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Jan. 26, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:23:23
2017 Maps of Meaning 02: Marionettes & Individuals (Part 1)
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Music So I'm going to briefly review some of what I told you last time, and then I'm going to walk through, as I mentioned, I'm going to walk through the Disney film Pinocchio, and which I presume most of you have seen, How many of you have seen it?
Yeah, okay.
So, as I think I mentioned, that's something in and of itself, right?
I mean, the fact that you've all seen it means that it's a production of cultural significance, and because it's such a strange artifact, that's one way of looking at it, it might be worth trying to take it apart to understand why it is, for example, that you even understand it.
And so, I offered you the proposition last week that we view the world essentially through a narrative lens and I believe that we view the world through a narrative lens because the fundamental problem that we have to solve as living creatures is how we should act in the world and that means how we should act to maintain ourselves but also how we need to act in relationship to other people and in relationship to the broader world in order to
maintain ourselves across time So that's a complicated problem, right?
It's not just how you survive, it's how you survive now, and next week, and next month, and next year, and 50 years from now, and maybe your descendants as well, if the culture is going to stabilize, and then not only you across all those time frames, but you and everyone else across all those time frames.
It's a viciously difficult problem.
And so, I would say that we have evolved mechanisms to solve that.
I think that's self-evident in some sense, because, for example, one of the mechanisms that animals have evolved to deal with the problem of social being, even if they're not particularly social animals, is the dominance hierarchy, right?
Or you could call it a hierarchy of authority or power, because I think considering human structures, social structures as mere power structures is a terrible mistake, it's a terrible oversimplification because power is by no means the only,
like force is what I mean, force is not a stable way of solving the problem of how to live together across time The question is, what is the stable way of solving how to live together across time?
And that really is the question, and it's part of the question that I'm trying to answer, partly because it's a perennial problem, right?
We face the problem of how to organize ourselves in small social units without undue conflict, and then we face the larger problem of how to organize ourselves into large social units without undue conflict, and that conflict can be Absolutely devastating, and frequently is.
So, then I would also say that the first way of solving this problem isn't conscious, you see, not at all.
And, you know, you may know and you may not know that there are different forms of memory, right?
Really, technically different forms of memory.
So, for example, there's short-term working memory, which is the memory that you use to hold things like telephone numbers in your active imagination it decays very rapidly it's only about four to seven bits which is why well, it's why phone numbers are were at least seven digits long you know,
you can kind of manage that as a loop and then there's episodic memory and that has two elements, one is semantic and the other is episodic it's a, what's the name of that?
hmm?
someone said something?
Yes, well there's procedural memory and then there's another the kind of memory that you use to represent your experiences to yourself so let's say it's image-laden and the other one is semantic and semantic is your memory for facts and those are quite different, so for example Procedural memory, that's how you ride a bike, that's how you play the piano, that's how you play jazz music if you're in a combo.
It's the memory, it's a funny kind of memory because it's actually built right into you, you know, I mean, so is the kind of memory that you use to represent your own life, but it's much more malleable in some sense.
So, what that means is that in your procedures, There is information that you don't know about.
Patterned information that you don't know about.
Part of that is how to act.
You know, like when you walk into a social gathering, you don't really think through how you're going to act.
You know how to act.
And if someone asked you exactly what it is that you're doing and why, you could formulate a story about it.
but the probability that it's the existence of that story that enabled you to act that way is zero because you have to react way faster than that and so, you know, you have social knowledge built into your nervous system because you've practiced being a social being for a very long period of time and of course then that social being has been shaped for forever,
really and it's the right way of thinking about it you know, we know that animals organize themselves into hierarchies And we'll say of dominance, because it's more true the farther back you go in time, at least since the time of the crustaceans, you know, when we split from our common ancestor 300 million years ago,
and so, and it's true for social animals and non-social animals, so even animals that don't live together in groups have to organize themselves into a hierarchy in the space they inhabit, songbirds are a good example, and they have dominance disputes all the time, partly that's you can hear them having their little dominance disputes in the spring when they're singing because basically what they're singing is I'm pretty damn healthy and I'm ready to go and if you're another bird like me you better steer clear of this tree and the dominant
songbirds you know, they don't live together, crows are social but most songbirds aren't the dominant songbirds get the best nest and the best nest is the one that doesn't get rained on it's not too windy and it's close to food sources and you know,
and so then they have the healthiest chicks and they attract the best mates and like it's really important where you're positioned in the hierarchy even if you're not like a flock or herd creature, now we're more like herd creatures so it's even more It's even more relevant to us, but there's just no escaping a hierarchical arrangement in social being.
That is social being.
And it's evolutionarily ancient beyond conception, so 300 million years ago there weren't trees, you know, I mean, so the dominance hierarchy is older than trees.
So that's really something to think about, and then, you know, when you're thinking about the reality that shaped us, say, from an evolutionary perspective, but also from a cultural perspective, what you have to understand is that the things that have shaped us most are the things that have been around the longest and so you could say those are the most real things and you can't even see some of them like it's not like you can come in here well,
it's not exactly true you can't come in here and see the multiple dominance hierarchies that are at work you can in a way because The chairs are set up to face this way, and I'm facing that way.
That gives you some clues about the social order here, and you take the cues instantly, right?
You come down, you sit in the chairs, you organize yourselves according to mutual expectation, and that's part of your procedural knowledge about how to behave as a social creature.
Now That knowledge is really, really deep, and a lot of it's coded in your behavior.
Now, and in other people's behavior as well.
And that's, you know, that's the expectations you have of other people and of yourself.
And a lot of those are implicit, right?
So, when we're interacting, there's a very large number of things that you just don't get to do.
And you know that too.
And you won't do them.
And that way, we can act as if we understand each other.
Even though we don't.
Because you're really complicated.
And I'm really complicated.
And there's lots of situations where we might really be in conflict.
But because we share a map of the culture, the cultural expectations, it's built right into our perception.
You will act out that set of expectations, and so will I. And if neither of us can do that, even if one of us can't, we're either going to immediately devolve into conflict or we're going to avoid each other like the plague and that's exactly the right thing to do and so one of the really useful things to understand and this took me a long time to formulate properly you know you hear the terror management theorists for example and they have this idea that your meaning representation,
the story you tell about the world Regulates your death anxiety.
It's something like that.
But that's not right.
I mean, it's close to right, and it's a smart idea.
It came from Ernest Becker, by the way, who wrote a book called The Denial of Death, which is actually quite a good book, even though it's wrong.
You know, sometimes a book can be very useful It can be usefully wrong, and Becker's book is usefully wrong, because he thought that it's the internal representation of your belief system that regulates your anxiety, and that anxiety is fundamentally, in the final analysis, anxiety about death.
It's like, well, okay, fine, it's a reasonable proposition, but that isn't how it works, you see.
It isn't my beliefs right now that are regulating my emotion.
It's the fact that I'm acting out those beliefs, which include implicit perceptions, I'm acting them out, and so are you.
And so, what you're doing and what I expect, more accurately, what you're doing and what I want you to do, and the way I want you to react to me, that's working.
So it's the match between my belief system and the way everyone else is acting that's regulating my emotions.
It's not the belief system.
It's mediated by the social culture and you see if you understand this then you understand more particularly why people are willing to fight to the bitter end to protect their culture.
It's not a psychological structure that they're protecting.
It's a psychological structure and a sociological structure simultaneously.
So the social contract is you have a set of expectations and I have a set of expectations.
They're actually desires.
They're not merely expectations because as living creatures we're desirous.
We don't just expect.
and so you desire an outcome and I desire an outcome and we agree to act in accordance with that that's the social contract and so people don't like having that disrupted well it isn't because it psychologically destabilizes them although it does it's because it actually destabilizes them Right?
If all of a sudden we can't occupy the same specified domain of territory it isn't only that we're thrown into psychological disarray, although we will be it's that we'll start fighting with each other like, and that can kill you,
it's no joke, it kills people a lot like, it happens, it can happen very easily that a cohesive social group can fragment along some fracture line of identity, let's say, and all hell breaks loose You know, that's what happened with the Tutsis and the Hutu in Rwanda, you know.
And those things can get out of control just so fast.
It's just unbelievable.
And so, and that wasn't Death anxiety, that was death.
That's a whole different thing, and that's the other thing that terror management people don't exactly get.
It's like, it isn't just that your culture and your cultural beliefs protect you from anxiety, and say anxiety about death even, it's that they actually protect you from death, as well as protecting you from death anxiety.
I mean, look, it's warm in here.
It's cold outside.
The fact that the culture is intact means that you're not outside freezing.
That's a hell of a lot more fundamental in some sense than mere anxiety, although I'm not trying to underplay the role of anxiety, that's a major issue, but there's something that's a lot more fundamental at stake than mere psychology.
So it's the match between your map of the world and other people's actions that regulates your emotion.
and it regulates it completely because you know, if someone in here started acting seriously deranged like brandished a pistol, let's say all of a sudden you would not be in the same place at all not a bit and so what would happen?
well Chaos would happen and chaos isn't just that you would get anxious, that's not a good enough explanation what would happen is more complex than that, what happens in some sense is that your body and it does this, what would happen is that you would react the same way that a rat reacts to a cat it's exactly that, it's exactly that, you would respond as if a terrible predator had emerged in your midst and so what is that reaction?
Well it's not just anxiety because when you encounter a predator, anxiety isn't the only thing that's useful, that just makes you freeze it's like, that could be the worst thing you could do you freeze and, well, you're a pretty easy target so you have to be prepared for a lot broader range of responses than mere mere petrification like, how about a little aggression?
that might be helpful, you don't know, it also might get you killed but you know, maybe you can take the guy down and maybe that's a good idea you know, and maybe you have to run, so that's disinhibited as well and maybe you have to think really quickly and reflexively,
so that happens, that's activated, disinhibited I would say as well, it's like your whole being is thrown into Intense concentration on the moment and you're burning up physiological resources like mad and so what will happen after something like that if you don't develop outright post-traumatic stress disorder,
which some of you would is that you, assuming that the situation was brought under control you'd walk out of here shaking with your heart rate at like 170 and it would take you like well, it might take you the rest of your life and maybe you would never recover but you could bloody well be sure that it would take you the rest of the day,
that's for sure and so, it's no joke when someone steps outside the confines of the social contract right, and that's kind of, there's a philosopher named Hobbes who I suppose in some sense was a centrally conservative philosopher as opposed to Rousseau,
who's kind of his exact opposite Rousseau believed that people were basically good In their natural state, so he believed nature was basically good and he believed that culture was what corrupted people and so, and Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, believed exactly the opposite.
He believed that in the state of nature, let's say, every person was at every other person's throat and the only thing that prevented continual chaos was the imposition of a of a collective agreement, that would be the social contract that essentially governed how people would interact and that would keep that underlying chaos at bay and you know,
my contention is that Hobbes was correct and Rousseau was correct and I think that if you add Rousseau and Hobbes together you get a total picture of the world and that's really, I think, the picture of the world that I'm trying to relate to you it's both at once, it's like, well you can't just attribute human Malevolence and unpredictability to society, it's a non-starter.
It's like, people built society, so all you're doing is pushing the problem back.
It's like, where did it come from?
Well, society, the society before, well then, the one before that.
It's like, well, you gotta tangle up the individual in there at some point, because people created society.
And so...
You can't just blame human irrationality and malevolence on society.
Well, and also, it's ungrateful for God's sake.
It's like, society obviously also makes you peaceful.
Part of the reason you're peaceful right now, all of you, is because while you're not that hungry, you're certainly not starving to death, you would be a very, very different person if you were starving right now.
You know, or if you were enraged, or if you were panicking, or if you were terrified because your future was radically uncertain.
I mean, you're just not any of those people right now.
You're satiated, and I mean that technically, you're satisfied.
None of your biological systems, except perhaps curiosity, which is a rather pleasant emotion, are activated in the least and you know, because of that you all think, well you're in control of yourself but don't be thinking that, that's just not right I mean,
if you look at how the brain is structured, for example the hypothalamus, which is a really important part of the brain, it basically it basically establishes the framework of reference and the actions the framework of reference within which and the actions you take in order to fulfill basic biological needs so the hypothalamus makes you thirsty and the hypothalamus makes you hungry and it makes you sexually aroused it puts you into a state of defensive aggression and It actually also makes you explore and
be curious.
All of that's hypothalamic.
It's an amazing structure.
And it's really small and it's right at the base of the brain.
And you can imagine it as something that has tremendously powerful projections upward throughout the rest of the brain into the emotional systems and the cortical systems and all of that.
like tree trunk sized connections, you know, metaphorically speaking and then the cortex has these little like vine-like tendrils going down to regulate the hypothalamus you know, and when push comes to shove, man, the hypothalamus,
that thing wins and so, you know, you get people now and then who have a hypothalamic dysfunction and one of them produces a condition called, I can't remember it, it's not dipsomania although it's like that, it doesn't matter it produces uncontrollable thirst and so what will happen is that people who have this hypothalamic problem will drown themselves by drinking water which you can do,
by the way and so they just cannot get enough water and there's no stopping them, right?
no more than there would be stopping you if you were suffering from raging thirst it's like, it's a happy day when the hypothalamus is not telling you what to do and you know, you live in such a civilized state that most of the time roughly speaking, you're tranquil and satisfied and more or less, you can imagine yourself as a peaceful you know, productive, well-meaning Entity.
But don't be thinking that that's what you'd be if you were put in the right situation, because that's just not right at all.
So, you know, lots of times soldiers develop post-traumatic stress disorder because they go out on the battlefield, they're kind of naive, they're young guys, you know, and...
It actually is worse if they're not that bright, it turns out, because having a lower IQ is one of the things that predisposes you to post-traumatic stress disorder, but anyways, they go out on the battlefield and they see what they're capable of under battlefield conditions, and like, you know, we've been fighting wars for a very long time.
Millions of years, you know, chimps basically have wars with other chimps, the troops, right?
Because the juveniles will patrol the perimeter of their territory and if they find other chimps from other troops that they outnumber, they will tear them to pieces.
Like, and chimps are really, really strong and so when I say they'll tear them to pieces, I mean that literally, you know, they tear them to pieces.
and Jane Goodall discovered that originally in the 1970's she didn't even report it for a while because she was so shocked you know, she kind of assumed like most followers of Rousseau that the human proclivity for warfare was part, that was something that was uniquely human you know,
it had something to do with our unique self-consciousness or our intelligence or something like that she had no idea that it was rooted That deeply, you know, we split from chimps about six, seven million years ago, something like that, and so we were patrolling territory,
we were gang members seven million years ago and, you know, that's minimum estimation because of course that ancestor shaded back maybe 20 million years into entities that were roughly primate-like and so,
territoriality and the proclivity to defend territory is so deeply embedded in us it's like, it's the control center for our whole brain and so there isn't anything more important to us, I would say, than maintaining the Match between what we want to have happen and what other people are doing in response to our actions.
Like, that's that.
That's what we want.
And as long as that match is maintained, then our emotional systems, and I would say anxiety is probably primary in that regard, our emotional systems remain inhibited.
They're on.
They're ready, like a nuclear reactor rods are on, and the rest of the brain dampens them down, but it's like, you don't want them to take time to start up, man, you want them to be on at a tenth of a second's notice when it's necessary, and so,
you know, that's kind of why, well, if you look at a wild animal, it's like, it's alert, you know, it's ready to dart this way or that way, especially a prey animal Instantaneously, and it has reflexes built into it, as you do, that will respond way before you're conscious.
So, for example, if you happen to be walking down a trail and you detect something snake-like in the periphery, you'll leap away before you even know that you leapt and that's because it takes a fair bit of time to actually see a snake by which I mean form a conscious representation of the snake you know,
maybe it takes a quarter of a second or something like that or even longer but it doesn't matter, maybe it takes, you know a twentieth of a second, a tenth of a second but the thing about the damn snake is it's way faster than that it's really fast that thing and it co-evolved with primates by the way and so it can nail you like way faster than you can look at it so you have your eyes map snake-like objects right onto your reflexes so that the eyes go,
the eyes make you jump and then they see after that, it's like yeah well now you can see, that's no problem you know So, alright.
Alright.
Now, what I would say that what we do is we live in a shared story.
and the story is a way of looking at the world and it's a way of acting in the world at the same time and that story has to operate within narrow parameters and this is something that's extraordinarily important to understand because, and this is something I think that Piaget figured out, Jean Piaget figured out better than anyone else I think he really got this right and by the way, one of the things that Piaget was trying to do you never hear about how strange these great thinkers are, but Piaget was a very strange guy and he was a hyper genius.
He was offered the curatorship of a bloody museum when he was 10 years old, you know, because he wrote this little paper on mollusks which apparently was very good and so they offered him the curatorship of a museum and his parents wrote back and said, well, you know No, probably not, because he's actually 10.
And so that was Piaget, man, the guy was a genius.
You know, he was actually motivated by the desire to reconcile science and religion.
That was actually his entire motivation for what he did.
You never hear that, but that's the case.
and so Piaget was very interested in how you produce structures that enable you to regulate yourself because you're like a kind of a colony of strange sub-animals that have to figure out how to get along so that you can sort of be one thing you kind of learn that I would say between the ages of two and four as you're being socialized you know how erratic two-year-olds are I mean they're a blast and it's part because they're erratic it's like they're unbelievably happy and then they're unbelievably hungry and then they're really hot and then they're really
upset and crying you know and then they're really scared it's like and all of that's just untrammeled and so it's really fun to be around them especially when they're happy because they're so happy that it's just you know you don't ever get to be that happy and so it's nice to be around a two year old because you can kinda Feel that again.
One of the horrible things about being a parent is that you spend a tremendous amount of your time making your child less happy.
And the reason for that is that positive emotion is very impulsive.
You know, because everybody says, well, you should be happy.
It's like, well, no.
When you're happy, you're actually quite stupid.
And so, because happiness makes you impulsive.
Happiness says, hey, things are really good right now, get what you can while the getting's good.
And so, as a, like if you're hyper-optimistic, manic will say, it's like every stock investment looks like a really good stock investment.
It's like you won't spend all your money because, look, there's those wonderful things everywhere and you could do such great things with them and then, you know, you spend all your money.
and then you crash and you think, oh god, my life's over, you know, because I just I just spent all my money on all this useless stuff and it's all under the grip of impulsive positive emotion you know, and so when you're telling your kids to be quiet and settle down it isn't because they're making a lot of noise being in pain it's because they're running around like wild baboons having a blast and disrupting things like mad,
you know, and so Kids, you've got to settle down, you know, like quit having so much fun!
And it's kind of awful that you do that, but you do.
And that's because the emotions and the motivations have to be brought into like a relationship with one another within the person so that, you know, one thing I remember with my son who is quite, he's quite disagreeable by temperament which is actually a good thing as far as I'm concerned although it brings its own challenges and so with my daughter when she was misbehaving she was pretty agreeable and You know,
if she was misbehaving, I could basically just look at her, and then she'd quit.
But my son, it was like, that was just nothing.
You're looking at me?
It's like, no, that's just not going to go anywhere, man.
And so then I'd tell him to stop, and that really wasn't having much of an effect either.
He'd just sort of maybe laugh or run away or whatever.
I mean, he was a tough little rat.
and, you know, what I would do with him is he would be doing something and I'd interfere and he'd get upset and, you know, angry and so then I'd get him to sit on the steps and I told him, this is when he was about two I said, look, you're going to sit on the steps, that's time out you're going to sit on the steps until you've got control of yourself and you can come back and be and play the family game again I basically said be a civilized human being and then you're welcome again and so he'd sit on the steps it was so interesting to watch because
he was just enraged he'd sit there like have you ever seen a two year old have a temper tantrum?
it's really quite the bloody phenomena if you ever saw an adult do that you'd like, you'd call 911 right away it's like oh my god!
and I've seen adults do that you know because people say with borderline personality disorder we'll have temper tantrums and it's like Man, you want to be about 30 feet away from that person, that's for sure, it's really, but in kids, it's like, well first of all, they're only this long, so how much trouble can they really cause?
But it's like, you know, they're just completely gone, they're like on the floor, their face is red, they're just furious, like way more furious than you ever get, if you're even vaguely socialized They're just outraged and they're kicking and hitting the ground and like,
it's like a little epileptic fit of anger, you know, they're completely controlled by their rage and we took care of one kid for a while who, he was actually a pushover, that kid, you could get him to behave by, you know, kind of shaking your finger at him but his mother thought he was really tough because he had her figured out and one of the things he would do is have a temper tantrum and during the temper tantrum he would hold his bloody breath until he turned blue It's like, try that.
Like, you know, that's your homework.
Go home and have a temper tantrum, and while you're doing it, hold your breath until you actually turn blue.
It's like, you won't be able to do it.
You don't have the willpower of a two-year-old, that's for sure.
That little varmint man, he'd just have a fit, and then he'd hold his breath, and then he'd turn blue.
It was like, wow, that's amazing.
And we would just, like, let him do it, you know.
He'd turn blue and everybody would be gone and he'd come out of it, you know, and it didn't work.
So he just quit doing it.
I think he did it like twice and he figured out, oh well, that's a lot of work for very little outcome.
You know, it's not like two-year-olds are stupid.
They're not stupid.
They're probably smarter than you.
But they're not civilized by any stretch of the imagination.
And so anyways, back to my son.
I'd put him on the steps and he'd be like just like enraged and trying to get himself together, you know?
And I'd wait a few...
I got a strict rule which was as soon as you're done You're welcome again.
So, it's completely under your control.
You get yourself calmed down.
You come and talk to me again.
If you're calm enough so I like you, then you're welcome back in the family.
No grudge, nothing.
And so, it's harder than you think.
Like, people think they like their kids.
It's like, don't be thinking that.
They're hard to like.
They're little monsters.
And they're very, very pushy and provocative.
And so, lots of parents do not like their children.
And they do terrible things to them their whole life.
So, it's no joke.
And, It's very common, and you know, that was Freud's observation, fundamental observation that a lot of psychopathology is rooted in the family, and you can be sure of that when you hear about some mother who has done something terrible to her child which happens reasonably frequently you know perfectly well that she has very terrible capacity to discipline the child has just provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and provoked her and it just happens to be a day where her new boyfriend left and she's quite hung over and she got fired and it's like That's
the wrong day to provoke her.
And then she does something that is not good.
And you read about it and you think, well how could that happen?
How could anyone do that?
that's how they do it and so, and kids are very provocative just like little chimps chimps will, the adolescents will like throw little pebbles and sticks at the sleeping larger males and bug them and that teasing, which it is,
that teasing turns into full-fledged dominance challenge behavior once the adolescent males get big enough to do it and so when you're being provoked by a child, which they provoke you all the time you're trying to figure out, well just Where are you exactly?
What happens if I do this?
What happens if I do this?
You know, and how else are they going to figure it out?
Anyways, he'd sit on the steps and just...
He's just enraged and trying to control himself and I'd watch that and then, you know, I'd come back after about two minutes or whatever and he'd still be...
I'd say, well, you know, have you got yourself under control?
Are you ready to get off the steps?
He'd go, no!
Not yet!
And then, you know, he'd get himself under control, and then he'd come back, and you know, he'd be contrite, and then I would like him right away, you know, you gotta watch that, you know, because you don't like being dominated by a two-year-old.
No one does.
And so, if the child hasn't mastered himself and started to act in accordance with the prevailing social norms, you won't like them.
Well, you think, oh, yeah, I will, because, you know, I'm a good person.
It's like, no, you won't.
And no, you're not a good person, so don't be thinking about that at all.
It's just not true.
So, When he was contrite, then he'd come and then, you know, we'd just go on like nothing had happened.
Because that's what you want to do, right?
As soon as you get compliance, especially if the compliance is in the best interest of the child, you want to reward it instantly, right?
That's the right thing to do.
And you could just see him gaining control over himself.
So really what was happening is, In his mind, in his brain, we'll say there was a war between the psyche, the ego that was starting to become integrated, you know, and starting to become a continuous person, an identity.
And it's fragile in two-year-olds, and it can be disrupted all the time, and it is, that's why they're so hyper-emotional.
It's fragile, that little ego, and it doesn't have a lot of power.
And so what you want to do is reward it when it wins.
You know, when he gets control over the underlying motivations, you want to say, hey, good work man, good work kid, you did it, you know, you got yourself under control, way to be!
And the kid's really happy about that because it's actually not that much fun to have a temper tantrum.
It's exhausting, you know, it takes you over.
Question?
Oh, just a pat on the head, or you know, that's good.
Kind word, you know, or whatever.
Yeah, notice it.
Pay attention.
That's it, that's it.
Pay attention.
And that's a great, it's a great thing to know with people.
Like in your relationships, here's the key to a good relationship.
It's not the only one, but watch your person carefully, carefully, carefully.
And whenever they do something that you would like them to do more of, Tell them that that was really good.
And mean it.
And it's not manipulative, because if it's manipulative it won't work.
It's like you have to say, wow, I'm so glad you did that.
And you have to be precise.
Here's what you just did that I thought was great.
Oh boy, that's so nice that you noticed.
I can't believe that you noticed.
It's like, you know, you do that 20 times and the person will be like the rat that's just pushing the lever for cocaine, you know.
So, but no, I'm serious.
Skinner established this.
B.F. Skinner noticed this a long time ago.
Reward is intensely useful in terms of modifying behavior, but the problem is that it's really hard to notice when things are going right, right?
Because you're kind of primed to notice when things are going wrong, and so you use threat and punishment more often as agents of shaping the people that you're around, because, you know, when everything's going right, it's like What are you going to say?
Everything is going right.
It turns to zero.
You just assume it.
And that's not good.
That's not good.
You want to pay attention.
And if your person, your children, your wife, whoever, your mother, your sister, if you want them to If you want to rectify your relationships with them, and I'm not saying to do this in a manipulative way, it won't work.
But if they do something that's promoting harmony and peace and goodwill, it's like, attend to it, tell them that you noticed.
It's like, it's so useful.
And you have to get rid of your grudges and your resentment to do that, right?
Because you're kind of mad at your sister, and then you notice she does something good.
You think, there's no goddamn way I'm going to reward her for that.
So you ignore her when she does something good.
It's like, That's brilliant, that is.
Because then you've just punished her for doing what you want.
And people do that with their kids all the time.
You know, because they let the kids dominate them.
Then they get resentful.
Then the kid will run up to them to show them something that's kind of spectacular.
And they'll, they're not happy.
They're like, oh yeah, that's, you know, I'm working.
You know, little kid is all sad about that.
And he's just learned something.
So, and it's not, perhaps, what you want him to learn.
and so you have to keep your relationship with your children pristine and that means that you can't hold a grudge or resent them and that means that you have to help them learn how to behave so that you like them and that way if you like them and you're kind of sensible and maybe your partner also likes them so you know you got a consensus going there there's a reasonable possibility that other people will actually like them too including other children and then the world will open up to them you know,
then you'll bring them to people's houses and the people will actually smile at them and give them a pat on the head instead of thinking, oh my god, that brat's coming to visit again, I wonder what he'll break this time you know, and that's just a horrible thing for your child to experience repetitively in situation after situation all they learn is that adults have a false smile but they're really lying all the time God!
It's like a bit of hell.
And there's a lot of children who are trapped in that.
It's really awful to see.
I can see kids like that when I walk down the street.
You know, it's like...
They're little doomed things and there they are.
And you know, they're screwed in 15 different ways and there's no way out of it.
It's really awful.
So, I would not recommend that you do that.
It's better to notice that you're a bit of a monster.
Or a lot of a monster.
And notice that...
you are much happier with the people around you when they behave in accordance with reasonable social norms and then you actually feel genuinely connected to them and you want to work on their behalf so that everything works out but if you think you're a good person and that you'd never do anything that was harmful to your children then you can just forget about that because you'll never take it seriously enough to actually learn so Alright,
so anyways, we live inside this story, as far as I can tell and, you know, we kind of put the story together inside us to begin with and that happens between 2 and 4 when you're integrating those motivations and emotions into a relatively functional unity right,
and that does happen between two and four if you don't have your kids socialized by the time they're four you might as well just forget it and I know that sounds terribly pessimistic and all of that but I know the literature on trying to rectify anti-social behavior in children and after the age of four it's virtually impossible no matter what you do and the reason for that is that kids who are still acting like two-year-olds when they're four You know, they're twice as old, eh, as a two-year-old.
That's a lot of difference, like, a four-year-old is an adult as far as a two-year-old is concerned.
And so if the four-year-old is still acting like a two-year-old, that's really not good!
And other four-year-olds will come up and, you know, do a little play invitation, like a dog, and, you know, the kid, the two-year-old, four-year-old has no idea how to react to that, and so the more mature kid thinks Oh well, how about I play with you?
And then that kid is isolated from the peers and after four you're mostly socialized by your peers and so you just fall farther and farther and farther behind you're more and more alienated, you're more bitter and angry and no wonder and it's just not, you can't rectify it so So that's useful to know.
It's like your job from 2 to 4 is to turn your child, help turn your child into a functional unity and by 3 they should be functional enough as a unity within themselves so that they can concentrate on a voluntary goal for some reasonable length of time which is also why it's useful to let them spend some time alone so that they can learn to amuse themselves because if they can't amuse themselves they're not going to be able to play with other kids and then by three they're sorted together enough so if another three
year old comes along they can at least play in parallel and may also start, may be able to start playing A cooperative game.
And so, that's often a fantasy game.
You know, pretend.
And so what the kids will do, sometimes they mediate it verbally, but sometimes it's more acted out.
It's a combination of the two.
They'll assign each other roles.
They'll do this with you, too.
It's like, let's have a tea party.
Well, what does that mean?
Well, it means let's sit down and act out the act of sharing food and see if we can get that right.
That's what the kid is saying.
We'll have a little tea party.
You know, it's very important because human beings share food.
Like, this is a major thing to get right, man.
And so, the kid will say, well, you be the mom and I'll be the dad and, you know, we'll make a little fort and that'll be our house and we'll go in there and we'll run our roles and, you know, we're acting out, we're acting out family and and if we're both reasonably civilized as three-year-olds we can concentrate on that goal we can establish that little fictional world we can negotiate a mutual goal and then we can run the simulation and that's what kids are doing when they're pretending it's bloody brilliant,
that's play man, it's like it's brilliant, it's absolutely unbelievable because you know, if you're going to play mom, let's say it isn't like you It isn't exactly like you imitate your mom, because imitation would be, you know how annoying it is when someone copies you?
So, you know, you're sitting like that, and then I do the same thing.
It's like, that's really annoying!
And that isn't what kids do!
They don't act out the precise actions that they've seen the target of their fantasy display, they're way more sophisticated than that, they watch their mother, let's say, like hawks and then they start to extract out regularities in their behavior which is mum behavior,
let's say, that's what makes you mum, whatever that is and then, so it's like they look at you across time and they extract out the regularity that makes you mother and then they try to embody that regularity in their pretend play and then they sort of encapsulate or incorporate the spirit of being a mother or being a father or whatever or an animal because they'll play at that so that's what they're doing they're using their body and their mind as dramatic forms it's really amazing you know,
it's so sophisticated and no other animal does that as far as we know and it's the platform on which language is based you know, first of all we imitate and language is imitation, right?
because we use the same words, right?
so it's imitation It's a big deal.
So you can act out someone else, and then you can conceptualize them in fantasy, and it's only way after that that you could maybe articulate it.
Like, what does it mean to be a mother?
So I could have you write an essay about that.
Well, you'd have to think about it, right?
You wouldn't just automatically know, but if someone hands you a baby, and you know, you're not completely Socially blind, you roughly know what to do.
After you're done with your initial nervousness, you roughly know what to do.
Don't drop it.
That's a good rule.
You've probably figured that one out at least.
You know, don't yell at it.
Don't startle it.
Give it a little pat, maybe.
Try hugging it.
Maybe you go like this, you know, you make eyes at it.
You know what to do.
It's built into you, you know.
It's built into you.
But that doesn't mean you could lay it out as a series of rules about how to be a mother.
It's like you could write a whole damn book about that.
so, alright, so anyways, you live in this story and first of all, you get your own story together and that's by integrating your motivations and emotions together under social influence you know, Piaget kind of states that before the age of three,
kids can't really play they're egocentric, it's not exactly right, because you're actually playing with your mother from the time you're born, so even with breastfeeding, that's a social interaction it's a complex cooperative endeavor and it's often hard for mother and infant to get that right because it's complicated and it requires a lot of social interaction like,
well the child has to learn not to bite for example you know, and the mother has to learn not to be too nervous there's a lot of social bonding, it's really complicated social interaction so the child, the infant, even at the earliest stages is already engaged in a complex social dynamic that's essentially play-oriented but it's,
you know, it's pretty primordial, it has to do mostly with the mouth child's mouth and tongue are already hardwired at birth so your child is most this is a Freudian observation as well your child is almost all mouth and tongue when it's born the rest of its body well you watch infants like even when they're How old?
Seven months?
Six months?
Four months?
I can't even remember now.
You know, they'll move their arm and they kind of go like this.
It's like, they have got no fine control.
It's more like they have, you know, clubs on the ends of sticks.
It's like that.
Their nervous system isn't thoroughly myelinated.
They don't have control over themselves.
But their mouth and tongue are already wired up.
And so, otherwise they wouldn't be able to swallow or nurse.
So, the oral element is extraordinarily important for a young child.
That's why kids put everything in their mouth.
You know, even when they're a bit older, it's like they see with their tongue, which, of course, everyone can do.
You know, if you put a block in your mouth, you can tell that it's like a cube.
You can tell that it's a cube without looking at it.
So you can see with your tongue and see with your hands.
You can even see, to some degree, with your ears.
Anyways.
so there's social interaction right from the beginning but for the point of simplification you might say well first the child organizes themself into a functional unity under the pressure of social dynamics and then they get unified enough so that they can attain unity with another child by setting up a fictional world and cooperating and competing within that because that's quite interesting too because You know, people often juxtapose cooperation and competition as if they're opposites, but they're not opposites at all.
Another Piagetian observation.
So you say, well is hockey a competitive game?
And people would say, well yeah, but then you think, well really?
Really?
No one brings a basketball.
Right?
So, we're going to play by the rules.
That's cooperation.
Well, are the teams competing against each other?
Well, yes, but they agree to compete within a particular landscape, and they all cooperate to maintain that landscape.
And so, you do the same thing when you're playing Monopoly.
It's like you're trying to win, but at the same time you're cooperating.
That's society, man.
That's society right there.
You're cooperating.
that's the big enclosure and within that there are regulated competitions but to separate those artificially and say well one's competition and the other's cooperation is just it's just not very smart,
it's not observant, that isn't how it works and games are intensely cooperative even if they're intensely competitive I mean The hockey teams are playing the same game, that's the cooperation, then each team There's competition within the team to be the best player,
let's say, but everyone wants that, because everyone wants good players to emerge, but you still cooperate like mad with your teammates, and if you don't pass and, you know, play like a reasonable person, then they're gonna not be happy with you.
And so, even within that competition, cooperation is regulating the interactions, and then you can think, this is a really good thing to think too, it's like, you know, people often say to their kids, It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.
And the kid, of course, has no idea what that means.
It's like, what do you mean?
Ah, I'm trying to win.
And the parent says, no, no, it matters how you play.
And the kid pushes them, and the parents really can't come up with a good explanation of why that's the case.
They might say, well, other kids won't play with you if you're...
Oh, there you go!
Because you could say...
This is something to think about, so...
There's a game And there's a victory within the game But then there's the set of all games And there's victory across the set of all games And the victory that you attain across the set of all games isn't winning all the games It's being invited to play all the games And so if you play fair then you're playing a metagame and the metagame is how to win across the set of all games and so if you teach your child how to behave properly then they always get
invited to play and that makes them winners and that's that, and so if you understand that, you understand something phenomenally important about the emergence of morality you know, because people, moral relativists in particular, think that morality is relative,
you know and of course, human beings are diverse, just like languages are diverse and there's more than one playable game, but there's not really more than one playable metagame It's like you're either the kind of person that other people want to play with, or you're not.
And if you're not the kind of person that other people want to play with, then you're a loser.
It's as simple as that.
And that's true of all cultures.
They might be playing different individual games within their culture, undoubtedly they are.
But the set of all games that they play is still common across cultures.
That's part of what makes us human.
And then you could say as well, We're actually evolved to detect people who are good at playing the set of all possible games.
And we actually know that.
That's not theoretical.
We know, for example, some things are easy to remember and some things are hard to remember.
Here's something that's easy to remember.
You play with someone and they cheat.
Man, you will remember that.
That's like in your mind.
That's not going anywhere.
and so you're great at detecting cheaters and you remember and that's because you can't trust a cheater and you shouldn't invite a cheater to play a game with you because they might cheat and so that's part of the innate morality system you remember cheaters because they aren't good at playing the metagame and of course you're evolved Of course you're adapted to the metagame, because you're the product of this immense evolutionary history, right?
And whoever your ancestors were, which is an unbroken string of successful reproducers going back three and a half billion years, you think about that, every single one of your ancestors successfully reproduced.
It's mind-boggling.
The chances against that are so, it's billions, billions to one, and here you are, the line of Three and a half billion years of success.
The whole world was trying to kill you that whole time, and here you are.
It's like, but, you know, you're still only going to last about 80 years.
So, but that's, you know, still, you know, good for you.
So anyways, there were lots of games that your ancestors were playing across that immense span of time Many, many, you know, lizard games and tree-dweller games and what?
And crustacean games, you know, that huge set of games.
And you're adapted to win across those games, all of them.
And that's built into you, man.
That's your central human nature.
That's what makes you social.
And it's not some mere cultural construct.
Quite the contrary.
It's so deeply embedded in you.
It's what you are.
Alright, so, well, this is a story, it's a game, too.
That's another way of thinking about it, you know.
Like, that's a monopoly game.
Well, what's the frame?
Well, that's the rules of the game.
And are they, why do you accept them?
Well, it's kind of arbitrary, right?
It's like, that happens to be the rules.
Hockey has different rules.
Basketball has different rules.
But what they share is that they have rules.
Okay, so there's a frame.
That's the rules.
And then within the frame, there's a goal.
And the goal is whatever the rules dictate.
You know, there's usually, it's usually the construction of a hierarchy of success within a frame.
And so that's what you play.
And so you play Monopoly and it's like, well, we'll accept the rules.
That's the social contract.
And then we'll each try to win.
And that'll be fun.
We find that amusing.
And if you lose, what do you say?
Well, you say, well, there's always another game.
And so that's great, so if you have that attitude and you play fair, then it doesn't matter that much that you, whether you win or lose, although you still want to try to win, because otherwise you're not a good player, but you accept defeat gracefully because you can play again!
And so, and you'll win some and you'll lose some, and so that's not so bad, you know, and even if you lose, well maybe you learn something, and you're doing a lot more than one thing while you're playing Monopoly, you know, you're having a conversation and Learning how to interact with people, and learning how to regulate your emotions, and so even if you lose, if you have any sense, you win, and if your kids have any sense, they know that!
And so, that way you buffer them against defeat.
It's like, yeah, yeah, you know, next time.
It's like, it's okay.
You should try, but it's okay.
And that's useful information for people to know.
So, alright, so you're always in one of these little frameworks, and there's just no getting out of it, so, and that's because, you know, at any given moment, this is like, it's like field theory, there used to be psychological theories that talked about the field of human experience, something like that, and this is kind of what that is,
this is a field, and basically what happens is you parse out a little part of the world, say, And, so, an amount you can handle, so let's say it has some duration, you're not aiming at something fifty years in the future, it's because how the hell are you going to do that?
There's too many variables, you know?
So, you're aiming at some handleable amount of time, and you posit a goal in there, and you plot your root, and then That tells you what's up, and tells you what's down, because up moves you towards the goal, and down moves you away from the goal, and that sets up your motivational framework, so that you have something worth attaining.
You know, that's a really interesting thing to know, too, is like, why have a goal?
Well, it's easy.
No goal, no positive emotion.
Because you experience positive emotion by noticing that you're moving towards a goal.
And so if you don't have a goal, well, you can't have any positive emotion.
So, you better have a goal.
And so, you might say, well, what should the goal be?
Well, we could start by saying, well, any goal is better than none.
And then we might say, well, it should be a goal that other people will let you pursue, because otherwise it's going to be kind of difficult.
Maybe they'll be even happy to help you pursue it, that would even be better.
and maybe it's a goal that would enable you to learn how to pursue other goals while you pursue that goal boy, that would really be good and so you can see that your goal is parameterized but that doesn't mean that any old goal works it means there's some goals that work nicely and some not so nicely there are playable games and non-playable games that's a good way of thinking about it and you want to have a playable game and there's a lot of them lawyer, plumber, you know Actor, whatever.
They're playable games.
And it's not obvious which one's better, but it's certainly obvious which ones are sustainable and which ones are worse.
So there's a set of playable games and you need to extract from that set of playable games a game that suits you.
and that would be partly due to your temperament you know, because extroverted people want to play an extroverted game and highly neurotic people want to play a safe game and agreeable people want to play a generous game and disagreeable people want to play a game that's highly competitive so they can win and you know fine, but they're all within the realm of playable games and that means they're socially acceptable as well and so that means it isn't just arbitrary.
It isn't just relative what you decide to do.
It's heavily parameterized.
There's only There's a set of playable games, and it's large, the set is large, but there are commonalities within it, and that's why there are commonalities, that's why morality has a common basis, fundamentally, and so that's partly what we're trying to investigate, is like, what does ap mean?
What does it mean?
Is there such a thing?
Now, one thing to remember is that If you don't erect a hierarchical structure with something to aim at, you've got no positive motivation.
Because you experience positive motivation in relationship to a goal, not from attaining the goal.
That's satisfaction.
Besides, it's fleeting.
You know perfectly well.
You graduate from university, poof!
Next day you have a problem.
Which is what do you do next?
And that's a tough problem.
It's not like you've solved your problems by winning that game.
You just introduced the problem of having to introduce another game.
So it's unreliable as a source of positive emotion, but what's reliable is you set a goal.
And you try to attain it.
And then that gives your life that literally Provides your life with meaning.
That's what meaning is.
Now, it's more than that, but that's what it is.
And so then you might ask yourself, well, what's a really good goal?
Well, that's what we're trying to figure out.
What's a really good goal?
And now, okay, so you got that.
So now I'm going to walk through, at least partly through, we'll see how far we get, I'm going to walk through Pinocchio with you, because that's what the movie's about.
It's hard to say how it came about, like it was written, a story, by a guy named Claudi, C-O-L-L-O-D-I It's quite a bit different, the story, that story, the written one from the Disney version The Disney version was a product of the collaboration of geniuses of animation, essentially, so they were artistic geniuses Great at capturing motion and emotion and all of that Stellar at that.
And imaginative, tremendously imaginative, but collectively imaginative.
And so they put together a collective product.
And you might say, well, how did they do that exactly?
It's like, well, they were good storytellers.
What does that mean?
Well, It means you know the story that works and the story that doesn't.
And maybe partly what you do is you kind of think out a story and you think, well what if this happens?
Well, maybe this should happen.
Oh!
That's the thing!
Oh!
That would work!
It's like the little flash of inspiration, right?
It's like you got a piece of the puzzle that fits, you think, yeah, that will work there!
And then you talk to the other people and you generate ideas and someone says, well what if they do this?
And everyone goes, no, no, no, that's just not believable, no one is going to buy that.
And someone else has a little revelation.
They say, well, you know, it makes some sense somehow if they do this.
And everybody goes, oh yeah, that really works.
It's like, why?
Why?
Why?
Well, you don't know.
You don't know why it works.
But it works because It works because it's the right story.
And so what does that mean?
Well, it's kind of associated with this metagame idea.
You know, it's like there's a story that you should be acting out that works across games and you have an inkling of it, you have a notion of it, you have a vague apprehension of it.
It's sort of built into you.
That's archetype.
That's an archetype.
and so then when you read a story that works you're just entranced by it and you all know that you go to a movie and it's a great movie and it's like you're just blown away you know, a movie can pull you in and turn you into one of the screen characters and like run you through a huge set of emotions I saw this movie once about South America,
it started with this guy running out of a subway naked and he didn't know where he was and it turned out that he had been absconded by the totalitarian death squads and he couldn't remember anything about himself and he went back to his village and Basically what happened was that he ended up back in the totalitarian death grip and it showed how the fascist state had saturated the village completely and so it was a tragedy and you could see with every
action that this amnestic guy, as he recreated himself and remembered his identity was going to travel down exactly the same road because nothing had changed and by the time, I wish, I've looked for what that movie was for years I've never been able to find it again but when the movie was over,
every single person in the theater was crying and not just a little bit, it was like they were just out of it it was brilliant, terrifying movie and that meant there was something right about it, man And it got people.
And you might say, you know you have dim apprehensions about the world.
and some of those are instinctual and some of those are a consequence of your experience and it's like the pieces are fragmented but if you get away from them a long ways you can see how they fit together but they're fragmented and then you go see a story and those pieces go click, click, click, click, click and you think, wow, that's what, that's how that works out that's what that means and that produces that overwhelming emotion and that's partly how you make yourself Transparent to yourself, you know?
You go experience a story, you go watch a story, you tell a story and you start to find out who you are by doing that My nephew had a dream at one point Someone made a little animated thing out of it and put it on the internet, which is quite cool.
So anyways, he was having night terrors and he ran around like a little knight, you know, K-I, K-N-I-G-H-T, knight.
And he had a little, you know, armor and a sword, and he'd run around the house with a little knight hat on, being a knight!
And he was only like four or something, and he'd watched a lot of Disney movies, a lot of movies, so he kind of got the knight idea, it was...
He's acting that out and he was having these terrors at night, right?
So he'd go to bed with his little night hat and his sword and he'd put him on his bed and then at night he'd wake up screaming and that happened for a very long time and so when I went to visit, you know, I found out that this was happening and he had a night terror, so the kid wakes up with night terrors screaming but can't remember anything generally speaking so, anyways this was happening and so it happened one day and I was sitting with him and his family at the breakfast table and I said, did you have a dream?
and he said, oh yes, I had a dream I said, well, you know, what was your dream?
and he said, well, I was out on this field and I was surrounded by these dwarfs and they came up to my knees and they were, they didn't have any arms, they had big feet and they were Covered with hair and there was a cross shaved at the top of their head and they were all greasy and they had huge beaks and everywhere I went they jumped at me with their beaks and there was lots of them and everybody was very quiet after he said this because it was like that,
oh, that's why you're screaming at night it's like, yeah, okay and so so, and then he said, but at the background there was a dragon and the dragon would blow out smoke and fire and then it would turn into these dwarfs So it's like, man, that kid had a problem, right?
It was like, well, what are you going to do?
You fight off a dwarf?
Who cares?
It's like, puff!
Ten more!
That's life, man!
That's life!
Really!
That's the hydra!
You cut off one head, seven more grow!
That's life!
Snakes everywhere!
And you get rid of one, there'll be more!
And so he figured that out.
It's a hell of an existential shock when you're four.
And so he's like, he's a knight.
He's thinking, what do I do about these dwarfs?
Well, there's too many of them, but there's a dragon.
Well, so I said, well, what could you do about that?
Right?
Loaded question.
It implies that you could do something about that.
Well, he kind of knew that, which is why he was running around like a knight.
He kind of figured that out.
And he said, well, I get my dad.
and I jump up on the dragon and I poke out both of its eyes with my sword and then I go right down its stomach to the place where the fire came out, the firebox and then I carve a piece of the firebox out and I make a shield and that would be the end of that and I thought, wow!
Good work, kid!
Like, you really got it, right?
It's the central human story There's the terrible unknown, right?
Fire breathing, generating trouble and what do you do?
You confront that, you confront that and by confronting it you get stronger, that's the shield and that's what a human being is and that's right, that's exactly right and that was the end of his night terrors by the way which seems too good to be true but it is actually true because I followed up with his mother for a long time and that was that he catalyzed that part of his identity He adopted the role of the mythological hero,
and that's what he needed to do, because there's a dragon and a bunch of dwarfs, like what the hell are you going to do about that?
Run?
That's not going to help.
You know, if you run in a dream like that, the dwarfs multiply and they get bigger, and you get smaller as you run.
It's like, that's not a good, that is not a good solution.
And people do that in their life all the time.
and so the dwarves get bigger until they're giants and they get smaller until there's nothing left of them and then there's no recovery that is not good now, okay, so now I also propose to you that there's a symbolic structure to the world it's a meta-structure,
I would say I think these categories are truly real and they're basically this unexplored territory, there's explored territory and there's you and unexplored territory is the source of great riches and it probably will kill you and explored territory is your culture and it crunches you into submission and conformity and turns you into a civilized being and you're stuck with both of those and then there's you and you know,
you're kind of admirable and cool and you do a lot of decent, wonderful, amazing things and there's things about you that are just horrible and you know about them, and you're stuck with them, and that's the world and that's the landscape of the world and what you'll see,
if you pay attention, is that people who are ideologues like Rousseau, or say, like Hobbes but it doesn't matter, ideologues will tell you part of that story so environmentalists, for example, will say nature, that's pristine beauty Natural harmony French landscape It's a paradise,
especially if there are no people, it's a paradise And then culture is a rapacious monster And human beings driving that culture against nature are Monsters of a sort, and perhaps there should be fewer of them.
It's like, yeah, yeah, that's all true, exactly, dead on, right on, exactly right.
Is that movie called Avatar?
Yes, that's James Cameron's movie, right?
That's that story, yeah.
And hey, it's a good story.
It's even a mythological story, but it's only half the story.
The other story, you could think about it as a frontier myth, that's Star Trek.
Or Star Wars for that matter, mostly Star Trek.
It's like But we'll put it in context of the frontier myth, the myth that drew settlers into America, say, it's well there's a wild savage landscape out there that can be conquered by and settled and stabilized by civilization and it'll be the heroic pioneer who does it.
It's exactly the opposite story of the environmental story which is actually why I think the environmental story eventually emerged it was, you know, the frontier story had a lack and it missed half of the world and so the other story had to come up and it did and if you take both of those stories,
even though they're exactly opposite to one another if you know both of those stories, then you know the whole story and it's really weird, you know, because one of the propositions of formal logic is, it's a fundamental proposition, is that something can't be itself and it's opposite at the same time it's like That's true for some sorts of things.
It's true for logical claims.
But it's completely wrong in this particular situation because things are what they are and they're opposite at the same time.
And that makes it very, very difficult to...
That's why a dragon hoards gold.
It's like, what's up with that?
Well, it'll eat you.
And it will.
But it has gold.
Well, so what do you do about that?
Because it's paradoxical demands.
Well, what you want to do is face the dragon and get the damn gold.
That's what you want to do.
Well, you have to be a paradoxical being even to do that.
So, you know, in the Hobbit, for example, when, what's his name?
Frodo, right?
It's not, or it's Bilbo.
It's Bilbo in the Hobbit.
You know, he's kind of this little underdeveloped Overprotected shire dweller and he's called on a great adventure to go and find the dragon and he has to become a thief in order to manage it.
Well, that's pretty weird, you know, it's like, well, it's because As a good citizen, he's just not enough to conquer a dragon.
He has to also become a bad citizen in some sense.
He has to incorporate the part of himself that's monstrous, let's say, and develop that and hone it.
And that's to say that, well, if you're harmless, you're not virtuous.
You're just harmless.
You're like a rabbit.
A rabbit isn't virtuous.
It just can't do anything except get eaten.
It's not virtuous.
If you're a monster and you don't act monstrously.
Then you're virtuous.
But you also have to be a monster.
Well, you see this all the time.
Harry Potter's like that too.
It's like he's flawed, he's hurt, he's got evil in him.
He can talk to snakes, man.
He breaks rules all the time.
All the time.
He's not obedient at all.
But, you know, he has a good reason for breaking the rules.
And if he couldn't break the rules, him and his little clique of rule-breaking, you know, troublemakers, if they didn't break the rules, They wouldn't attain the highest goal.
So it's very peculiar, but it's a very, very, very, very common mythological notion.
You know, the hero has to be...
The hero has to be a monster.
But a controlled monster.
Batman is like that.
You know, I mean, it's everywhere.
It's the story you always hear.
Meaning, you have to be more precise I feel like, because everyone is moral, but in order to imagine you have to define the moral you have to kind of go into...
Well, that's a good question, you know, because one question is you know, you're kind of implicitly moral insofar as you're socialized but that's sort of procedural, it's just built into you this is different, this is also becoming conscious of it and expanding out your personality into dimensions that it wouldn't normally occupy This happens to people all the time.
So, for example, lots of my clients, my clinical clients, are too agreeable.
And they're generally women, because women are more agreeable than men, but not always, because I've had agreeable men as clients as well.
And what happens is, they're resentful, and they don't know how to stand up for themselves, and it's because they're very compassionate by nature, and so, if you're entering into a negotiation with them, they'll let you win.
Well, that's not so good, because, you know, you need to win too.
Especially if you're in an organization of adults, where there's a struggle, right?
When you have kids, you can let them win, especially infants.
Like, you have to let them win, and that's partly why compassion is so necessary.
But as a basis for negotiation between adults, it's like, sorry, it's insufficient.
You have to be a bit of a monster so that you can say no.
and so a lot of what you do in psychotherapy is treat people's anxiety and depression, that's a huge chunk of it help them straighten out the way they think, that's a huge chunk of it, but another chunk of it is well let's toughen you up, you know, let's put you in a position where you can bargain, let's teach you how to assert yourself and stand up for yourself and that's assertiveness training and it's a huge chunk of psychotherapy and you need to learn it,
it's like, because part of how you regulate your interactions with other people is to negotiate and you cannot negotiate unless you can say no you can't do it and it causes conflict to say no and if you don't like conflict which is basically the definition of being agreeable then you can't tolerate the conflict and so then you can't negotiate on your own behalf and so then you keep losing and you're bullied and you know it's not good then you get resentful and it's really not good so you have to
develop your inner monster a little bit and and then that makes you a better person, not a worse person it's weird, it's weird, but but that's just how it is outside of that Diagram is chaos itself and that's the chaos from which things emerge now I can't tell you much about that yet because it's too damn complicated But I think the best way to think about chaos
is as potential That's one way of thinking about it.
It's also that place you end up when you don't know what to do It's the source of all things, but it's also the terrible predator, the terrible eternal predator that lurks beyond the explored domain.
It's a winged dragon.
And it's winged, who knows why?
Matter and spirit, that's partly what it is, and I'll explain that later.
It's also potentially the predatory beast that's been after us for forever.
And the winged predator that picked us off from the sky.
So primates, for example, monkeys have Some monkeys have three specialized alarm cries, one is for snakes and that usually means hit the trees and then one is for leopards and that means hit the trees and go out on a skinny branch because the leopard can't get to you and then there's one for like birds of prey which means hide somewhere on the ground so that you don't get picked off and it's like well That's what that is.
That's what that is.
And that's chaos.
And it's expanded into much more than that.
And then I showed you, I don't remember if I showed you this, but this is a symbolic representation of mother nature, father culture, and the suffering individual.
But it's all, that's all positive.
There's no negative elements there.
But that's okay.
That's a partial representation.
And those things are sacred in some sense because they are representative of an ultimate reality.
Of an ultimate reality.
The sacrificial individual here, the suffering individual, well that's pretty straight forward.
It's like, that's what, that's life.
That's suffering.
That's life.
That's what happens to the individual.
And so, everyone is looking at that.
It has power, that idea.
Well, it's because, you know, culture supports the suffering individual, and culture is nested inside benevolent nature, and that's part of the story of the world.
And it's part of the story we're trying to figure out and make articulate.
We've been doing that for thousands of years, trying to make this story articulate.
And it's not yet articulated.
We're only getting it, we're only getting it.
And we basically do that now mostly with movies and stories and fiction and that sort of thing.
We still don't have it articulated.
I think Jung came closer than anyone else, Jung and Eric Neumann who was one of his students, came closer than anyone else ever has to actually articulating that and that's what Jung was trying to do, is to take all these images, archetypal images Instinctual images and say, what do they mean?
What do they mean?
What do they mean?
And he got a long ways on that, although his writing is quite obscure.
And it's obscure because, how the hell are you going to explain an image like that without being obscure?
It's like, it's insanely complicated.
And it's not linear.
It's not a linear thing.
That's why it's in a picture.
Because a picture presents everything at once.
And you want to take that apart linearly, Jesus, it's just impossible.
But we've been struggling to do that, really, we've been struggling to do that from the time we became self-conscious.
You know, what is the world about?
How should we live in it?
Well, that's a partial answer, and it's a culture-bound answer, obviously.
But you see, archetypal representations like this in many cultures, so for example, the image of the virgin and child, that way predates Christianity.
Like the Egyptians, that was Isis and Horus, that goes back, oh, we have no idea how far thousands and thousands of years before the emergence of Judaism and Christianity way back before that, and no doubt back into prehistory itself, because a culture that doesn't hold the mother and child as sacred, dies!
Obviously!
Because, obviously!
So, it has to be held as something that you revere.
Which at least means you don't kill mothers and children.
It at least means that.
And that's an instinct, you know, it's an instinct.
It violates you to do that, and thank God.
Alright, let's take 15 minutes.
So, I told you about this a little bit last week, but, you know, one of the motivations I had for thinking the things that I thought through, the motivation I had for thinking them through was because, well,
it seemed self-evident to me, let's say, and I think that was partly from reading Jung, but that just helped me clarify it, was that, you know, it was sort of Jung's contention that We had a organic development of a metaphysical ethic that was embedded in religious tradition and that basically unfolded let's say in the west till about 1600,
1500, something like that and then science emerged and we got unbelievably technologically powerful and using a certain view of the world, you know, we're so technologically powerful but we're still not very wise And that just seems to me to be a bad combination.
And I thought about that a lot.
It's like, okay, well, how do you handle the combination of exceptional technological power and an impaired ethic, let's say, something like that, underdeveloped ethic, or one even in which you have no faith because, you know, it seems The foundational elements of it are irrational, they're in mythology, they're in religion, they don't fit well with the scientific world view.
How do you rectify that problem?
Well, that's a tough problem, you know, it's a crazy problem and certainly it was the problem that Jung was trying to address, there's no doubt about it and along with that went an associated problem which was, you know, what happened in the 20th century, which was so awful and in so many places it was just so unbelievably brutal and terrible and it was perpetrated by millions of people and they were individual people and they weren't that much different from normal people in fact they were normal people and so the
other thing that struck me was that it would be better if that sort of thing didn't happen anymore and so I was trying to figure out what the hell could possibly be done about that and you know part of Jung's contention was well you had to understand yourself as a monster if you were ever going to Maintain some control over the fact that you are, in fact, a monster and that that could come forth if the situation is correct.
It's like, okay, that seems reasonable.
And so...
Well, it seemed to me that, you know, people had to become wiser And, of course, that's a very difficult thing to figure out because you can even question whether there is such a thing as wisdom, you know?
And then I thought, well, that's what the universities are supposed to do, especially the humanities, mostly, in particular.
It's supposed to make you wise.
That's what it's for.
And it's doing a terrible job of that, in my estimation.
It's more decimating people, as far as I can tell, and undermining whatever ethic they have rather than making people wise.
And, but I think that we have to become wise.
I don't think there's a choice.
I think it's a matter of survival.
And it's more than that, because if you're wise in your own life, you're gonna have a way better life.
Like, incomparably better, because you're gonna sleep soundly with a good conscience at night.
And you know, people say that's worth more than money, and that's worth more than money.
I know lots of people who have lots of money, and let me tell you, Money protects you.
You're as well protected from the world by money right now as you ever will be for the rest of your life.
Because most of life's fundamental problems can't be solved with money.
You know, like rich people get divorced.
They have affairs.
Their children get sick.
They have all the problems you have and that's partly because you're already rich.
And so You might think that if you had a bunch more money, things would be better, but it's just not true.
In fact, in some ways they might be worse.
Because money can open up the possibility of all sorts of temptations to you that you just can't afford at the moment.
So, Well, so, like economics, we've already solved that problem fundamentally and we're rapidly solving it everywhere in the world, right?
I mean, the world economy is growing so damn fast that you can't even imagine how you could possibly make it grow any faster, it's crazy!
We've lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the last 15 years, you know The UN set a goal by 2015, I think it was to cut poverty by half If I remember correctly.
And they reached it two years early.
You know, it's like, it's unbelievable.
So...
Well, so then I started to...
try to understand what it might be to live and really what I was looking for was not so much to live a life that was wise but at least to live a life that wasn't pathologically unwise you know, and I thought of the sorts of things that people were doing to one another in the Auschwitz camps and in the Gulag Archipelago and all of that horror that was perpetrated on on people as definitely unwise whatever else you might say about it was unwise and so then I thought well maybe there's a
way to figure out how you could not do that and so that's and I think that that's my sense is that when you come to university to learn how to be a civilized person which is what's supposed to happen at university otherwise it's just a trade school and you might as well go to trade school as far as I'm concerned if you want to learn something that will get you a job it's like it's a lot faster and it's more certain and it's useful if
you're not being taught to be a citizen at university then Why bother with it?
So that's what we're trying to figure out And that's part of that cloud of mythological fantasy that surrounds our culture It's part of its deep history that we're trying to, you know, if you grapple with the humanities and with art and all of that,
that you're trying to master and incorporate and pull into you so that you're situated properly in history and you're not just floating in the void of, you know, this tiny individuality that's divorced from everything else.
You're weak in that circumstance.
Alright, so That's more of an explanation of why I'm trying to puzzle through these things than trying to puzzle through them with you.
So anyways, we talked about this song last week.
You know, I made a hypothesis to you.
We'll go through this quickly.
It's doggerel, it's not great poetry, but it's irrelevant.
It was a very popular song.
It's quite beautiful.
In the movie, it's actually sung by like a heavenly choir.
That's what it sounds like.
So it's got this cathedral.
You can imagine people singing it in a cathedral, essentially.
And so that's not accidental.
It's purposeful.
You know, it partakes of that What would you call it?
It partakes of that aesthetic, that's it.
So the filmmakers are implying that what is about to be shown to you has this divine element, essentially, and that that's signified by the choir of voices that sings this song.
And the song says, fundamentally, something like this.
Is that if you lift up your eyes above the temporal into the transcendent, and so that's what exists in the heavenly world, in the stars If you pick an ultimate goal, if you pick the right ultimate goal Then, anyone can do this.
That's the other thing.
It's democratic.
It's anyone can do this.
So that's the second proposition.
It doesn't matter who you are.
You can do this.
And so I think that's a reflection of the idea of the divinity of the individual.
It's like there's something about each individual that's valuable regardless of their idiosyncrasies and And so they have this potential that they can manifest.
And how do you manifest it?
Well, you pick the right goal.
And what's the right goal?
Well, it's high.
It's elevated.
It's above the mundane.
Now, what does that mean?
Well, you don't really know.
You don't really know.
That's why it's signified by a star.
A star is something that glimmers in the night, right?
So it's a source of light in the darkness.
and so there's a metaphor there, obviously there's a metaphor there and the star is the star that's the star of Hollywood you know, the person that you emulate, that's part of it because an ideal is, it's going to be a human ideal of some sort that you're aiming at and so the ideal human being is the star that you're aiming at, maybe it's something like that if that's what you're aiming at, you might say, well what should you aim at in life?
and one answer is, well why don't you aim at being Whatever you could be, that would be the best.
Now, you don't know what that is, exactly, because how do you know?
You know, but you could think, well, that would be really good if I could have it.
And then you could say, well, can I think of anything better than that?
And if the answer is no, then, well, why not go for that?
you know, and you might say, well, it's too ambitious, it takes too much responsibility it's like, yeah, yeah, those are definitely problems and one of the things that I've figured out over the years is that if you offered the person the opportunity you know, because people say, well, life doesn't really have any ultimate meaning it's like,
yeah, okay, fine, so, fine let's say it has an ultimate meaning but that in order to experience that ultimate meaning, you have to take on ultimate responsibility for what you do Well, that's a heavy price to pay, to have a meaningful life.
You know, and you might say, there's no damn way I'm going to do that.
I'll just go for the, you know, pointless I'll go for the trivial, pointless perspective, which, you know, is kind of hard on me existentially, but it frees me up.
I can do whatever the hell I want moment to moment.
I don't have any ultimate responsibility.
And so then you think, well, that's kind of a good deal.
And then, but that raises this weird specter of doubt, which is, well, when you hear people talk about the ultimate futility of life, is it because life is ultimately futile, or is it because they've decided that they would just as soon not adopt the responsibility and they use that real decision,
which is to not adopt the responsibility they rationalize that by proposing that life is ultimately meaningful, meaningless and like, you know, I kind of buy that, I really do think that's what's going on so but maybe not but it could be that if you want to have an ultimately meaningful life that you have to adopt ultimate responsibility Makes sense.
What might that mean?
Well, one thing it might mean is that, and I do think it means this, is that I think it was Alexander Pope, but I might be wrong about that, who said, nothing human is foreign to me.
And that's a hell of a statement, right?
Because if you think about all the things that human beings are capable of and they're capable of some like if you really want to know what people are capable of you should read about, read about unit 731 but I would not recommend it because if you read it you will never forget it and you will be sorry that you read it but you'll know anyways to say that nothing human is foreign to you that's a hell of a thing to say because that means that what other people have done you could do and that also means
you need to take responsibility for that That's no joke, you know, it's a big deal to do that in even a trivial manner.
Anyway, so, the idea is that you can elevate, if you elevate your viewpoint to some transcendent ethic, you want what's ultimately good, you really want that, whatever that is, you don't know, but that's what you're aiming at.
Says that, well then it says this strange thing that, well what you want will all of a sudden come to you.
Well, that's a proposition, and it's the proposition that's basically played out in the movie.
It's a hypothesis.
The hypothesis is the best way to orient yourself in life is to orient yourself towards the highest good that you're capable of imagining, and then aim at that, and then things will work out the best way they can for you.
And I think, I believe that's correct.
My observation of life has led me to see that that seems to be correct.
So for example, you don't get something you don't aim at.
That just doesn't work out.
And so lots of people aim at nothing, and that's what they get.
So, if you aim at something, you have a reasonable crack at getting it.
You know, you tend to change what you're aiming at a bit along the way, because like, what do you know?
You know, you aim there, you're wrong.
But you get a little closer, and then you aim there.
And you're still wrong, you get a little closer, and you aim there.
You know, as you move towards what you're aiming at, your characterization of what to aim at becomes more and more sophisticated.
And so it doesn't really matter if you're wrong to begin with, as long as you're smart enough to learn on the way, and as long as you specify a goal.
So specify a vague one.
I want things to be the best they could be.
And I'm willing to learn what best means as I go along.
Okay, so fine.
And then you get What you truly need, we'll say.
Well, maybe not.
No, if your heart is in your dream, what does that mean?
Well, that to me reflects this idea of a kind of integrated viewpoint.
One of the things Jung proposed was that as you integrate yourself psychologically, what happens is that your rationality integrates with your emotions they stop being opposed forces like the enlightenment idea is that rationality and desire are opposites and enemies in a sense and the Jungian notion is and the psychoanalytic notion I would say in general and the humanist notion,
even, perhaps, is that, no, that's not right what you want to do is you want to integrate your rationality with your emotions and your motivations they're not separable, even technically they have to work together, and that all has to be integrated with your body not only do you have to take your heart into account and notice what it is that you want and don't want But you also have to embody that.
You have to act that out in the world.
So fine.
So that's what that means.
And if you do that, then...
Well, then your horizons open up.
And I also believe that's true.
You know, I've known people in my life who are insanely successful.
Like, insanely successful.
And those people are...
Like, they're...
They're pretty damn together, man, you know, like they're tough, smart, strategic, generous, you know, they're always giving people opportunities, honest, like they've got it all, you know, and sometimes, now I'm not saying that everyone who's wildly successful is wildly successful because they've got themselves together,
but, you know, because there are crooks and, you know, there are people who gain status one way or another by nefarious means but that's a lot more unstable than you might think and I can't say exactly if you pursue that route you're going to pay for it like you'll have your money or whatever it is but it's not going to do much good for you so and so it does seem to me to be the people that have integrated themselves and that are
pursuing a noble goal, a high goal who Who actually are able to do remarkable things.
And remarkable things can be done at every level, you know.
It isn't like you have to change the world.
As a whole, it could be that you do something remarkable within your family.
You know, and that can be tremendously admirable.
You know, someone's got to take care of a family member if they're sick.
You know, like there's heroic acts that you can undertake in the local environment.
And maybe that will go un...
Unheralded, let's say, but that doesn't mean that it isn't remarkable.
I mean, I've met people who are so damaged, you just can't imagine it.
And yet, well, one person I met when I was in Montreal was this woman, and she was just ruined, man.
She looked like a street person, and she was so shy, she couldn't even look at you.
Like, she basically looked at the ground because it was like there was light emanating from everyone else, and she was way too timid and humble to even bear it.
You know, and partly what I was doing was trying to get her to straighten up and not look so street person-ish because it wasn't going very well for her in social interactions, you know.
But it turned out that that isn't what she came to the behavior therapy unit for.
And she had her aunt, I think she lived with her aunt who was like schizophrenic and then her aunt's boyfriend was an alcoholic who like went on long harangues about the devil and it's like, really man?
And she wasn't bright, this woman.
She really wasn't.
You know, she didn't really have a job and it was just like, it was just not good in every way.
And then she also, you know, had this unbelievable humility and But then, you know, it turned out what she wanted.
I just couldn't bloody well believe this, that she had this dog, and she used to walk it around.
She took care of the dog.
You know, that was a good thing.
And she'd actually been an inpatient at the Douglas Hospital, which is where I was working.
And there were inpatients in the Douglas Hospital, and this was back in the 80s, and those people were, like, she was like superwoman compared to the inpatients at the Douglas Hospital.
Those people looked like they were from a Hieronymus Bosch painting, because they had Deinstitutionalized everyone that could possibly be deinstitutionalized and so the only people that were left were people who couldn't be deinstitutionalized and so those would have been people who were in the psych ward for like 30 years and all of the hospitals were connected by tunnels underground and the patients used to hang out down there by the coke machine and so forth and one day I took my brother down there he was visiting and like it was just like he just turned white you know because it was just
Really, I don't know if you know Hieronymus Bosch, he's very an interesting painter to say the least, but that's what it was like, and so So here was her idea!
She'd come to the behavior therapy unit because she'd been in the inpatient ward for a while and she met some of these like, ruined people And she tried to get the hospital, she thought, well I'm walking my dog, you know, well maybe I could take one of these patients out for a walk.
You know, and she had been talking to the hospital administrators trying to get her, allow her to go, you know, take out one of these patients and go for a walk with her dog.
And basically she had come to the behavior therapy unit because that's what she wanted to do.
It's like, man, that person, she just blew me away, like, it's like, I just couldn't believe it.
Like, she had nothing going for her.
Like, nothing.
And yet, she wanted to, you know, help some people that were worse off.
And like, there just weren't that many people that were worse off than her.
Mind-boggling.
Mind-boggling.
And I never forgot it.
And it really, it really blew me away.
So, you know, there are opportunities for elevating your sights within your realm of capability wherever you happen to be.
and that's interesting, it's strange that that's the case She brings those who love, that's what that should say, the sweet fulfillment of their secret longing like a bolt out of the blue,
fate characterized here as feminine and that's what happens in the movie, the movie's got a Christian underbelly, like it's quite pronounced, but it's really a pagan movie in many ways, so for example there's no blue fairy and the reason I'm speaking of Christianity of course is because this movie was created in a culture where Christianity was still reasonably intact and of course it was fully informed by that but the underlying mythos is not precisely Christian even though it's informed by Christian Imagery,
there is this old idea, I think it's a Gnostic idea that the wisdom of God is feminine something like that, and anima which means soul is feminine and so there's an idea like that lurking here and anyways that's fate and that's the blue fairy in this particular movie you know she comes down from the star which is kind of makes her an avatar of God,
that's the idea and she's the transformative agent, she's really mother nature you know in her positive guise and that's why she can animate To animate something means to infuse it with soul.
That's what it means.
And she animates Pinocchio, right?
She's the force that frees him from his strings.
And so that's her fate.
Like a bolt out of the blue, the blue fate steps in and sees you through.
Well, what that means, it means something like It means something like this, is that you know, if you orient yourself properly in the world and we'll say that you do that by trying to attain the ultimate goal, whatever that happens to be then it's as if the world is on your side and things go well for you and I also believe that's true because Certainly, one of the things that's more or less self-evident is that, generally speaking, if you tell the truth, things go a lot better for you.
And the reason for that is, well, do you want to have reality opposed to you?
Or do you want to have reality backing you up?
It's like, it's a pretty straightforward question.
If you're truthful to the degree that you can be truthful, then reality is on your side.
That's a good thing, because there's a lot of it, and there isn't much of you.
Whereas if you take a deceitful approach to things, then, well, then you're You're challenging reality.
It's like, good luck with that, man.
It's like you're holding a plastic ruler in front of your face and bending it, you know.
And at some point, you're going to let go and it's going to, all that force that you've stored up and it's going to snap back and nail you.
And that happens.
I have just never seen anyone in my clinical practice ever get away with anything.
Nothing.
And it's not surprising.
It's like, if you're gonna mess with the structure of reality, like, it's gonna mess back.
And it does.
And it might not happen for years, and you might not even notice the connection.
I mean, part of what you do in psychotherapy is actually make those connections.
It's like, why did this horrible thing happen to me?
Well...
Who knows?
It's like, let's take it apart.
Who knows how far back we have to go?
It might even have things to do, not even with you, it might have things to do with the errors in your parents' relationship.
Like, you just can't mess with the structure of reality.
It stays warped until you straighten it out.
And it's not good.
So, So there's an injunction here, which is that, you know, if you follow this path, you pick a high goal, and you put your heart in it, you know, you commit to it, believe in it.
Believe means to love.
Believe and be love.
It's the same thing.
It means to act out.
And that's what the belief means.
Like, we think belief means to accept a set of propositions as true.
Well, that is one form of belief, but That's more like factual knowledge, right?
Belief is more like you decide that you're going to act something out.
You make a decision and then you act it out.
And that's a reflection of your belief.
You know, it's your staking yourself on something.
Do you know?
Well, no!
Because you can't.
You can't know.
You're bounded by ignorance.
You can make your best guess and move forward.
And you can do that with commitment.
But you have to believe in order to do that.
I guess that's why it's a wish.
Okay, so fine.
Well, then we have Jiminy Cricket.
That's Southern U.S. slang for Jesus Christ, by the way.
And the initial overlap isn't a fluke.
I mean, I'm sure the animators thought that was funny, and of course it is funny.
You know, in The Lion King, you know that baboon who's the shaman, basically?
Well, to begin with, he was kind of just a comic relief character, like a fool, you know?
but one of the things Jung mentioned about the fool is that the fool tends to turn into the savior it's an archetypal reality Bugs Bunny is sort of like that, you know, he's a trickster and as the movie developed the character of the fool baboon took on the full-fledged, you know, shaman priest element And, you know, okay, well, Jiminy Cricket, he's this little cricket, and he turns out to be the conscience, which is pretty damn weird.
It's like, a bug is your conscience, and a bug is JC, and it's like, that's a very strange juxtaposition of ideas.
Conscience, insect, savior.
It's like, what's up with that?
And so, well, what bugs you?
That's part of it.
Well, your conscience certainly bugs you, and you should pay attention to it.
It's just a little niggling, annoying thing that you can't quite, you can override it, right?
Obviously.
But, it's this, well, and he says, when he talks to Pinocchio later, he says, it's that still small voice, you know?
And I've asked people before, like in my personality class, like, because conscience is a weird thing, and, like, if I said to you, If you're about to do something that you know you shouldn't do, do you have a voice in your head that tells you that you shouldn't do it?
So how many people have had that experience?
Okay, good.
Now, so other people have a feeling instead of a voice, and so is there anybody here who's willing to admit it who has neither the feeling nor the voice?
Okay, so, and you know, it's a very understudied phenomena in psychology, this conscience.
I mean, people can be conscientious, and maybe those are people who listen to their conscience more, I don't know, but nobody's ever investigated it, and the fact that you do have this little voice, whatever it is, inside your head, it's like, what the hell's up with that?
You know, and it doesn't tell you what you want to hear.
At least as far as I can tell.
Now you could say, well that's the internal representation of society operating within you.
That would be a Freudian view, that's the superego.
And certainly, there's something to that.
But, I don't think it's necessary to presume that that's all there is to it and even if it is, you still wouldn't have the voice if you didn't have the biological potential to have that voice embed itself in you.
So even if it is socioculturally constructed, which it is in part, it's like language, it's like your language is socio-culturally constructed but the reason you can speak is because human beings can speak and if you have a conscience it's because human beings have a conscience and the contents of that conscience might differ but the fact that it exists what seems to me to be universal okay, so well that's the conscience and That's Jiminy Cricket.
And then the Cricket opens this book, and then you look at the book, and you think, well, what kind of book is that?
Well, it's got a spotlight on it, so it's being highlighted.
This is an important book.
And what kind of book is it?
Well, it's leather-bound.
It has a lock on it, you know.
It's not some cheap book.
It's kind of like a, you might think about, it looks like something from an old library, or maybe it looks biblical, whatever.
It's a major league book, and this bug is the introduction to the book.
So does that mean your conscience is the introduction to the book?
Well, maybe that is what it means.
It's certainly what's being played out in the movie.
Well, then the cricket opens the book, and so then what do you see?
Well, what does that look like?
What does it look like?
What does it remind you of?
Okay, so that's the Van Gogh painting.
It's a nativity scene.
It's the Christmas star.
And you know that, because what's going to happen?
Well, the hero is going to be born.
That's what happens, and so a star signifies that.
Why does a star signify the birth of an infant, let's say?
Well, because there's something miraculous about the birth of an infant.
And why would the infant be a savior, which is the Christian notion, say?
Well, because that's what the infant is, potentially.
Every infant.
And so that's how you should act about them.
And you know, one of the things that really is interesting about having little kids, and I loved having little kids, is that You have this opportunity to have this pristine relationship with someone, like a relationship you've never had with anyone, because the kid really is just there to love you.
Like, if you don't screw it up, you've got that.
And then you can keep that going, you know?
And you can try to keep that relationship, like, pristine.
And that's so fun.
It's so fun to try to do that.
It's really...
It's amazing.
It's an amazing thing.
And, you know, kids get a bad rap in our society, but...
It's an amazing thing to have little kids, and they are remarkable, and they give you back far more than they require from you, and partly because they treat you like you're valuable beyond belief, that's what the kid thinks about you.
It's like, that's pretty good.
So yeah, it's like something divine is going to happen, so okay, fine, you know, fair enough.
Well, there's the star signifying that.
And that's associated in some way with this star that you're supposed to wish upon.
Well, that's kind of odd.
Like, there's this relationship that's implicit.
The star that signifies the birth of the hero is the same star that you wish upon.
Well...
Perhaps the star that you're wishing upon is the wish that the hero will be born in your soul.
It's something like that.
You're aiming at an ideal.
It's the ideal you.
Whatever that would be.
Well...
You can certainly figure out what it isn't.
That's where you start, as far as I can tell.
You know, you know what you shouldn't be doing, and you could at least stop doing those things, and then see what happens, you know, and if you ask yourself, it's a meditative exercise, you know, and you do this with the autobiography to some degree, it's like, okay, Sit down for 10 minutes and have a little dialogue with yourself like you actually wanted to know the answer, you know?
So, you ask, well, I'm probably doing something stupid that if I quit doing, my life would be better, that I could quit doing, that I would quit doing.
and maybe it's not a very big thing because you're not very disciplined, but maybe there's something ask yourself that question man, you'll have an answer in no time flat like, well I should stop doing this, like yeah, I know, and I could, and you know, I won't, but, or maybe I would, but if I did, I know my life would be better it's like, you can figure that out immediately, and if you do that a hundred times Well, you'll be in way better shape.
So if you don't know what to do that's good, you could at least figure out what you shouldn't do that's just moronically, you know, pathetic.
And you can be sure you're doing like a dozen of those things at least.
You know, procrastinating or, you know, you know, everyone, that's what the conscience tells you.
And if you ask, it'll just tell you why you're, you know, stupid and insufficient.
And so, who wants to hear that?
But, what, maybe you could do something about it.
Okay, so the cricket comes into the village there and he sees this little house and there's a little fire in it and so it's kind of got a welcoming place it's a light in the darkness, this house, just like the star and so he hops towards it and then he ends up inside it and you know, there's a nice fire and you get to see the inside The inside, it's cozy.
You know, it's welcoming.
And then when you look around, you see that everything's kind of in its place.
It's not hyper-organized or anything like that.
It's friendly and welcoming.
There's a lot of wood and there's a nice fire.
Then there's toys everywhere.
And they're well-constructed.
So you know that whoever lives there likes children.
And so if someone likes children, well, if someone doesn't like children, it's like you should run away from them very rapidly.
but if they like children, well then that's a good sign that, you know, Jesus, they're at least human, that's a start, you know and then these things are all high quality, they're made very well and then there's, and he's looking around to see all of this and there's toys and there's clocks and they're all handmade and so he sort of infers that maybe there's a woodcarver who lives there and a woodcarver is someone who can build things and if you build things that work and that are beautiful, that's a kind of truth, right?
it's like It's built right into the object.
That's what quality is.
Quality is the building into an object of truth.
The thing works.
It does what it's supposed to.
It has integrity.
And so you see that everywhere in here.
So you're getting a sense of the filmmakers are setting the stage.
and so, well, so they set the stage by showing you the stage and the cricket tells you what he sees and he's pretty happy to be there because and this is also someone who's concerned about time, right?
because there's a lot of clocks, there's a lot of clocks and so time turns out to be an important sub-element of this story and then he sees the puppet, he's a marionette so what's a marionette?
Well, a marionette, and he's sitting on the shelf, a marionette is something that's quasi-animated, because it can move, doesn't really have a soul, but it sort of acts like it has a soul, in the sense of anima and soul and animated.
But a marionette is something that is being manipulated by something else behind the scenes, right?
It doesn't have its own volition.
It's dependent on the will of something behind the scenes and so there's a strong implication that whatever this thing is is half formed and that it's being manipulated by unseen forces behind Unseen forces behind the facade.
Well, that's a Freudian idea, that's you, that's all of you, you know, you're pulled hither and fro by unconscious forces and some of those are biological and some of them are cultural, you know, and you think about people who are swept up in great ideological movements like the communists or the fascists, it's like, those people are marionettes!
That's exactly what they are.
They all say the same thing.
They all mouth the same words.
They all act the same way.
And something's behind it.
And the question is what?
Well, that is the question and that's partly what this movie tries to figure out.
So you see this marionette.
He's a half-formed, wooden-headed puppet.
And he has a little bit of potential, you know, and the cricket goes up and interacts with him and sees that he's made out of pretty good wood and makes a little joke about having a wooden head and, you know, that's kind of obvious what that means and you notice the cricket is dressed like a tramp And when you first saw him, he wasn't.
He was dressed like a 1920s millionaire.
So, but here he's a tramp, and this is so interesting.
It's like, so this bug that's a messiah, that's the introduction to the book, that's the conscience, is also a tramp with no home.
It's like, what does that mean?
And it took me a long time to sort that out, and it's like, he's been everywhere.
this tramp, he's been everywhere and he knows he's traveled the world but he doesn't have a place, he doesn't have a home he hasn't made a relationship with anything real yet he's kind of a potential and this is one of the things that's really interesting about this movie because if you think about the cricket as a fragment of the hero and say a reflection of the savior which is his relationship with JC of course and the person who introduces the book Then
the story gets strange, because if it was merely a representation of the perfect person, the archetype of the hero, then the conscience would know everything, right?
And it would just tell the puppet what to do, and that would be the end of it.
But that, first of all, that's a dull story, it's like perfect conscience comes along, puppet does everything it says, bingo, perfection.
But that isn't what happens, there's this weird idea that this thing that's got all these attributes needs a home, And has to enter into a learning relationship with the thing that it's trying to transform.
It's so sophisticated because, you know, I could say you should do what your conscience tells you.
It's like, well, maybe not.
Maybe that's not exactly how it works.
Maybe your conscience isn't omniscient and omnipotent.
Maybe it's not God, right?
It's a guide.
But it's maybe smarter than you sometimes.
Maybe because it's society in your head.
And obviously it's smarter than you sometimes because it tells you not to do something and you go do it and then you get into trouble and you think, well, if I would have just listened.
But you don't.
And that's interesting too.
It's something that you don't have to listen to.
Which seems to be associated with free will.
It's weird.
It's like if your conscience knows what to do, why aren't you just a deterministic puppet of your conscience?
Christ, that would work a lot better.
You wouldn't have to torture yourself and you wouldn't make any mistakes.
So, why the separation?
Well, maybe it's because the conscience is generic.
And so it has to be taught.
It has to learn too.
And so what you do is you have a dialogue with your conscience.
It's something like that.
And then you expose yourself to more and more of the world and you get wiser and your conscience gets wiser and you mature together.
and that's what happens in this story because the cricket starts out as this tramp that you know is smarter than the puppet but not as smart as he thinks he is, that's for sure and when he first starts to operate as a conscience he's completely useless at it he babbles off a lot of cliches about morality and then he's late the first day for his job and he's just not very good at it and so there's this weird idea that the conscience which is part of what puts you towards redemption is something that you actually have to interact with Over the course
of your life in order for it to develop as you develop.
and so then I would also say that the cricket represents at least in part what Jung described as the self which is like the potential fully developed human being that sort of exists within you as a possibility but it has to be it has to be manifest in the actual conditions of your life and so the conscience has to learn how to position itself here and now and it's got generic advice and that's not good enough and so that's why the cricket is looking for a home and so he needs a home Even though he's all these other things
we already said he was.
He has to find a specific home before he can become who he could be.
Well, so then Geppetto shows up, and he's a kindly old guy, which is pretty much exactly what you'd expect.
You know, he's a careful craftsman, and he likes kittens, and you know, that's always a good thing.
And he has some fish, and you know, he's...
And he's good at making things, and he's got a sense of humor, and he's kind of playful, and so he's the good father, fundamentally.
He's the wise king.
He's the positive archetype of the masculine.
And that's what he is.
And so he's culture in its positive manifestation, and he gives rise to this creation, which is his puppet, which is what culture does, because you're a puppet of your culture.
You're a marionette of your culture.
And so maybe you could be more than that.
And that's the other thing that's strange about this movie, and it's strange about the mythological way of looking at the world, because scientifically, deterministically, there's nature, and there's culture, and you are the deterministic product of the interaction between nature and culture.
There's nothing else to you than that.
That's that.
But the mythological world doesn't say that.
It says something different.
It says that there's nature and culture, and then there's you.
and the you that's in there has choices and a destiny and that you actually affect the interplay of nature and culture in determining your own character and it insists upon that, the oldest stories we have there's always the hero and the archetypal mother and the archetypal father there's always those three things,
there's never just two so, from the narrative perspective there's always the implication that there's something autonomous about The hero of the story and, you know, you can't account for that, we don't have a good way of accounting for that from a scientific perspective.
I was having a discussion with Sam Harris the other day which was very, what would you say?
He said we got wrapped around an axle which is pretty much, Sam Harris is one of the four famous, you know, atheists along with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins and Dan Dennett, yeah, and so we were having a discussion and he's a determinist, just right down to the bottom.
It's like you're determined, there's no free will.
You're a deterministic machine.
You know, if you're a coherent scientist and you're a Newtonian, roughly speaking, you don't really have much choice other than to think that way, but that isn't how it seems to people.
And we don't treat each other that way.
And our entire legal system is predicated on the idea that you do in fact have free will.
So, well, can we account for it?
Well, no.
And do we have a scientific model for it?
No.
But then I would also say, we do not have a scientific model for consciousness.
We don't know a damn thing about consciousness.
Which is why Dan Dennett's book, which was called Consciousness Explained, was referred to by its critics as Consciousness Explained Away.
which is exactly right as far as I'm concerned because he took a mechanistic approach and I just don't think you get to do that because there's something really weird about consciousness I mean, the phenomenologists like Heidegger who tried to radically transform western philosophy right from the bottom up he basically said,
well, you know you can treat the world as if consciousness is primary and that human experience is reality, that's reality And that it doesn't exist independently of consciousness in any explicable way.
It's like, well, what's out there if there's nothing to experience it?
Well, everything at once.
It's something like that.
It's not really comprehensible.
Without a subject, the subject defines it and makes it real.
Now, you don't have to believe that, but...
At least I'm telling you that there are thoroughly coherent philosophical positions that make that case very strongly and that allow consciousness to exist as a phenomena and to take it seriously and you certainly act like you take it seriously you act like there's a you and that you make choices and you certainly treat other people that way deterministic or not,
you're still going to get angry when they're being, you know, rude to you and you're going to act as if they had some choice in the matter now maybe that's an illusion, possibly but maybe it's not and I would say the oldest stories that we have always include that as not only a fundamental element, but even as the fundamental element so Well, so you can think about that however you want, but anyway, so Geppetto comes along and he's going to finish off the puppet and so what does he do to finish off the puppet?
He gives it a voice!
He gives it a mouth!
Well that's really, really interesting, so In Genesis, this is a very very very complex idea and it took people thousands of years to figure this idea out and it's something like this, so at the beginning of everything there was chaos and that was like potential,
it was something like potential the potential for being and God, who is God the Father in the Genesis account uses a faculty that he has, which is the word to call Being from chaos and that's the creation of being, right?
It's the manifestation of order from chaos and it's the word, the logos that it's the logos that's the tool that God uses to do that and that logos in Christianity is associated with Christ which is a very weird thing but the reason for that is that there's an idea that The divine element of the individual is the thing that uses language, communicative language, to call the world into being.
And that is what we do, as far as we can tell, it's like you make a decision, you think it through, you talk it over with your friends, you plot a course, and the world manifests itself in relationship to your choice.
And it's for that reason, and it is for that reason, that in Genesis and in many other accounts that Logos capacity is identified with human beings it's like you have a small bit of that in you whatever that means and you participate in the process of continually generating order out of chaos and sometimes the reverse,
you mediate between them And so, in Western culture, and it's certainly the case in other cultures as well, that that's why you have rights, fundamentally.
That's why the law has to respect you, is because you've got this spark of divinity in you that's transcendent, that nobody gets to transgress against.
And you say, well, do you believe that?
It's like, well, you act like you believe it.
You treat other people like you believe it, or they're not very happy with you.
So, it depends on what you mean by believe.
You act it out.
Well, do you accept it as a proposition?
Well, I don't care if you accept it as a proposition, frankly, because I think the best indicator of what you believe is how you act, not what you say.
Because what do you know about what you know?
Hardly anything.
And so, actions speak louder than words.
And if you want to be treated properly by someone, what that means is that you want them to treat you as a valuable, autonomous entity.
That's what you want.
And so, maybe you're not that.
Maybe you're a deterministic puppet.
And what this strange movie suggests is that you are kind of a deterministic puppet, but that you don't have to be.
Alright.
Well, the mouth goes on.
And then Geppetto's happy about that, and then they have a little dance.
You know, they turn the music on, and all these little music boxes, and they all play together, and it's like harmony of some sort has been established because that's what the music represents, and there's layers of reality that are communicating with one another because that's what the music represents, and then they have a little dance, and the idea is that, well, it's a good thing to let this puppet have its own voice.
Well, that's an interesting idea because what the hell does it know?
It's a wooden headed marionette.
Why the hell would you want something like that to talk?
Well, it's the same question you have in relationship to your children.
It's like, what do they know?
They're two.
Or three.
You know, they don't know anything.
Well, so should you just, like, tyrannize them and make them do everything you want, or are you going to let them have a bit of a voice?
And the question is, it depends on whether we want them to be a puppet or not.
And if you don't want them to be a puppet, if you want them to grow up autonomous, then you let them have a voice.
And you facilitate the development of that voice.
and so, and that's what you do if you don't want a marionette so, and Geppetto doesn't want a marionette, so he gives the puppet a voice even though he knows it's just a puppet and that it doesn't know anything and then, this is fantastic,
so the cricket's sitting up there watching that, he's pretty happy with it, that's the first little scene you see there and he's sitting by this other thing that is just not happy at all and that's the terrible father and you see, it's a character that repeats throughout the entire movie you see manifestations of the tyrannical father continually through the movie in different characters,
like he's played out by different roles and so, first of all the cricket is so thrilled about this and then He looks at the frowning king there, who is not happy that the puppet has been given a voice.
He's a tyrant, right?
He's the representation of a tyrant, and a tyrant does not want you to have a voice.
And so the cricket looks at him and says, well, you can't please everybody all the time.
And it's just this tiny little fragment of a joke, you know, but it's, there's this old idea I think it comes from Chekhov and the idea is that if you set a play up and there's a gun, a rifle or a pistol on a table in the first act it better have been used by the third act or it shouldn't have been there at all and the idea is you don't put anything in your play That's random.
You never do that.
It's like, because this isn't life.
This isn't life.
This is a work of art.
And everything is connected.
And it's there by intent.
And so this isn't accidental that this little king character doesn't like what's going on.
Or that he shows up.
so anyways, all the clocks go off and the music boxes go and they have a little dance and everybody's happy about it and then Geppetto notices what time it is and so there's a tremendous emphasis on time in this part of the movie because all these clocks are going off and they're all telling him what time it is like 30 clocks go off and then he takes his watch out and notices what time it is it's like the idea that there's something about time going on is like whacked at you You know,
dozens of times so that you get it.
And it's a little joke that he, you know, pulls out his watch.
He figures out it's time for bed.
Well, so now we're making a transition between the conscious world and the unconscious world.
Okay, so there's an intimation in the movie that everything that happens now is in the unconscious world and the way you know that is that it's strange because the movie moves in and out of this underworld but at the very end when Pinocchio is transformed into a real boy the last thing Geppetto does is,
I think it's Geppetto, is hit one of the pendulums and start all the clocks again so it's as if what happens from here onwards is part of a dream now it's murky because Pinocchio goes to school and you know,
there's the next day and all of that and so those are sort of realistic elements but then there's also the whole going down into the ocean to find the whale thing which seems completely dreamlike but there's an intimation that we're in a different kind of world and so they all go to sleep,
including the cricket and so, then, Geppetto notices the star and because he's a good guy, he makes a wish on the star we've already explained why you might wish on a star and what that might mean and he makes a very interesting wish It's not a self-serving wish.
In fact, it's quite the contrary.
He doesn't wish that Pinocchio is an obedient son.
He doesn't wish that he's produced someone who will work for him.
He doesn't wish any of that.
He wishes what a good father would wish.
Which is that the creation that he's brought forth Would develop its capacity for autonomy.
He wants him to become real.
He wants him to become an actual living creature and not a wooden headed marionette.
And so you'd say, well that is what your father should wish for you.
You know, and I have clients frequently whose fathers weren't like that at all.
They were tyrannical or they were neglectful or they punished the person every time they did something good.
That's a real fun game.
They competed with them and undermined them at every opportunity.
They didn't want to produce someone strong and autonomous.
They wanted to give birth to a slave and then diminish it as much as possible.
And so that's bad.
It's not good.
And that's so, Geppetto's not like that.
So he says, well, I'm going to wish for something completely unreasonable, which is that part of that ideal idea, right?
And the unreasonable thing is that this puppet could become Real, could actually take on its autonomy and move forward.
And so that's what he wishes.
And then they go to sleep.
and then the cricket starts to become driven mad by the noises of the clock and so it's like he's going into this sort of state of hyper alertness and the clocks are clanging at him and Geppetto was snoring and he can even hear the little grains of sand falling out of the hourglass he's becoming hyper alert, hyper alert and then he yells stop!
and all the clocks stop which is a pretty good trick for a cricket you know, it's like he's the master of time but also we're in a place now where time has come to a stop we're outside of time and one of the things that Freud pointed about dreams is that dreams are kind of outside of time Now,
here's what that means, is first of all, they draw on eternal themes, that's part of it, but you know, you must have had this experience, and Freud noted this carefully in the interpretation of dreams, where, you know, you're sleeping, and the alarm goes off, and the alarm noise is incorporated into your dream,
and it's like, the dream has been going on for an hour in subjective time, and you wake up and you realize that it's the alarm clock, it's like, and there's no reason why your dream time should be the same as real time, because it's all going on in your imagination, but It's amazing in some sense how much can happen in such a short period of time in your imagination and so it's outside of time,
the world of fantasy is in some sense outside of time and so the cricket tells time to stop and it does and then the star enlarges and it turns into this blue fairy who's got a celestial gown covered with stars and who's got wings,
so she's kind of some ethereal being and like, you don't have a problem with that in the movie, it's like, yeah, sure, I mean, you know It's a fairy, it came from a star, that makes perfect sense, which of course it makes no sense whatsoever, right?
It makes no sense, but you're willing to go along with it, because on the one hand it makes no sense, and on the other hand it makes perfect sense, it's like the fairy godmother idea, it's like, yeah, yeah, fairy godmother, no problem, we got that.
And the idea there is that, well, nature comes to your aid, it's something like that, it's the benevolent force of nature is on your side, now Not obviously only on your side, because it opposes you as well.
And there's your own mother as well, who's also nature, who's on your side.
But there's an idea here, and the idea is that if the father gets the wish right, the aim right for the child, then nature will cooperate.
Right, and that's true, I believe that's true, is that if you set up your relationship, your cultural relationship with your child properly then they're far more likely to flourish and so you get the magic of nature on your side by establishing the proper aim and so that's what happens, Geppetto says, well this is what I'm aiming at and because he's aiming at it And because it's within the realm of possibility, nature comes to his service, and that is how it works.
That's exactly how it works, because when you aim at something, then you muster your biological forces towards that goal, and if the goal is feasible and attainable, then you will cooperate with yourself.
And so that's quite cool.
Carl Rogers would call that, what's the word for that?
I think he called it genuineness, which is kind of weak but I think that's still what he called it he sort of meant that, well that's sort of what happens when your goals and your physiological and your biological being are aligned well and you can communicate both, you're not full of internal contradictions and so your conscious aims and your biological possibilities are manifesting themselves in the same direction And so, well, that would be good.
So anyways, the fairy shows up, and she's quite sexually attractive, she's quite provocative, and she charms the cricket, and who gets all blushes, and like is all, you know, embarrassed, and overwhelmed by this, like, figure of celestial beauty,
and decides to cooperate, the conscience decides to cooperate, and gets some responsibility, and so the fairy Allows the puppet to move without strings, so that's kind of interesting, so it's the intervention of nature Culture focuses the aim,
then it's the intervention of nature that produces the autonomy And that seems to be right, I mean, even though it's not that understandable, it seems to be right And then, so, she takes the strings off Pinocchio and you might say, well that's partly because your child is not,
certainly not just a creature of culture by no means, your child has a temperament you'll see that right away and that temperament will unfold and hopefully it will unfold in a cultural context that's amenable to it and that the combination of those two things will produce something new he can talk He can walk.
And so the good fairy basically tells him that He's got a bit of autonomy and now it's up to him to like clue in a bit and act properly and learn the difference between good and evil and to speak truthfully and all that it's a bit propagandistic that part of the movie I would say but it doesn't really matter it's kind of inculcation of conventional morality and there's a fair bit to it especially that he's supposed to tell the truth and you know he says he will and the cricket's listening and then the
puppet asks well what does conscience mean because The fairy says, always let your conscience be your guide.
And he says, what does conscience mean?
And then the bug, who's like all puffed up because he wants to impress the fairy, pops down and gets on his little matchbox and gives this like horrible little lecture about how to behave properly that's just like ideological chatter, you can hardly even stand listening to it.
It's supposed to be like that.
It's generic moral advice that anyone could give that's kind of dull and also puffed up and grandiose.
He's just not very good at it.
So that's why he's on his little matchbox there with his chest puffed out.
So he says, that's just the trouble with the world today.
and I think that's his opening line, you know, he's diagnosing the whole world and you know, the fairy, she thinks he's kind of funny because he is and you know, it's sort of, there's a real interesting thing here going on because he's male and he's all puffed up with his knowledge which is completely shallow and then he's put in contact with this like celestial feminine ideal and he just turns into a complete moron and that's exactly what happens to men,
it happens to them all the time So, anyways, she decides to give him a chance and turns him into this conscience, and all of a sudden he's this, like, 1920s millionaire, so he's been ennobled.
But then she tells him that, you know, he has to journey along with Pinocchio in order for things to go properly, and he promises that he'll be a good conscience and do it, and he already thinks that he can do it, and that's why he's on the matchbox podium, you know,
espousing his morality but the reality turns out to be much more complex so the bug has a little talk with the cricket the bug has a little talk with the puppet and the bug tries to tell Pinocchio explicitly what it means to be good and he gets completely tangled up in the explanation because what the hell does he know and the puppet doesn't understand anything that he says anyways and so there's a message there and the message is The
kind of knowledge that the conscience and the puppet are supposed to co-create is not something that you can articulate easily as a table of rules.
It's not like that.
Because life is too complicated to just have five rules that you live by and that will solve every problem.
Partly because the rules will conflict.
That's a huge part of the problem, right?
One moral guideline contradicts another in a situation.
It's like, you don't know what to do.
So anyways, they decide that they're They decide that they're just going to He says, Pinocchio says, well, I'll be a good boy, and the cricket says, well, that's the spirit, and then, well, then Geppetto gets wind of it, and they have a little, like, horror episode,
and then he finds out that the puppet can, is autonomous, and they have a little party, which tells you exactly what Geppetto's up to, is the autonomy emerges, and he's happy about it, so it's stamping home the notion that Geppetto is, in fact, a good guy, and that that is, in fact, what he wants, so it's like, The encouragement of your father is a precondition for the emergence of your individuality.
And it also allows the feminine to play a role, both as nature and perhaps as mother.
And the combination of those two things produces the autonomous individual.
It's like, well, that seems perfectly reasonable.
So, off they go to sleep.
Next day they wake up and it's a new day and Pinocchio is off to school and that's a good thing too because Geppetto isn't, and he's really excited about it and so what that means is that he's been parented properly and he's going to go out into the world of his peers which is where he belongs and Geppetto isn't too worried about it, in fact he's pushing him out the door, you know, it's like, go!
You can do it!
This is the next thing!
The kid isn't cowering in the corner and overcome by terror with the parents freaking out about all the things that are going to go wrong there's some faith in his ability so he sees all the kids wandering by and Geppetto dresses them up and sends them off to school And so that's good, so that's a happy family story.
It's like mom and dad got together, they decided that the kid was gonna, you know, be competent and autonomous and ready to face the world and so out he goes.
And so he's like five years old at this point or something like that and that's where we get, that's where we're at in the story.
And I think that's a good place to stop because the next thing that happens is Anomaly, essentially, it's like Pinocchio goes off to be a good boy, but it turns out that's a hell of a lot more complicated than he might think, because there are actually complications in the world,
but also malevolence the desire for things not to go right there are people who are not oriented towards the ideal in any way at all and Pinocchio is young and naive and so he has no defense whatsoever against this malevolence and that's you know that's not unexpected and it also turns out that the conscience,
the cricket who is still not very clued in, oversleeps and so he's just not there at a critical moment but I think we'll pick that up next week because this is a good point in the plot to stop the child has entered the broader world and has to cope with it and so he's prepared because he had a wonderful father and he had a magical mother and so he's as prepared as you can be he's not even completely a marionette anymore But,
now it's up to him.
That's the thing.
Now it's up to him.
His parents have done basically what they could.
And that's really about right, you know.
It's wise, I would say, psychologically.
So, alright.
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