatives like to have things stay in the damn box

00:10:04.460 where they belong.

00:10:05.700 Partly because they're orderly

00:10:06.960 and partly because they're low in openness.

00:10:08.580 They don't get any real...

00:10:09.820 They're not interested in what happens

00:10:11.500 if you free up your conceptions.

00:10:13.380 All they see in that is the probability of disorder.

00:10:17.300 Whereas liberals, who are high in openness

00:10:19.340 and low in conscientiousness slash orderliness,

00:10:22.540 they get a real charge out of letting things out of the box

00:10:25.260 so that they can creatively interplay.

00:10:27.740 Now, the issue is, who's correct?

00:10:29.960 And the answer is, you don't know.

00:10:32.580 Because the environment underneath the political landscape moves.

00:10:36.420 And so sometimes the right answer is,

00:10:38.120 tighten up the borders and fortify.

00:10:39.760 And sometimes the right answer is, no, no, no.

00:10:42.500 Loosen things up because everything's getting too static and tight

00:10:45.780 and we need more information.

00:10:48.200 And the dialogue that occurs in the political landscape,

00:10:51.460 this is why dialogue is so important,

00:10:53.640 is fundamentally between these two opposing views of borders.

00:10:57.540 And because you can't say with certainty

00:10:59.480 which one is right at any given time,

00:11:02.120 an open dialogue has to maintain itself

00:11:04.320 so that the entire political state can maneuver properly

00:11:07.760 along that moving line.

00:11:09.100 It's absolutely crucial.

00:11:10.800 It's really, really, really useful to know

00:11:14.100 that people vote their damn temperament.

00:11:17.600 It gives you more of an understanding,

00:11:19.640 at least in principle,

00:11:20.680 of those who sit on the other side of you on the political fence.

00:11:24.320 And there's been recent newspaper articles quite interesting.

00:11:28.260 I tweeted a couple of them about this company in UK

00:11:31.080 called Cambridge Analytics.

00:11:32.760 And they're using the damn Big Five.

00:11:34.660 They can extract out Big Five information from your Facebook likes.

00:11:38.160 They've got a model of every single person in the United States Big Five personality.

00:11:43.820 And they help Trump craft political messages

00:11:46.660 right down to the level of apartment buildings

00:11:48.900 to appeal to people based on their Big Five temperament.

00:11:52.520 And that's all recent work.

00:11:54.380 And so one of the things that's very interesting

00:11:56.580 is we are teaching computers to understand us so fast,

00:11:59.640 you can't believe it.

00:12:00.460 And we really do risk walking into an electronic world

00:12:04.200 where you will only see what you want to see.

00:12:07.540 I mean, obviously, the marketers are trying to do that as fast as possible, right?

00:12:10.920 They only want to send you ads that you're going to be interested in

00:12:14.180 because it's expensive and foolish

00:12:15.800 to send you anything that will annoy you or that you'll ignore.

00:12:18.660 And so the marketers are trying like mad to map who you are,

00:12:22.900 even by watching your eyes.

00:12:25.220 They're trying to figure out who you are

00:12:26.600 so they can send you the right information.

00:12:28.200 But the danger is that that'll happen,

00:12:30.080 say, in the domain of news and broader information,

00:12:32.780 increasing this tendency for people to be siloed

00:12:35.180 in their exposure to the external world.

00:12:37.320 It's a big...

00:12:37.820 It's sort of like each of us is becoming a micro celebrity

00:12:41.640 surrounded by electronic sycophants

00:12:44.320 who do nothing but tell us exactly what we want to hear.

00:12:46.660 It's a real problem.

00:12:48.320 Karl Popper, a famous philosopher of science,

00:12:50.520 said that one of the things that you should do,

00:12:52.800 and this is akin to the Piagetian view,

00:12:55.100 is you should always look for information

00:12:56.900 that contradicts your current viewpoint.

00:12:59.240 Now, that's painful, right?

00:13:00.440 Because who wants their axioms contradicted?

00:13:02.640 It can take you apart.

00:13:04.400 But it's the only way that you can ensure

00:13:06.240 that you're learning at the same time

00:13:08.400 that you're maintaining your stability.

00:13:10.000 And that's another reason why it's really necessary

00:13:11.980 to engage in dialogue with people

00:13:14.040 that you do not agree with.

00:13:15.460 Because they're the ones who will tell you things

00:13:17.440 that you don't know.

00:13:18.820 It's of crucial importance

00:13:20.480 in the maintenance of your own stability.

00:13:22.340 The worst thing that can happen to a person...

00:13:24.740 No.

00:13:25.440 Because there's many horrible things

00:13:26.800 that can happen to a person.

00:13:27.600 But one of the worst things that can happen

00:13:29.160 is that you find yourself in a situation

00:13:31.020 where no one is offering you corrective feedback anymore.

00:13:34.700 Because you rely on the corrective feedback

00:13:36.860 provided by other people

00:13:38.060 to keep yourself sane,

00:13:39.700 to keep moving in the ever-changing environment.

00:13:41.860 And if you cut yourself off from that feedback,

00:13:45.000 then...

00:13:45.720 Well, then you end up static and shrinking.

00:13:48.580 It's really not good.

00:13:50.520 You get less and less competent.

00:13:52.020 You get less and less confident.

00:13:53.560 And the threats outside of you loom larger and larger.

00:13:56.420 So that's all to do with the...

00:13:58.340 You know, the domain outside the light.

00:14:03.240 See, Jung would also say that out in this domain

00:14:05.820 that's sort of beyond what you understand,

00:14:07.880 that's also where you encounter

00:14:09.460 the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

00:14:12.160 Now, that's a really, really complicated idea.

00:14:14.680 But what he means by that

00:14:16.060 is that if you're put outside the domain of your competence,

00:14:19.740 you're going to start to use fantasy

00:14:21.800 to organize your world.

00:14:23.680 So I can give you an example of that.

00:14:25.160 So you...

00:14:26.660 I presume most of you are old enough

00:14:29.320 to have a conscious memory

00:14:30.660 of when the Twin Towers came crashing down.

00:14:32.840 And so everybody in the days after that

00:14:35.820 was wandering around like they were in a daze.

00:14:38.180 And the reason they were in a daze

00:14:39.340 is because, well, it wasn't exactly clear what fell, right?

00:14:43.140 There was the physical towers fell,

00:14:45.060 but that was only a tiny bit of the problem

00:14:46.780 because those physical towers

00:14:48.500 were embedded in a network of meaning,

00:14:50.460 like a very, very sophisticated network of meaning,

00:14:53.280 but also a political network

00:14:54.600 and an economic network

00:14:55.680 and a military network

00:14:56.800 and like they're nodes inside a very complex system.

00:15:00.140 And so when they come crashing down,

00:15:01.520 you don't know what's come crashing down, right?

00:15:04.840 So you're out there in the unknown

00:15:06.160 and wondering what's going on

00:15:07.860 and wandering around in a daze,

00:15:09.200 which is exactly what happened to people.

00:15:10.820 And then what Bush did,

00:15:12.860 George W.,

00:15:13.580 was immediately turn that into

00:15:15.020 a good versus evil drama instantly.

00:15:17.780 And that's an archetypal idea.

00:15:19.320 So that's when he came up with the idea

00:15:21.340 of the axis of evil.

00:15:22.560 I think that was Iran, North Korea,

00:15:24.860 and I don't remember the other one at the moment,

00:15:27.460 but he immediately turned the political landscape

00:15:31.120 into a good versus evil drama.

00:15:32.680 And he said to everyone in the world

00:15:34.400 that they were either with him

00:15:35.540 or against him fundamentally.

00:15:37.660 And that was the,

00:15:38.440 that was part of the retreating into,

00:15:40.800 I guess, a more protected landscape.

00:15:43.260 That's one of the ways that human beings deal with

00:15:45.740 the encounter with a traumatic threat.

00:15:48.180 And so the reason you meet the unconscious

00:15:50.660 and even the collective unconscious

00:15:52.740 on the border of your knowledge

00:15:54.580 is because when you hit the border of your knowledge,

00:15:57.060 you start to use fantasy

00:15:59.000 in order to bring the newest form of order

00:16:02.380 out of the unknown

00:16:03.780 so that you can start to make sense out of it.

00:16:05.740 And that's what artists always do.

00:16:08.420 That's what they do.

00:16:09.420 And so from the Jungian perspective,

00:16:11.220 people who are engaged in creative art

00:16:13.140 are the ones who are on the perimeter

00:16:14.860 of knowledge structures.

00:16:15.940 And so what they're doing

00:16:16.840 is taking the absolute unknown,

00:16:19.060 which would be in Rumsfeld's terms,

00:16:22.160 the unknown unknowns,

00:16:23.360 and turning them into partially known unknowns.

00:16:26.500 That's what an artist does.

00:16:28.140 And especially the more classical artists

00:16:30.840 who deal with mythological and religious themes,

00:16:32.880 which was the case for art right up until,

00:16:35.420 really until the late 20th century.

00:16:37.240 They're using these mythological ideas

00:16:39.540 to sort of extend the domain of human knowledge

00:16:42.640 out beyond its current parameters.

00:16:45.540 And so artists do that.

00:16:47.300 And literary people do that.

00:16:49.440 And dramatists do that.

00:16:51.580 And they help us extend our knowledge.

00:16:53.540 Now, that's where open people live.

00:16:56.120 That's another way of thinking about it.

00:16:57.320 So think about it this way.

00:16:58.280 So you're in a city, you know,

00:16:59.640 and the city has parts of it that degenerate.

00:17:02.460 And so you could think about that

00:17:03.700 as order degenerating into chaos.

00:17:05.280 And then the open people who are creative

00:17:07.800 come along and they find places in the city

00:17:10.600 that have degenerated,

00:17:11.600 but that still have interesting potential, right?

00:17:14.200 And then they move in there where it's cheap too.

00:17:16.740 And they start producing art.

00:17:18.400 They start producing galleries.

00:17:19.600 And then the coffee shops move in.

00:17:21.180 And then the thing starts to get civilized.

00:17:23.460 And then, of course,

00:17:24.380 the more liberal conservative types move in.

00:17:27.740 Those would be the yuppies, roughly speaking.

00:17:29.820 So they're much more conservative than the artists,

00:17:32.960 but they're still liberal

00:17:34.240 compared to the bulk of the population.

00:17:36.020 And so the more daring people move in

00:17:38.140 after the artists have civilized it.

00:17:40.140 And then after that, you know,

00:17:41.540 then the chain stores start to move in.

00:17:43.300 And soon it's completely turned into Zeller's

00:17:45.420 or something like that.

00:17:46.760 And then the artists have to go somewhere else

00:17:48.760 and find another place on the boundary

00:17:50.600 where they can live.

00:17:52.400 And it's a physical boundary

00:17:54.180 as much as a mental boundary.

00:17:55.860 And so because you think

00:17:56.940 each of those personality traits,

00:17:59.160 there's five dimensions,

00:18:00.220 each of them represent the possibility

00:18:02.340 of inhabiting a kind of niche, right?

00:18:04.720 An ecological niche.

00:18:06.180 So if you're an extroverted person,

00:18:08.120 your niche is the social environment.

00:18:10.080 If you're an introverted person,

00:18:11.700 the niche is, I think, nature.

00:18:13.280 I don't know that for sure

00:18:14.740 because I've never figured out

00:18:16.020 exactly what introverts are adapted to,

00:18:17.900 but it's not exactly the social world.

00:18:20.500 If you're agreeable,

00:18:21.760 then your niche is relationships.

00:18:23.880 If you're disagreeable,

00:18:24.700 your niche is competition.

00:18:25.940 If you're conscientious,

00:18:27.240 your niche is duty and effort.

00:18:29.480 And so, and those niches are partly social

00:18:33.620 because so much of our environment is social,

00:18:35.900 but they're also partly natural

00:18:37.200 because our social being

00:18:39.120 is nested inside the natural world.

00:18:40.860 And so you can think about the big five traits

00:18:43.160 as different kinds of adaptations

00:18:44.940 to different kinds of niches.

00:18:46.500 And that's the niche that the open people,

00:18:49.280 the open exploratory types occupy.

00:18:53.080 So that seems to make a higher order super factor,

00:18:56.220 extroversion and openness called plasticity,

00:18:58.500 as opposed to stability,

00:18:59.880 which is conscientiousness, agreeableness,

00:19:01.920 and emotional stability.

00:19:03.480 And there's a playoff between those two things

00:19:05.740 because the stable people obviously are stable,

00:19:08.020 but the plastic types of people are more dynamic

00:19:11.960 and they're more concerned with transformation.

00:19:14.560 And in order to get a system optimally stable and dynamic,

00:19:18.860 you have to have a continual interplay of those factors

00:19:22.120 because static doesn't work because everything changes.

00:19:25.440 That's the problem with conservatism.

00:19:27.580 And the problem with liberalism fundamentally is,

00:19:29.860 yes, everything changes,

00:19:31.160 but you have to bring forward some structures from the past.

00:19:34.360 So it's very, very difficult to get that balance correct.

00:19:39.060 So, all right.

00:19:41.340 So anyways, out there in the underworld,

00:19:44.020 in the place beyond your current conceptualizations,

00:19:47.260 that's the place of death and nature,

00:19:49.240 and it's beyond the light.

00:19:50.720 And it's also the place of hell.

00:19:52.640 And that's what you see here.

00:19:53.920 And how do you conceptualize that?

00:19:56.460 Well, one of the things you'll see,

00:19:58.320 if you're interested in this sort of thing,

00:20:00.000 if you ever go read the writings of the Columbine killers,

00:20:04.300 the teens, they're very interesting.

00:20:05.980 They're very much worth reading,

00:20:08.120 especially, I think it's Dylan Klebold,

00:20:10.120 who was the more literate of the two.

00:20:12.020 But he tells you exactly where he went

00:20:13.980 after brooding and brooding and brooding

00:20:16.880 on his isolation and segregation from mankind.

00:20:21.120 So he's out there beyond,

00:20:22.860 he's out there in a chaotic domain.

00:20:24.920 And because he's tortured by that,

00:20:26.400 his thoughts take an unbelievably dark turn.

00:20:28.580 Like it's unimaginably dark.

00:20:31.400 If you're interested in that sort of thing,

00:20:33.120 you could read that.

00:20:33.820 There's another book you could read called Panzram,

00:20:36.660 P-A-N-Z-R-A-M.

00:20:39.020 And it's a fascinating book.

00:20:40.420 It's about this guy who,

00:20:41.840 I think he raped 1,200 men.

00:20:44.080 So that sort of tells you what sort of guy he was.

00:20:46.400 Extraordinarily physically powerful

00:20:47.700 and brutal and malevolent.

00:20:50.040 And he was kind of a juvenile delinquent type.

00:20:52.680 And they put him in a reform school

00:20:54.280 and he was not well treated in that reform school.

00:20:56.960 It's sort of like the worst

00:20:58.380 of the Canadian residential schools.

00:21:00.100 And when he came out,

00:21:01.440 he was not a happy boy.

00:21:03.800 And so he spent the rest of his life

00:21:05.920 trying to be as destructive

00:21:07.240 as he could possibly imagine.

00:21:09.100 And purely consciously with malevolent intent.

00:21:12.780 And then,

00:21:13.600 and believe me,

00:21:15.180 he was pretty destructive.

00:21:16.340 He kept track of the dollar value

00:21:17.700 of all the buildings he burned down.

00:21:19.080 He tried to start a war

00:21:20.120 between Britain and the United States.

00:21:21.680 Like he was all out for all out mayhem.

00:21:24.740 His dying words,

00:21:26.160 that they're going to hang him.

00:21:28.180 He told the guy who was going to hang him,

00:21:30.280 he said,

00:21:30.820 hurry up you,

00:21:31.400 who's your bastard?

00:21:32.220 I could kill 12 men

00:21:33.360 in the time it takes you to hang me.

00:21:35.080 And that's exactly the sort of person he was.

00:21:37.480 And he made friends with this physician

00:21:39.460 in the prison

00:21:41.380 who he thought was like the first person

00:21:43.700 who ever did something nice for him.

00:21:45.380 Gave him a dollar for cigarettes,

00:21:46.660 if I remember correctly.

00:21:47.600 And the physician encouraged him

00:21:49.160 to write his autobiography.

00:21:50.680 And so he did.

00:21:51.600 And it's available.

00:21:52.720 And so if you want a view,

00:21:55.480 because you know,

00:21:56.100 you always think of people,

00:21:58.040 you think,

00:21:58.440 well,

00:21:58.520 people have good intentions,

00:21:59.980 you know,

00:22:00.620 that you especially think that

00:22:01.820 if you're naive and agreeable.

00:22:03.300 So all of you who are sitting there

00:22:04.900 out there thinking

00:22:05.660 people have good intentions,

00:22:07.000 you're probably high in agreeableness.

00:22:08.840 But that's not always the case.

00:22:11.180 People can have very dark motivations

00:22:13.960 that are fully conscious

00:22:15.460 and very well elaborated.

00:22:17.100 And Panzram was no,

00:22:18.260 he was smart

00:22:19.560 and his book is very well written

00:22:21.540 and he tells you exactly

00:22:22.920 why he thought the way he thought.

00:22:25.040 And so it's a good glimpse

00:22:26.020 of exactly this sort of thing

00:22:27.360 where you can get to

00:22:28.720 if you want to

00:22:29.460 by brooding on your specific misfortune.

00:22:32.280 You know,

00:22:32.460 and his basic credo

00:22:34.140 was that human beings

00:22:35.000 were so reprehensible

00:22:35.940 that they should just be eliminated.

00:22:37.840 And believe me,

00:22:38.500 that's what he was trying to do.

00:22:39.980 And these people

00:22:41.020 who do terrible things

00:22:42.240 like the Columbine shooters,

00:22:43.780 that's exactly what,

00:22:45.140 for lack of a better word,

00:22:46.160 they're possessed by.

00:22:47.040 It's sheer malevolence.

00:22:49.280 And the Columbine kids

00:22:50.220 had a much more spectacular

00:22:51.500 catastrophe planned

00:22:52.680 than the one that actually occurred.

00:22:54.760 And they knew

00:22:55.480 it was going to be

00:22:56.020 a full-blown media circus.

00:22:57.720 And lots of these people

00:22:58.820 who engage in those sorts

00:22:59.940 of mass murders,

00:23:01.340 they know about

00:23:02.220 the other mass murderers

00:23:03.360 and they're engaged

00:23:04.020 in a competition.

00:23:04.820 And the competition

00:23:05.800 is who can do

00:23:06.520 the most brutal thing

00:23:07.440 the fastest,

00:23:08.220 something like that.

00:23:09.540 So you can't just be thinking

00:23:11.020 about people who've,

00:23:12.560 you know,

00:23:12.900 who have good intentions

00:23:14.380 but have somehow gone wrong.

00:23:16.320 If you ever meet someone

00:23:17.320 who isn't like that

00:23:18.160 and you think that,

00:23:19.660 you're just a tree

00:23:20.560 with ripe fruit

00:23:21.320 to be plucked.

00:23:22.520 So you don't want

00:23:23.780 to be in that situation.

00:23:24.940 You have to keep

00:23:25.520 your eyes open.

00:23:26.500 And so,

00:23:27.260 anyways,

00:23:27.780 that's basically

00:23:28.440 what's encapsulated

00:23:29.300 in this part of the story.

00:23:30.440 Now,

00:23:30.900 the hyenas go after

00:23:31.800 the little lion,

00:23:33.160 obviously,

00:23:34.380 but they manage to escape.

00:23:36.320 It's a very malevolent scene.

00:23:38.440 And Mufasa shows up

00:23:40.980 at the last minute

00:23:41.700 to rescue them.

00:23:43.240 So,

00:23:43.880 and,

00:23:44.300 you know,

00:23:45.000 there's also

00:23:45.660 a mythological trope there

00:23:47.080 which is that

00:23:47.640 if you go outside

00:23:48.600 your domain of competence

00:23:50.220 and you encounter

00:23:50.920 something you don't understand,

00:23:52.520 the first thing

00:23:53.080 that you're going to do

00:23:53.740 is look to the knowledge

00:23:54.820 structures that you

00:23:55.720 already possess

00:23:56.360 to explain it.

00:23:57.860 Right?

00:23:58.000 And that's the,

00:23:58.580 you could say

00:23:59.180 from a symbolic perspective

00:24:00.720 that that's the manifestation

00:24:01.860 of the father.

00:24:03.320 Because,

00:24:03.560 of course,

00:24:03.880 that's what you're going to do.

00:24:05.380 And,

00:24:05.700 you know,

00:24:06.320 what's really interesting too

00:24:07.800 is because I've had

00:24:08.420 a lot of clients

00:24:09.080 who've had PTSD

00:24:09.940 and without exception

00:24:11.880 every single one of them

00:24:13.080 was induced by

00:24:14.000 one form of malevolence

00:24:15.260 or another.

00:24:15.940 They have to develop

00:24:16.940 a very sophisticated philosophy

00:24:18.500 of good and evil

00:24:19.340 to get out of it.

00:24:20.580 Because they have a worldview

00:24:21.820 in which those things

00:24:22.800 don't really exist.

00:24:23.820 There's no such thing

00:24:24.600 as pure malevolence.

00:24:26.200 Well,

00:24:26.400 that's fine

00:24:26.880 unless you encounter it.

00:24:28.440 And then as soon

00:24:29.000 as you encounter it,

00:24:30.520 as soon as you encounter it,

00:24:31.840 you won't know what to do.

00:24:33.120 And then you won't be able

00:24:34.620 to get on with your life.

00:24:35.520 You'll do nothing

00:24:36.600 but think about that

00:24:38.120 and think about it

00:24:38.880 and think about it

00:24:39.600 and think about it.

00:24:40.140 It'll disrupt your sleep.

00:24:41.840 It'll put you into

00:24:42.460 a permanent state

00:24:43.320 of preparation for action.

00:24:45.100 Because the part of your brain

00:24:46.380 that's detected that,

00:24:47.700 which in my estimation,

00:24:48.780 by the way,

00:24:49.160 is the same part,

00:24:50.040 at least in part,

00:24:51.180 that detects snakes.

00:24:52.500 It's the same damn circuit.

00:24:54.220 Once it's seen

00:24:54.860 something like that,

00:24:55.700 it is not going to let you go

00:24:57.060 until you figure it out.

00:24:58.600 And that's basically

00:24:59.340 what post-traumatic stress disorder is.

00:25:01.300 And,

00:25:01.660 you know,

00:25:01.800 to some degree,

00:25:02.440 each of you

00:25:03.600 will have experienced that.

00:25:05.580 Maybe not all of you in here,

00:25:06.700 but many of you.

00:25:07.700 And you can tell that.

00:25:08.840 So if you go back

00:25:09.780 and you think about your past

00:25:11.380 and you have any memory

00:25:13.160 that's more than

00:25:13.780 about 18 months old,

00:25:15.260 and when you think about it,

00:25:16.480 it produces a fair bit

00:25:17.520 of negative emotion,

00:25:19.040 then that's like a place

00:25:21.940 where there's a mini

00:25:23.020 post-traumatic stress problem.

00:25:25.340 And what's happened?

00:25:26.100 You remember I showed you

00:25:26.820 that hierarchy

00:25:27.540 moving from

00:25:28.720 tiny motor actions

00:25:29.940 all the way up

00:25:30.500 to high order abstractions?

00:25:32.200 Well,

00:25:32.420 you can imagine,

00:25:33.260 say,

00:25:34.280 you have good person

00:25:35.140 at the top

00:25:35.800 and you kind of use

00:25:37.280 that scenario

00:25:39.260 to construe other people.

00:25:40.800 People are basically good.

00:25:42.360 Well,

00:25:42.580 then you run into someone

00:25:43.720 who is not good

00:25:44.700 and boom,

00:25:46.040 the whole bloody system

00:25:46.940 comes tumbling down

00:25:47.820 because it's violated

00:25:48.560 that highest order axiom.

00:25:50.420 So that's

00:25:50.740 post-traumatic stress disorder.

00:25:52.300 If something has violated

00:25:53.880 an axiom

00:25:54.540 that's more differentiated,

00:25:56.940 you know,

00:25:57.200 closer to the actual

00:25:58.080 motor output,

00:25:58.860 not quite so high

00:25:59.700 in the abstraction chain,

00:26:01.060 then all it does

00:26:01.860 is wipe out

00:26:02.540 that part of the structure.

00:26:03.840 It doesn't wipe out

00:26:04.460 the whole thing.

00:26:05.240 And you can tell

00:26:06.120 if you have holes

00:26:07.060 in your perceptual value structure

00:26:10.220 by checking to see

00:26:12.060 if you have memories

00:26:12.900 that are still alive

00:26:13.960 in a negative way

00:26:14.880 that are old enough

00:26:16.420 so that they should have

00:26:17.180 been incorporated

00:26:17.800 into your personality.

00:26:19.740 And so one of the things

00:26:20.480 you can do,

00:26:22.100 you're doing one

00:26:23.640 of the exercises

00:26:24.440 that's on my

00:26:25.160 self-authoring site,

00:26:26.080 you guys do

00:26:26.540 the personality analysis,

00:26:27.780 but there's another

00:26:28.800 program there

00:26:29.640 called the,

00:26:30.260 it's called

00:26:31.160 the past authoring

00:26:32.000 where you write down

00:26:32.700 an autobiography.

00:26:34.060 And thinking through

00:26:36.240 these things

00:26:36.840 that have happened

00:26:37.380 to you in your past

00:26:38.180 that are negative

00:26:38.820 is a good way

00:26:39.800 of making them go away.

00:26:40.980 And thinking them through

00:26:41.980 kind of means

00:26:42.580 you have to figure out

00:26:44.160 what happened,

00:26:45.780 right?

00:26:46.220 And then you sort of

00:26:47.220 have to figure out

00:26:47.780 how to make it

00:26:48.340 not happen again.

00:26:49.360 What you're trying to derive

00:26:50.700 is some kind of

00:26:51.280 causal analysis.

00:26:52.200 How is it that I was

00:26:53.860 put into a situation

00:26:54.980 where I was made

00:26:56.260 vulnerable?

00:26:57.440 You know,

00:26:57.600 and that could be,

00:26:58.280 well,

00:26:58.360 because you're only four

00:26:59.320 and you couldn't

00:26:59.760 protect yourself

00:27:00.460 and now it's time

00:27:01.220 to update that

00:27:01.920 because you're a fully

00:27:02.980 functioning adult.

00:27:04.340 Or there may be things

00:27:05.620 that you have to think

00:27:06.640 through and change

00:27:07.420 in your own personality

00:27:08.420 or attitudes that

00:27:09.800 you've been holding

00:27:10.840 onto since you were tiny.

00:27:12.300 I had this client once

00:27:13.560 and she came in

00:27:15.080 and told me that

00:27:15.820 she had been

00:27:16.660 sexually assaulted

00:27:18.260 by her older brother.

00:27:19.260 And she told me

00:27:20.880 the story

00:27:21.300 and I kind of

00:27:21.720 got the impression

00:27:22.360 that maybe she was

00:27:23.160 like eight

00:27:23.640 and he was like 17

00:27:24.920 or something like that.

00:27:26.280 And she was about 27

00:27:27.480 when she came

00:27:28.040 and talked to me

00:27:28.560 and then I found out

00:27:29.780 by further questioning

00:27:30.880 that she was four

00:27:31.840 and he was six.

00:27:33.000 And I thought

00:27:33.800 she still had this story

00:27:36.000 in her head

00:27:36.560 of her being tormented

00:27:37.700 by this older person,

00:27:39.480 right?

00:27:39.700 That's how she told

00:27:40.520 the story.

00:27:41.200 And what I told her

00:27:42.340 was,

00:27:42.960 well,

00:27:43.080 look,

00:27:43.380 another way of looking

00:27:44.240 at this is that

00:27:44.960 you two were very badly

00:27:46.220 supervised children

00:27:48.480 because I mean,

00:27:49.120 he was six for God's sake,

00:27:50.460 you know,

00:27:50.640 he's a little kid.

00:27:51.600 That doesn't mean

00:27:52.480 that what happened

00:27:53.120 to her was any less traumatic,

00:27:55.520 but,

00:27:55.840 but he wasn't 17,

00:27:57.660 right?

00:27:57.960 The story was different

00:27:59.340 than the one she had

00:28:00.200 in her head.

00:28:00.680 And,

00:28:01.200 you know,

00:28:01.520 by the time she left

00:28:02.860 after we had that conversation,

00:28:04.200 it was clear that the way

00:28:05.680 that she was construing

00:28:06.660 the experience

00:28:07.260 had radically shifted.

00:28:08.620 And it was very interesting

00:28:09.900 because,

00:28:10.240 you know,

00:28:10.320 you think of the past

00:28:11.220 as fixed,

00:28:11.840 but,

00:28:12.960 and it is in some sense,

00:28:14.520 but the reason you remember

00:28:16.340 the past

00:28:17.020 isn't to make

00:28:17.860 an objectively accurate

00:28:19.040 record of the past.

00:28:20.320 It's so that you can

00:28:21.420 use the information

00:28:22.800 in the past

00:28:23.400 to prepare you

00:28:24.360 for the future.

00:28:25.700 And your mind

00:28:26.520 won't leave you alone

00:28:27.480 unless that has happened.

00:28:28.540 So if you've encountered

00:28:29.320 something that's negative

00:28:30.780 and you don't know why

00:28:32.260 and you don't know

00:28:33.160 what to do about it,

00:28:34.260 if that happens again

00:28:35.280 in the future,

00:28:35.920 then that will stay with you.

00:28:37.780 And I think one of the things

00:28:39.140 it does too

00:28:39.760 is it increases

00:28:40.440 your overall physiological load.

00:28:42.520 There's actually physiologists

00:28:43.860 who've been talking about this.

00:28:45.180 I can't remember

00:28:46.840 the damn phrase,

00:28:47.840 but you can imagine

00:28:48.700 that your mind

00:28:49.240 is doing something

00:28:49.880 like this all the time.

00:28:50.920 It's,

00:28:51.140 it's,

00:28:51.860 it's,

00:28:52.740 it's got a record

00:28:54.360 in some sense

00:28:55.100 of your autobiographical

00:28:56.200 experiences.

00:28:57.140 And what it's doing

00:28:58.180 is calculating

00:28:58.940 how frequently

00:28:59.820 you've been successful

00:29:01.180 versus unsuccessful.

00:29:02.860 And the more frequently

00:29:04.040 that you've been successful,

00:29:05.300 the higher you are

00:29:06.340 up on the dominance hierarchy.

00:29:08.060 That's one possibility.

00:29:09.840 So your serotonin levels

00:29:10.760 go up

00:29:11.140 and you're calmer,

00:29:12.180 but also

00:29:12.600 it's reasonable

00:29:14.140 to assume

00:29:14.720 that the environment

00:29:15.340 is less dangerous,

00:29:16.440 right?

00:29:16.800 Because that's sort of

00:29:17.460 what constitutes danger.

00:29:19.940 You're somewhere

00:29:20.640 and you act

00:29:21.700 and something you don't

00:29:22.680 want to have happen

00:29:23.400 happens.

00:29:24.100 That's danger.

00:29:25.540 And so your brain

00:29:26.180 is always trying

00:29:26.820 to figure out

00:29:27.260 how to calibrate

00:29:27.980 how anxious you should be.

00:29:29.700 And one of the things

00:29:30.360 it does is by

00:29:31.100 sort of keeping track

00:29:32.100 of your past success

00:29:33.180 failure ratio.

00:29:35.280 And so

00:29:35.620 to the degree

00:29:37.180 that your past

00:29:38.600 has been characterized

00:29:39.360 by,

00:29:39.860 we'll call them failures,

00:29:40.900 those are situations

00:29:41.760 where you do not

00:29:42.640 get what you want,

00:29:44.160 then your body,

00:29:45.960 your brain

00:29:46.320 puts your body

00:29:47.000 on constant alert.

00:29:48.540 Because if everything

00:29:49.660 that you've done

00:29:50.380 has resulted

00:29:51.000 in catastrophe,

00:29:52.020 then you're somewhere

00:29:52.880 insanely dangerous

00:29:54.120 and you should be

00:29:54.900 like a prey animal

00:29:57.480 that's ready

00:29:58.240 to dart

00:29:58.700 in any direction.

00:30:00.100 And how much

00:30:00.880 you should be

00:30:01.660 a prey animal

00:30:02.380 is dependent on,

00:30:03.820 it's an estimate,

00:30:04.640 partly your trait

00:30:05.400 neuroticism,

00:30:06.940 partly your success

00:30:08.600 as adjudicated

00:30:09.600 by other people,

00:30:10.920 right,

00:30:11.160 because they'll

00:30:11.820 pop you up

00:30:12.780 the dominance hierarchy

00:30:13.560 if you've been successful,

00:30:14.800 but also partly

00:30:15.740 on your record

00:30:16.560 of failures

00:30:17.100 and successes

00:30:17.740 in the past.

00:30:19.340 And so you can go back

00:30:20.360 and you can find out

00:30:21.220 where you have holes

00:30:22.240 in your,

00:30:23.100 in the structure

00:30:24.160 through which you're

00:30:24.820 viewing the world,

00:30:25.620 that's one way

00:30:26.180 of looking at it,

00:30:26.920 and you can sew

00:30:27.660 those things up.

00:30:29.000 And that's a very,

00:30:29.840 that's in some sense,

00:30:30.880 that's what you're doing

00:30:31.540 in psychotherapy.

00:30:32.620 You know,

00:30:32.960 partly it's exposure

00:30:34.480 to things you're afraid

00:30:35.440 of and disgusted by

00:30:36.440 and are likely to avoid,

00:30:37.640 that's a huge chunk of it.

00:30:38.840 But if you go back

00:30:40.400 into your past

00:30:41.200 and you start talking

00:30:42.200 those things through,

00:30:43.000 it's really the same thing.

00:30:44.740 It's more abstracted.

00:30:46.520 So Freud,

00:30:47.680 of course,

00:30:48.040 was always,

00:30:48.680 when he was doing

00:30:49.280 his free association

00:30:50.360 process with his clients,

00:30:53.980 he'd find that

00:30:54.760 if he just let them talk,

00:30:56.400 that their speech

00:30:57.120 would circle

00:30:57.740 until it hit a place

00:30:59.320 like that,

00:31:00.320 where they were confused

00:31:01.540 and doubtful.

00:31:02.420 And then their speech

00:31:03.220 would sort of wander

00:31:04.040 around that,

00:31:05.100 and then they'd have

00:31:06.120 an emotional expression

00:31:07.160 that was a consequence

00:31:08.060 of that.

00:31:08.440 He thought the

00:31:09.280 emotional expression

00:31:10.200 was what was curative.

00:31:11.300 It was cathartic

00:31:12.340 in his terms.

00:31:13.720 But later,

00:31:14.340 James Pennebaker,

00:31:15.860 upon whom these

00:31:16.600 writing exercises

00:31:17.440 I described,

00:31:18.720 his research

00:31:19.680 is based on that.

00:31:21.660 My exercises

00:31:23.120 are based on his research.

00:31:24.720 He found that

00:31:25.280 if you brought

00:31:25.800 college students

00:31:27.120 into the lab

00:31:28.320 and you had them

00:31:28.900 write for 15 minutes

00:31:30.080 three times

00:31:31.180 over three days

00:31:32.040 about the worst thing

00:31:33.300 that had ever happened

00:31:34.040 to them

00:31:34.400 or the worst thing

00:31:35.220 they ever did,

00:31:35.860 if I remember correctly,

00:31:37.520 they got worse

00:31:38.360 in the short term

00:31:39.120 but better

00:31:39.580 in the long run.

00:31:40.300 For example,

00:31:40.740 they went and visited

00:31:41.320 the doctor less

00:31:42.280 and markers

00:31:43.440 of their physical

00:31:44.120 health improved.

00:31:45.980 And so I think

00:31:46.640 the reason for that

00:31:47.440 is because,

00:31:49.080 what is that called?

00:31:49.840 It's called

00:31:50.180 something load.

00:31:51.780 Just about got it right

00:31:52.940 from the physiologist.

00:31:54.600 Doesn't matter.

00:31:56.620 They got healthier

00:31:57.660 as far as I can tell

00:31:58.800 because they basically

00:32:00.000 calmed down.

00:32:01.160 Once they had gone

00:32:02.440 through the negative

00:32:03.100 memory and sorted

00:32:04.600 it out properly

00:32:05.380 and told a properly

00:32:06.500 articulated story

00:32:07.700 and figured out

00:32:08.680 how to deal with it

00:32:09.660 then their physiology

00:32:11.500 calmed down.

00:32:13.860 And so then

00:32:14.660 they weren't as stressed.

00:32:15.960 They weren't producing

00:32:16.520 as much cortisol

00:32:17.480 and so cortisol

00:32:18.680 suppresses your immune

00:32:19.700 function and so

00:32:20.760 they were more likely

00:32:21.400 to stay healthy.

00:32:23.000 And so,

00:32:23.840 well,

00:32:24.580 so that's all

00:32:25.760 very much worth

00:32:26.420 thinking about.

00:32:26.980 That's all in the domain

00:32:27.980 outside of the light.

00:32:29.100 That's one way

00:32:29.600 of thinking about it.

00:32:30.360 Now,

00:32:31.060 of course,

00:32:32.100 Simba and his

00:32:32.880 and what's the girl's name?

00:32:35.640 Mala.

00:32:36.060 Yeah.

00:32:36.480 They're,

00:32:37.100 you know,

00:32:37.480 pretty cowed

00:32:38.160 about what has happened

00:32:39.060 because they sort of

00:32:40.040 stumbled stupidly

00:32:40.980 out into the unknown.

00:32:42.640 They stumbled foolishly

00:32:44.320 out into the unknown

00:32:45.340 and this actually

00:32:46.460 highlights another

00:32:47.280 Jungian archetype

00:32:48.560 and that's the archetype

00:32:49.540 of the trickster

00:32:50.240 and the trickster

00:32:51.400 is like the joker

00:32:52.160 in the king's court

00:32:53.040 and the trickster

00:32:54.080 is someone who

00:32:54.780 will be

00:32:55.600 or play the fool

00:32:56.760 and the thing about

00:32:57.820 the fool

00:32:58.240 is that the fool

00:32:58.960 is close to the truth

00:33:00.100 because you can't

00:33:01.060 learn anything new

00:33:01.820 unless you're willing

00:33:02.420 to be a fool.

00:33:03.840 Right?

00:33:04.280 You know what that's like.

00:33:05.200 You know exactly

00:33:06.260 what that's like.

00:33:07.240 You have to master

00:33:08.460 a new skill

00:33:09.040 but you're avoiding it

00:33:10.140 because you know

00:33:11.040 that you'll be bad at it

00:33:12.160 when you first do it

00:33:13.020 and if you're perfectionistic

00:33:14.380 you're going to say,

00:33:15.200 well,

00:33:15.300 I can't allow myself

00:33:16.380 to be bad at anything.

00:33:17.980 I can't allow myself

00:33:18.760 to be a fool

00:33:19.480 and no wonder

00:33:20.400 but the problem is

00:33:21.640 is when you try

00:33:22.220 something new

00:33:22.740 you're always a fool

00:33:23.740 and so unless you're

00:33:25.100 willing to be a fool

00:33:25.980 you can't learn

00:33:26.760 anything new

00:33:27.380 and that's also

00:33:28.220 why Jung regarded

00:33:29.080 the trickster

00:33:29.620 as the precursor

00:33:30.440 to the savior

00:33:31.080 archetypally speaking

00:33:32.280 is because you cannot

00:33:33.660 do the right thing

00:33:34.720 unless you're willing

00:33:35.780 to be a fool first

00:33:36.960 and that's really worth

00:33:38.360 knowing.

00:33:39.000 Lots of times

00:33:39.680 you guys

00:33:40.460 you're going to make

00:33:40.980 a stage transition

00:33:41.920 in your life

00:33:42.560 and you're going to

00:33:43.400 feel like an imposter

00:33:44.420 when you get a new job

00:33:45.660 or when you get a promotion

00:33:46.500 or something like that

00:33:47.360 you're going to feel

00:33:48.080 like an imposter

00:33:48.820 and you are

00:33:50.020 because what do you know

00:33:51.340 when you make

00:33:51.780 that first transition?

00:33:53.040 Right?

00:33:53.680 But it's going to

00:33:54.660 make you embarrassed

00:33:55.360 and it's going to

00:33:55.940 make you ashamed

00:33:57.520 and all of those things

00:33:58.460 but you have to

00:33:59.220 understand that

00:34:00.020 you are a fool

00:34:00.860 when you first

00:34:01.400 try something new

00:34:02.300 but you're a worse fool

00:34:03.600 if you don't try it.

00:34:05.240 That doesn't mean

00:34:05.900 you should you know

00:34:06.720 make like you know

00:34:07.820 everything as soon

00:34:08.580 as you're promoted

00:34:09.360 or you have some

00:34:10.400 transition in status

00:34:11.480 that's foolish

00:34:12.920 of the wrong sort

00:34:14.720 but to know that

00:34:16.560 to know that you have

00:34:18.120 to be fallible

00:34:18.940 in order to progress

00:34:20.560 is an unbelievably

00:34:21.360 useful thing

00:34:22.140 it can free you up

00:34:23.060 you know I was

00:34:24.500 talking to a writer

00:34:25.300 the other day

00:34:25.960 about his process

00:34:27.500 for beginning writing

00:34:28.540 he's written many books

00:34:29.500 he writes a very

00:34:31.000 very very bad

00:34:31.960 first draft

00:34:32.840 right and that's

00:34:34.540 a good way to think

00:34:35.180 about things

00:34:35.720 is throughout your life

00:34:36.680 you're going to be

00:34:37.060 doing that is writing

00:34:37.960 the next draft of you

00:34:40.220 and it's pretty bad

00:34:41.540 to begin with

00:34:42.260 but that's okay

00:34:43.460 because it isn't

00:34:44.860 going to get any better

00:34:45.640 unless you put yourself

00:34:46.620 out into the domain

00:34:47.500 of the unknown

00:34:48.100 to begin with

00:34:48.780 and you know you might

00:34:49.560 you might

00:34:50.200 it might go badly

00:34:51.460 I mean that's

00:34:52.000 what happens here

00:34:52.780 anyways

00:34:57.220 Mufasa has a chat

00:34:58.740 with Simba

00:34:59.240 and you know

00:34:59.720 tells him that he's

00:35:00.520 he did what he

00:35:02.280 wasn't supposed to do

00:35:03.280 although you know

00:35:04.560 even in that situation

00:35:06.240 Mufasa's

00:35:07.360 discipline is

00:35:09.280 paradoxical

00:35:10.780 because

00:35:11.120 there's part of him

00:35:12.380 because he's reasonably

00:35:13.220 wise that knows

00:35:14.040 that breaking the rules

00:35:14.940 like that is actually

00:35:15.800 necessary

00:35:16.320 even though you still

00:35:17.280 have to say

00:35:17.940 play by the damn

00:35:19.300 rules

00:35:19.740 you know you have

00:35:20.320 to leave that door

00:35:21.180 open so that the

00:35:22.080 rules can be broken

00:35:23.040 an appropriate amount

00:35:24.480 so he forgives them

00:35:26.080 and peace is made

00:35:27.420 between them

00:35:27.940 and then

00:35:28.280 they involve themselves

00:35:32.200 in sort of gazing

00:35:33.060 at the night sky

00:35:34.060 and so the two of them

00:35:35.260 do that together

00:35:35.960 and the night sky

00:35:36.680 is an interesting place

00:35:37.800 you know

00:35:38.060 because that's where

00:35:38.740 the absolute unknown

00:35:40.280 resides

00:35:40.980 one of the things

00:35:42.180 Jung wrote a lot about

00:35:43.820 was astrology

00:35:45.080 strangely enough

00:35:46.240 slash astronomy

00:35:47.620 and one of Jung's

00:35:48.640 contentions

00:35:49.560 this is a very

00:35:50.120 interesting one

00:35:50.840 was that

00:35:51.200 because the night sky

00:35:52.660 was completely unknown

00:35:53.800 people could project

00:35:54.840 their fantasies

00:35:55.700 into it

00:35:56.240 and that's what

00:35:57.000 they did with

00:35:57.460 astrology

00:35:58.880 so astrology

00:36:00.340 is this cumulative

00:36:01.360 fantasy

00:36:02.040 that's going on

00:36:02.860 in that

00:36:03.400 roughly speaking

00:36:04.240 in the deep

00:36:04.800 unconscious

00:36:05.280 projected onto

00:36:06.640 the sky

00:36:07.260 and so if you

00:36:08.540 analyze old

00:36:09.260 astrological

00:36:10.060 writings

00:36:10.720 what you're really

00:36:11.600 doing is analyzing

00:36:12.560 old fantasies

00:36:13.600 and because of that

00:36:14.560 you could develop

00:36:15.080 some insight

00:36:15.580 into the structure

00:36:16.280 of the mind

00:36:16.920 and so

00:36:17.860 he did the same

00:36:18.920 thing with alchemy

00:36:19.660 in his later

00:36:20.260 writings

00:36:20.600 which are very

00:36:21.480 very difficult

00:36:22.040 to understand

00:36:22.700 but extremely

00:36:23.340 worthwhile

00:36:23.920 okay so anyways

00:36:25.780 back to the

00:36:26.560 to the hellish

00:36:27.580 domain

00:36:28.080 now I told you

00:36:28.840 that that domain

00:36:29.980 that's outside

00:36:30.620 of knowledge

00:36:31.200 you could think

00:36:31.660 about that

00:36:32.040 as the underworld

00:36:32.620 or you can

00:36:33.140 think about it

00:36:33.620 as nature

00:36:34.180 the negative

00:36:34.760 element of nature

00:36:35.560 in particular

00:36:36.140 and so I mentioned

00:36:37.800 that one element

00:36:38.500 of that is hellish

00:36:39.540 and that's exactly

00:36:40.600 what the movie

00:36:41.200 explains next

00:36:42.640 it does exactly

00:36:43.540 that

00:36:43.780 we go back out

00:36:44.500 to this domain

00:36:45.520 that scar

00:36:46.480 the adversary

00:36:47.540 or the negative

00:36:48.540 king

00:36:48.940 that's another

00:36:49.460 way of looking

00:36:49.980 at him

00:36:50.280 this is his

00:36:51.360 his the domain

00:36:52.360 over which he

00:36:53.020 rules

00:36:53.500 and so

00:36:54.520 you can see him

00:36:57.280 there surrounded

00:36:58.160 in fire

00:36:58.760 same idea as the

00:36:59.840 you know as the

00:37:00.560 hyenas surrounded

00:37:01.200 by fire earlier

00:37:02.000 although this is

00:37:02.680 green fire and

00:37:03.620 smoke which I

00:37:04.180 think is even

00:37:04.600 worse

00:37:04.980 and this is

00:37:06.800 where the movie

00:37:07.920 starts to draw

00:37:08.680 on essentially

00:37:09.900 Nazi symbolism

00:37:11.840 at least the

00:37:12.760 symbolism of

00:37:13.420 totalitarian states

00:37:14.560 and you know

00:37:14.940 you think about

00:37:15.940 you think about

00:37:16.960 a totalitarian

00:37:17.700 state you think

00:37:18.500 about the Nazis

00:37:19.180 and their goose

00:37:19.780 stepping what's

00:37:20.900 happening is that

00:37:21.600 every single person

00:37:22.860 in the military

00:37:23.720 becomes an

00:37:24.660 identical unit

00:37:25.560 right a unit

00:37:26.300 they're all

00:37:26.760 uniform and

00:37:27.940 they're all in

00:37:29.000 some sense

00:37:29.520 imitating the

00:37:30.440 dictator in an

00:37:32.240 absolutely perfect

00:37:33.360 way and so

00:37:34.620 the dictator wants

00:37:35.720 to impose strict

00:37:36.640 uniformity on the

00:37:37.780 entire population

00:37:38.620 that's order

00:37:39.760 order and one

00:37:41.820 of the things

00:37:42.240 we've discovered

00:37:43.060 that's really

00:37:43.800 interesting is

00:37:45.080 that disgust

00:37:47.600 sensitivity is

00:37:48.480 associated with

00:37:49.260 orderliness and

00:37:51.220 that's associated

00:37:51.940 with conscientiousness

00:37:52.860 and one of the

00:37:53.620 things about

00:37:54.020 Hitler was that

00:37:54.600 he was very

00:37:55.260 disgust sensitive

00:37:56.360 and a lot of

00:37:57.340 his hatred for

00:37:58.340 non-Aryans so

00:37:59.680 imagine inside the

00:38:00.540 Aryan box it was

00:38:01.400 all uniform

00:38:02.000 outside it was all

00:38:03.120 parasites and

00:38:03.840 predators and so

00:38:05.340 and that was a

00:38:06.160 manifestation of

00:38:07.040 disgust not of

00:38:08.120 fear it's a whole

00:38:09.320 different thing and

00:38:10.460 if you read

00:38:11.320 Hitler's table

00:38:12.020 talk which is a

00:38:13.260 collection of his

00:38:14.040 spontaneous dinner

00:38:15.200 speeches from

00:38:15.860 1939 to 1942 it's a

00:38:18.000 very interesting

00:38:18.500 book you see that

00:38:19.760 his metaphor for

00:38:21.560 the Aryan race was

00:38:22.960 a body a pure

00:38:24.240 body unassaulted by

00:38:26.340 parasites or

00:38:27.100 predators and that

00:38:28.160 he was trying to

00:38:28.780 erect a border around

00:38:30.300 it to keep all of

00:38:31.020 that away so it's an

00:38:32.500 immunological disgust

00:38:34.060 like metaphor and

00:38:35.680 there's some recent

00:38:36.360 work that was

00:38:37.180 published in

00:38:37.720 PLOS ONE about

00:38:38.460 three years ago

00:38:39.260 showing that

00:38:40.340 brilliant study

00:38:41.740 should have got

00:38:42.220 much more

00:38:42.640 attention showing

00:38:43.340 that if you went

00:38:44.260 around and

00:38:45.280 sampled political

00:38:46.620 attitudes in

00:38:47.240 different countries

00:38:47.920 or even within

00:38:48.920 the same country

00:38:49.900 what you found

00:38:51.540 was that the

00:38:52.440 higher the

00:38:52.920 prevalence of

00:38:53.540 infectious diseases

00:38:54.540 the higher the

00:38:56.280 probability of

00:38:57.060 totalitarian political

00:38:58.240 attitudes at the

00:38:59.100 local level and

00:39:00.400 you can imagine

00:39:00.940 well what happens

00:39:02.200 if there's infectious

00:39:02.940 diseases is you

00:39:03.800 want to put borders

00:39:04.460 around everything

00:39:05.120 you don't want free

00:39:06.220 movement between

00:39:07.060 ideas or people

00:39:08.020 because that's

00:39:08.600 partly how the

00:39:09.160 disease spreads

00:39:09.900 you're going to

00:39:10.360 have much more

00:39:11.660 strict sexual

00:39:13.280 rules for example

00:39:14.840 because that's a

00:39:15.540 great way for

00:39:16.100 diseases to be

00:39:16.880 transmitted and

00:39:18.060 before Hitler went

00:39:18.920 on his rampage

00:39:19.800 against the

00:39:20.660 non-Aryans he

00:39:21.680 cleaned up all the

00:39:22.440 factories like he

00:39:24.140 went in there and

00:39:24.680 fumigated them it

00:39:25.480 was part of the

00:39:26.040 law and he went

00:39:27.140 on a public health

00:39:28.060 campaign to get

00:39:29.220 rid of tuberculosis

00:39:30.160 and he got rid of

00:39:30.880 the bugs in the

00:39:31.600 factories as well

00:39:32.400 and he used

00:39:33.000 Zyklon B that's

00:39:35.200 an insecticide and

00:39:36.060 that's the gas that

00:39:37.100 he used in the gas

00:39:37.960 chambers event

00:39:38.600 actually so first

00:39:39.300 it was the bugs

00:39:39.920 and the rats and

00:39:41.180 then it was people

00:39:41.880 who were then it

00:39:42.680 was euthanasia that

00:39:43.680 was the next move

00:39:44.520 and forced you

00:39:45.980 euthanasia and the

00:39:47.680 rationale for that

00:39:48.960 was compassion by

00:39:50.180 the way just so you

00:39:51.420 all know it's it's

00:39:52.980 it's merciful to put

00:39:54.540 these people who are

00:39:55.860 burdensome to

00:39:57.160 themselves and their

00:39:57.960 families and the

00:39:58.740 state who are living

00:39:59.840 second-rate lives

00:40:01.480 it's merciful to

00:40:03.380 euthanize them and

00:40:04.360 that was a huge

00:40:04.980 campaign in Germany

00:40:05.860 it was after that

00:40:06.700 that the more

00:40:08.060 racial purifications

00:40:11.060 began and so

00:40:12.740 that's the

00:40:13.820 disgusting that's

00:40:14.840 unbelievably important

00:40:16.060 it's it's it's

00:40:17.940 because lots of times

00:40:19.420 people think that

00:40:20.120 conservatives are more

00:40:21.060 anxiety sensitive than

00:40:22.260 liberals and that's

00:40:23.220 why they're closed in

00:40:24.120 terms of their ideas

00:40:25.360 but that doesn't look

00:40:26.280 right first of all

00:40:27.260 conservatives are less

00:40:28.200 neurotic than liberals

00:40:29.160 although the effect

00:40:29.860 isn't that big so it

00:40:31.560 doesn't look and they

00:40:32.320 actually are they're

00:40:33.180 they score higher in

00:40:34.240 measures of well-being

00:40:35.340 the most unhappy

00:40:36.500 people are liberal

00:40:37.360 men by the way so

00:40:39.300 but you know people

00:40:42.000 are often accused if

00:40:43.080 they're conservative of

00:40:43.860 being fearful and

00:40:44.680 that's why they you

00:40:45.840 know suppress other

00:40:46.880 people's viewpoints but

00:40:47.820 that doesn't look right

00:40:48.620 it's low openness and

00:40:50.140 high orderliness and

00:40:51.300 that looks like it's

00:40:52.020 associated with disgust

00:40:53.280 and that looks like it's

00:40:54.520 associated with

00:40:55.340 something called the

00:40:56.300 extended immune system

00:40:57.540 which is the proclivity

00:40:58.460 of people to to keep

00:41:00.140 themselves away from

00:41:01.060 potential sources of

00:41:02.080 contamination

00:41:02.540 it's really terrifying

00:41:04.380 because one of the

00:41:05.060 things people often

00:41:05.960 said about Germany

00:41:06.840 was that you know

00:41:08.120 it was a very

00:41:08.720 civilized country and

00:41:09.880 yet it descended into

00:41:11.220 barbarity but

00:41:13.040 conscientiousness is a

00:41:14.120 very good predictor of

00:41:15.200 long-term success and

00:41:17.260 so you could say well

00:41:18.140 conscientious societies

00:41:19.780 are more civilized but

00:41:21.700 they're also more

00:41:22.280 orderly and that makes

00:41:23.520 them more disgust

00:41:24.240 sensitive and so what

00:41:25.220 it might have easily

00:41:25.900 might have easily been

00:41:27.020 in Germany was that it

00:41:28.580 was an excess of

00:41:29.600 civilization rather than

00:41:31.380 its lack that produced

00:41:32.620 exactly these

00:41:33.360 consequences and that's

00:41:34.740 a far more frightening

00:41:35.580 proposition and one

00:41:36.640 that's I believe much

00:41:37.980 more likely to be true

00:41:38.900 Hitler bathed four times

00:41:40.420 a day and he was also

00:41:42.480 an admirer of willpower

00:41:43.840 so he could stand like

00:41:44.840 this for eight hours in

00:41:45.860 the back of a car and

00:41:47.140 the thing about

00:41:47.600 conscientious people is

00:41:48.740 they're very willpower

00:41:50.000 oriented and so if

00:41:51.620 you're unfortunate enough

00:41:52.600 to be sick chronically in

00:41:54.980 the house of someone

00:41:55.880 who's conscientious

00:41:56.840 especially if it's a

00:41:57.940 mental illness you're

00:41:58.600 more likely to relapse

00:41:59.740 because the conscientious

00:42:01.560 person is going to be

00:42:02.360 judgmental and they're

00:42:03.300 going to say to you if

00:42:04.120 you're schizophrenic

00:42:04.820 they're going to say

00:42:05.300 well if you just

00:42:05.920 organize yourself and

00:42:06.940 get up in the morning

00:42:07.620 and try a little harder

00:42:08.880 you could overcome this

00:42:10.460 which is of course true

00:42:11.760 except you can't because

00:42:13.380 you're schizophrenic and

00:42:14.760 so the pressure put on

00:42:15.900 you by the anger and the

00:42:17.060 contempt is going to

00:42:18.100 increase the probability

00:42:19.020 that you'll relapse so

00:42:20.980 orderly people are very

00:42:22.760 judgmental and you know

00:42:24.360 orderliness is a is very

00:42:25.800 highly associated with

00:42:26.980 things like anorexia and

00:42:28.680 the anorexic is basically

00:42:29.820 someone who's so

00:42:31.000 disgust sensitive that

00:42:32.140 they become unable to

00:42:33.540 tolerate their own body

00:42:35.260 and they see it as a

00:42:36.620 source of corruption and

00:42:37.700 imperfection which of

00:42:38.980 course is exactly right

00:42:40.180 it is and it's very

00:42:42.200 difficult thing to

00:42:42.900 maintain order around

00:42:44.780 so anyways so what

00:42:48.000 happens out here in this

00:42:48.980 terrible domain where

00:42:50.320 scar rules is that

00:42:51.360 things turn into a

00:42:52.540 totalitarian state you

00:42:54.200 know and he's he's

00:42:55.080 presented here as as a

00:42:56.840 Nazi like leader and

00:42:59.160 see there's another

00:42:59.820 thing that's really

00:43:00.480 interesting that's even

00:43:01.380 deeper than this from a

00:43:02.620 mythological perspective I

00:43:04.360 don't know if I can even

00:43:05.140 go into it well not

00:43:07.540 really I guess what I'll

00:43:08.660 have to do is satisfy

00:43:09.960 myself with this

00:43:10.820 observation there's

00:43:13.460 always been some

00:43:14.040 antagonism for example

00:43:15.260 between the Catholic

00:43:16.100 Church and rationalism

00:43:17.460 and everyone knows that

00:43:19.140 it's a very long-standing

00:43:20.380 antagonism that sort of

00:43:21.660 runs its way through at

00:43:23.920 least the last thousand

00:43:24.860 years or so of Western

00:43:25.920 civilization and the

00:43:28.080 people who regarded

00:43:28.980 Catholics as antithetical

00:43:31.280 to science take the

00:43:32.420 Catholics to task for that

00:43:33.980 and describing it as

00:43:35.380 prejudicial and super

00:43:36.960 superstitious and fair

00:43:38.600 enough but there's

00:43:39.560 something else going on

00:43:40.600 there that's more

00:43:41.140 important and that's the

00:43:42.720 observation and this is

00:43:43.980 at a deep level again the

00:43:45.480 observation that

00:43:46.520 rationality has one big

00:43:49.300 problem so it's it can

00:43:51.500 easily become arrogant and

00:43:52.660 believe in its own

00:43:53.660 theories so if you're

00:43:55.820 smart and there are

00:43:56.740 going to be some of you

00:43:57.380 people who are like that

00:43:58.260 too some of you your

00:43:59.520 primary the primary

00:44:01.040 trait that distinguished

00:44:01.880 you from other people

00:44:02.920 over the course of your

00:44:03.940 whole life was that you

00:44:05.280 are more intelligent than

00:44:06.300 most and you may have

00:44:07.540 staked your identity on

00:44:08.840 that and and overvalue

00:44:10.800 intelligence and

00:44:11.660 rationality and the

00:44:12.800 problem with that is that

00:44:13.680 you you make a theory of

00:44:15.080 the world and then you

00:44:15.960 tend to assume that it's

00:44:17.120 100% correct that's the

00:44:19.320 tendency to fall in love

00:44:20.280 with your own theories and

00:44:21.440 that's what a totalitarian

00:44:22.620 does the totalitarian says

00:44:24.580 here's the damn theory and

00:44:26.860 it's exactly right and

00:44:27.940 you're going to act it out

00:44:28.720 exactly and if you don't

00:44:30.720 well we've got some

00:44:32.780 special treats in mind for

00:44:34.000 you and one of the most

00:44:35.760 terrible things that that I

00:44:37.080 encountered while reading

00:44:37.980 about totalitarianism and

00:44:39.700 this was even more true of

00:44:40.820 the Soviet Union under

00:44:41.880 Stalin was that the true

00:44:44.780 believers and and there were

00:44:46.380 many of them were in a

00:44:49.460 terrible position because

00:44:50.620 according to their own

00:44:51.840 doctrine they're already

00:44:53.360 involved in the process

00:44:54.380 that was going to bring

00:44:55.100 utopia to mankind the

00:44:56.900 problems had already been

00:44:57.760 solved but many of them

00:44:58.760 were still suffering terribly

00:45:00.200 as individuals but if

00:45:01.880 you're a totalitarian

00:45:02.880 believer in utopia your own

00:45:04.800 suffering becomes heretical

00:45:06.180 right because your suffering

00:45:08.320 is an indication that the

00:45:09.480 damn theory isn't correct and

00:45:11.360 so then you're in a terrible

00:45:12.300 position because you either

00:45:13.760 admit that the theory isn't

00:45:14.920 correct and fall apart

00:45:16.400 because of that and maybe

00:45:17.600 face terrible punishment as

00:45:19.280 well or you have to separate

00:45:22.240 yourself from your own

00:45:23.400 suffering and and lie about

00:45:24.920 it fundamentally and of

00:45:25.980 course that's exactly what

00:45:26.900 happened in places like the

00:45:27.940 Soviet Union where everyone

00:45:29.340 lied about everything all of

00:45:31.160 the time to themselves to

00:45:32.800 their family members to their

00:45:34.420 friends the entire system was

00:45:36.740 completely permeated by lies

00:45:39.360 and so you get this terrible

00:45:41.220 place that scars the ruler over

00:45:44.900 which is totalitarian and

00:45:46.540 brutal and murderous and

00:45:47.920 resentful and deceitful and

00:45:50.180 arrogant all at the same time

00:45:52.160 and you that's brought about

00:45:57.080 so the Columbine guys for

00:46:00.060 example when they're justifying

00:46:01.820 their murderousness and their

00:46:04.000 plans to shoot up the schools

00:46:05.660 they keep making reference to

00:46:08.300 the fact that people had

00:46:09.820 slighted them for example you

00:46:12.220 know and insulted them and that

00:46:13.500 they were alienated they weren't

00:46:15.000 bullied exactly the way the

00:46:16.300 press made it out I don't know

00:46:17.600 if they were bullied any more

00:46:18.580 than people usually are in high

00:46:19.800 school but they took their

00:46:21.340 alienation personally and

00:46:24.720 regarded that their isolation

00:46:27.340 from common humanity as

00:46:28.760 indication of the pathology of

00:46:30.420 everything and then they went

00:46:32.120 out to destroy and that's

00:46:34.080 exactly what this sort of thing

00:46:35.340 represents that's the

00:46:36.700 uniformity and you see he's got

00:46:38.340 this kind of vicious grin on his

00:46:41.320 face which is malicious and and

00:46:43.260 pleased all at the same time

00:46:44.820 there's no fear in that it's it's

00:46:46.500 quite quite the opposite and

00:46:49.560 there's another image of you know

00:46:51.040 using what's essentially imagery

00:46:52.540 of hell which everyone

00:46:53.880 understands strangely enough and

00:46:56.180 that associates him with the

00:46:57.420 crescent moon and the crescent moon

00:46:59.100 is well it's a symbol of darkness

00:47:01.160 and the underworld fundamentally so

00:47:03.720 all right so anyway so that's we

00:47:07.480 see the underworld we see that

00:47:09.120 which lies beyond the light and in

00:47:10.960 there we see a fragment of that

00:47:12.300 that's basically hellish and all of

00:47:14.200 that's incorporated into the story

00:47:15.740 and everyone understands that when

00:47:17.300 they see it even without I would

00:47:19.720 say the overt references to

00:47:21.140 Nazism okay so now scar has a plan

00:47:24.520 he's going to kill the king and he's

00:47:26.640 going to do that by putting what the

00:47:29.600 king loves in danger and so scar

00:47:33.080 feigning sympathy has enticed him

00:47:37.300 but down into this ravine and scars

00:47:40.340 minions are going to cause a

00:47:42.380 wildebeest stampede right so a

00:47:44.880 mindless stampede to to to put to

00:47:49.760 put Simba in danger and so that's what

00:47:52.360 happens here the wildebeest start to

00:47:54.960 march into the ravine and everyone is

00:47:58.480 making a scar tells Mufasa that Simba

00:48:02.440 is down in that ravine and entices him

00:48:05.240 down there and so they're all off

00:48:06.960 running to see if they can save Simba

00:48:10.240 and then you see Mufasa running in

00:48:13.960 front of the wildebeest herd trying to

00:48:15.500 try to find his son and trying to stay

00:48:17.580 ahead of them the mad mob that's put

00:48:21.280 his son in danger and so he tries to

00:48:24.240 escape climbing up the butte which is

00:48:26.900 almost a sheer cliff and when he gets to

00:48:28.800 the top his brother is waiting for him

00:48:31.880 there and he asks him to pull him up and

00:48:35.780 scar basically before he kills him

00:48:39.000 indicates that he's betraying him and

00:48:41.240 puts his claws into Mufasa's paws and

00:48:45.140 throws him off the cliff and so that's

00:48:47.480 that and it's a sad part of the story

00:48:49.080 it's a hard part that's very hard on

00:48:51.220 kids because the father has died and you

00:48:54.000 know it's a rare kid who won't cry about

00:48:55.600 that scene in particular where you see

00:48:57.960 Simba very upset and his father dying

00:49:00.720 now this is a hard part of the story to

00:49:03.000 interpret and I don't know if it's

00:49:05.220 because of my lack of ability to

00:49:06.700 interpret or because the story takes a

00:49:08.220 weird twist here but there there is this

00:49:10.760 confusion in the story about whether

00:49:13.280 Simba's an innocent victim who set up

00:49:16.500 for the murder of his father or whether

00:49:18.100 he actually bears some guilt for it you

00:49:20.700 know and he's broken some rules and that

00:49:23.020 and so on so he's not exactly placed in

00:49:26.260 the position of innocence but of course

00:49:28.240 he's also been set up by scar in any

00:49:30.560 case scar tells him that it's his fault

00:49:32.460 pure and pure and that because of that

00:49:34.980 he's going to have to leave he's going to

00:49:36.580 have to be banished beyond the kingdom now

00:49:39.200 you see this motif quite quite frequently in

00:49:46.780 hero stories where the hero has to be

00:49:49.560 raised outside of the kingdom that happens

00:49:52.940 with King Arthur for example and it happens

00:49:56.020 with Harry Potter right because Harry Potter

00:49:57.840 is raised by muggles instead of being

00:49:59.600 inside the magic kingdom so it's a very

00:50:01.940 common theme and partly what it means is

00:50:04.320 that it means two things one is that you

00:50:07.140 do grow up alienated from your culture to

00:50:09.320 some degree there's no way around that

00:50:11.340 because the culture doesn't match you

00:50:13.180 perfectly and it doesn't work for you

00:50:15.460 perfectly and it's old and it's kind of

00:50:17.600 corrupt and it alienates you as it's

00:50:19.900 shaping you and so you're going to develop

00:50:21.860 some separation from it and you see that

00:50:24.040 in intergenerational rhetoric you know

00:50:27.180 where the new generation has the

00:50:28.580 proclivity to blame the previous

00:50:29.920 generation for everything that's wrong

00:50:31.700 with the current system and fair enough

00:50:34.240 you know because you do inherit everything

00:50:36.980 that's wrong of course you also inherit

00:50:38.780 everything that's going well which is a

00:50:40.600 good thing to also notice but the idea is

00:50:44.020 that you can't help but be alienated from

00:50:46.260 let's call it the patriarchy for lack of a

00:50:49.240 better work because it's got a tyrannical

00:50:51.480 element and because it's not matched well

00:50:53.880 to you so but then there's also this

00:50:57.220 other issue which is well maybe you're not

00:51:00.600 being successful by the terms that are by

00:51:03.940 the values that are instantiated in the

00:51:05.700 current system and you might say well

00:51:07.880 that's because the system is set up in an

00:51:09.640 unfair manner and fair enough but it's also

00:51:12.640 possibly because you're just not very good

00:51:14.600 at acting out those values right so part of

00:51:17.300 the reason you get alienated from your

00:51:18.660 culture is because the culture is corrupt

00:51:20.400 but another part of the reason is you're

00:51:22.520 just not doing as well as you could be

00:51:24.320 you're not playing by the even your own

00:51:26.500 rules properly and so you get alienated

00:51:28.980 and you're unsuccessful because of your

00:51:30.840 own inadequacies and so the movie plays

00:51:33.800 both of those it's obviously simba is set

00:51:36.840 up but there is an intimation that he's not

00:51:39.160 entirely blameless as well anyways he's

00:51:42.720 very broken up about this and no wonder

00:51:44.720 it's also partly a story of the emergence

00:51:47.660 of adolescence because you know when you're

00:51:50.280 a child and you're ensconced right inside the

00:51:53.000 familial framework then you sort of exist

00:51:56.020 within that system of rules like you would

00:51:58.200 under the Piagetian scheme but when you

00:52:00.300 become an adolescent then there's much more

00:52:03.180 of a proclivity to break free and to start

00:52:05.280 breaking rules and so that's also akin in some

00:52:08.700 sense to the death of the father and that's a

00:52:12.040 necessary developmental stage anyway scar

00:52:16.180 comes down into the ravine it's all foggy

00:52:18.500 now because that goes along with the sort

00:52:20.140 of murkiness of death and tells simba that

00:52:24.220 it's his fault and that he's going to have

00:52:26.320 to leave he's going to have to leave the

00:52:29.220 kingdom of his father which makes sense now

00:52:31.200 his father's dead so how are you gonna once

00:52:33.800 your father has died how are you going to

00:52:35.580 stay around in his kingdom so to speak so and

00:52:39.480 then scar tries to get these hyenas to go

00:52:42.940 track simba down and kill him so and zazu

00:52:48.180 goes back to tell all the rest of the lions

00:52:50.580 that mufasa is dead and that simba has

00:52:52.840 disappeared and then scar takes over pride

00:52:58.340 rock and so what's happened now is the

00:53:00.600 malevolent element of the king has obtained

00:53:04.220 control over the state right and so this is

00:53:08.080 the king the wise king wasn't paying enough

00:53:11.180 attention that's one way of looking at it

00:53:13.540 and so the malevolent part of the state has

00:53:15.700 now got control this is a very very old idea

00:53:18.420 i've traced it back at least several thousand

00:53:21.760 years in its in its representation in stories

00:53:24.800 you can see it in egyptian mythology for

00:53:26.820 example so the idea is that as the social

00:53:29.520 structure builds in complexity it offers you

00:53:32.260 the protection of a functioning complex system

00:53:34.480 but it also becomes increasingly likely to

00:53:37.580 turn into a tyranny and because it's more and

00:53:39.820 more powerful the fact of its potential for

00:53:41.940 tyranny becomes more and more of a danger and

00:53:44.360 so then the question is well what are the

00:53:47.380 factors that encourages it turning into a

00:53:50.140 tyranny and one factor would be the wise part

00:53:53.540 of it is not paying enough attention to the

00:53:56.060 malevolent part of it and you could say that's

00:53:58.560 true at the state level it's also true at the

00:54:00.860 individual level right you have to watch your

00:54:02.880 own proclivity to upset yourself and other

00:54:05.760 people and and take that into account and pay

00:54:08.640 careful attention to it because otherwise it can

00:54:10.740 gain control especially because you're going to

00:54:13.160 avoid looking at it and one of the characteristics

00:54:17.460 of the wise king who gets overthrown by the tyrant

00:54:20.240 is that he has an evil brother and he won't pay

00:54:22.560 enough attention to him he avoids he doesn't

00:54:25.740 look and so the the evil king gets the upper hand

00:54:28.860 and that's what's happened here and so notice

00:54:30.940 now he takes possession of pride rock not in

00:54:33.760 full daylight right but at night so that ties

00:54:38.200 his rule into the rule of unconscious processes

00:54:41.180 and and malevolence all right so simba runs away

00:54:46.100 from the kingdom out into the desert now why is

00:54:49.120 that well you remember maybe you remember and maybe

00:54:52.060 you don't maybe you don't know it the story of

00:54:54.040 exodus when moses takes the hebrews out of egypt

00:54:56.440 they end up in a desert well why well it's because

00:55:00.500 when you leave a kingdom no matter how tyrannical you

00:55:05.020 still fall into disorder you're out in a place that's

00:55:08.280 desert there's no civilization there you know that's

00:55:10.940 what happened to iraq after the americans went in you

00:55:14.400 know the the americans the neocons were all convinced

00:55:17.180 that the iraqis would welcome them with open arms and

00:55:19.820 there would be this smooth transition to democracy same

00:55:22.540 idea in libya it's like no that's not what happens what

00:55:26.500 happens is the state devolves into a desert chaos and maybe

00:55:31.380 then you can make order but probably not and so simba has

00:55:34.960 left the kingdom and the first thing that happens is he

00:55:37.520 damn near dies in the desert and so you know if you have an

00:55:42.200 old belief system and it's not working very well and you

00:55:44.920 abandon it well good for you because you're out of the old

00:55:48.240 belief system but now you're nowhere one of the things

00:55:51.200 that happens to alcoholics for example and and draw other

00:55:54.580 drug addicts as well so imagine that you're trying to stop

00:56:00.040 drinking all right fine maybe you have to undergo some medical

00:56:04.000 treatment so when you first stop you don't die of seizures

00:56:06.920 because that often happens to people who are addicted to

00:56:09.540 alcohol so and they get valium or something like that from a

00:56:13.060 doctor to see them through the first bits of what would you

00:56:18.200 call it of well of sobering up and so they get through it and

00:56:22.260 then then maybe two weeks later they're not physiologically

00:56:25.240 dependent on alcohol anymore the same thing is true of cocaine

00:56:29.540 but if you take them back and you put them in their environment

00:56:33.320 say they go back out of the treatment center back into the

00:56:36.020 normal world they start drinking or using right away again and

00:56:39.460 the reason for that is that well let's say you've been an

00:56:41.740 alcoholic for 20 years okay first of all that's all you do for

00:56:47.160 entertainment you drink and all your friends are alcoholics

00:56:51.880 right and so if you're going to stop drinking not only do you have

00:56:59.900 to rid yourself of the of the physiological addiction but you have

00:57:09.640 to completely learn a new way of living because what do you know you

00:57:13.620 have to get rid of all your friends because they're all drunks pretty

00:57:16.060 much or if they're not they're at least people who are facilitating your

00:57:19.000 drinking so you have to build a whole new social network you don't know

00:57:22.040 how to amuse yourself because of course the way you've done that is by

00:57:25.280 going to the bar sitting at home drinking and so there's a huge hole in

00:57:28.740 your life you abandon the previous pathological mode of adaptation but

00:57:33.980 that just leaves you with nothing and then you have to rebuild that thing

00:57:37.720 from from from from scratch it's extraordinarily difficult and that's why

00:57:41.840 so many people fail when they're trying to overcome a major addiction so all

00:57:46.720 right so anyways simba's out there in the desert he's left his family and the

00:57:51.660 comforts of home and he's he's discovered by these by pumbaa and um who's a

00:57:58.100 little rat's name timon yes he's a meerkat right which are very cool things um and

00:58:05.900 they discover him and this is sort of his transition into adolescence and he he kind

00:58:10.180 of finds and this is i would say more typical of the male transition into

00:58:13.700 adolescence um because females of course hit puberty so much younger the males who

00:58:18.700 aren't very attractive when they're young like and just starting to undergo

00:58:22.940 puberty they're not very attractive to females they tend to clump together in in

00:58:26.840 gangs and and and manage the transition over what it could be seven years so and

00:58:33.580 that's what happens here is simba joins this little gang of you know these guys are

00:58:37.400 all right but you know they're a little on the primordial side you might say you

00:58:42.600 know one of them is basically just a walking gastrointestinal tract and the

00:58:46.860 other one is he's not so bad but he's like you know a foot high really what good is

00:58:50.760 he and so he he's got some second-rate companions out here past the desert but he

00:58:55.280 enters he's out of childhood now and now he enters the adolescent world and what

00:58:59.320 happens here is that very quickly in the film he goes from being a little cub to a

00:59:03.300 full full adolescence and there's about a five minute transition and so it's the

00:59:07.620 next stage in his development and now he's out there in this paradise which is

00:59:12.000 kind of strange because adolescence really is no no picnic but the idea here is

00:59:16.220 that he really doesn't have any responsibilities right none and that is one

00:59:20.740 thing about adolescence is and even the stage of life that you guys are at is you

00:59:25.600 have lots to do but you're not really responsible for anyone other than yourself

00:59:28.980 and so even though you might be quite burdened with your current

00:59:32.440 responsibilities it's nothing compared to what it would be like when you you

00:59:36.860 know you have responsibility for for children for example or for the people

00:59:40.900 that are working for you or or whatever so anyways out here it's a kind of

00:59:45.880 impulsive place as well and adolescence is like that we've had high school

00:59:51.500 students try to do the future authoring program you know where they have to

00:59:54.680 think three to five years down the road it's like forget that they just can't

00:59:58.960 do it and I've watched them and what happens is you you immediately become

01:00:02.380 aware of just how little high school students know when they're like 15 or

01:00:05.740 16 three to five years forget it they don't have the world knowledge to project

01:00:10.540 themselves out that far in the future not even close and so we've built a high

01:00:14.440 school version that helps them design a better future three to six months down

01:00:18.360 the road and even that's really pushing it but you know adolescents are more

01:00:21.840 impulsive and they live more for the moment and there's some utility in that I

01:00:28.100 mean being impulsive and living for the moment is one of the things that gets

01:00:31.300 you pregnant as a teenager and that is certainly one way that the species has

01:00:35.000 managed to propagate itself and so positive emotion and impulsivity are very

01:00:40.520 tightly linked and so he's out there in this adolescent delusional fantasy that

01:00:47.380 might be one way of thinking about it but more important he's out there where he's in

01:00:51.580 a domain now where the impulses of the moment basically take precedence and so

01:00:56.380 and I think they sing some song about yeah Hakuna Matata right which basically means do

01:01:05.780 whatever you do whatever you want and tomorrow will take care of itself or

01:01:09.180 something like that so it's very impulsive and lacks all responsibility one of the

01:01:14.800 things that I would recommend to you if you want to protect yourself from

01:01:17.980 ideological possession shall we say is that when you hear people speak politically

01:01:23.740 and they don't say anything about your responsibilities you should probably stop

01:01:27.300 listening to them because whenever they're trying to offer you something if it

01:01:31.920 doesn't come along with an equivalent cost there's something being hidden from

01:01:35.320 you and they're appealing to the part of you that's well I would say at best

01:01:39.500 adolescent so all right so anyways he's out there in his little adolescent

01:01:44.480 paradise and uh with his dopey chums and back at at pride rock things are not good

01:01:52.140 right scar who's arrogant and refuses to learn and who will not establish a

01:02:00.340 reasonable relationship with the females all he does is tyrannize over them he ends

01:02:04.440 up ruling over a completely barren landscape and that's really what happens in

01:02:08.720 totalitarian states and we also know quite interestingly is that one of the best

01:02:13.660 predictors of economic development in a state is the degree to which they extend

01:02:17.620 rights to women it's one of the best predictors and I would say well if you're

01:02:22.320 going to tyrannize your own women you're going to tyrannize everything you're going

01:02:25.180 to tyrannize ideas you're going to tyrannize structures like if you have to

01:02:29.200 enslave your own women you're you've adapted a pretty damn pathological view of

01:02:34.920 the world and the probability that that narrow constrained restricted viewpoint is

01:02:39.600 going to pay off for you economically is extraordinarily low so anyways scar

01:02:43.640 it's like what happened in the soviet union you know part of the reason it

01:02:46.740 collapsed by 1989 is that it just could not move any farther it was like this

01:02:52.900 really complicated motor that was worn completely out that no one had ever taken

01:02:57.700 care of and it just ground to a halt it just stopped working because it because it

01:03:03.200 didn't work and so if you're totalitarian and you won't update your system and

01:03:08.860 adjust it then it wears out and grinds to a halt and everything becomes

01:03:13.300 unproductive now it's it's not easy to figure out what makes a society productive

01:03:18.260 because you might say well it's natural resources or something like that first of

01:03:21.940 all natural resources are very often a curse to a country because they produce

01:03:26.680 corruption they call that the Dutch disease there's a reason for that you can

01:03:31.300 look it up but natural resources in and of themselves are by no means sufficient to

01:03:36.620 guarantee the well-being of a country Japan has virtually no natural resources at

01:03:40.700 all and it's really rich and one of the prime natural resources actually seems

01:03:46.020 maybe there's two one is honesty another is trust and if you can set up a society

01:03:51.420 where people are roughly honest which means they do what they say they're going

01:03:54.520 to do and where the default bargaining position on both sides is trust then the

01:04:00.640 probability that that culture will become wealthy is very very high so and a

01:04:05.400 functional legal system is also a natural resource of tremendous tremendous value

01:04:10.560 you know it's partly why people in China for example wealthy people in China are

01:04:15.240 dumping their money into the real estate market in North America like mad because

01:04:18.720 one of the things you do know if you buy real estate in North America is you

01:04:22.300 actually own it it's still going to be yours 20 years in the future 30 years in

01:04:26.820 the future there's no doubt about that and so that fact of ownership is embedded in

01:04:31.560 the functioning legal system and that's what gives those sorts of properties crazy

01:04:35.400 value you know much to the much to the problematic situation for all of you people

01:04:42.480 who are at some point most of you are going to try to buy property in Toronto and

01:04:46.700 that's really going to be entertaining so now look the the other thing about

01:04:50.960 scars he's got the little bird locked up right that's the vision of the king well he

01:04:55.460 doesn't want to know anything he already knows everything so why does he need this

01:04:58.620 stupid bird flying around telling him what's going on the last thing he wants to

01:05:02.520 know is what's going on yeah Stalin I mean God you gave that guy bad news or good

01:05:09.360 news he was going to have you killed it kept the bad news to a minimum and that's a

01:05:14.460 real problem right because if you torture people who bring you bad news then you're

01:05:18.360 never going to learn anything well you don't have to if you already know

01:05:21.400 everything anyways and so that's the situation here

01:05:24.100 well his little minions the hyenas are getting pretty unhappy because they haven't

01:05:30.080 had anything to eat and the reason for that is they've just stripped the landscape

01:05:33.700 bare right I mean and I read at the demise of the Soviet Union that something like

01:05:39.280 10 to 15 percent of the entire landmass of the Soviet Union had been rendered

01:05:43.720 permanently uninhabitable by industrial pollution

01:05:46.560 so you know and then that I don't remember if that included Chernobyl you know where that

01:05:51.680 terrible nuclear accident took place but but there were massive domains of devastation

01:05:57.260 in those countries that you know will take hundreds of years to fix so anyways when

01:06:02.820 scar rules everyone starves that's a good way of thinking about it or everyone dies but

01:06:07.840 that's okay because that's really what he's after anyway so that works out quite

01:06:10.980 nicely now back out here in paradise I mean look at him how pathetic can you get

01:06:15.440 look at the expression on that creature's face you know he's he's self he's sated like someone

01:06:22.000 who's just eating a gallon of ice cream and he's got this pathetic

01:06:25.280 self-satisfied naive

01:06:29.820 clueless unconscious grin on his face which the animators did a very nice job of capturing like

01:06:36.620 that's a complicated expression and you just want to slap him and that's exactly what should happen

01:06:41.740 and that's exactly what does happen so anyways he's out there being unconscious dingbat well

01:06:46.680 his society is degenerating and that's bloody well worth thinking about because that's an archetypal

01:06:51.700 trope right it's like things are sinking around you the question is what are you doing about it

01:06:56.760 you know are you just staying in kind of a blithe unconsciousness because you can get your next meal

01:07:02.180 are you going to wake up and do something about it well that's the call of the self so now we go back

01:07:06.920 to to Rafiki here and he knows what's going on in the kingdom he's a symbol of the self and he also

01:07:13.280 has some inkling that Simba is still alive so

01:07:16.500 so the son of the king is still alive despite the fact that the the the uh the land has become ruled

01:07:23.740 by a tyrant and the son is absent he's still around somehow and so in a union from the union

01:07:29.660 perspective there isn't much distinction between the self and the and the and the child the self

01:07:37.300 is the sum total of all possibility and the child is possibility itself and so so let's say you've

01:07:44.080 become an adolescent you're all cynical right and everything's falling apart around you which is the

01:07:49.900 typical state of human beings right because adolescents are cynical generally speaking and

01:07:54.660 everything's falling around falling apart around them generally speaking and so what do you have

01:07:59.780 to do in order to to do something about that well one is you have to be drawn by the call of wisdom

01:08:06.120 and the other part is that you have to rediscover that part of yourself that's a childlike part

01:08:10.840 that's associated with the son and associated with that early you know the early exposure of Simba

01:08:16.680 to the son you have to find that again and then trust that some childlike exploration and a bit of

01:08:22.960 manifestation of faith might get you to the next place and so that's what's happening here with

01:08:27.760 the little you know the baboon in the tree and the and the drawing so anyways he knows that Simba's

01:08:33.280 alive now and so he goes off to find him and in meanwhile Simba and his dopey companions are out

01:08:39.320 hunting for bugs you know because he's a lion you know he shouldn't be eating bugs for crying out loud

01:08:44.580 but they're easy and so you see this scene where Pumbaa goes after this bug and then another lion shows up

01:08:50.700 and chases him so she's going to kill him and eat him and uh ha see that's an interesting thing

01:08:58.080 because one of the things that happens I suppose you could think about this one of the things that

01:09:03.700 happens in late adolescence is that the formation of male gangs is often broken up by the proclivity

01:09:10.080 of one or more members of that gang to get involved in an individual romantic relationship

01:09:15.700 and so the idea that the female lion is the carnivore the female is the carnivore that will

01:09:23.320 devour the group is exactly right and so what a girl will do often if she's um in a relationship with

01:09:31.440 you know somebody like a young man or an older adolescent is she'll try to separate him from

01:09:36.000 his dopey friends and like no wonder you know why wouldn't she do that because he does have dopey

01:09:40.980 friends and it'd be better for him if he could get beyond them and so anyways they're pretty freaked

01:09:46.000 out about this and so then Simba goes out and has a fight with this lion to protect his dopey chums

01:09:52.340 and I'm sure you don't need any explanation about what that means and uh they have this huge fight and

01:09:58.540 Nella who it turns out to be pins him and so that goes back to the beginning of the story where when he

01:10:05.080 first encountered her she pinned him all the time she's an anima figure right and now what she does

01:10:11.800 immediately is shame him so she he's an anima figure in part she's an anima figure in part because she

01:10:17.200 actually does shame him right so she's the gateway to higher consciousness she makes himself conscious

01:10:23.220 and rightly so but he's also a she's also a psychological figure because imagine that when a

01:10:29.320 young man is establishing a relationship with a young woman and he's he's uh enamored of her he's

01:10:34.580 falling in love he projects an ideal onto her and that ideal is going to be partially fulfilled by

01:10:39.800 the relationship the degree to which is unspecified and sometimes it'll collapse completely but he

01:10:44.840 projects an ideal onto her because otherwise he wouldn't be attracted to her and then the ideal

01:10:49.240 judges him and so that makes him feel all self-conscious and and useless which is useful because he is

01:10:56.420 useless and should feel that way and so it's part of the impetus to growing up so and of course

01:11:02.540 one of the you need necessity in order to mature you because to mature is to take on responsibility

01:11:09.760 and you're not going to feel that impetus unless

01:11:12.560 adopting the responsibility has some sort of payoff and women tend to mate across and up dominance

01:11:20.480 hierarchy so they tend to actually like men who are useful and so if they encounter a man who isn't useful

01:11:25.300 at all they're gonna that's exactly what's going to happen they're gonna not be happy about that in

01:11:32.280 the least and so and no wonder and i think the reason for that it's an economic and a biological

01:11:37.780 reason the reason is is that women are in the position of having to take care of infants primarily

01:11:43.320 and an infant is a very heavy load and so even a woman who's extraordinarily competent

01:11:49.080 is going to find herself substantially limited in her possibilities if she has an infant and so then

01:11:55.300 she's looking around for someone who'll pick up part of the load it's perfectly reasonable and you're

01:11:59.800 not going to pick up part of the load if you're completely useless and so it's in the woman's best

01:12:04.560 interest not to have two children roughly speaking so anyway she pins him and then he's all resentful

01:12:12.000 about it immediately because she's calling him on his stupid friends and the fact that he's out there

01:12:16.140 gallivanting impulsively in paradise when there's real problems to be solved and so look at him he's

01:12:21.160 all resentful and useless and and you know feeling put upon and picked upon and you just you got to

01:12:27.100 slap him again fundamentally and she's just completely stunned by that it's like and tells him you know

01:12:32.320 where's the simba i used to know right now he's a little doubtful about the whole situation there

01:12:38.920 the animators do a very nice job of this part of the movie because one of the things you see is that

01:12:44.120 his eyebrows are always pointing up in the middle whereas his father's eyebrows were pointing down

01:12:48.700 in the middle and so that's the difference between this which is sort of like things are happening to

01:12:52.920 me and this which is more like i'm imposing my will on things and that's an immature face and and the

01:12:59.240 animators capture that brilliantly so here's where she shames him again she tells him how much she liked

01:13:05.480 him when he was little and and you know a potential king and how hurt she is that he's this useless

01:13:10.840 you know wide-eyed naive impulsive pleasure-seeking adolescent and uh she tells him that she missed

01:13:20.800 him and god only knows why because look at him again it's like completely appalling appalling creature

01:13:28.260 and uh this is when pumba and timon sing that song about the fact that you know their friends doomed

01:13:35.120 because you know this girl's got him and uh and then they switch into another archetypal scene and so

01:13:41.380 they're falling in love here and so that paradisal imagery is really highlighted in the movie and so

01:13:47.520 they go off and have this like romp self-reflective romp through this new paradise and uh they wrestle

01:13:55.560 around and and uh play and then he pins her more or less and she licks him that's that's not

01:14:05.120 so good and this is one of the most brilliant shots i think that the animators managed because

01:14:12.440 she's obviously pushing this a little bit farther than he knows what to do with and so they're

01:14:18.840 wrestling and he she licks him and then she lays down and makes this face which is every single class

01:14:25.100 i've ever showed this to all laugh when they see that image and that's a good example so freud said

01:14:31.260 that jokes were a good route into the unconscious so the question is and this is an archetypal facial

01:14:37.620 expression and everyone knows exactly what it means there's something sexually seductive about it

01:14:42.000 and something very sexually seductive about it despite the fact that it's a lioness and uh the

01:14:47.660 animators do an extraordinarily good job of capturing that and so that has a huge effect on him well these

01:14:53.020 guys know that like the game's up man it's like they know they're dead uh whatever attractions they

01:15:00.840 can offer are paling in comparison to this so so anyways things don't really progress past that but

01:15:08.680 you know he gets a hint of her longing for him what's waiting for him if he grows up and the fact

01:15:14.480 that she's completely disappointed in him because he's so completely useless and so now he's lounging

01:15:19.260 about you know like some basement dweller with cheeto dust all over his chest and and trying to

01:15:26.700 justify his absolutely useless life and you know saying that he doesn't have any responsibility to

01:15:32.800 the devastated kingdom and he's out there where hakuna matata you know i can just do whatever i

01:15:37.660 want and and follow my impulsive pleasures and she thinks he's pretty pathetic and the reason for that

01:15:42.700 is is because he is actually pretty pathetic and she she tells him that you know she's extraordinarily

01:15:48.800 disappointed he gets all pouty about it i mean even here you see when he when he's got kind of an

01:15:54.460 aggressive look on his face there's still nothing about it that's commanding it's petulant right it's

01:16:00.420 like well now i'm irritated but he's got no force and and still completely appalling in this in this

01:16:07.860 particular situation so she judges him very harshly and leaves and that makes him think yeah he makes

01:16:14.020 it's all self-conscious because this female that he admires wants to have nothing to do with him

01:16:19.520 and so he's first of all then he thinks well maybe i'll just hate all women which is you know

01:16:24.160 pretty pathetic conclusion and but a very common one and the next is well maybe there's actually

01:16:29.560 something wrong with him right which is a very painful bit of self-reflection so he he had he

01:16:36.500 notes that there's something wrong with him and then he calls out to his father and says look you said

01:16:40.420 you're always going to be here for me and you're not and so what's happening is that he's he's become

01:16:45.740 aware of the insufficiency of his current adolescent value structure and he wants something beyond it

01:16:50.900 which would be associated with identification with the father but he can't he can't find the father the

01:16:56.120 father's dead it's like when pinocchio goes down to the bottom of the ocean to bring geppetto up from

01:17:00.840 the depths right that's the situation that that simba finds himself in right now the father's gone

01:17:06.920 and has to be brought up from the depths so this is where the movie takes the the the archetypal

01:17:13.420 pathway of an issue initiation ceremony so he says he wants to change now one of the things carl

01:17:20.080 rogers one of the clinicians that we'll talk about pointed out was that if if someone was going to come

01:17:24.460 to psychotherapy there's some things that had to happen before they went into psychotherapy and one

01:17:29.300 thing that had to happen was that they had to admit that there was something wrong and they had to want

01:17:33.920 to change you had to have that before you went into the psychotherapeutic situation and what happens

01:17:39.220 here is simba is actually he's dropped his arrogance and he's looking upward kind of like geppetto wishing

01:17:46.400 on the star in pinocchio he's looking upwards he looking towards something higher and he wants to

01:17:52.440 transform himself so he's asked the question how can i change for the better and he doesn't get an answer

01:17:59.520 and then refiki shows up so what does that mean it means that as soon as you know you're wrong about

01:18:06.880 something as soon as you admit that you're wrong about something and you open the door to potential

01:18:12.740 change that part of you will respond so and you know this because think about this you're thinking

01:18:20.320 so you ask yourself a question because that's what you do when you're thinking and then you generate

01:18:25.020 some answers it's like it's very strange the thinking will actually work you can actually come

01:18:29.700 up with answers if you think about something and so this this issue is okay i thought i was real good

01:18:35.660 in my little impulsive paradise but then it turns out that i'm just a halfwit and i noticed that and i

01:18:41.560 want to do something about so the question is now the question is has now been posed and what jung would

01:18:47.600 say is the deeper part of yourself the part that still contains your undeveloped potential will

01:18:53.300 respond to that posed question and change the way that you look at things and change the way that

01:18:58.920 you act it'll start it'll start changing things so that you can tap those parts of yourself that are

01:19:04.740 not yet developed and you certainly do that in psychotherapy but you can do that jung said that

01:19:09.380 psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort and by that he meant was that if you really

01:19:14.560 wanted things to be better if you wanted to get your act together and you admitted that you were

01:19:19.200 insufficient in your current state and you meditated on the issue and tried to figure out what you

01:19:25.200 should do next to make to put yourself together that you would be able to find out that there's

01:19:30.080 something in you that guides the process of development that's the self it's a higher it's the higher

01:19:35.460 self in some sense it's the thing that remains constant across transformations you know because

01:19:41.580 you're somewhere then you fall apart then you get somewhere else but there's something outside of

01:19:45.400 that that's guiding that process and that's that's also the self that's what you could be and you can

01:19:51.660 communicate in some sense with what you could be and that's a very strange thing it's about human

01:19:56.640 beings anyways Rafiki shows up and Simba is sitting by the water self-reflecting there's a little pebble

01:20:03.100 that drops into the pool to attract his attention and up pops the self and Rafiki's a trickster he tells

01:20:09.280 him weird jokes and he hits him with a stick a bunch of times thank god because someone really needs to

01:20:13.520 and he he he makes some stupid jokes about bananas and kind of entices Simba into following him

01:20:21.220 right he he lets him know that he has a secret and he entices Simba into following him and so

01:20:26.040 Simba's all of a sudden become interested in something so if you ask yourself what the next

01:20:31.020 developmental stage is and you really want to know then all of a sudden you're going to become

01:20:34.300 interested in things that might move you to the next stage and that'll happen more or less

01:20:39.440 unconsciously so anyways Rafiki entices him and then runs away and Simba follows him and

01:20:46.760 well that's where he reveals himself as a sage and then he tells Simba to follow him and he goes

01:20:53.660 underground and this is the initiation scene right which we talked about at the beginning of the class

01:20:59.060 this is the descent into the underworld and it's a it's a prerequisite to radical personality

01:21:06.240 transformation so anyways he goes through this horrifying underground tunnel system where

01:21:12.360 everything's all tangled up which is you know if you ever fall into chaos that everything down there

01:21:17.780 in chaos is tangled up it's a tangled mess and he's quite and there's horrifying music going on in the

01:21:24.120 background and he goes deeper and deeper until Rafiki says he finds a pool in the middle of the chaos

01:21:29.820 a deep pool and that's another symbol of the self it's it's the deep unconscious there's something

01:21:35.240 down there that's alive that can be drawn up to the surface and so Rafiki shows him the pool and Simba

01:21:42.180 who's quite terrified at this point looks in it and the first thing he sees is he only sees himself

01:21:48.320 he only sees his own reflection and Rafiki says look deeper now you see what the animators do here it's

01:21:54.760 very cool so there's Simba and there's his reflection but you see that is already half his father and you

01:22:00.840 look at the difference in the eyebrows and the look so there's a there's a tightness of jaw and a firmness

01:22:08.040 of face that's starting to manifest itself there and that means that he's starting to see the man he could

01:22:13.580 be beyond the adolescent that's a good way of thinking about it and then all of a sudden well there you know

01:22:18.840 that's a whole different face right that's a seriously different face that everything's going in and that

01:22:26.600 it's like get out of my way because things are going to happen around me very judgmental as well so it's not

01:22:32.460 it's not naive by any stretch of the imagination but you know we know his father's a good guy and so there's

01:22:38.700 something archetypal about this and so he sees the man he could be reflected back to him and then that switches

01:22:44.920 that actually becomes a cosmic event and we switch up to the sky instead and so Mufasa manifests himself

01:22:52.200 basically as a solar deity

01:22:53.800 and he tells Simba that he's forgotten who he is which is the son of a king

01:23:01.960 and that he should remember that and start acting like it and that's an archetypal idea so if you're just

01:23:10.920 a useless adolescent then you've forgotten who you are and the consequence of that is that

01:23:15.140 the state is going to fall around fall apart around you and you're not going to do anything to fix it

01:23:20.700 and you're not going to be good for anything and no one's going to be able to rely on you and you're

01:23:24.300 going to be all whiny and resentful and then after that it even gets worse and so that's basically what

01:23:30.140 Mufasa tells him and so Simba is like blown away by this vision right because he sees what he could be

01:23:37.020 and also what he's not which is pretty damn horrifying so anyways the storm so to speak clears

01:23:45.220 and Rafiki comes up and and Simba's a lot more thoughtful and not quite as whiny and resentful anymore

01:23:51.140 and Rafiki leaves and so Simba now knows what he's supposed to do he's supposed to stop being useless

01:23:58.900 and take on the moral requirements of setting the kingdom straight

01:24:03.880 and so he runs back across the desert there's all sorts of impressive music happening and then he comes

01:24:10.780 back to his kingdom and it's not looking so good and that's the consequence of his his abandonment of

01:24:17.060 it that's a big part of it so now it's dead but also his abandonment of it to nothing but malevolence

01:24:22.900 and chaos and so he's pretty taken aback at what's happened and that he exaggerates his guilt or it

01:24:30.840 should anyways and Nella shows up and and they decide they're going to do something about this so

01:24:38.100 in the meantime Simba's mother is complaining about the fact that there's no food in the kingdom anymore

01:24:45.740 and that they've gone as far as they can and Scar doesn't want to hear this so he he attacks her

01:24:51.000 and Simba decides to uh to go to war and so this is where he wakes up and he's willing to encounter

01:24:58.780 the shadow at this point and so he confronts Scar and Scar is very concerned about this because

01:25:05.180 actually Simba's looking pretty impressive now and he thought he was dead besides and so he tries

01:25:11.580 to use treachery and whininess and and subordination to excuse himself but he's planning to overthrow

01:25:18.940 Simba nonetheless to resist him so he tells Scar to leave he's going to banish him to the nether regions

01:25:27.840 outside of the kingdom like Scar did to him and Scar basically refuses and then a storm gathers right

01:25:36.220 and lights the dead wood around the rock on fire so we have another kind of descent into hell scene

01:25:43.920 here uh very common in Disney movies this this this notion of the hero fighting the evil force

01:25:50.020 on the edge of something that's burning it's quite a common motif you see it in Sleeping Beauty for

01:25:54.040 example so they have a big war and Scar ends up putting Simba in the same position that Mufasa was in

01:26:00.980 and then he whispers to him that he killed his father so Simba's been thinking all along that it was

01:26:06.160 only his fault and it is sort of his fault but he didn't know that there was a more archetypal

01:26:10.980 theme playing out in the background which is that societies are always endangered by malevolence

01:26:17.500 always and that's independent to some degree of Simba's decisions and his and his lack thereof

01:26:22.600 anyway Scar tells him because he thinks he's won and that energizes Simba to have this sort of final

01:26:30.200 battle he leaps out from the pit and they have a big fight and he pins him basically and the female

01:26:38.480 lioness has come to his aid and Simba tells him that again that he has to leave and so they have

01:26:45.180 a big fight that's a particularly good bit of animation so there's real demonic aspect to Scar

01:26:50.200 there um sort of king of hell imagery and but he loses and then ha he blames his minions he blames

01:26:59.420 the hyenas for everything terrible that's happening forgetting that they can hear him and then he falls

01:27:03.660 off the cliff and the hyenas go in and finish him off so it's a pretty brutal ending for poor old Scar

01:27:10.520 um eaten by his own minions and then Scar's dead and Simba has won and so the rains come immediately

01:27:18.440 and so what does that mean well it means that when proper order is restored in a kingdom then

01:27:22.680 everything starts to flourish again and so the rains come and then

01:27:27.280 while it's raining Simba climbs up to the top of the rock and now he's completely mature right

01:27:35.540 the the facial the pathetic facial expression disappears entirely and he straightens himself

01:27:39.440 up because now he's full of serotonin after having defeated good old Scar and all the lionesses are

01:27:45.520 roaring and he climbs up pride rock and they roar at him which is good they're tough and he's tough

01:27:52.080 and they show in their teeth it's it's not it's not a society of naive and harmless creatures it's

01:27:59.920 it's something that's got some bite and the rains come and then the next thing you see is the

01:28:05.820 restoration of the kingdom and so basically that what that means is that if the individual is willing

01:28:11.520 to confront their own shadow and then to take on the malevolent forces that continually undermine

01:28:16.160 society then harmony can be restored and everyone can do well and so then we have a return to the

01:28:23.060 beginning right and so Simba and Nella are now a couple along with Pumbaa and Timon and they have

01:28:32.400 a baby and Rafiki shows up and does the same thing you know he's going to present the baby to the sun

01:28:44.260 and have all the animals bow again and and that's the end of the movie so that's all packed into an

01:28:51.140 archetypal tale and and so one of the things that Jung would point out is that you all understood this

01:28:58.180 right while you were watching it because otherwise at some level all these things made sense they all

01:29:05.320 cohered and the narrative appeared to be an appropriate narrative even when you're a little kid

01:29:09.240 it because it strikes a chord inside you and well that chord the thing that it strikes inside you

01:29:16.020 that's the archetype because if there wasn't something inside of you so to speak that this

01:29:21.240 could communicate with then it would fall on deaf ears and it speaks to the part of you that's most

01:29:26.920 particularly human and it's a story of the development of the sovereign individual that's that's the right

01:29:33.740 way to think about it's a hero archetype that's another way of thinking about it and people are going to get

01:29:39.000 that story one way or another and now and then a piece of public art comes along like this that

01:29:44.720 does a good job of encapsulating it it captures everyone's imagination and so that's why you've all

01:29:50.060 seen it and why I presume you all enjoyed it when you were kids and maybe still enjoy it now so

01:29:56.380 well that was actually faster than I thought it would be today so this is what I'm going to do well

01:30:03.760 we've got 20 minutes so why don't you think for a minute or two and I'll take some questions which

01:30:08.820 I don't often do but and they can be any questions about anything we've covered in class so take a minute and

01:30:16.540 it's a question it's like a question about archetypes it's like um I have this feeling uh sometimes you watch a movie and you feel like you know the character but it's not exactly that character like uh what comes to mind as uh you know Gandalf from the universe like it feels like you know that sort of wise old man uh you know

01:30:44.920 archetype. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's not much difference between Gandalf and who's the wizard

01:30:53.000 in Harry Potter? Dumbledore. They could be the same guy. It's right. Right. And so while that

01:30:59.100 that is precisely the indication of the existence of an archetype, it's like and a movie. One time

01:31:06.020 a student asked me, well, if if there are these archetypes, why don't we just tell the archetype

01:31:09.620 over and over? Why do we need fiction, for example, which is like a bridge? If there's

01:31:13.920 individuals here and the archetype is up here, you know, at a high level of abstraction,

01:31:17.980 fiction sort of fills the gap between them. And so what you want is a story that's archetypal

01:31:23.020 so that you understand its basic structure. But you want enough variation and specificity

01:31:27.620 so that it's new and interesting and also applicable to you. So you have to humanize the

01:31:32.280 archetype to some degree. Otherwise, it's so abstract you can't you can't relate to it. And

01:31:37.040 good stories really do that. They bridge the gap. And some of them are more personal and

01:31:42.920 less archetypal. But if they're completely non archetypal, there's nothing about them

01:31:46.720 that captures you. It doesn't have any force. And then if it's too archetypal, well, it gets

01:31:51.060 to be too abstract and you can't relate to it. So good fiction writers and good purveyors

01:31:56.500 of of dramatic entertainment. We think about it as entertainment are really good at occupying

01:32:01.800 that middle position. So yeah. And they reveal the archetype through the individual. That's

01:32:07.420 one way of thinking about it. And and that keeps it fresh. And you know, one of the things

01:32:12.580 that you pointed out, too, was that you're you're going to be manifesting archetypal

01:32:18.400 patterns of behavior in your life, whether you know it or not. We even when you do something

01:32:22.620 like fall in love, because that's going to be a very particular experience for you. But

01:32:27.120 it's also a very common experience at the same time. Right. And and romance is older than

01:32:33.200 people. That's one way of looking about looking at it. I mean, because sex is older than human

01:32:39.740 beings. And so you're in the grip of something that's really ancient. But at the same time,

01:32:44.720 it's really personal. And so a good novelist or a writer of fiction is able to capture both

01:32:50.740 the personal element of that to show show the transpersonal within the personal. And so and

01:32:56.720 in some sense, your destiny, proper destiny from a union perspective is to consciously express

01:33:02.540 an archetype. And so it would be the archetype. There's a bunch of them, but one of them would

01:33:06.960 be the archetype of the hero. And you're supposed to manifest that in the conditions of your own

01:33:10.500 life. So that makes the archetype real in the conditions of your own life. And Jung would also

01:33:16.060 say that when you're doing that, your experience will manifest itself as meaningful. And so it's

01:33:21.880 because in some sense, you're acting in accordance with your deepest instincts, technically

01:33:25.660 speaking, right, you're, you're acting out what it means to be human in the world. And you're

01:33:30.880 going to find that meaningful. So yes.

01:33:36.340 I have a question about the shadow. So let's look, say, the shadow is wrong when you're like,

01:33:46.340 who you truly are, is opposite to like, your actions or behavior. So if for example, I find

01:33:53.840 someone who helps, but like, inside of me, like, I just have like, because it's my moral duty,

01:34:01.340 but like, it's an act of love, versus someone like, I don't know, like, who's like, helping,

01:34:07.340 but he's like, appreciating to help. So like, if I'm the person who's helping, but with, with,

01:34:14.340 you know, like, love and stuff, so is my shadow, the opposite of my actions, or is it opposite of my intentions?

01:34:23.340 Okay, so the question is about the relationship between the shadow and the, okay, so

01:34:29.640 the first thing you have to understand with regards to trying to come to terms with the

01:34:36.800 conception of the shadow is to understand the idea of persona. And persona is the you that you present

01:34:42.940 when you want people to accept and like you, often like, let's say that you go to a party and

01:34:53.360 you're trying to impress the people that are there, and you're trying to get them to like you.

01:35:00.240 And so you, maybe you get jabbed at a little bit, and you laugh, and you know, you're, you go along

01:35:06.100 with everyone, so that they like you. And then you go home, and you're bitterly resentful about the way

01:35:11.120 that you were put down at this party. And that's going to make all sorts of aggressive. I wish I

01:35:16.020 could have said, it's going to make all sorts of aggressive and vengeful thoughts sort of flash

01:35:21.300 through your imagination. Well, the first part of the problem is that you were too much persona,

01:35:27.520 right? You sacrificed yourself in some sense at the party so that people would like you.

01:35:32.000 And in the second part, you're refusing to admit to the existence of those elements of you that would

01:35:38.420 have actually protected you from doing that. So let's say you go home, and you're all bitter and

01:35:42.900 resentful, and you have fantasies of revenge. I mean, that reveals to you the shadow part of you

01:35:48.940 that's aggressive. And the thing is, you actually need that, because if you would have integrated that

01:35:53.720 more successfully into your personality, when you went to the party, you wouldn't have had let you

01:35:58.560 wouldn't have had to let people put you down to get them to like you. You know, instead of having a

01:36:03.240 face like this, which says, I'll take anything that's coming my way, you know, you have a face

01:36:09.080 and a stance that's more determined and assertive. And if you manifest that properly, people aren't

01:36:14.360 going to mess with you to begin with. But you know, you may have already adopted a morality that

01:36:19.160 says, well, I have to be likable, and I shouldn't do anything that causes any conflict. And I shouldn't

01:36:23.800 ever, you know, hurt anybody's feelings. And so you're just to present yourself as a punching bag.

01:36:29.140 And you think that that makes you a good person, but it doesn't. And there's no integration of the

01:36:34.580 shadow in that situation. So you see that at the end of the movie, you know, when I mentioned this,

01:36:39.880 when Simba climbs up the rock to take control of it, all the female lionesses bear their teeth, and he

01:36:44.760 roars. It's like that aggressiveness is integrated into him. And so resentment is a really good emotion

01:36:53.080 for making contact with the shadow side, because if you're resentful about something, it basically

01:36:58.900 reveals two things. It either means that you're immature, and you should stop whining and get on with

01:37:04.640 things. You know, someone's asked, this often happens with adolescents who are asked, say, by their

01:37:08.840 mother to clean up the room. They get all resentful about it. It's like, shut up and clean up your room.

01:37:13.680 You know, it's not that much to ask. Or, so that can be a gateway into the observation of your own

01:37:20.480 immaturity. Or, it's possible that you're resentful because people really have been poking at you too much

01:37:26.880 and taking cheap shots at you and oppressing you. But what that means is that you've got some things

01:37:33.620 to say that you haven't been willing to say or don't know how to say. Right? You can't stand up

01:37:39.400 for yourself properly. And in order to do that, you have to grow some teeth and be willing to use

01:37:44.840 them. And again, that's something that might violate your morality, because you might say, well,

01:37:49.300 I shouldn't be able to bite people. And the thing is, yes, you should be able to bite people hard.

01:37:54.940 And if you're able to bite them, then generally you don't have to.

01:37:59.540 But they need to know that you can, because otherwise, especially people who are badly

01:38:03.800 socialized, they'll just keep encroaching on you and encroaching on you and encroaching on you

01:38:07.940 and encroaching on you until you put up a wall. Like someone who's really well put together won't do

01:38:14.600 that, you know, because they're sophisticated. But if you run into people who only have boundaries

01:38:21.340 because other people impose them on them and you won't do it, you're going to be the bullied one

01:38:26.360 in the office. For example, you're not going to get a raise. People aren't going to credit you with

01:38:31.720 your own work. Other people are going to take credit for it. You know, and you're going to go home

01:38:36.040 angry because you're doing your best and you're trying to get along with everyone and nothing ever

01:38:40.080 goes your way. Well, it's because you're a pushover. And you think that's good because you confuse

01:38:46.500 harmlessness with morality. It's not right. Just because you can't do any damage doesn't mean

01:38:54.060 you're moral. It just means you don't have the capability for mayhem. And that makes you a pushover.

01:39:00.820 I mean, the union stuff is very, very dark. You know, it's very dark because his notion of what

01:39:07.320 constitutes a moral human being is much different from the typical view. He really thinks you get

01:39:13.220 that horrible side of yourself integrated. So it's up there where you can use it because otherwise

01:39:18.040 you're, you're dangerous. You can't say no to people and you'll go along with the crowd. And then if

01:39:26.060 the crowd does something particularly pathological, which it's liable to do, you won't be

01:39:30.800 able to resist it. You won't have the strength of character. And so then you'll fall prey to

01:39:35.760 to crowd pathology. And it'll be because you're too agreeable with a, you know, with a shadow

01:39:42.300 resentful side that the crowd and its murderous intent is going to act out. So the question is

01:39:48.320 the relationship between archetype archetypes and the idea of memes. Well, oh yeah, that's a complicated

01:39:54.400 one. So Richard Dawkins was the guy who originated the idea of meme. And his notion was that

01:40:00.800 you could produce an idea or a set of ideas that had the capacity to propagate across minds

01:40:07.580 for whatever reason, it was catchy. Let's say like a, like a song that gets stuck in your

01:40:12.200 head, you know, and that those, he called those memes, which was sort of a play on the idea

01:40:19.740 of genes. So there are these stable sets of ideas that can be transferred across minds.

01:40:26.000 Well, I've often thought when I was reading Dawkins, that if he would have kept thinking,

01:40:30.940 he would have turned into Carl Jung because an arc.

01:40:33.780 I hope you enjoy this episode of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast. I'm Michaela Peterson,

01:40:38.680 Jordan's daughter. This is Carl Jung part two. Part one was released last week. If you haven't

01:40:44.500 left a review on the podcast or a rating, we love seeing those and dad does check them. More news

01:40:49.600 from him coming in the next few weeks, I hope. I'm just here to read ads, intros, keep the podcast

01:40:54.720 running and keep you folks as updated as I can. Also to occasionally shamelessly advertise my own

01:41:00.600 podcast, the Michaela Peterson podcast. For all the folks suffering from mood or autoimmune disorders

01:41:05.560 out there, I frequently have doctors on that have incredibly valuable information for healing with

01:41:10.880 diet and lifestyle. So I hope it helps people. Thank you very much to our podcast sponsor Helix for

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01:45:34.580 So we'll continue with our Jungian analysis of the Lion King today. We ended at the point where,

01:45:42.700 remember, Mufasa had taken Simba up to the top of Pride Rock and

01:45:48.280 described to him the fact that his kingdom essentially constituted everything that the light

01:45:55.400 touched. And you can think about that as the domain of the, roughly speaking, of the great father

01:46:01.340 with the domain of the great mother on the outside of that, that being symbolically equivalent to

01:46:06.340 the underworld or to death or to nature. All of those things seem to be approximately equally true.

01:46:12.700 And he forbade Simba from going to investigate what was beyond the confines of the light.

01:46:19.360 And in some sense, that's exactly what a tradition does for you. Because the tradition is precisely

01:46:25.220 what defines the domain of the light. And to be moral from the perspective of the tradition,

01:46:30.920 it's akin to playing a Piagetian game, but only adhering to the rules. You know how Piaget described

01:46:36.940 the fact that when kids first master a game, they learn how to act it out. And then they learn what

01:46:42.360 the rules are. And then they regard the rules in some sense as sacred. You can't go outside the

01:46:47.520 rules. And then later in moral development, if they get to that stage, then they start to recognize

01:46:52.320 themselves also as formulators of the rule or formulators of the game. And culture tells you,

01:46:58.700 don't go beyond the rules. That's the definition of morality within the box of culture. And you don't

01:47:03.160 go outside of that. And so that's why Mufasa plays that particular role. And it's wise, because if you

01:47:10.160 go outside the domain of what you already understand, then it's dangerous out there. Clearly, it's

01:47:14.880 dangerous out there. But the downside of that particular message, and this is perhaps, this is

01:47:21.200 the mythological reason why Mufasa isn't as aware as he could be of Scar. You know, his knowledge is

01:47:26.900 bounded. And he's not aware enough of what lies outside of that in this realm, let's say, of death

01:47:33.220 and destruction. And so Scar is able to overcome his brother. You see this sort of thing happening to

01:47:43.740 people very frequently, for example, who develop post-traumatic stress disorder. And one of the

01:47:48.580 things that's not as well known about post-traumatic stress disorder as might be known is, A, it happens

01:47:54.920 to you if you encounter an experience that sort of blows out the axioms of your knowledge system.

01:47:59.600 That's one way of looking at it. It's so unexpected that you can't account for it within the confines

01:48:06.000 of the system that you're using to interpret the world. And that often happens to people when they

01:48:10.920 encounter something that's truly malevolent. And that can be within them, or it can be in the form of

01:48:16.760 someone else who is genuinely out to hurt them. They're often people who develop PTSD are often,

01:48:22.220 but not always, somewhat naive. And they're not aware of the full catastrophe of the world. That

01:48:30.180 might be one way of looking at it. And then they encounter someone who's truly out to hurt them.

01:48:37.200 And they can detect that even in the way the person's face looks, or they encounter a part of

01:48:42.520 them that's much more malevolent than they had ever imagined it could possibly be. And then they do

01:48:48.140 something terrible, and then they don't know what to do about it. So, Dallaire, the Canadian general,

01:48:55.840 wrote a book called Shake Hands with the Devil. And it was about what happened to him in Rwanda when

01:49:00.340 he was stationed there as a UN warrior, or a UN soldier. And, I mean, Dallaire was not naive,

01:49:08.020 but what he encountered was truly malevolent. And it just blew him into pieces. And that's what

01:49:14.240 happens. And so, there's real utility in staying within the bounded domain. But the problem is,

01:49:21.400 is that there may be information that's outside of that domain that you absolutely need to know.

01:49:25.880 And so, part of the problem with being alive is that you have to continually determine how much

01:49:32.120 you're going to maintain your stability, and how much you're going to explore. And you have to explore

01:49:37.460 because the stable part of you gets outdated. But if you explore too much, or too unwisely,

01:49:45.320 then you can encounter things that flip you upside down. It's actually one of the problems with being

01:49:49.740 high in trade openness, especially if you're also high in neuroticism. Because if you're open,

01:49:54.260 you're creative, you're always looking for ideas that are outside of your current systematic way of

01:49:58.920 thinking. But if you're high in neuroticism, so you experience a lot of anxiety and emotional pain,

01:50:03.340 and that sort of thing, you can continually upset your own apple cart. Now, the other thing that

01:50:08.260 you might want to think about, this is really useful, as far as I'm concerned, is you might want

01:50:12.140 to think about this politically. And we've been doing a lot of work, I'm going to have one of my

01:50:16.320 graduate students actually come and talk to you about the work we've been doing on personality

01:50:19.360 and political belief. So what happens with political belief is that if you're high in openness and low

01:50:25.180 in conscientiousness, you tend to be a liberal. The openness being the particularly important part of

01:50:29.660 that. And if you're low in openness and high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness,

01:50:34.240 you tend to be a conservative. Now, it's kind of strange, because openness and conscientiousness

01:50:38.780 aren't very highly correlated. So it's not obvious why those two traits would combine to determine

01:50:44.760 political belief. And the relationship is actually quite strong between temperament and political

01:50:49.220 belief, if you measure political belief comprehensively. But it seems to me that the

01:50:53.640 fundamental distinction, and this is the political game, at least along the liberal conservative

01:50:58.140 axis, boils down to one thing. It boils down to how open borders should be, compared to how closed

01:51:04.460 they should be. And, you know, you can see that reflected, for example, in the attractiveness

01:51:09.860 of Trump to a large part of the general population, because he's going to close the borders, build

01:51:15.040 a wall, and fortify the borders. And conservatives like that. They like to have borders between

01:51:21.040 things stay tight. And they don't even care if it's state borders, or political borders, or town

01:51:26.540 borders, or ethnic borders, or borders between ideas, or borders between sexual identities.

01:51:32.760 Conservatives like to have things stay in the damn box where they belong, partly because

01:51:37.360 they're orderly, and partly because they're low in openness. They don't get any real, they're not

01:51:41.060 interested in what happens if you free up your conceptions. All they see in that is the probability

01:51:46.940 of disorder. Whereas liberals, who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness, slash

01:51:52.740 orderliness, they get a real charge out of letting things out of the box so that they

01:51:56.680 can creatively interplay. Now the issue is, who's correct? And the answer is, you don't

01:52:02.560 know. Because the environment underneath the political landscape moves. And so sometimes

01:52:08.020 the right answer is, tighten up the borders and fortify. And sometimes the right answer

01:52:12.340 is, no, no, no. Loosen things up, because everything's getting too static and tight, and we need more

01:52:17.820 information. And the dialogue that occurs in the political landscape, this is why dialogue

01:52:23.340 is so important, is fundamentally between these two opposing views of borders. And because you

01:52:29.340 can't say with certainty which one is right at any given time, an open dialogue has to maintain

01:52:34.860 itself so that the entire political state can maneuver properly along that moving line. It's

01:52:40.760 absolutely crucial. It's really, really, really useful to know that people vote their damn

01:52:47.060 temperament. It gives you more of an understanding, at least in principle, of those who sit on the

01:52:53.180 other side of you on the political fence. And there's been recent newspaper articles, quite

01:52:57.880 interesting. I tweeted a couple of them about this company in UK called Cambridge Analytics,

01:53:03.700 and they're using the damn Big Five. They can extract out Big Five information from your Facebook

01:53:08.640 likes. They've got a model of every single person in the United States Big Five personality,

01:53:14.240 and they help Trump craft political messages right down to the level of apartment buildings

01:53:19.860 to appeal to people based on their Big Five temperament. And that's all recent work. And so

01:53:25.660 one of the things that's very interesting is we are teaching computers to understand us so fast,

01:53:30.600 you can't believe it. And we really do risk walking into an electronic world where you will only see

01:53:36.700 what you want to see. I mean, obviously, the marketers are trying to do that as fast as possible,

01:53:41.620 right? They only want to send you ads that you're going to be interested in because it's expensive

01:53:46.080 and foolish to send you anything that will annoy you or that you'll ignore. And so the marketers

01:53:51.040 are trying like mad to map who you are, even by watching your eyes. They're trying to figure out who

01:53:57.280 you are so they can send you the right information. But the danger is that that'll happen, say, in the

01:54:01.420 domain of news and broader information, increasing this tendency for people to be siloed in their

01:54:06.400 exposure to the external world. It's a big sort of like each of us is becoming a micro celebrity

01:54:12.620 surrounded by electronic sycophants who do nothing but tell us exactly what we want to hear.

01:54:17.820 It's a real problem. Karl Popper, a famous philosopher of science, said that one of the

01:54:22.540 things that you should do, and this is akin to the Piagetian view, is you should always look for

01:54:27.440 information that contradicts your current viewpoint. Now, that's painful, right? Because who wants their

01:54:32.280 axioms contradicted? It can take you apart. But it's the only way that you can ensure that you're

01:54:37.660 learning at the same time that you're maintaining your stability. And that's another reason why it's

01:54:42.260 really necessary to engage in dialogue with people that you do not agree with, because they're the

01:54:47.440 ones who will tell you things that you don't know. It's of crucial importance in the maintenance of

01:54:52.300 your own stability. The worst thing that can happen to a person, no, because there's many horrible

01:54:57.460 things that can happen to a person. But one of the worst things that can happen is that you find

01:55:00.920 yourself in a situation where no one is offering you corrective feedback anymore, because you rely

01:55:06.720 on the corrective feedback provided by other people to keep yourself sane, to keep moving in the

01:55:11.800 ever-changing environment. And if you cut yourself off from that feedback, then, well, then you end up

01:55:18.200 static and shrinking. It's really, it's really not good. You get less and less competent, you get less

01:55:23.520 and less confident, and the threats outside of you loom larger and larger. So that's all to do with the,

01:55:29.080 you know, the domain outside the light. See, Jung would also say that out in this domain that's sort

01:55:37.640 of beyond what you understand, that's also where you encounter the archetypes of the collective

01:55:42.280 unconscious. Now, that's a really, really complicated idea. But what he means by that is that if you're

01:55:47.720 put outside the domain of your competence, you're going to start to use fantasy to organize your world.

01:55:54.560 So I can give you an example of that. So you, you, you, I presume most of you are old enough to have a

01:56:00.840 conscious memory of when the twin towers came crashing down. And so everybody in the days after

01:56:06.580 that was wandering around like they were in a daze. And the reason they were in a daze is because,

01:56:11.200 well, it wasn't exactly clear what fell, right? There was the physical towers fell, but that was only a

01:56:16.680 tiny bit of the problem because those physical towers were embedded in a network of meaning, like a very,

01:56:21.920 very sophisticated network of meaning, but also a political network and an economic network and a

01:56:26.920 military network. And like their, their nodes inside a very complex system. And so when they come

01:56:31.780 crashing down, you don't know what's come crashing down, right? So you're out there in the unknown and,

01:56:37.460 and wondering what's going on and wandering around in the days, which is exactly what happened to

01:56:41.440 people. And then what Bush did, George W was immediately turn that into a good versus evil

01:56:47.020 drama instantly. And that's an archetypal idea. So that's when he came up with the idea of the

01:56:52.540 axis of evil. I think that was Iran, North Korea, and I don't remember the other one at the moment,

01:56:58.440 but, but he, he, he immediately turned the political landscape into a good versus evil drama.

01:57:03.640 And he said to everyone in the world that they were either with him or against him fundamentally.

01:57:08.260 And that was the, that was part of the retreating into a, I guess, a more protected landscape.

01:57:13.920 That's one of the ways that human beings deal with the encounter with a traumatic threat.

01:57:19.180 And so the reason you meet the unconscious and even the collective unconscious on the border of

01:57:25.040 your knowledge is because when you hit the border of your knowledge, you start to use fantasy in

01:57:30.700 order to bring the newest form of order out of the unknown so that you can start to make sense out

01:57:36.540 of it. And that's what artists always do. That's what they do. And so from the union perspective,

01:57:42.180 people who are engaged in creative art are the ones who are on the perimeter of knowledge

01:57:46.460 structures. And so what they're doing is taking the absolute unknown, which would be in Rumsfeld's

01:57:52.200 terms, the unknown unknowns and turning them into partially known unknowns. That's what an artist

01:57:58.420 does. And, and especially the, the more classical artists who deal with mythological and religious

01:58:03.420 themes, which was the case for art right up until really until the late 20th century, they're,

01:58:08.740 they're using these mythological ideas to sort of extend the domain of human knowledge out beyond

01:58:14.220 its current parameters. And so artists do that and literary people do that and, and dramatists do

01:58:22.220 that and they help us extend our knowledge. Now that's where open people live. That's another way

01:58:27.680 of thinking about it. So think about it this way. So you're in a city, you know, and the city has

01:58:31.860 parts of it that degenerate. And so you could think about that as order degenerating into chaos.

01:58:36.340 And then the open people who are creative come along and they find places in the city that have

01:58:41.880 degenerated, but that still have interesting potential. Right. And then they move in there

01:58:46.240 where it's cheap too. And they start producing art. They start producing galleries and then the coffee

01:58:51.320 shops move in and then the thing starts to get civilized. And then of course, the, the, the more

01:58:56.700 liberal conservative types move in. Those would be the yuppies, roughly speaking. So they're,

01:59:01.620 they're much more conservative than the artists, but they're still liberal compared to the bulk of the

01:59:06.260 population. And so the more daring people move in after the artists have civilized it. And then

01:59:11.320 after that, you know, then the chain stores start to move in and soon it's completely turned into

01:59:15.800 Zellers or something like that. And then the artists have to go somewhere else and find another place

01:59:20.820 on the boundary where they can live. And it's a physio, it's a physical boundary as much as a mental

01:59:25.980 boundary. And so you, because you think each of those personality traits, there's five dimensions.

01:59:31.080 Each of them represent the possibility of inhabiting a kind of niche, right? An ecological niche. So if

01:59:37.380 you're an extroverted person, your niche is the social environment. If you're an introverted person,

01:59:42.680 the niche is, I think nature. I don't know that for sure because I've never figured out exactly what

01:59:47.560 introverts are adapted to, but it's not exactly the social world. If you're agreeable, then your niche

01:59:53.780 is relationships. If you're disagreeable, your niche is competition. If you're conscientious,

01:59:57.820 your niche is duty and effort. And so, and those niches are partly social because so much of our

02:00:06.060 environment is social, but they're also partly natural because our social being is nested inside

02:00:10.960 the natural world. And so you can think about the big five traits as different kinds of adaptations to

02:00:16.220 different kinds of niches. And that's the niche that the open people, the open exploratory types

02:00:22.880 occupy. So that seems to make a higher order super factor, extroversion and openness called

02:00:28.560 plasticity, as opposed to stability, which is conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional

02:00:33.660 stability. And there's a playoff between those two things because the stable people obviously are

02:00:38.380 stable, but the plastic types of people are more dynamic and they're, they're more concerned with

02:00:44.580 transformation. And in order to get a system optimally stable and dynamic, you have to have a

02:00:50.640 continual interplay of those, of those factors because static doesn't work because everything

02:00:55.700 changes. That's the problem with conservatism and the problem with liberalism fundamentally is yes,

02:01:01.080 everything changes, but you have to bring forward some structures from the past. So it's very,

02:01:06.760 it's very, very difficult to get that balance correct. So, all right. So anyways, out there in the

02:01:14.200 underworld, in the place beyond your current conceptualizations, that's the place of death and

02:01:19.660 nature, and it's beyond the light. And it's also the place of hell. And that's what you see here.

02:01:24.880 And what do you, how do you conceptualize that? Well, one of the things you'll see, if you're

02:01:29.940 interested in this sort of thing, if you ever go read the writings of the Columbine killers,

02:01:35.240 the teens, they're very interesting. They're very much worth reading, especially, I think it's Dylan

02:01:40.460 Klebold, who was the more literate of the two. But he tells you exactly where he went after brooding

02:01:46.160 and brooding and brooding on his, his isolation and segregation from mankind. So he's out there

02:01:52.880 beyond, he's out there in a chaotic domain. And because he's tortured by that, his thoughts take

02:01:58.060 an unbelievably dark turn. Like it's unimaginably dark. If you're interested in that sort of thing,

02:02:04.080 you could read that. There's another book you could read called Panzram, P-A-N-Z-R-A-M. And it's a

02:02:10.540 fascinating book. It's about this guy who I think he raped 1200 men. So that sort of tells you what

02:02:16.080 sort of guy he was extraordinarily physically powerful and brutal and malevolent. And he was

02:02:21.840 kind of a juvenile delinquent type and they put him in a reform school and he was not well treated

02:02:26.740 in that reform school. It's sort of like the worst of the Canadian residential schools. And when he came

02:02:32.080 out, he was not a happy boy. And so he spent the rest of his life trying to be as destructive as he

02:02:38.700 could possibly imagine. And purely consciously with malevolent intent. And then, and believe me,

02:02:46.160 he was pretty destructive. He kept track of the dollar value of all the buildings he burned down.

02:02:50.060 He tried to start a war between Britain and the United States. Like he was all out for all out mayhem.

02:02:55.760 His dying words that they're going to hang him. He told the guy who was going to hang him to,

02:03:01.460 he said, hurry up you. Who's your bastard? I could kill 12 men in the time it takes you to hang me.

02:03:05.900 And that's exactly the sort of person he was. And he made friends with this physician in the,

02:03:11.560 in the prison who he thought was like the first person who ever did something nice for him,

02:03:16.340 gave him a dollar for cigarettes, if I remember correctly. And the physician

02:03:19.180 encouraged him to write his autobiography. And so he did, and it's, it's available. And so

02:03:24.020 if you want a view, because, you know, you, you always think of people, you think, well,

02:03:29.460 people have good intentions, you know, that you especially think that if you're naive and agreeable.

02:03:34.080 So all of you who are sitting there out there thinking people have good intentions,

02:03:37.980 you're probably high in agreeableness, but that's not always the case.

02:03:42.300 People can have very dark motivations that are fully conscious and very well elaborated.

02:03:48.080 And Panzram was no, he was smart and his book is very well written. And he tells you exactly why

02:03:54.260 he thought the way he thought. And so it's a good glimpse of exactly this sort of thing where you

02:03:58.960 can get to, if you want to, by brooding on your specific misfortune, you know, and his,

02:04:03.860 his basic credo was that human beings were so reprehensible that they should just be eliminated.

02:04:08.500 And believe me, that's what he was trying to do. And these people who do terrible things like the

02:04:13.620 Columbine shooters, that's exactly what, for lack of a better word, they're possessed by.

02:04:18.020 It's sheer malevolence. And the Columbine kids had a much more spectacular catastrophe planned

02:04:23.640 than the one that actually occurred. And they knew it was going to be a full-blown media circus.

02:04:28.680 And lots of these people who engage in those sorts of mass murders, they know about the other mass

02:04:33.840 murderers and they're engaged in a competition. And the competition is who can do the most brutal

02:04:38.120 thing the fastest, something like that. So you can't just be thinking about people who've,

02:04:43.000 you know, who have good intentions, but have somehow gone wrong. If you ever meet someone

02:04:48.280 who isn't like that, and you think that you're just a tree with ripe fruit to be plucked. So you

02:04:54.420 don't want to be in that situation. You have to keep your eyes open. And so anyways, that's basically

02:04:59.400 what's encapsulated in this part of the story. Now, the hyenas go after the little lion, obviously,

02:05:05.160 but they managed to escape. It's very malevolent scene. And Mufasa shows up at the last minute to

02:05:12.860 rescue them. So, and you know, that there's also a mythological trope there, which is that if you go

02:05:19.060 outside your domain of competence and you encounter something you don't understand, the first thing

02:05:24.060 that you're going to do is look to the knowledge structures that you already possess to explain it.

02:05:28.540 Right. And that's the, you could say from a symbolic perspective, that that's the manifestation

02:05:32.840 of the father is of course, that's what you're going to do. And you know, what's really interesting

02:05:38.500 too, is because I've had a lot of clients who've had PTSD and, and without exception, every single

02:05:43.580 one of them was induced by one form of malevolence or another. They have to develop a very sophisticated

02:05:48.800 philosophy of good and evil to get out of it because they have a worldview in which those

02:05:53.520 things don't really exist. There's no such thing as pure malevolence. Well, that's fine unless you

02:05:58.320 encounter it. And then as soon as you encounter it, as soon as you encounter it, you won't know what to

02:06:03.500 do. And then you won't be able to get on with your life. You'll do nothing, but think about that

02:06:09.100 and think about it and think about it and think about it. It'll disrupt your sleep. It'll put you

02:06:13.260 into a permanent state of preparation for action because the part of your brain that's detected

02:06:18.020 that, which in my estimation, by the way, is the same part, at least in part that detects snakes.

02:06:23.440 It's the same damn circuit. Once it's seen something like that, it is not going to let you go

02:06:28.020 till you figure it out. And that's basically what post-traumatic stress disorder is. And you know,

02:06:32.740 to some degree, each of you will have experienced that. Maybe not all of you in here, but many of

02:06:38.200 you. And you can tell that. So if you go back and you think about your past and you have any memory

02:06:44.120 that's more than about 18 months old, and when you think about it, it produces a fair bit of negative

02:06:48.860 emotion, then that's like a place where there's a mini post-traumatic stress problem. And what's

02:06:56.760 happened? You remember I showed you that hierarchy moving from tiny motor actions all the way up to

02:07:01.600 high order abstractions? Well, you can imagine, say, you have good person at the top and you kind

02:07:07.940 of use that scenario to construe other people. People are basically good. Well, then you run into

02:07:14.440 someone who is not good and boom, the whole bloody system comes tumbling down because it's violated

02:07:19.540 that highest order axiom. So that's post-traumatic stress disorder. If something has violated an axiom

02:07:25.520 that's more differentiated, you know, closer to the actual motor output, not quite so high in the

02:07:30.900 abstraction chain, then all it does is wipe out that part of the structure. It doesn't wipe out the

02:07:35.580 whole thing. And you can tell if you have holes in your perceptual value structure by checking to see

02:07:43.040 if you have memories that are still alive in a negative way that are old enough so that they should

02:07:48.040 have been incorporated into your personality. And so one of the things you can do, you're doing one of

02:07:54.700 the exercises that's on my self-authoring site. You guys do the personality analysis, but there's

02:07:59.480 another program there called the, it's called the past authoring where you write down an autobiography

02:08:04.480 and thinking through these things that have happened to you in your past that are negative

02:08:09.780 is a good way of making them go away. And thinking them through kind of means you have to figure out

02:08:15.120 what happened, right? And then you sort of have to figure out how to make it not happen again.

02:08:20.140 What you're trying to derive is some kind of causal analysis. How is it that I was put into a

02:08:25.460 situation where I was made vulnerable? You know, and that could be, well, because you're only four

02:08:30.280 and you couldn't protect yourself. And now it's time to update that because you're a fully functioning

02:08:34.540 adult. Or there may be things that you have to think through and change in your own personality

02:08:39.420 or attitudes that you've been holding onto since you were tiny. I had this client once and she came in

02:08:46.060 and told me that she had been sexually assaulted by her older brother. And she told me the story.

02:08:52.320 And I kind of got the impression that maybe she was like eight and he was like 17 or something like

02:08:56.560 that. And she was about 27 when she came and talked to me. And then I found out by further

02:09:01.440 questioning that she was four and he was six. And I thought she still had this story in her head of

02:09:07.660 her being tormented by this older person, right? That's how she told the story. And what I told her

02:09:13.300 was, well, look, another way of looking at this is that you two were very badly

02:09:17.200 supervised children. Because I mean, he was six for God's sake, you know, he's a little kid.

02:09:22.580 That doesn't mean that what happened to her was any less traumatic, but he wasn't 17, right?

02:09:28.960 The story was different than the one she had in her head. And, you know, by the time she left,

02:09:33.880 after we had that conversation, it was clear that the way that she was construing the experience

02:09:38.220 had radically shifted. And it's very interesting because, you know, you think of the past as fixed.

02:09:43.660 But, and it is in some sense, but the reason you remember the past isn't to make an objectively

02:09:49.460 accurate record of the past. It's so that you can use the information in the past to prepare you for

02:09:55.520 the future. And your mind won't leave you alone unless that has happened. So if you've encountered

02:10:00.280 something that's negative, and you don't know why, and you don't know what to do about it, if that

02:10:05.740 happens again in the future, then that will stay with you. And I think one of the things it does too,

02:10:10.720 is it increases your overall physiological load. There's actually physiologists who've been

02:10:15.240 talking about this. I can't remember the damn phrase, but you can imagine that your mind is

02:10:20.360 doing something like this all the time. It's, it's, it's, it's got a record in some sense of your

02:10:26.340 autobiographical experiences. And what it's doing is calculating how frequently you've been

02:10:31.460 successful versus unsuccessful. And the more frequently that you've been successful, the higher

02:10:36.880 you are up on the dominance hierarchy, that's one possibility. So your serotonin levels go up and

02:10:42.240 you're calmer, but also it's reasonable to assume that the environment is less dangerous, right?

02:10:47.740 Because that's sort of what constitutes danger. You're somewhere in, and you act and, and something

02:10:53.360 you don't want to have happen happens. That's danger. And so your brain is always trying to figure

02:10:58.100 out how to calibrate how anxious you should be. And one of the things it does is by sort of keeping

02:11:02.680 track of your past success failure ratio. And so to the degree that your past has been characterized

02:11:10.320 by, we'll call them failures. Those are situations where you do not get what you want. Then your,

02:11:16.120 your body, your brain puts your body on constant alert, because if everything that you've done has

02:11:21.540 resulted in catastrophe, then you're somewhere insanely dangerous. And you should be like, like a,

02:11:26.860 you know, like a prey animal that's ready to dart in any direction. And how much you should be

02:11:32.640 a prey animal is dependent on, it's an estimate, partly your trait neuroticism, partly your, your

02:11:39.120 success as adjudicated by other people, right? Because they'll pop you up the dominance hierarchy

02:11:44.520 if you've been successful, but also partly on your record of failures and successes in the past.

02:11:49.960 And so you can go back and you can find out where you have holes in your, in the structure through

02:11:55.380 which you're viewing the world. That's one way of looking at it. And you can sew those things up.

02:11:59.460 And that's a very, that's in some sense, that's what you're doing in psychotherapy.

02:12:03.680 You know, partly it's exposure to things you're afraid of and disgusted by and are likely to avoid.

02:12:08.620 That's a huge chunk of it. But if you go back into your past and you start talking those things

02:12:13.680 through, it's really the same thing. It's more abstracted. So Freud, of course, was always,

02:12:19.620 when he was doing his free association process with his clients, he'd find that if he just let them

02:12:26.700 talk that their speech would circle until it hit a place like that, where they were confused and

02:12:32.720 doubtful. And then their speech would sort of wander around that. And, and then they'd have an emotional

02:12:37.520 expression. That was a consequence of that. He thought the emotional expression was what was

02:12:41.760 curative. It was cathartic in his terms. But later, James Pennebaker, upon whom these writing exercises

02:12:48.400 I described, his research is based on that. My, my exercises are based on his research. He found that

02:12:56.260 if you brought college students into the, to the lab and you had them write for 15 minutes,

02:13:01.500 three times over three days about the worst thing that had ever happened to them or the worst thing

02:13:06.200 they ever did. If I remember correctly, they got worse in the short term, but better in the long run.

02:13:11.200 For example, they went and visited the doctor less and markers of their physical health improved.

02:13:16.940 And so I think the reason for that is because what is that called? It's called something load

02:13:22.080 just about. It got it right from the physiologists. It doesn't matter.

02:13:27.540 They got healthier as far as I can tell, because they basically calmed down once they had gone through

02:13:33.600 the negative memory and sorted it out properly and told a properly articulated story and figured out

02:13:39.660 how to deal with it. Then their physiology calmed down. And so then they weren't as stressed.

02:13:46.800 They weren't producing as much cortisol. And so cortisol suppresses your immune function.

02:13:51.400 And so they were more likely to stay healthy. And so, well, so that's all very much worth thinking

02:13:57.660 about. That's all in the domain outside of the light. That's one way of thinking about it.

02:14:01.340 Now, of course, Simba and his, and what's the girl's name? Mala. Yeah. They're, you know, pretty cowed

02:14:09.120 about what has happened because they sort of stumbled stupidly out into the unknown. They stumbled

02:14:14.440 foolishly out into the unknown. And this actually highlights another Jungian archetype. And that's the

02:14:20.060 archetype of the trickster. And the trickster is like the joker in the king's court. And the trickster is

02:14:25.240 someone who will be or play the fool. And the thing about the fool is that the fool is close to the

02:14:30.680 truth because you can't learn anything new unless you're willing to be a fool. Right? You know what

02:14:35.620 that's like. You, you know exactly what that's like. You're true. You have to master a new skill,

02:14:40.120 but you're avoiding it because you know that you'll be bad at it when you first do it. And if you're

02:14:44.600 perfectionistic, you're going to say, well, I can't allow myself to be bad at anything. I can't allow

02:14:49.380 myself to be a fool. And no wonder. But the problem is, is when you try something new, you're always a

02:14:54.440 fool. And so unless you're willing to be a fool, you can't learn anything new. And that's also why Jung

02:14:59.660 regarded the trickster as the precursor to the savior, archetypally speaking, is because you

02:15:04.300 cannot do the right thing unless you're willing to be a fool first. And that's really worth knowing

02:15:09.720 lots of times you guys are going to make a stage transition in your life. And you're going to feel

02:15:14.560 like an imposter when you get a new job or when you get a promotion or something like that, you're

02:15:18.780 going to feel like an imposter. And you are, because what do you know when you make that first

02:15:23.160 transition? Right? But it's going to make you embarrassed and it's going to make you ashamed and all of

02:15:29.020 those things. But you have to understand that you are a fool when you first try something new,

02:15:33.280 but you're a worse fool if you don't try it. That doesn't mean you should, you know, make like you

02:15:38.560 know everything as soon as you're promoted or you have some transition in status. That's foolish of

02:15:44.980 the wrong sort. But to know that you have to be fallible in order to progress is an unbelievably

02:15:52.320 useful thing. It can free you up. You know, I was talking to a writer the other day about his

02:15:57.880 process for beginning writing. He's written many books. He writes a very, very, very bad first

02:16:03.300 draft. Right? And that's a good way to think about things is throughout your life. You're going to be

02:16:08.040 doing that is writing the next draft of you. And it's pretty bad to begin with, but that's okay

02:16:14.440 because it isn't going to get any better unless you put yourself out into the domain of the unknown

02:16:19.080 to begin with. And, you know, you might, you might, it might go badly. I mean, that's what happens here.

02:16:23.760 Anyways, Mufasa has a chat with Simba and, you know, tells him that he's, he did what he wasn't

02:16:33.460 supposed to do. Although, you know, even in that situation, Mufasa's discipline is paradoxical

02:16:41.760 because there's part of him because he's reasonably wise that knows that breaking the rules like that

02:16:46.340 is actually necessary. Even though you still have to say, play by the damn rules. You know,

02:16:51.040 you have to leave that door open so that the rules can be broken an appropriate amount. So he

02:16:56.420 forgives them and, and, and peace is made between them. And then, um, they're, they're, they involve

02:17:02.720 themselves in sort of gazing at the night sky. And so the two of them do that together. And the night

02:17:07.420 sky is an interesting place, you know, because that's where the absolute unknown resides. And one

02:17:12.580 of the things Jung wrote a lot about was astrology, strangely enough, slash astronomy. And one of

02:17:19.220 Jung's contentions, this is a very interesting one, was that because the night sky was completely

02:17:24.380 unknown, people could project their fantasies into it. And that's what they did with, with, um,

02:17:29.540 astrology. So astrology is this cumulative fantasy that's going on in the, in that, roughly speaking,

02:17:35.220 in the deep unconscious projected onto the sky. And so if you analyze old astrological writings,

02:17:41.700 what you're really doing is analyzing old fantasies. And because of that, you could develop some

02:17:46.260 insight into the structure of the mind. And so he did the same thing with alchemy and his later

02:17:51.220 writings, which are very, very difficult to understand, but extremely worthwhile. Okay. So

02:17:56.440 anyways, back to the, to the hellish domain. Now I told you that that domain that's outside of

02:18:01.780 knowledge, you could think about that as the underworld, or you can think about it as nature,

02:18:05.320 the negative element of nature in particular. And so I mentioned that one element of that is

02:18:10.000 hellish. And that's exactly what the movie explains next. It does exactly that. We go back out to

02:18:15.620 this domain that scar the adversary or the negative King. That's another way of looking at

02:18:21.140 him. This is his, his, the domain over which he rules. And so you can see him there surrounded in

02:18:29.380 fire. Same idea as the, you know, as the hyenas surrounded by fire earlier, although this is green

02:18:34.020 fire and smoke, which I think is even worse. And, uh, this is where the movie starts to draw on

02:18:39.960 essentially Nazi symbolism, at least the symbolism of totalitarian states. And, you know,

02:18:46.120 you think about, you think about a totalitarian state, you think about the Nazis and their goose

02:18:50.740 stepping. And what's happening is that every single person in the military becomes an identical unit,

02:18:56.520 right? A unit, they're all uniform and they're all in some sense, imitating the, the dictator in,

02:19:02.860 in an absolutely perfect way. And so the dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire

02:19:09.000 population. That's order order. And one of the things we've discovered that's really interesting

02:19:15.300 is that, um, disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness and that's associated with

02:19:23.080 conscientiousness. And one of the things about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive and a lot of

02:19:28.320 his hatred for non Aryans. So imagine inside the Aryan box, it was all uniform outside. It was all

02:19:34.080 parasites and predators. And so, and that was a manifestation of disgust, not of fear. It's a whole

02:19:40.280 different thing. And if you read Hitler's table talk, which is a collection of his spontaneous dinner

02:19:46.180 speeches from 1939 to 1942, it's a very interesting book. You see that his metaphor for the Aryan race

02:19:53.720 was a body, a pure body, unassaulted by parasites or predators, and that he was trying to erect a border

02:20:00.840 around it to keep all of that away. So it's an immunological disgust like metaphor. And there's

02:20:06.840 some recent work that was published in PLOS ONE about three years ago, showing that brilliant study

02:20:12.720 should have got much more attention, showing that if you went around and sampled political attitudes

02:20:17.960 in different countries, or even within the same country, what you found was that the higher the

02:20:23.880 prevalence of infectious diseases, the higher the probability of totalitarian political attitudes

02:20:29.640 at the local level. And you can imagine, well, what happens if there's infectious diseases is you

02:20:34.760 want to put borders around everything. You don't want free movement between ideas or people because

02:20:39.240 that's partly how the disease spreads. You're going to have much more strict sexual rules, for example,

02:20:45.800 because that's a great way for diseases to be transmitted. And before Hitler went on his rampage

02:20:50.780 against the non-Aryans, he cleaned up all the factories. Like he went in there and fumigated them.

02:20:56.340 It was part of the law. He went on a public health campaign to get rid of tuberculosis. And he got

02:21:01.540 rid of the bugs in the factories as well. And he used Zyklon B. That's an insecticide. And that's the

02:21:07.460 gas that he used in the gas chambers eventually. So first it was the bugs in the rats. And then it was

02:21:12.500 people who were, then it was euthanasia. That was the next move and forced euthanasia. And the

02:21:18.660 rationale for that was compassion, by the way, just so you all know. It's merciful to put these people who,

02:21:26.100 who are burdensome to themselves and their families and the state who are living second

02:21:31.460 rate lives. It's merciful to euthanize them. And that was a huge campaign in Germany. It was after

02:21:37.380 that, that the more racial purifications began. And so that's the disgusting, that's unbelievably

02:21:46.420 important. It's, it's, it's because lots of times people think that conservatives are more anxiety

02:21:52.500 sensitive than liberals. And that's why they're closed in terms of their ideas, but that doesn't

02:21:56.980 look right. First of all, conservatives are less neurotic than liberals, although the effect isn't

02:22:00.980 that big. So it doesn't look, and they actually are, they're high, they score higher in measures

02:22:05.620 of wellbeing. The most unhappy people are liberal men, by the way. So, but you know, people are often

02:22:13.460 accused if they're conservative of being fearful and that's why they, you know, suppress other people's

02:22:18.100 viewpoints, but that doesn't look right. It's low openness and high orderliness. And that looks like

02:22:22.660 it's associated with disgust. And that looks like it's associated with something called the extended

02:22:27.700 immune system, which is the proclivity of people to, to keep themselves away from potential sources

02:22:32.820 of contamination. It's really terrifying because one of the things people often said about Germany

02:22:37.780 was that, you know, it was a very civilized country and yet it descended into barbarity.

02:22:43.700 But conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success. And so you could say,

02:22:48.740 well, conscientious societies are more civilized, but they're also more orderly. And that makes

02:22:54.340 them more disgust sensitive. And so what it might have easily might have easily been in Germany was

02:22:59.220 that it was an excess of civilization rather than its lack that produced exactly these consequences.

02:23:05.220 And that's a far more frightening proposition. And one that's, I believe, much more likely to be true.

02:23:10.020 Hitler bathed four times a day. And he was also an admirer of willpower. So he could stand like

02:23:15.700 this for eight hours in the back of a car. And the thing about conscientious people is they're very

02:23:20.180 willpower oriented. And so if you're unfortunate enough to be sick chronically in the house of

02:23:26.500 someone who's conscientious, especially if it's a mental illness, you're more likely to relapse

02:23:31.140 because the conscientious person is going to be judgmental. And they're going to say to you,

02:23:34.820 if you're schizophrenic, they're going to say, well, if you just organize yourself and get up in the

02:23:38.260 morning and try a little harder, you could overcome this, which is, of course, true,

02:23:42.740 except you can't because you're schizophrenic. And so the pressure put on you by the anger and

02:23:47.780 the contempt is going to increase the probability that you'll relapse. So orderly people are very

02:23:53.620 judgmental. And, you know, orderliness is very highly associated with things like anorexia.

02:23:59.300 And the anorexic is basically someone who's so disgust sensitive that they become unable to

02:24:04.420 tolerate their own body. And they see it as a source of corruption and imperfection,

02:24:09.220 which of course is exactly right. It is. And it's very difficult thing to maintain order around.

02:24:16.500 So anyways, so what happens out here in this terrible domain where Scar rules is that things

02:24:22.820 turn into a totalitarian state, you know, and he's, he's presented here as, as a Nazi-like leader.

02:24:29.860 And see, there's another thing that's really interesting that's even deeper than this from

02:24:33.380 a mythological perspective. I don't know if I can even go into it. Well, not really. I guess what

02:24:39.380 I'll have to do is satisfy myself with this observation. There's always been some antagonism,

02:24:45.620 for example, between the Catholic church and rationalism. And everyone knows that it's a very

02:24:50.580 longstanding antagonism that sort of runs its way through at least the last thousand years or so of

02:24:56.500 Western civilization. And the people who regarded Catholics as antithetical to science take the

02:25:03.300 Catholics to task for that and describing it as prejudicial and superstitious and fair enough.

02:25:10.020 But there's something else going on there that's more important. And that's the observation.

02:25:14.420 And this is at a deep level again, the observation that rationality has one big problem.

02:25:21.380 So it's, it can easily become arrogant and believe in its own theories. So if you're smart,

02:25:27.300 there are going to be some of you people who are like that too. Some of you, your primary,

02:25:31.460 the primary trait that distinguished you from other people over the course of your whole life

02:25:35.620 was that you are more intelligent than most. And you may have staked your identity on that

02:25:40.500 and, and overvalue intelligence and rationality. And the problem with that is that you,

02:25:44.980 you make a theory of the world and then you tend to assume that it's 100% correct.

02:25:49.780 That's the tendency to fall in love with your own theories. And that's what a totalitarian does.

02:25:54.260 The totalitarian says, here's the damn theory. And it's exactly right. And you're going to act

02:25:59.380 it out exactly. And if you don't, well, we've got some special treats in mind for you.

02:26:05.540 And one of the most terrible things that, that I encountered while reading about totalitarianism,

02:26:10.340 and this was even more true of the Soviet Union under Stalin, was that the true believers,

02:26:16.580 and there were many of them were in a terrible position because according to their own doctrine,

02:26:23.700 they're already involved in the process that was going to bring utopia to mankind.

02:26:27.620 The problems had already been solved, but many of them were still suffering terribly as individuals.

02:26:32.420 But if you're a totalitarian believer in utopia, your own suffering becomes heretical,

02:26:37.140 right? Because your suffering is an indication that the damn theory isn't correct. And so then

02:26:42.500 you're in a terrible position because you either admit that the theory isn't correct and fall apart

02:26:47.300 because of that and maybe face terrible punishment as well. Or you have to separate yourself from your

02:26:54.020 own suffering and lie about it fundamentally. And of course, that's exactly what happened in places

02:26:58.500 like the Soviet Union, where everyone lied about everything all of the time to themselves,

02:27:03.540 to their family members, to their friends. The entire system was completely permeated by lies.

02:27:10.820 And so you get this terrible place that scars the ruler over, which is totalitarian and brutal and

02:27:18.020 murderous and resentful and deceitful and arrogant all at the same time. And that's brought about.

02:27:28.420 So the Columbine guys, for example, when they're justifying their murderousness and their plans to

02:27:35.620 shoot up the schools, they keep making reference to the fact that people had slighted them, for example,

02:27:42.900 you know, and insulted them and that they were alienated. They weren't bullied exactly the way the

02:27:47.140 press made it out. I don't know if they were bullied any more than people usually are in high school,

02:27:50.980 but they took their alienation personally and regarded that their isolation from common humanity as

02:27:59.700 indication of the pathology of everything. And then they went out to destroy. And that's exactly what

02:28:05.540 this sort of thing represents. That's the uniformity. And you see, he's got this kind of vicious grin

02:28:11.780 on his face, which is malicious and pleased all at the same time. There's no fear in that. It's quite

02:28:17.780 quite the opposite. And there's another image of, you know, using what's essentially imagery of hell,

02:28:24.020 which everyone understands, strangely enough. And that associates him with the crescent moon. And

02:28:29.300 the crescent moon is, well, it's a symbol of darkness and the underworld, fundamentally.

02:28:34.340 So, all right. So anyway, so that's, we see the underworld, we see that which lies beyond the

02:28:41.300 light. And in there, we see a fragment of that that's basically hellish. And all of that's incorporated

02:28:45.940 into the story. And everyone understands that when they see it, even without, I would say,

02:28:50.820 the overt references to Nazism. Okay. So now Scar has a plan. He's going to kill the king. And he's

02:28:57.460 going to do that by putting what the king loves in danger. And so Scar feigning sympathy has enticed

02:29:07.940 Simba down into this ravine. And Scar's minions are going to cause a wildebeest stampede, right? So a

02:29:15.700 mindless stampede to put Simba in danger. And so that's what happens here. The wildebeest start to

02:29:25.780 march into the ravine. And everyone is making a... Scar tells Mufasa that Simba is down in that ravine

02:29:34.980 and entices him down there. And so they're all off running to see if they can save Simba. And then you

02:29:43.700 see Mufasa running in front of the wildebeest herd, trying to find his son and trying to stay ahead

02:29:48.660 of them. The mad mob that's put his son in danger. And so he tries to escape, climbing up the butte,

02:29:57.460 which is almost a sheer cliff. And when he gets to the top, his brother is waiting for him there.

02:30:03.300 And he asks him to pull him up. And Scar basically, before he kills him, indicates that he's betraying

02:30:11.300 him and puts his claws into Mufasa's paws and throws him off the cliff. And so that's that. And it's a sad

02:30:19.220 part of the story. It's a hard part that's very hard on kids because the father has died. And you know,

02:30:24.980 it's a rare kid who won't cry about that scene in particular, where you see Simba very upset and his

02:30:30.580 father dying. Now, this is a hard part of the story to interpret. And I don't know if it's because

02:30:36.340 of my lack of ability to interpret or because the story takes a weird twist here. But there is this

02:30:42.180 confusion in the story about whether Simba is an innocent victim who set up for the murder of his

02:30:48.260 father or whether he actually bears some guilt for it, you know, and he's broken some rules and that

02:30:53.940 and so on. So he's not exactly placed in the position of innocence. But of course, he's also

02:30:59.540 been set up by Scar. In any case, Scar tells him that it's his fault, pure and pure. And that because

02:31:05.540 of that, he's going to have to leave. He's going to have to be banished beyond the kingdom. Now,

02:31:14.420 you see this motif quite, quite frequently in hero stories where the hero has to be raised outside of

02:31:21.940 the kingdom. That happens with King Arthur, for example. And it happens with Harry Potter,

02:31:27.700 right? Because Harry Potter is raised by muggles instead of being inside the magic kingdom. So it's

02:31:32.580 a very common theme. And partly what it means is that it means two things. One is that you do grow

02:31:38.580 up alienated from your culture to some degree. There's no way around that because the culture

02:31:43.300 doesn't match you perfectly and it doesn't work for you perfectly. And it's old and it's kind of

02:31:48.500 corrupt. And it alienates you as it's shaping you. And so you're going to develop some separation

02:31:53.620 from it. And you see that in intergenerational rhetoric, you know, where the new generation

02:31:59.140 has the proclivity to blame the previous generation for everything that's wrong with

02:32:03.060 the current system. And fair enough, you know, because you do inherit everything that's wrong.

02:32:08.580 Of course, you also inherit everything that's going well, which is a good thing to also notice.

02:32:13.300 But the idea is that you can't help but be alienated from, let's call it the patriarchy,

02:32:19.140 for lack of a better word, because it's got a tyrannical element and because it's not matched

02:32:24.500 well to you. So but then there's also this other issue, which is, well, maybe you're not being

02:32:31.780 successful by the terms that are by the values that are instantiated in the current system.

02:32:37.940 And you might say, well, that's because the system is set up in an unfair manner and fair enough.

02:32:42.420 But it's also possibly because you're just not very good at acting out those values,

02:32:47.380 right? So part of the reason you get alienated from your culture is because the culture is corrupt.

02:32:51.620 But another part of the reason is you're just not doing as well as you could be.

02:32:55.460 You're not playing by the even your own rules properly. And so you get alienated and you're

02:33:00.420 unsuccessful because of your own inadequacies. And so the movie plays both of those. It's obviously

02:33:06.340 Simba is set up, but there is an intimation that he's not entirely blameless as well.

02:33:11.460 Well, anyways, he's very broken up about this and no wonder. It's also partly a story of the

02:33:18.180 emergence of adolescence because, you know, when you're a child and you're ensconced right inside

02:33:23.620 the familial framework, then you sort of exist within that system of rules like you would under

02:33:29.380 the Piagetian scheme. But when you become an adolescent, then there's much more of a proclivity

02:33:34.820 to break free and to start breaking rules. And so that's also akin in some sense to the death of

02:33:40.660 the father. And that's a necessary developmental stage. Anyway, Scar comes down into the ravine.

02:33:48.580 It's all foggy now because that goes along with the sort of murkiness of death and tells

02:33:54.340 Simba that it's his fault and that he's going to have to leave. He's going to have to leave the

02:34:00.100 kingdom of his father, which makes sense now. His father's dead. So how are you going to,

02:34:04.420 once your father has died, how are you going to stay around in his kingdom, so to speak?

02:34:09.620 So, and then Scar tries to get these hyenas to go track Simba down and kill him. So,

02:34:16.180 and Zazu goes back to tell all the rest of the lions that Mufasa is dead and that Simba has

02:34:23.780 disappeared. And then Scar takes over Pride Rock. And so what's happened now is the malevolent element

02:34:32.580 of the king has obtained control over the state, right? And so this is the king, the wise king wasn't

02:34:41.620 paying enough attention. That's one way of looking at it. And so the malevolent part of the state has

02:34:46.580 now got control. This is a very, very old idea. I've traced it back at least several thousand years

02:34:53.140 in its representation in stories. You can see it in Egyptian mythology, for example. So the idea is that

02:34:59.700 as the social structure builds in complexity, it offers you the protection of a functioning complex

02:35:05.060 system, but it also becomes increasingly likely to turn into a tyranny. And because it's more and more

02:35:10.820 powerful, the fact of its potential for tyranny becomes more and more of a danger. And so then

02:35:15.540 the question is, well, what are the factors that encourages it turning into a tyranny? And one factor

02:35:22.660 would be the wise part of it is not paying enough attention to the malevolent part of it. And you could

02:35:28.980 say that's true at the state level. And it's also true at the individual level, right? You have to watch

02:35:33.540 your own proclivity to upset yourself and other people and take that into account and pay careful

02:35:39.940 attention to it because otherwise it can gain control, especially because you're going to avoid

02:35:44.420 looking at it. And one of the characteristics of the wise king who gets overthrown by the tyrant is

02:35:51.300 that he has an evil brother and he won't pay enough attention to him. He avoids, he doesn't look.

02:35:57.380 And so the evil king gets the upper hand and that's what's happened here. And so notice now he takes

02:36:02.580 possession of pride rock, not in full daylight, right? But at night. So that ties his rule into

02:36:10.260 the rule of unconscious processes and, and malevolence. All right. So Simba runs away from

02:36:17.140 the kingdom out into the desert. Now, why is that? Well, you remember, maybe you remember, and maybe

02:36:22.980 you don't, maybe you don't know it. The story of Exodus, when Moses takes the Hebrews out of Egypt,

02:36:27.380 they end up in a desert. Well, why? Well, it's because when you leave a kingdom, no matter how

02:36:34.340 tyrannical, you still fall into disorder. You're out in a place that's desert. There's no civilization

02:36:40.820 there. You know, that's what happened to Iraq after the Americans went in, you know, the Americans,

02:36:46.340 the neocons were all convinced that the Iraqis would welcome them with open arms. And there would

02:36:50.980 be this smooth transition to democracy. Same idea in Libya. It's like, no, that's not what happens.

02:36:57.220 What happens is the state devolves into a desert chaos. And maybe then you can make order, but

02:37:03.540 probably not. And so Simba has left the kingdom. And the first thing that happens is he damn near

02:37:09.060 dies in the desert. And so, you know, if you have an old belief system and it's not working very well,

02:37:15.380 and you abandon it, well, good for you, because you're out of the old belief system. But now you're

02:37:20.340 nowhere. One of the things that happens to alcoholics, for example, and other drug addicts as well.

02:37:26.980 So imagine that you're trying to stop drinking. All right, fine. Maybe you have to undergo some

02:37:34.580 medical treatment. So when you first stop, you don't die of seizures because that often happens

02:37:39.300 to people who are addicted to alcohol. So, and they, and they get Valium or something like that

02:37:43.620 from a doctor to see them through the first bits of, um, what would you call it? Well, of sobering up.

02:37:51.780 And so they get through it. And then, then maybe two weeks later, they're not physiologically

02:37:56.180 dependent on alcohol anymore. The same thing is true of cocaine. But if you take them back and

02:38:03.060 you put them in their environment, say they go back out of the treatment center, back into the normal

02:38:07.140 world, they start drinking or using right away again. And the reason for that is that, well,

02:38:11.860 let's say you've been an alcoholic for 20 years. Okay. First of all, that's all you do for

02:38:18.100 entertainment. You drink. And all your friends are alcoholics, right? And so

02:38:24.260 if you're going to stop drinking, not only do you have to rid yourself of the

02:38:38.580 of the physiological addiction, but you have to completely learn a new way of living.

02:38:43.300 Because what do you know? You have to get rid of all your friends because they're all drunks

02:38:46.740 pretty much. Or if they're not, they're at least people who are facilitating your drinking. So you

02:38:50.660 have to build a whole new social network. You don't know how to amuse yourself because of course,

02:38:55.060 the way you've done that is by going to the bar, sitting at home drinking. And so there's a huge

02:38:59.140 hole in your life. You abandon the previous pathological mode of adaptation, but that just

02:39:05.220 leaves you with nothing. And then you have to rebuild that thing from, from, from, from scratch.

02:39:10.900 It's extraordinarily difficult. And that's why so many people fail when they're trying to overcome

02:39:14.580 a major addiction. So, all right. So anyways, Simba's out there in the desert. He's

02:39:20.580 left his family and the comforts of home. And he's, he's discovered by these by Pumbaa and

02:39:28.660 it was a little rat's name to Timon. Yes. He's a meerkat, right? Which are very cool things.

02:39:36.580 And they discover him. And this is sort of his transition into adolescence. And he,

02:39:40.660 he kind of finds, and this is, I would say, more typical of the male transition into adolescence.

02:39:46.020 Because females, of course, hit puberty so much younger. The males who aren't very attractive

02:39:50.420 when they're young, like, and just starting to undergo puberty, they're not very attractive to

02:39:55.860 females. They tend to clump together in, in gangs and, and, and manage the transition over what

02:40:02.340 it could be seven years. So, and that's what happens here is Simba joins this little gang of,

02:40:07.140 you know, these guys are all right, but you know, they're a little on the primordial side,

02:40:12.180 you might say, you know, one of them is basically just a walking gastrointestinal tract. And the

02:40:17.700 other one is he's not so bad, but he's like, you know, a foot high, really, what good is he? And so he,

02:40:22.420 he's got some second rate companions out here past the desert, but he enters, he's out of childhood

02:40:27.860 now. And now he enters the adolescent world. And what happens here is that very quickly in the film,

02:40:32.660 he goes from being a little cub to a full, full adolescence. And there's about a five minute

02:40:37.300 transition. And so it's the next stage in his development. And now he's out there in this

02:40:42.020 paradise, which is kind of strange because adolescence really is no, no picnic. But the

02:40:46.340 idea here is that he really doesn't have any responsibilities, right? None. And that is one

02:40:51.620 thing about adolescence is, and even the stage of life that you guys are at is you have lots to do,

02:40:57.220 but you're not really responsible for anyone other than yourself. And so even though you might be quite

02:41:02.020 burdened with your current responsibilities, it's nothing compared to what it would be like when

02:41:07.220 you, you know, you have responsibility for, for children, for example, or for the people that are

02:41:12.020 working for you or, or whatever. So anyways, out here, it's a kind of impulsive place as well.

02:41:18.500 And adolescence is like that. We've had high school students try to do the future authoring program,

02:41:24.740 you know, where they have to think three to five years down the road. It's like, forget that.

02:41:29.300 They just can't do it. And I've watched them. And what happens is you, you immediately become

02:41:33.220 aware of just how little high school students know when they're like 15 or 16, three to five years,

02:41:38.660 forget it. They don't have the world knowledge to project themselves out that far in the future,

02:41:43.060 not even close. And so we've built a high school version that helps them design a better future

02:41:48.100 three to six months down the road. And even that's really pushing it. But you know,

02:41:51.700 adolescents are more impulsive and they live more for the moment. And

02:41:54.820 there's some utility in that. I mean, being impulsive and living for the moment is one of

02:42:01.460 the things that gets you pregnant as a teenager. And that is certainly one way that the species has

02:42:05.860 managed to propagate itself. And so positive emotion and impulsivity are very tightly linked.

02:42:12.100 And so he's out there in this adolescent delusional fantasy. That might be one way of thinking about it,

02:42:19.700 but more importantly, he's out there where he's in a domain now where the impulses of the moment

02:42:24.980 basically take precedence. And so, and I think they sing, uh, some song about,

02:42:33.620 yeah, Hakuna Matata, right. Which basically means do whatever you want and tomorrow will take care of

02:42:39.540 itself or something like that. So it's very impulsive and lacks all responsibility. Um,

02:42:45.220 one of the things that I would recommend to you, if you want to protect yourself from, um,

02:42:49.780 ideological possession, shall we say, is that when you hear people speak politically and they don't say

02:42:55.540 anything about your responsibilities, you should probably stop listening to them. Because whenever

02:43:00.820 they're trying to offer you something, if it doesn't come along with an equivalent cost,

02:43:04.820 there's something being hidden from you and they're appealing to the part of you that's,

02:43:08.820 well, I would say at best adolescent. So, all right. So anyways, he's out there in his little

02:43:14.980 adolescent paradise and, uh, with his dopey chums and back at, at pride rock, things are not good,

02:43:23.060 right? Scar who's arrogant and refuses to learn and who will not establish a reasonable relationship

02:43:32.180 with the females. All he does is tyrannize over them. He ends up ruling over a completely barren

02:43:37.460 landscape. And that's really what happens in totalitarian states. And we also know quite

02:43:41.700 interestingly is that one of the best predictors of economic development in a state is the degree

02:43:47.540 to which they extend rights to women. It's one of the best predictors. And I would say,

02:43:52.740 well, if you're going to tyrannize your own women, you're going to tyrannize everything.

02:43:55.780 You're going to tyrannize ideas. You're going to tyrannize structures. Like if you have to enslave

02:44:00.420 your own women, you're you've adapted a pretty damn pathological view of the world. And the

02:44:06.420 probability that that narrow, constrained, restricted viewpoint is going to pay off for

02:44:11.220 you economically is extraordinarily low. So anyways, scar, it's like what happened in the Soviet Union.

02:44:16.580 You know, part of the reason it collapsed by 1989 is that it just could not move any farther.

02:44:23.220 It was like this really complicated motor that was worn completely out that no one had ever taken

02:44:28.660 care of. And it just ground to a halt. It just stopped working because it because it didn't work.

02:44:35.220 And so if you're totalitarian and you won't update your system and adjust it, then it wears out and

02:44:41.700 grinds to a halt and everything becomes unproductive. Now, it's not easy to figure out what makes a society

02:44:48.660 productive because you might say, well, it's natural resources or something like that. First of all,

02:44:53.460 natural resources are very often a curse to a country because they produce corruption.

02:44:58.340 They call that the Dutch disease. There's a reason for that. You can look it up. But natural resources

02:45:04.980 in and of themselves are by no means sufficient to guarantee the well-being of a country.

02:45:09.300 Japan has virtually no natural resources at all. And it's really rich. And one of the prime natural

02:45:15.620 resources actually seems maybe there's two. One is honesty. Another is trust. And if you can set up a

02:45:21.860 society where people are roughly honest, which means they do what they say they're going to do,

02:45:25.940 and where the default bargaining position on both sides is trust, then the probability that that

02:45:32.500 culture will become wealthy is very, very high. So and a functional legal system is also a natural

02:45:38.420 resource of tremendous, tremendous value. You know, it's partly why people in China, for example,

02:45:44.900 wealthy people in China are dumping their money into the real estate market in North America like mad,

02:45:49.380 because one of the things you do know if you buy real estate in North America is you actually own

02:45:54.100 it. It's still going to be yours 20 years in the future, 30 years in the future. There's no doubt

02:45:59.060 about that. And so that fact of ownership is embedded in the functioning legal system. And that's what

02:46:04.340 gives those sorts of properties crazy value. You know, much to the problematic situation for all of

02:46:12.820 you people who are, at some point, most of you are going to try to buy property in Toronto,

02:46:17.460 and that's really going to be entertaining. So now look, the other thing about scars,

02:46:22.260 he's got the little bird locked up, right? That's the vision of the king. Well, he doesn't want to

02:46:26.740 know anything. He already knows everything. So why does he need this stupid bird flying around,

02:46:30.980 telling him what's going on? The last thing he wants to know is what's going on.

02:46:35.380 Yeah. Stalin. I mean, God, you gave that guy bad news or good news. He was going to have you killed.

02:46:42.580 It kept the bad news to a minimum. And that's a real problem, right? Because if you torture people

02:46:47.860 who bring you bad news, then you're never going to learn anything. Well, you don't have to,

02:46:51.700 if you already know everything anyways. And so that's the situation here.

02:46:57.060 Well, his little minions, the hyenas are getting pretty unhappy because they haven't had anything to

02:47:01.540 eat. And the reason for that is they've just stripped the landscape bare, right? I mean,

02:47:06.740 and I read at the demise of the Soviet Union, that something like 10 to 15% of the entire land

02:47:12.420 mass of the Soviet Union had been rendered permanently uninhabitable by industrial pollution.

02:47:18.260 So, you know, and then that, I don't remember if that included Chernobyl, you know, where that

02:47:22.500 terrible nuclear accident took place, but, but there were massive domains of devastation in,

02:47:28.340 in those countries that, you know, will take hundreds of years to fix. So anyways,

02:47:33.300 when scar rules, everyone starves. That's a good way of thinking about it. Or everyone dies,

02:47:38.500 but that's okay. Cause that's really what he's after anyway. So that works out quite nicely.

02:47:43.060 Now back out here in paradise. I mean, look at him. How pathetic can you get?

02:47:46.500 Look at the expression on that creature's face. You know, he's, he's self, he's sated,

02:47:52.500 like someone who's just eaten a gallon of ice cream. And he's got this pathetic,

02:47:56.180 self-satisfied, naive,

02:48:02.660 clueless, unconscious grin on his face, which the animators did a very nice job of capturing.

02:48:07.380 Like that's a complicated expression and you just want to slap him. And that's exactly what should

02:48:12.260 happen. And that's exactly what does happen. So anyways, he's out there being unconscious dingbat.

02:48:17.300 Well, his society is degenerating and that's bloody well worth thinking about because that's an

02:48:22.020 archetypal trope, right? It's like things are sinking around you. The question is,

02:48:26.500 what are you doing about it? You know, are you just staying in kind of a blithe unconsciousness

02:48:31.540 because you can get your next meal? Are you going to wake up and do something about it?

02:48:35.300 Well, that's the call of the self. So now we go back to, to Rafiki here and he knows what's going

02:48:41.220 on in the kingdom. He's a symbol of the self. And he also has some inkling that Simba is still alive.

02:48:46.500 So, so the son of the king is still alive, despite the fact that the, the, the, the land has become

02:48:54.420 ruled by a tyrant and the son is absent. He's still around somehow. And so in a union from the union

02:49:00.580 perspective, there isn't much distinction between the self and the, and the, and the child, the self

02:49:08.180 is the sum total of all possibility and the child is possibility itself. And so, so let's say you've become

02:49:15.140 an adolescent and you're all cynical, right? And everything's falling apart around you,

02:49:20.260 which is the typical state of human beings, right? Because adolescents are cynical,

02:49:24.580 generally speaking, and everything's falling around, falling apart around them, generally

02:49:28.420 speaking. And so what do you have to do in order to, to do something about that? Well, one is

02:49:34.580 you have to be drawn by the call of wisdom. And the other part is that you have to rediscover

02:49:39.220 that part of yourself. That's a childlike part that's associated with the sun and associated

02:49:44.980 with that early, you know, the early exposure of Simba to the sun. You have to find that again,

02:49:49.380 and then trust that some childlike exploration and a bit of manifestation of faith might get you

02:49:55.780 to the next place. And so that's, what's happening here with the little, you know, the baboon in the

02:50:01.140 tree and the, and the drawing. So anyways, he knows that Simba is alive now. And so he goes off to find

02:50:06.580 him. And in meanwhile, Simba and his dopey companions are out hunting for bugs, you know,

02:50:12.100 because he's a lion, you know, he shouldn't be eating bugs for crying out loud, but they're easy.

02:50:16.420 And so you see this scene where Pumbaa goes after this bug, and then another lion shows up and chases

02:50:22.740 him. So she's going to kill him and eat him. And ha, see, that's an interesting thing, because one of

02:50:29.540 the things that happens, I suppose you could think about this. One of the things that happens in late

02:50:35.380 adolescence is that the formation of male gangs is often broken up by the proclivity of one or more

02:50:42.660 members of that gang to get involved in an individual romantic relationship. And so the idea

02:50:47.860 that the female lion is the carnivore, the female is the carnivore that will devour the group is exactly

02:50:56.180 right. And so what a girl will do often if she's in a relationship with, you know, somebody like a

02:51:03.780 young man or an older adolescent is she'll try to separate him from his dopey friends. And like,

02:51:08.420 no wonder, you know, why wouldn't she do that? Because he does have dopey friends and it'd be

02:51:12.820 better for him if he could get beyond them. And so anyways, they're pretty freaked out about this.

02:51:17.940 And so then Simba goes out and has a fight with this lion to protect his dopey chums. And I'm sure you

02:51:24.260 don't need any explanation about what that means. And they have this huge fight and Nella, who it turns out

02:51:31.380 to be pins him. And so that goes back to the beginning of the story where when he first

02:51:36.260 encountered her, she pinned him all the time. She's an anima figure, right? And now what she

02:51:42.420 does immediately is shame him. So he's an anima figure in part. She's an anima figure in part

02:51:47.780 because she actually does shame him, right? So she's the gateway to higher consciousness.

02:51:52.660 She makes himself conscious and rightly so. But he's also a, she's also a psychological figure

02:51:58.660 because imagine that when a young man is establishing a relationship with a young woman

02:52:02.740 and he's, he's enamored of her, he's falling in love. He projects an ideal onto her. And that ideal

02:52:09.380 is going to be partially fulfilled by the relationship, the degree to which is unspecified.

02:52:13.700 And sometimes it'll collapse completely, but he projects an ideal onto her because otherwise

02:52:18.340 he wouldn't be attracted to her. And then the ideal judges him. And so that makes him feel all

02:52:23.620 self-conscious and, and useless, which is useful because he is useless and should feel that way.

02:52:29.300 And so it's part of the impetus to growing up. So, and of course, one of the, you need necessity

02:52:37.540 in order to mature you because to mature is to take on responsibility. And you're not going to feel

02:52:42.260 that impetus unless adopting the responsibility has some sort of payoff. And women tend to mate

02:52:50.020 across and up dominance hierarchy. So they tend to actually like men who are useful. And so

02:52:54.500 if they encounter a man who isn't useful at all, they're going to, that's exactly what's going to

02:52:59.860 happen. They're going to not be happy about that in the least. And so, and no wonder. And I think the

02:53:06.020 reason for that, it's economic and a biological reason. The reason is, is that women are in the

02:53:12.020 position of having to take care of infants primarily. And an infant is a very heavy load. And so even a

02:53:18.420 woman who's extraordinarily competent is going to find herself substantially limited in her

02:53:23.220 possibilities if she has an infant. And so then she's looking around for someone who'll pick up

02:53:27.780 part of the load. It's perfectly reasonable. And you're not going to pick up part of the load if

02:53:31.860 you're completely useless. And so it's in the woman's best interest not to have two children,

02:53:38.500 roughly speaking. So anyway, she pins him and then he's all resentful about it immediately because

02:53:44.340 she's calling him on his stupid friends. And the fact that he's out there gallivanting,

02:53:47.700 impulsively in paradise when there's real problems to be solved. And so look at him.

02:53:51.860 He's all resentful and useless and, and, you know, feeling put upon and picked upon. And

02:53:57.060 you just, you got to slap him again, fundamentally. And she's just completely stunned by that. It's

02:54:01.700 like, and tells them, you know, where's the Simba I used to know, right? Well, he's a little

02:54:08.100 doubtful about the whole situation there. Um, the animators do a very nice job of this part

02:54:13.220 of the movie because one of the things you see is that his eyebrows are always pointing up in the

02:54:16.660 middle. Whereas his father's eyebrows were pointing down in the middle. And so that's

02:54:20.500 the difference between this, which is sort of like things are happening to me and this,

02:54:24.820 which is more like I'm imposing my will on things. And that's an immature face. And,

02:54:29.620 and the animators capture that brilliantly. So here's where she shames him again. She

02:54:34.820 tells him how much she liked him when he was little and, and you know, a potential king and

02:54:39.620 how hurt she is that he's this useless, you know, wide eyed, naive, impulsive, pleasure seeking

02:54:47.220 adolescent. And, uh, she tells him that she missed him and God only knows why, because look at him

02:54:54.580 again. It's like completely appalling, appalling creature. And, uh, this is when Pumbaa and Timon sing

02:55:03.140 that song about the fact that, you know, their friends doomed because, you know, this girl's got

02:55:08.340 him. And, uh, and then they switch into another archetypal scene. And so they're falling in love

02:55:13.540 here. And so that paradisal imagery is really highlighted in the movie. And so they go off

02:55:18.900 and have this like romp self-reflective romp through this new paradise. And, uh, they wrestle around and,

02:55:27.060 and, and, uh, play. And then he pins her more or less, and she licks him. That's, that's not so good.

02:55:39.140 And this is one of the most brilliant shots, I think, that the animators managed because

02:55:43.540 she's obviously pushing this a little bit farther than he knows what to do with. And so they're

02:55:49.700 wrestling and he, she licks him and then she lays down and makes this face, which is every single class

02:55:55.940 I've ever showed this to all laugh when they see that image. And that's a good example. So Freud said

02:56:02.100 that jokes were a good route into the unconscious. So the question is, and this is an archetypal

02:56:08.180 facial expression and everyone knows exactly what it means. There's something sexually seductive about

02:56:12.660 it and something very sexually seductive about it, despite the fact that it's a lioness. And, uh,

02:56:18.260 the animators do an extraordinarily good job of capturing that. And so that has a huge effect on

02:56:23.140 him. Well, these guys know that, like, the game's up, man. It's like, they know they're dead. Uh,

02:56:30.420 whatever attractions they can offer are paling in comparison to this. So, so anyways, things don't

02:56:38.020 really progress past that. But, you know, he gets a hint of her longing for him, what's waiting for him

02:56:44.180 if he grows up, and the fact that she's completely disappointed in him because he's so completely

02:56:48.100 useless. And so now he's lounging about, you know, like some basement dweller with Cheeto dust all over

02:56:54.660 his chest and, and trying to justify his absolutely useless life. And, you know, saying that he doesn't

02:57:02.180 have any responsibility to the devastated kingdom. And he's out there where Hakuna Matata, you know,

02:57:07.540 I can just do whatever I want and, and follow my impulsive pleasures. And she thinks he's pretty pathetic.

02:57:12.580 And the reason for that is, is because he is actually pretty pathetic. And she, she tells him

02:57:18.180 that, you know, she's extraordinarily disappointed and he gets all pouty about it. I mean, even here,

02:57:22.900 you see when he, when he's got kind of an aggressive look on his face, there's still nothing about it.

02:57:28.620 That's commanding. It's petulant, right? It's like, well, now I'm irritated, but he's got no force and,

02:57:34.900 and still completely appalling in this, in this particular situation. So she judges him very harshly and leaves.

02:57:42.820 And that makes him think, yeah, he makes, gets all self-conscious because this female that he

02:57:48.340 admires wants to have nothing to do with him. And so he's, first of all, then he thinks, well,

02:57:53.140 maybe I'll just hate all women, which is, you know, pretty pathetic conclusion and, but a very common

02:57:58.260 one. And the next is, well, maybe there's actually something wrong with him, right? Which is a very

02:58:03.060 painful bit of self-reflection. So he, he had, he notes that there's something wrong with him.

02:58:08.900 And then he calls out to his father and says, look, you said you were always going to be here

02:58:12.420 for me and you're not. And so what's happening is that he's, he's become aware of the insufficiency

02:58:17.940 of his current adolescent value structure. And he wants something beyond it, which would be

02:58:22.340 associated with identification with the father, but he can't, he can't find the father. The father's

02:58:27.460 dead. It's like when Pinocchio goes down to the bottom of the ocean to bring Geppetto up from the

02:58:31.860 depths, right? That's the situation that, that Simba finds himself in right now. The father's gone,

02:58:38.020 and has to be brought up from the depths. So this is where the movie takes the, the,

02:58:43.300 the archetypal pathway of an initiation ceremony. So he says he wants to change.

02:58:49.780 Now, one of the things Carl Rogers, one of the clinicians that we'll talk about pointed out was

02:58:53.840 that if, if someone was going to come to psychotherapy, there's some things that had

02:58:57.140 to happen before they went into psychotherapy. And one thing that had to happen was that they had

02:59:02.080 to admit that there was something wrong and they had to want to change. You had to have that before

02:59:07.020 you went into the psychotherapeutic situation. And what happens here is Simba is actually,

02:59:11.660 he's dropped his arrogance and he's looking upward, kind of like Geppetto wishing on the star in

02:59:18.180 Pinocchio. He's looking upwards. He looking towards something higher and he wants to transform himself.

02:59:24.360 So he's asked the question, how can I change for the better? And he doesn't get an answer.

02:59:30.500 And then Rafiki shows up. So what does that mean? It means that as soon as you know, you're wrong

02:59:37.580 about something, as soon as you admit that you're wrong about something and you open the door to

02:59:43.240 potential change, that part of you will respond. So, and you know this because think about this,

02:59:50.260 you're thinking. So you ask yourself a question because that's what you do when you're thinking.

02:59:55.080 And then you generate some answers. It's like, it's very strange. The thinking will actually work.

02:59:59.660 You can actually come up with answers if you think about something. And so this, this issue is,

03:00:04.740 okay, I thought I was real good in my little impulsive paradise, but then it turns out that

03:00:09.920 I'm just a half wit. And I noticed that, and I want to do something about it. So the question is now,

03:00:15.540 the question is, has now been posed. And what Jung would say is the deeper part of yourself,

03:00:20.580 the part that still contains your undeveloped potential will respond to that posed question

03:00:26.740 and change the way that you look at things and change the way that you act. It'll start,

03:00:30.920 it'll start changing things so that you can tap those parts of yourself that are not yet developed.

03:00:37.240 And you certainly do that in psychotherapy, but you can do that. Jung said that psychotherapy

03:00:40.920 could be replaced by a supreme moral effort. And by that, he meant was that if you really wanted

03:00:45.860 things to be better, if you wanted to get your act together and you admitted that you were

03:00:50.160 insufficient in your current state, and you meditated on the issue and tried to figure out

03:00:55.540 what you should do next to make, to put yourself together, that you would be able to find out

03:01:00.380 that there's something in you that guides the process of development. That's the self.

03:01:04.760 It's a higher, it's the higher self in some sense. It's the thing that remains constant across

03:01:10.360 transformations, you know, because you're somewhere, then you fall apart, then you get somewhere else.

03:01:15.060 But there's something outside of that that's guiding that process. And that's, that's also the self.

03:01:19.940 That's what you could be. And you can communicate in some sense with what you could be.

03:01:25.400 And that's a very strange thing. It's about human beings. Anyways, Rafiki shows up and Simba is

03:01:31.140 sitting by the water, self-reflecting. There's a little pebble that drops into the pool to attract

03:01:35.900 his attention and up pops the self. And Rafiki's a trickster. He tells him weird jokes and he hits him

03:01:41.580 with a stick a bunch of times. Thank God, because someone really needs to. And he, he, he makes some

03:01:47.140 stupid jokes about bananas and kind of entices Simba into following him, right? He, he lets him

03:01:53.420 know that he has a secret and he entices Simba into following him. And so Simba's all of a sudden

03:01:58.360 become interested in something. So if you ask yourself what the next developmental stage is,

03:02:03.100 and you really want to know that all of a sudden you're going to become interested in things that

03:02:06.620 might move you to the next stage. And that'll happen more or less unconsciously. So anyways,

03:02:12.820 Rafiki entices him and then runs away and Simba follows him. And while that's where he reveals

03:02:19.140 himself as a sage, and then he tells Simba to follow him and he goes underground. And this is the

03:02:26.220 initiation scene, right? Which we talked about at the beginning of the class. This is the descent

03:02:31.380 into the underworld. And it's a, it's a prerequisite to radical personality transformation. So anyways,

03:02:39.160 he goes through this horrifying underground tunnel system where everything's all tangled up,

03:02:44.860 which is, you know, if you ever fall into chaos, that everything down there in chaos is tangled up.

03:02:49.980 It's a tangled mess. And he's quite, and there's horrifying music going on in the background. And he goes

03:02:56.320 deeper and deeper until Rafiki says, he finds a pool in the middle of the chaos,

03:03:00.780 a deep pool. And that's another symbol of the self. It's, it's the deep unconscious. There's

03:03:05.780 something down there that's alive that can be drawn up to the surface. And so Rafiki shows him the pool

03:03:12.280 and Simba, who's quite terrified at this point, looks in it. And the first thing he sees is he only

03:03:18.560 sees himself. He only sees his own reflection. And Rafiki says, look deeper. Now you see what the

03:03:24.880 animators do here. It's very cool. So there's Simba and there's his reflection, but you see that is

03:03:30.360 already half his father. And you look at the difference in the eyebrows and the, and the look.

03:03:35.360 So there's a, there's a tightness of jaw and a firmness of face that's starting to manifest itself

03:03:41.160 there. And that means that he's starting to see the man he could be beyond the adolescent. That's a good

03:03:47.220 way of thinking about it. And then all of a sudden, well, there, you know, that's a whole different face,

03:03:51.020 right? That's a seriously different face that everything's going in and that it's like, get out

03:03:58.360 of my way because things are going to happen around me. Very judgmental as well. So it's not,

03:04:03.520 it's not naive by any stretch of the imagination, but you know, we know his father's a good guy.

03:04:08.820 And so there's something archetypal about this. And so he sees the man he could be reflected back

03:04:14.760 to him. And then that switches, that actually becomes a cosmic event. And we switch up to the sky

03:04:19.580 instead. And so Mufasa manifests himself basically as a solar deity.

03:04:27.720 And he tells Simba that he's forgotten who he is, which is the son of a king.

03:04:34.120 And that he should remember that and start acting like it. And that's an archetypal idea. So if you're

03:04:41.700 just a useless adolescent, then you've forgotten who you are. And the consequence of that is that

03:04:46.120 the state is going to fall around, fall apart around you, and you're not going to do anything

03:04:51.160 to fix it. And you're not going to be good for anything. And no one's going to be able to rely

03:04:54.260 on you. And you're going to be all whiny and resentful. And then after that, it even gets worse.

03:04:59.480 And so that's basically what Mufasa tells him. And so Simba is like blown away by this vision,

03:05:05.440 right? Because he sees what he could be and also what he's not, which is pretty damn horrifying.

03:05:10.800 So anyways, the storm, so to speak, clears and Rafiki comes up and Simba's a lot more thoughtful

03:05:19.700 and not quite as whiny and resentful anymore. And Rafiki leaves. And so Simba now knows what he's

03:05:27.540 supposed to do. He's supposed to stop being useless and take on the moral requirements of

03:05:33.340 setting the kingdom straight. And so he runs back across the desert. There's all sorts of impressive

03:05:40.000 music happening. And then he comes back to his kingdom and it's not looking so good. And that's

03:05:45.040 the consequence of his abandonment of it. That's a big part of it. So now it's dead, but also his

03:05:51.240 abandonment of it to nothing but malevolence and chaos. And so he's pretty taken aback at what's

03:05:58.960 happened and that he exaggerates his guilt or it should anyways. And Nella shows up and they decide

03:06:07.620 they're going to do something about this. So in the meantime, Simba's mother is complaining about

03:06:14.840 the fact that there's no food in the kingdom anymore and that they've gone as far as they can

03:06:18.140 and Scar doesn't want to hear this. So he attacks her and Simba decides to go to war. And so this is

03:06:26.460 where he wakes up and he's willing to encounter the shadow at this point. And so he confronts Scar

03:06:33.920 and Scar's very concerned about this because actually Simba's looking pretty impressive now and he

03:06:39.340 thought he was dead besides. And so he tries to use treachery and whininess and and subordination to

03:06:46.400 excuse himself, but he's planning to overthrow Simba nonetheless to resist him. So he tells Scar to leave.

03:06:55.640 He's going to banish him to the nether regions outside of the kingdom like Scar did to him.

03:07:02.600 And Scar basically refuses and then a storm gathers, right? And lights the dead wood around the rock

03:07:12.060 on fire. So we have another kind of descent into hell scene here. Very common in Disney movies. This

03:07:17.640 notion of the hero fighting the evil force on the edge of something that's burning. It's quite a common

03:07:23.500 motif. You see it in Sleeping Beauty, for example. So they have a big war and Scar ends up putting

03:07:29.800 Simba in the same position that Mufasa was in. And then he whispers to him that he killed his father.

03:07:35.300 So Simba has been thinking all along that it was only his fault and it is sort of his fault, but he

03:07:40.200 didn't know that there was a more archetypal theme playing out in the background, which is that

03:07:43.820 societies are always endangered by malevolence always. And that's independent to some degree of

03:07:51.120 Simba's decisions and his, and his lack thereof. Anyway, Scar tells him because he thinks he's won

03:07:56.220 and that energizes Simba to have this sort of final battle. He leaps out from the pit and they have a

03:08:03.700 big fight and he pins them basically. And the female lionesses come to his aid and

03:08:11.760 Simba tells him that again, that he has to leave. And so they have a big fight. That's a particularly

03:08:17.720 good bit of animation. So there's real demonic aspect to Scar there. Um, sort of king of hell

03:08:23.500 imagery and, but he loses. And then, ha, he blames his minions. He blames the hyenas for everything

03:08:31.360 terrible that's happening, forgetting that they can hear him. And then he falls off the cliff and the

03:08:36.180 hyenas go in and finish him off. So it's pretty brutal ending for poor old Scar, um, eaten by his own

03:08:44.000 minions. And then Scar's dead and Simba has won. And so the rains come immediately. And so what does

03:08:50.000 that mean? Well, it means that when proper order is restored in the kingdom, then everything starts

03:08:54.320 to flourish again. And so the rains come and then while it's raining, Simba climbs up to the top of

03:09:04.120 the rock and now he's completely mature, right? The, the facial, the pathetic facial expression

03:09:08.680 disappears entirely. And he straightens himself up because now he's full of serotonin after having

03:09:13.100 defeated good old Scar. And all the lionesses are roaring and he climbs up pride rock and they roar

03:09:20.360 at him, which is good. They're tough and he's tough and they show in their teeth. It's, it's not, it's not a

03:09:26.120 society of naive and harmless creatures. It's, it's something that's got some bite and the rains come. And

03:09:35.540 then the next thing you see is the restoration of the kingdom. And so basically that, what that means is

03:09:40.280 that if the individual is willing to confront their own shadow and then to take on the malevolent

03:09:45.620 forces that continually undermine society, then harmony can be restored and everyone can do well.

03:09:52.260 And so then we have a return to the beginning, right? And so Simba and Nella are now a couple

03:09:58.640 along with Pumbaa and Timon. And they have a baby and Rafiki shows up and does the same thing.

03:10:07.580 Um, you know, he's, he's going to present the baby to the sun and have all the animals bow again. And,

03:10:17.280 and that's the end of the movie. So that's all packed into an archetypal tale. And, and so one of

03:10:24.600 the things that Jung would point out is that you all understood this, right? While you were watching it,

03:10:31.080 because otherwise at some level, all of these things made sense. They all cohered and the narrative

03:10:37.760 appeared to be an appropriate narrative, even when you're a little kid, it, it, because it strikes a

03:10:42.320 chord inside you. And while that chord, the thing that it strikes inside you, that's the archetype,

03:10:47.900 because if there wasn't something inside of you, so to speak, that this could communicate with,

03:10:53.180 then it would fall on deaf ears. And it speaks to the part of you. That's most particularly human.

03:10:59.080 And it's a story of the development of the sovereign individual. That's, that's the right

03:11:04.700 way to think about it. It's a hero archetype. That's another way of thinking about it. And,

03:11:08.620 uh, people are going to get that story one way or another. And now and then a piece of public

03:11:14.280 art comes along like this, that does a good job of encapsulating it. It captures everyone's

03:11:17.940 imagination. And so that's why you've all seen it. And why I presume you all enjoyed it when

03:11:23.720 you were kids and maybe still enjoy it now. So yeah.

03:11:29.080 Well, that was actually faster than I thought it would be today. So this is what I'm going

03:11:34.280 to do. Well, we've got 20 minutes. So why don't you think for a minute or two, and I'll

03:11:38.800 take some questions, which I don't often do, but, and they can be any questions about anything

03:11:43.300 we've covered in class. So take a minute and, yes.

03:11:50.300 Yes.

03:11:51.300 Um, there's a question about archetypes. It's like, um, I have this feeling, uh, sometimes

03:11:57.500 you watch a movie and you feel like you know the character, but it's not exactly that character.

03:12:04.660 Like, uh, what comes to mind is, uh, you know, Gandalf. Like, it feels like, you know, that sort

03:12:13.760 of wise old man, uh, you know. Archetype. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's not much difference between

03:12:22.080 Gandalf and, uh, who's the wizard in Harry Potter? Dumbledore. They could be the same guy. It's

03:12:27.340 right. Right. And so, well, that, that is precisely the indication of the existence of

03:12:33.280 an archetype. It's like, and a movie, one time a student asked me, well, if, if there are these

03:12:38.880 archetypes, why don't we just tell the archetype over and over? Why do we need fiction? For example,

03:12:43.220 which is like a bridge. If there's individuals here and the archetype is up here, you know,

03:12:47.320 at a high level of abstraction, fiction sort of fills the gap between them. And so what you want is a

03:12:52.520 story that's archetypal so that you understand its basic structure, but you want enough

03:12:56.840 variation and specificity so that it's new and interesting and also applicable to you.

03:13:01.680 So you have to humanize the archetype to some degree. Otherwise it's so abstract. You can't,

03:13:06.320 you can't relate to it. And, and good stories really do that. They bridge the gap and some of

03:13:11.500 them are more personal and less archetypal, but if they're completely non archetypal, there's nothing

03:13:17.240 about them that captures you. It doesn't have any force. And then if it's too archetypal, well,

03:13:21.760 it gets to be too abstract and you can't relate to it. So good fiction writers and, and

03:13:26.680 good purveyors of, of dramatic entertainment, we think about it as entertainment are really good

03:13:31.840 at occupying that middle position. So, yeah. And they reveal the archetype through the individual.

03:13:38.000 That's one way of thinking about it. And, and that keeps it fresh. And, you know, one of the

03:13:43.100 things that Jung pointed out too, was that you're, you're going to be manifesting archetypal patterns

03:13:49.720 of behavior in your life, whether you know it or not. Even when you do something like fall in love,

03:13:54.440 because that's going to be a very particular experience for you, but it's also a very common

03:13:59.120 experience at the same time. Right. And, and romance is older than people. That's one way of

03:14:06.280 looking about, looking at it. I mean, because sex is older than human beings. And so you're in the

03:14:12.440 grip of something that's really ancient, but at the same time, it's really personal. And so a good

03:14:18.180 novelist or a writer of fiction is able to capture both the personal element of that,

03:14:22.820 to show, show the transpersonal within the personal. And so, and in some sense, your destiny,

03:14:30.320 proper destiny from a union perspective is to consciously express an archetype. And so it would

03:14:35.140 be the archetype. There's a bunch of them, but one of them would be the archetype of the hero. And

03:14:39.180 you're supposed to manifest that in the conditions of your own life. So that makes the archetype real

03:14:43.820 in the conditions of your own life. And Jung would also say that when you're doing that,

03:14:48.840 your experience will manifest itself as meaningful. And so it's because in some sense,

03:14:53.720 you're acting in accordance with your deepest instincts, technically speaking, right? You're,

03:14:58.180 you're acting out what it means to be human in the world. And you're going to find that meaningful.

03:15:02.760 So, yes.

03:15:07.040 I have a question about the shadow. So, let's look, say, the shadow is wrong when you're, like,

03:15:17.380 who you truly are, is opposite to, like, your actions or your behavior. So, if, for example,

03:15:24.560 find someone who helps loneliness people, but, like, inside of me, like, I, I just have, like,

03:15:30.880 because it's my moral duty, but, like, it's an act of love versus someone, like, I don't know,

03:15:36.040 like, who's, like, helping, but he's, like, appreciating to help. So, like, if I'm the person

03:15:43.340 who's helping, but he will, you know, like, love and stuff. So, is my shadow the opposite of my actions

03:15:51.960 Okay, so the question is about the relationship between the shadow and the, okay, so

03:16:00.600 The first thing you have to understand with regards to trying to come to terms with the conception of the shadow

03:16:08.760 is to understand the idea of persona. And persona is the you that you present when you want people to accept

03:16:15.360 often like you, often like, um, let's say that you go to a party and

03:16:24.320 you're trying to impress the people that are there and you're trying to get them to like you

03:16:30.420 and so you maybe get jabbed at a little bit and you laugh and, you know, you're, you go along with everyone

03:16:37.740 so that they like you and then you go home and you're bitterly resentful about the way that you were put down

03:16:43.180 at this party. And that's going to make all sorts of aggressive, I wish I could have said, it's going to

03:16:48.200 make all sorts of aggressive and vengeful thoughts sort of flash through your imagination.

03:16:54.260 Well, the first part of the problem is that you were too much persona, right? You sacrificed yourself

03:16:59.820 in some sense at the party so that people would like you. And in the second part, you're refusing to

03:17:05.720 admit to the existence of those elements of you that would have actually protected you from doing that.

03:17:11.180 So let's say you go home and you're all bitter and resentful and you have fantasies of revenge.

03:17:16.060 I mean, that reveals to you the shadow part of you that's aggressive. And the thing is, you actually

03:17:22.620 need that because if you would have integrated that more successfully into your personality,

03:17:26.460 when you went to the party, you wouldn't have had let, you wouldn't have had to let people put you

03:17:31.060 down to get them to like you. You know, instead of having a face like this, which says, I'll take

03:17:37.180 anything that's coming my way. You know, you have a face and a stance that's more determined and

03:17:42.020 assertive. And if you manifest that properly, people aren't going to mess with you to begin

03:17:46.340 with. But you know, you may have already adopted a morality that says, well, I have to be likable

03:17:51.500 and I shouldn't do anything that causes any conflict. And I shouldn't ever, you know, hurt anybody's

03:17:56.280 feelings. And so you're just to present yourself as a punching bag. And you think that that makes you a

03:18:01.980 good person, but it doesn't. And there's no integration of the shadow in that situation.

03:18:07.520 So you see that at the end of the movie, you know, when I mentioned this, when Simba climbs up the rock

03:18:12.600 to take control of it, all the female lionesses bear their teeth and he roars. It's like that

03:18:17.940 aggressiveness is integrated into him. And so resentment is a really good emotion for making

03:18:25.040 contact with the shadow side, because if you're resentful about something, it basically reveals two

03:18:30.540 things. It either means that you're immature and you should stop whining and get on with things.

03:18:36.320 You know, someone's asked, this often happens with adolescents who are asked, say, by their mother

03:18:40.020 to clean up the room. They get all resentful about it. It's like, shut up and clean up your room. You

03:18:44.740 know, it's not that much to ask. Or so that can be a gateway into the observation of your own

03:18:51.460 immaturity. Or it's possible that you're resentful because people really have been poking at you too much

03:18:57.860 and taking and taking shots, cheap shots at you and oppressing you. But what that means is that

03:19:03.840 you've got some things to say that you haven't been willing to say or don't know how to say.

03:19:09.180 Right? You can't stand up for yourself properly. And in order to do that, you have to grow some

03:19:13.680 teeth and be willing to use them. And again, that's something that might violate your morality

03:19:18.560 because you might say, well, I shouldn't be able to bite people. And the thing is, yes, you should be

03:19:24.680 able to bite people hard. And if you're able to bite them, then generally you don't have to.

03:19:30.360 But they need to know that you can because otherwise, especially people who are badly

03:19:34.760 socialized, they'll just keep encroaching on you and encroaching on you and encroaching on you and

03:19:39.040 encroaching on you until you put up a wall. Like someone who's really well put together won't do that,

03:19:45.880 you know, because they're sophisticated. But if you run into people who only have boundaries because

03:19:52.600 other people impose them on them and you won't do it, you're going to be the bullied one in the

03:19:57.600 office. For example, you're not going to get a raise. People aren't going to credit you with

03:20:02.700 your own work. Other people are going to take credit for it. You know, and you're going to go

03:20:06.700 home angry because you're doing your best and you're trying to get along with everyone and nothing

03:20:10.840 ever goes your way. Well, it's because you're a pushover. And you think that's good because you

03:20:17.000 confuse harmlessness with morality. It's not right. Just because you can't do any damage doesn't mean

03:20:25.040 you're moral. It just means you don't have the capability for mayhem. And that makes you a

03:20:31.340 pushover. I mean, the Jungian stuff is very, very dark, you know. It's very dark because his notion

03:20:37.960 of what constitutes a moral human being is much different from the typical view. He really thinks

03:20:43.500 you get that horrible side of yourself integrated so it's up there where you can use it.

03:20:48.280 Because otherwise, you're dangerous. You can't say no to people. And you'll go along with the

03:20:55.760 crowd. And then if the crowd does something particularly pathological, which it's liable

03:21:00.500 to do, you won't be able to resist it. You won't have the strength of character. And so then you'll

03:21:06.160 fall prey to crowd pathology. And it'll be because you're too agreeable with a, you know, with a

03:21:12.980 shadow resentful side that the crowd and its murderous intent is going to act out. So the

03:21:18.660 question is the relationship between archetypes and the idea of memes. Well, oh yeah, that's a

03:21:25.060 complicated one. So Richard Dawkins was the guy who originated the idea of meme. And his notion was

03:21:31.580 that you could produce an idea or a set of ideas that had the capacity to propagate across minds

03:21:38.560 for whatever reason. It was catchy, let's say, like a, like a song that gets stuck in your head,

03:21:43.520 you know, and that those, he called those memes, which was sort of a play on the idea of genes.

03:21:51.920 So there are these stable sets of ideas that can be transferred across minds.

03:21:56.980 Well, I've often thought when I was reading Dawkins, that if he would have kept thinking,

03:22:01.900 he would have turned into Carl Jung because an archetype is a meme, but it's a really,

03:22:06.580 really, really deep meme. So you can imagine that an idea has been so around for so long

03:22:12.440 and that people have acted out for so long that it's actually become part of the landscape that

03:22:18.620 does the selection. So think about it this way. So it's more or less a truism that if you take a

03:22:25.940 male dominance hierarchy, the probability that the men at the top of the hierarchy will leave

03:22:31.440 offspring is much higher than the probability that the men at the bottom will leave offspring.

03:22:35.540 That's true in many, many species. Now there's a much higher probability of the average female

03:22:40.900 leaving offspring than the average man. So, so now then imagine that there's characteristics that

03:22:49.200 push a man up a dominance hierarchy. Okay. And then imagine that there are characteristics that push a

03:22:54.880 man up a set of dominance hierarchies. So that each dominance hierarchy has something in common

03:23:01.420 with all of the others. It's sort of like the idea of a, of a good player of a game being a good

03:23:06.400 sport across games. So then imagine that the idea of the successful male starts to become encapsulated

03:23:16.340 in, in, in, in biology because the species is going to the male part of the species, at least is going

03:23:23.860 to be adapting to the selection pressures placed on the male by the male dominance hierarchy. So what

03:23:30.060 happens is you have a competition between men, the men that win the competition, find partners and mate.

03:23:35.880 So the, the, the male is going to start to adapt to the fact of the selection that's implemented by the

03:23:42.880 dominance hierarchy. Then you can imagine that that's going to take case, take place across dominance

03:23:47.940 hierarchies because this is happening in many, many situations spread across time. And so then

03:23:54.680 the idea of how the proper man should act starts to become incorporated in the biology and also in the

03:24:03.840 expectations of the society. And then that starts to loop. So as the expectations become clearer and

03:24:10.160 clearer, the notion of what it constitutes success becomes clearer and clearer as well. And the two

03:24:16.220 things get tangled together now. And I think you can see that a manifestation of that whenever you go

03:24:23.740 watch a movie, because you immediately identify the hero and you identify with him. It's like, he's the

03:24:31.480 person that your mythological imagination grasps onto. And you play that out using your body as a

03:24:38.920 representational platform when you watch the movie. And so maybe you admire the hero. If he's a

03:24:44.660 successful hero, you do. Well, that admiration is the manifestation of the instinct that drives you

03:24:50.400 towards that kind of behavior. And not only can you manifest it, in which case you're likely to feel

03:24:55.880 good about yourself, because you know that sometimes you can feel good about yourself and sometimes not,

03:25:01.600 but you're also going to be able to recognize it when you see it in the world. And that's going to

03:25:05.880 manifest itself in admiration. And admiration is the proclivity to imitate.

03:25:11.920 So the meme can be so, so you can imagine dominance hierarchies are very, very old. They're like 300

03:25:19.720 million years old. They've been around a very long time. And the idea that we have an image of what it

03:25:25.840 takes to climb the dominance hierarchy, it's more or less self-evident. Because that's the landscape that

03:25:32.580 selected us. And at the same time, you know, the archetype, the pattern that propagates you up the

03:25:40.460 dominance hierarchy is also the same pattern that makes you attractive to women. They're the same

03:25:45.500 thing. So, and of course, that's a massively powerful selection mechanism. And sexual selection

03:25:52.680 has really shaped human beings. It's turned us into what we are. And that's an interesting thing too,

03:25:58.340 because, you know, this is one of the things that really bothers me about the emphasis of

03:26:03.360 evolutionary scientists on randomness. It's like the, the general mutation generation process is

03:26:10.900 random or quasi random. We don't know that for sure, because there is evidence now that you can

03:26:15.520 inherit acquired characteristics. And that was, nobody thought that was possible 20 years ago. So

03:26:21.060 things are, have taken a very weird twist in the Darwinian world. But for the sake of argument,

03:26:26.420 we could say that the mutation process is random, but the selection process isn't random.

03:26:32.380 It's not even close to random. Ever since creatures have been able to evaluate one another,

03:26:38.080 the selection process hasn't been random. And so basically we're selected by, you could say,

03:26:43.940 by the manifestation of mind in the world. Unless you believe that women, for example, exercise no

03:26:50.340 conscious choice in their mate selection, which seems completely absurd. First of all, men consciously

03:26:55.760 choose who's going to lead them, at least in part, you know, who's going to succeed in a hierarchy

03:27:00.460 and women consciously choose their sexual partners. So the idea that the selection process,

03:27:06.420 that the evolutionary process is random is, it's an absurd proposition. Sexual selection makes it

03:27:12.400 non-random. And Darwin knew that he emphasized sexual selection a lot, but modern biologists since

03:27:18.680 the time of Darwin, except for the last about 20 years, downplayed the role of sexual selection.

03:27:24.180 And I think the reason for that is that it brings mind into the evolutionary process in a way that

03:27:31.480 they don't like. And no wonder, it's complicated, you know? It's like, to some degree, we're consciously

03:27:37.620 directing our own evolution, at least through the mechanism of selection.

03:27:40.820 Yes. Yes. Well, Dawkins just thought of memes as something that were, he never thought about them

03:27:55.700 as something that could last long enough to play a role in selection itself. You know, he thought

03:28:01.000 about them more as parasitical cognitive entities, I would say, that just sort of floated on the surface

03:28:06.300 of, of the mental landscape. He never, he never grappled with the idea that a meme could be something

03:28:13.100 that could last for hundreds of millions of years, roughly speaking. So.

03:28:21.520 We've got time for one more question, if anybody has. Yes.

03:28:24.300 Hey, um, you said the most unhappy people are liberal men.

03:28:27.340 Yes. From a political perspective, like if you divide people by their political affiliation,

03:28:32.200 it looks like liberal men are the most unhappy.

03:28:37.140 They're higher in neuroticism.

03:28:40.080 I think the openness probably contributes to it as well, but we don't, and also possibly the low

03:28:46.580 conscientiousness. When my graduate students come in, or one of them anyways, we're going to talk

03:28:50.480 about this in some detail, because she's going to tell you, because we've also looked at the

03:28:54.360 personality predictors of political correctness, which is extraordinarily interesting, as well,

03:28:59.540 because it doesn't really seem to fall exactly on the liberal conservative continuum.

03:29:04.100 So, we'll talk more about that when we get into the big five part of the course.

03:29:09.280 Okay, good.

03:29:10.040 Thank you.

03:29:24.360 Thank you.

03:29:47.220 Thank you.

03:29:48.020 Thank you.

03:29:48.100 Thank you.

03:29:48.600 Thank you.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - November 15, 2020

145. Carl Jung (Part 2)

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