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Feb. 8, 2017 - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast
02:12:20
2017 Maps of Meaning 04: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 3)
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Time Text
Music So I hope we can...
my plan is to finish this today so and then we'll go into the more concrete details now that you've got some sense of the way that a narrative like this can unfold so if you remember we were Just leaving this terrible little bar, which I think was called the Red Lobster or something like that, where the fox and the cat had met the coachman.
And the coachman is obviously someone who takes you somewhere.
He takes you on a trip.
And the coachman basically revealed himself.
First, he kind of looks like a I guess a somewhat jolly old man, although his expression doesn't precisely read as jolly.
And then he reveals himself as something positively satanic.
And that's enough to terrify these two-bit thugs, the fox and the cat, who think they're tough, but really aren't tough at all.
And so they see, at some point, what they're really tangled up in.
And I think I mentioned to you that that was something akin...
Jung had this idea that...
people's shadows reach all the way down to hell which is actually a very frightening concept and what he meant by that is that if you take a look at the impulses that drive you that are actually malevolent if you can admit to such impulses that if you basically follow those all the way down to their origin you find some very nasty things and what you find down there basically is what allies you with people who've done terrible things and that's Not
a very pleasant experience, I would say, although one thing that's worth thinking about is that it is something that can protect you against Being very, very badly hurt, because one of the things that characterizes people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder is that they're often naive,
and then they encounter something that's really not within their framework of thinking, and it's usually something bad, and because there isn't anything in their philosophy, their way of looking at the world that has prepared them for that, they end up fragmented and devastated, and so It's actually protective to you if you can figure out what your full range of capabilities is,
because that can help you understand other people a lot better and to be wiser and more careful in your actions.
It's also useful, I think, if you want to convince yourself to act properly, because if you regard yourself as harmless, Which is a big mistake, then nothing you can do is really that bad, right?
Because you're harmless, after all.
But if you understand that you're seriously not harmless, then that can make you a lot more careful with yourself.
And I would say that that's especially true maybe when you're dealing, when you have kids and you start dealing with your kids.
If you know that what you're capable of, because you're human, Then that can motivate you to be much more careful with what you say and do.
And I don't mean cautious.
I don't mean timid.
I don't mean any of that.
I just mean that you want to keep things pristine between you and your children, let's say, because that way they're on your good side.
And you want them on your good side, because children who get on their parents' bad side suffer very badly for it.
And sometimes it's because they're literally abused.
But more often it's because they get Well, they get abused, let's say, or neglected in much more subtle ways.
And you're definitely capable of that.
I mean, all you have to do is think about the way that you've interacted with someone that you've decided to not like, or maybe someone you genuinely don't like, you know?
And that can range from just not paying any attention to them, especially if they're doing something good, to really pursuing them and making their life miserable.
And you can certainly do that with your family members, and you can do that with your intimate partners, and you can do that with your friends, and you can do it with yourself, and so...
It's really worth knowing that.
So, well, the fox thinks he's a royal rule-breaker, but he's really just a two-bit thug, and this is where he learns that.
So...
Sorry, I have a new phone, and I'm kind of stupid with it still.
So...
Well, hypothetically, that'll work, but it probably won't.
Anyways, the coachman's got these guys in his grasp now, regardless, and partly because they're already down this road and they can't back off, and partly because he also offers them more money than they've seen before, and so as bad as they are, they're going to get worse.
Many of you, I presume, have seen Breaking Bad, and that's a really good example of the Of the incorporation, at least in part, or maybe the possession by the shadow from the Jungian perspective, right?
Because you have this ordinary high school teacher who really thinks that he's an axe, and his family as well.
You know, like your typical persona, roughly speaking.
He's just a normal guy.
but part of the reason that he's a normal guy is because he actually hasn't been put in abnormal circumstances and then all of a sudden he is and he has a genuine moral conundrum, right?
he's gonna die of lung cancer and he has a son who's got a lot of health problems and he's terrified that he's going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing and then of course has the story, and so he decides to do something that temporarily that he regards as what he would normally regard as reprehensible,
and of course he just gets tangled up in that, but then as the story unfolds you see that there's, it's more complicated because It's not that he was just innocent good guy and he decided to turn bad, he's also very resentful and angry, and it's partly because he's a bit of a pushover at the beginning, or maybe more than a bit of a pushover,
and also that he didn't really fulfill his own potential, and that he had friends who Walk down the entrepreneurial path, and maybe they weren't quite fair to him, but whatever, he ends up not very successful as a high school teacher,
so he's really angry about that, and so there's more motivation for him opening up the door to the terrible elements of his personality than just the fact that he's got good motivations to do so, and that unfolds, you know, and so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character Increasingly manifest themselves as he walks down this road to really total brutality.
And it's quite good.
There's a book called Ordinary Men that's a lot like that.
I don't think I've mentioned that to you before, but Ordinary Men is a book about...
It's the best book of its type.
Maybe it's the only book of its type.
It's possible, but it's plotted much like Breaking Bad in some sense.
It's a story about these German policemen in the early stages of World War II. And they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian propaganda Came out in full force, you know, if you were a teenager, say, in the 1930s, you were gonna be pulled right into the propaganda machine, and maybe you were part of the Hitler Youth, and, like, you were raised in that, you know?
But if you were older, then you were raised before that, and you're not as amenable to propaganda once you're older than about, well, I would say about 22 or something like that.
It's pretty young, actually.
If you're gonna make a soldier, you have to get a soldier young, because once people are in their early 20s, say, they're kinda, they already have their personality developed.
Anyways, these policemen were sent into Poland after the Germans marched through, and you know, it was wartime, and there was this hypothesis in Germany that the Jews in particular were operating as a fifth column and undermining the German war effort,
because of course the Germans blamed the Jews and a variety of other people for actually setting up the conditions that made the war necessary, and so when the police were sent into Poland They were also required to make peace, roughly speaking, and so they started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 65 and gathering them in stadiums and then shipping them off on the trains, but that isn't where they ended.
They ended in a very, very dark place.
I mean, these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women and shooting them in the back of the head by the end of their training.
And what's really interesting about that is that Their commander told them that they could go home at any time.
So this is not one of those examples of people following orders.
And the reason they didn't, roughly speaking, there's many reasons, but one of the reasons they didn't is because they didn't think it was comradely, so to speak, to leave the guys they were working with to do all the dirty work and run off.
You know, and that's really an interesting fact, you know, because in different circumstances you wouldn't think about that as reprehensible, right?
You'd think, well, that's part of teamwork, under rough circumstances, and that's at least in part how they viewed it.
And they were also made physically ill multiple times, physically and psychologically ill, by the things that they had to do.
But they kept doing them anyways.
So, it's one step at a time.
And that's the thing, is that you end up in very bad places one step at a time, so you've got to watch those steps.
Anyways...
Pinocchio has now decided, after his latest misadventure, to return to the proper pathway.
He's off to school again, and he's still pretty naive, although perhaps not as much so as he was before, and so he decides that he's gonna do things right, he's gonna go get educated, he's going back to school, he's gonna take the conventional route to discipline and be a good boy, roughly speaking, and so he's off to school.
And the fox waylays him again.
This is a really interesting scene.
It took me quite a long time to unpack this, too.
And so the fox, first of all, starts out by acting like he's sympathetic again, sympathetic towards Pinocchio.
And so he's empathetic, you could say.
And so this is an interesting analysis of empathy.
So what happens is, is the fox convinces Pinocchio, through a variety of maneuvers, that he's actually not feeling very well, that he's sick.
He really convinces him that he's a victim.
And one of the things, I had a graduate student named Maja Jikic who had worked with the UN in Bosnia and she had toured some of the mass grave sites there and we wrote a paper one time called You Can Neither Remember Nor Forget What You Don't Understand and it was a paper about The idea,
for example, it was partly about the idea that we should never forget the Holocaust, and the idea there is that, well, we should never forget it, and we shouldn't repeat it, but the thing is, if you don't understand how those things come about, you can't really remember them, right?
You think about them as a set of historical facts, but...
That's not the kind of remembering that actually makes any difference.
You have to understand the causal pathways.
You have to understand how a society would transform in that manner, and more importantly, you have to understand the role of the individuals within that society, unless you're going to assume that they're so completely unlike you that there's no connection whatsoever, in which case you haven't remembered it at all.
You haven't learned anything at all, because the right lesson from what happened in the 20th century is, this is what human beings are like.
That's the correct lesson.
And you can say, well, not me, but...
But probably you, too.
That's the thing.
Probably.
And probably me, too.
At least under normal circumstances.
Anyways, the fox convinces Pinocchio that he's sick.
He performs a lot of tricks to do this.
You could say that Pinocchio is susceptible to this because maybe there's still part of him that's looking for the easy way out.
And so, one of the things that Maya and I found when we were writing this paper, we were looking at the discourse that precedes genocide in genocidal states, and the enhancement of a sense of victimization on the part of one of the groups, usually the group that's going to commit the genocide,
first of all, their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues who are trying to stir up this sort of hatred, so they basically say, look, You've been oppressed in a variety of ways, and these are the people who did it, and they're not going to stop doing it, and this time we're going to get them before they get us.
It's something like that.
And so there's something very pathological about the enhancement of victimization, which is, well...
See, the problem, as far as I'm concerned with it, is it's not thought through very well.
Because there's a point that's being made, and the point is that people have been oppressed and they suffer.
And that's true, that point.
But that's...
But then the proper framework from within which to interpret that, I believe, is that that's characteristic of life.
you can't take it personally in some sense and you can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims and you certainly can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims and then assume that you're only in the victim class and then assume that that gives you certain, like, access to certain Forms of redress, let's say.
It gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing.
So, for example, one of the things that characterized the Soviet Union, and this was particularly true in the 1920s, but afterwards, so the Soviets were very much enamored of the idea of class guilt.
So, for example, although it was only about 40 years previously that the serfs had been Emancipated, they weren't much more than slaves, right?
And so that was the bulk of the Russian population.
They were bought and sold along with the land.
So...
They had been emancipated, and some of them, many of them had turned into independent farmers, and some of them had become reasonably prosperous, because, at least in principle, I presume a certain proportion of them from being crooked, but I presume a larger proportion from actually being able to raise food.
And, of course, at that time, the bulk of the Russian food population was produced by these relatively successful peasant farmers and relatively successful would mean maybe they had a brick house or something and maybe they had a couple of cows and maybe they were able to hire a few people and so,
you know, it wasn't like they were massive landowners or anything but I've talked to you a little bit about the Pareto Principle, and the notion that in any domain of activity, a small proportion of people end up producing most of what's in that domain of activity.
The same was true in Russia with regards to these peasant farmers.
Some of them were extraordinarily efficient, and they produced most of Russia's food.
When the Communists came in, they described those land holders as parasites, essentially.
Predicated on the Marxist idea that If someone had extracted profit from an enterprise, that they had basically stolen that profit from the people, say, that they had employed or otherwise oppressed.
And so you could be a member of the KULAK, K-U-L-A-K, K-U-L-A-K, you could be a member of the KULAK class.
And then, because you were a member of that class, you were automatically guilty.
And so what happened was...
And you've got to think this through to really understand what happened.
So what happened was the intellectual communists were sent out in cadres out into these little towns to find people who would help them round up the kulaks.
Now you've got to think about what a small town is like, because...
So imagine you're in a town and there's three or four people, or maybe ten people, or something like that, who are a little more successful than everyone else.
And a certain number of people are going to be fine with that, and maybe even happy about it, because they regard those people as particularly productive, and, you know, as stalwart members of the community, regardless of their flaws.
But there's going to be some people who are not happy about it at all.
that are going to be very resentful about that and jealous and so those are going to be people whose characters I would say are of the less positive type and so when the intellectuals came in and described the reason that these people should be treated as parasites and profiteers then it was the resentful minority in those towns and that would be the kind of guy that hangs around in the bar all the time and is completely unconscientious and fails at everything and then blames everyone else for it the intellectuals came in and said here's This is unfair
that this happened to you.
You've actually been victimized, and now it's your opportunity to go have your revenge.
And so that's exactly what happened.
Now, in some of the villages, sometimes the peasants would actually surround the farmsteads of these more successful people and try to defend them, but that never worked out for very long.
And so then, these mobs, these angry mobs would go into the...
farmhouses and stripped the place right down to nothing and they packed these people up and sent them on trains with no food out to Siberia where there was no place to live and so they were packed into houses, you know, maybe they had a square meter each to live in and all their children died of typhoid and many of them froze to death many, many people died, millions of people died as a consequence of the de-kulakization At least as a consequence of its total effect.
So what happened then was that there wasn't any food produced.
And so then 6 million Ukrainians starved to death in the 1920s.
Which is something you never hear about, right?
You never hear about that.
Why do you never hear about that?
That's a question worth asking.
You know, it was an absolute catastrophe.
They used to...
So these people were starving.
Right to the point of cannibalism, right?
I mean, it was ugly, as ugly as anything you could possibly imagine.
If you were a mother, and so you're supposed to hand all your grain into the Central Committee, mostly for distribution into the cities.
You didn't get to keep any for yourself.
And so maybe then afterwards, if you were a mother, you'd go out in the fields that had already been harvested, and you'd pick up individual grains of wheat, and if you didn't turn those in, that was death for you.
So that's how far it was pushed.
So...
Well, so that's a little story about how victimization, how the idea of victimization and perpetration can get out of hand extraordinarily rapidly.
And so whenever people are beating the victim drum, you know, they'll cover that up with empathy, roughly speaking.
We're speaking on behalf of the oppressed.
It's like, maybe you are, but maybe you're no saint, because, you know, You're so sure that you're a saint and you're only speaking from the position of good.
It's highly unlikely.
Anyway, so, Pinocchio is enticed into believing that he's a victim.
Now, the logical part of that is that it is the case that, you know, you can make a very strong case that every human being is in some sense involved in a tragic enterprise.
Because you're biologically vulnerable, you're not what you could be as a biological specimen, right?
You're full of imperfections, and plus, you're going to be sick, and those you love are going to be sick, and everything ends up in death, and so there's a very tragic element to that.
And then, by the same token, you're also subject to the tyrannical aspect of your culture, right?
Because it's forcing you to be a certain way all the time.
Socialization does that.
You're required to modify your own intrinsic nature in order to come into conformity with the broader community, and you can think about that from the Piagetian sense, which is the socialization makes you a more and more sophisticated person, and there's some truth in that,
but you can also be subject just to tyranny, you know, and I see people in my practice, for example, who've had very tyrannical fathers, for example, sometimes they have tyrannical mothers as well, but They're not so much encouraged to integrate properly into the social community as they are harassed and abused and made to feel insufficient and, you know, basically subject to tyranny.
And that's true of everyone to some degree.
You know, you come to university and there's a tyrannical aspect to it, especially in a big institution like this.
You're not really marked out as an individual in any sense.
You're a number, along with 60,000 other people, and there's something cold and impersonal about that, which is well represented in the design of this classroom, say.
But by the same token, the university provides you with an identity.
While you're exploring an intellectual landscape, you have a lot of freedom Compared to the vast majority of people, perhaps you don't have as much freedom as you might if you compared it to some utopian notion of freedom, but in any real-world sense,
you're unbelievably well protected by the university, partly because it stamps you with the identity student, which is a respectable identity, and so you can go off and educate yourself as much as you can, Well, and everyone in society says that's okay,
they carve out a protected space for you, so at the same time as you're being tyrannized by the institution and forced in some ways also to adopt the viewpoint, say, of the professors, depending on the professor, you're also the beneficiary of that, just like you're the beneficiary of this huge industrial infrastructure that underlies everything we do.
So anyways, the fact that your life is tragic Necessarily, and that you are subject to oppression, makes the victimization story really easy to swallow.
But then there's a dark side of that, too.
And this is actually what happens with Pinocchio.
So, what happens here is that he's told that he's ill, and convinced that he's ill.
And they do use trickery, and so again, you could look at him in some sense as an innocent victim, but the innocence...
the filmmakers do a good job of Hedging against the innocent interpretation, because what he's offered and accepts because he's ill is an easy way out.
And so what the Fox basically tells him is that he needs to have a vacation because he's sick and he can go off to Pleasure Island, which is this place of impulsivity, roughly speaking, and whim.
It's like reversion to being two years old in some sense, and that he really needs that because otherwise he's not going to be able to Live properly.
He's not going to be able to recover his health.
And so what Pinocchio is offered is the opportunity to abandon responsibility as a reward for adopting the guise of victim And that's really worth thinking about, because one of the things I've thought about for a long time is that I've been trying to figure out what gives people's lives meaning,
and tragedy gives life its negative meaning, and nobody disputes that, even if you're nihilistic, you're not going to dispute the fact that tragedy gives life negative meaning, so when nihilists say that life is meaningless, that isn't exactly what they mean.
They mean that life is suffering, but there isn't anything transcendent about it that you could set against that suffering.
That's nihilism.
It's not that life is meaningless.
That would just be neutral.
It's like, no one believes that, and they certainly don't act like they believe it.
If you look at it technically, and we will as we progress through this class, that in order to have any positive meaning in your life, you have to have identified a goal, and you have to be working towards it, and there is a technical reason for that, and the technical reason, as far as I can tell, is that the circuitry that produces the kind of positive emotion that people really like is only activated when you notice that you're...
when you're proceeding towards a goal that you value.
And so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value, you can't have any positive emotions.
So, technically, that's the incentive-reward system, and the underlying circuitry is dopaminergic, and when that circuitry is activated, then it's part of the exploratory circuit.
It gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile.
And that's, you know, you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward, but there's two kinds of positive emotion.
One is the reward that's associated with satiation, and that's consumatory reward, and that's the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat.
But the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which you are operating, right?
It's time to eat.
well, you eat, and then that framework's no longer relevant, so the consumatory reward eliminates the value framework and then you're stuck with, well, what are you gonna do next?
and so, the consumatory reward has with it its own problems, but the incentive reward is constantly what keeps you moving forward and incentive reward, because it's dopaminergic, also is analgesic, literally analgesic, so if you're in pain you take opiates,
and that will cut the pain, but so will psychomotor stimulants like cocaine or amphetamines And so, it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging, and you're working towards a goal, that you're going to feel less pain, and you can see this happening with athletes who, you know, they'll break their thumb or something, or maybe sometimes even their ankle, and they'll keep playing the game.
Of course, afterwards, they're suffering like mad, but the fact that they're so filled with goal-directed enthusiasm means that, well, the pain systems are in some sense shut off.
So that's an interesting thing, because what it suggests...
I mean, then you could imagine...
I might say, well, how happy are you that you've made a certain amount of progress?
And if you think about it, what you'd say is, well, it depends on how much progress and in relationship to what.
So, hypothetically, you're going to be happier if you've made quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal.
And then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important, because that's not obvious.
Now, you could say...
You're in this class and you're listening to some information and maybe there's two reasons for that.
You might find the information interesting per se, but let's forget about that for a minute.
You need to listen to the information so that you can do well on the assignments, so that you can do well in the class.
You need to do well in your classes so that you can finish up your degree.
You need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world.
You need to do that so that you're financially stable and maybe you can start a family and have a life and that's all part of being a good person, something like that.
And so...
That's a hierarchy of goals, and you might say that being a good person would be the thing, however vaguely thought through, that's at the top of that hierarchy.
And then, when you're doing things that serve that ultimate purpose, then you're going to find those more meaningful, and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the engagement of this exploratory circuit that's nested right down in your hypothalamus.
It's really, really old.
It's as old as thirst, and it's as old as hunger.
It's really an old system.
And so, you want to have that thing activated.
I mean, at least from a...
Well, it isn't only from a hedonic point of view.
You know, it isn't a matter of being happy.
It's the wrong way of thinking about it.
It's much more complicated than that.
It's...
Yes?
I was actually...
I was just about to ask, like, bring up, like, the hedonic element.
Yeah.
Because I'm just trying to understand this, I guess, not relationship, but the differentiation between...
Hedonism and satiation.
Going back to when you mentioned that it's not that life is meaningless.
But hedonism isn't exactly...
It's not satiation because at that point people are just doing what they're doing for the sake of doing.
It's not just for activation of the dopaminergic system.
So I'm just trying to understand...
Well, what I would say, we're going to go into that a lot once we're done this.
Like, a lot.
But I'll go over it briefly.
I mean, it's not merely hedonism, because there's an analgesic and also a fear-reducing element to pursuing the proper path, right?
So there's control of negative emotion.
But there's not just control of negative emotion and generation of positive emotion in the immediate future, which is kind of what you'd think about with regards to hedonism.
Actually, Pinocchio takes a hedonic route next.
The problem with the hedonic route is that, so the pursuit of pure happiness, let's say, is that what makes you happy in the next minute might not be something that will make you happy in the next hour.
Well, you know that.
There's this comic, what's his name?
They called him King of the One-Liners.
He talked about drinking wine.
He said, don't you know that's going to cause a hangover?
He said, yeah, at the end, but the beginning and middle are excellent!
And so that's really the problem with hedonism, right, is that To pursue something that makes you happy in the immediate present risks sacrificing your, well, many things, but at least, let's say, your hedonism in the medium to long term,
and of course that is one of the major problems with drug use, and alcohol is a really good example of that, because whatever hedonic kick you might get from it that moment at night, you're going to pay for almost completely, or maybe even more so, because the next day you're Much more jittery and anxious, and that's a direct consequence of withdrawing from the drug.
So when you have a hangover, you're in alcohol withdrawal.
So that's how fast you get, roughly speaking, addicted to it.
And so if you take another drink when you're hungover, it'll cure it.
But it's not a very useful cure, because all you do is push the inevitable hangover one more step into the future.
And so part of the problem with the hedonic answer is...
Happy when...
Exactly, and over what period of time?
And also, who's happy?
Because maybe something makes you happy, but makes your family miserable.
Now, you could say, well, I don't care, but you do care if you have to live with your family, because they're gonna take it out on you.
So, the impulse of hedonism, which is also fostered, say, by a positive emotion, it tends to put people into a state of the pursuit of short-term hedonism, it's not a good long-term, or medium-term, long-term solution.
I actually think that's why people evolved conscientiousness, right?
Because conscientiousness is not happy.
Conscientious people aren't conscientious because it makes them happy.
We're starting to think that they're conscientious because they actually feel terrible if they're just sitting around doing nothing, and so it's a way of staving off Stress, the stress that's related to enforced leisure, something like that.
You know, if you know industrious people, some of you are industrious, some of you will have industrious parents, they just can't sit around and do nothing.
They have to be working.
They don't feel good unless they're working.
So, one thing about conscientiousness is that it involves continual sacrifice, right?
You're doing difficult things in the present, hypothetically, to make the future better.
But that's not driven by hedonism, by any stretch of the imagination.
And conscientiousness is actually a pretty good predictor of long-term life success in stable societies.
Because there's also no point in being conscientious and saving things up and storing things if a bunch of thugs are going to just come in randomly and take it all away.
So conscientiousness actually only works intelligently in societies that have some medium to long-term stability.
You know, because you can get wiped out by hyperinflation, too.
Because hyperinflation kills off the conscientious people.
The people who accrue debts are thrilled when hyperinflation kicks in because it wipes out their debts.
But, of course, those debts are the things they owe to people who were conscientious enough to save.
So anyways, Pinocchio was transformed into a victim, and he's offered this, he's offered this identity, and he takes it.
Now, it's partly because he's deceived and manipulated, but it's also partly because the fox offers him the abandonment of responsibility as payment for As payment for adopting the victim identity.
So, this is where his own lack of morality, let's say, because this is all about Pinocchio's development as a character, plays a role in his demise.
So, if I'm a victim, then everyone else owes me something, and I don't have to take any responsibility.
And so, one of the things I've wondered, here's something to think about.
It might be that the sense of meaning that life can provide to you is proportionate to the amount of responsibility you decide to take on.
That'd be very strange if it was the case, you know, because responsibility, of course, is a kind of weight, obviously, and it's difficult to take on responsibility.
But if any positive emotion that you feel, and your control of anxiety, and the control over pain, is dependent on the activation of these systems that watch you move towards a desired goal, Then the more complete and weighty the goal is, the more kick there's going to be in the observation that you're moving towards it.
And you know, you kind of already know this, because you'll have observed in your own life that when you're engaged in something that you believe in, that the time passes properly.
You know, you can see this even if you're, maybe, you're reading a paper and it's actually related in some intelligible manner to something that you want to learn.
So, even though it's difficult, you get engaged in it, you can remember it better, you can process it better, and you're not so likely to fall asleep, and you're not so likely to want to find distractions, all of that, you can get into it.
And it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the degree of responsibility that you're willing to shoulder, and I think you can make a strong case for that.
I've also often wondered, imagine you could offer people a choice.
Here's the choice.
You could say, well, your life isn't meaningful.
The nihilists have got it right.
There's no meaning in your life.
And because of that, there's no reason for you to accept any responsibility.
So, you can live a responsibility-free life, and maybe one of impulsive pleasure-seeking, but a responsibility-free life, but the price you pay is that it doesn't get to be meaningful.
Or you could say to someone, no, we're gonna do the opposite, we're gonna say, you can live a meaningful life, but it's only gonna be as meaningful as the amount of responsibility that you're willing to bear.
And then you might say, well, what would people choose?
Because everybody always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life.
But if the price you pay for that is the adoption of responsibility, then it's not so obvious that people would choose meaning over pointless pursuits if the benefit they got for choosing the pointless pursuits was that they really didn't have to.
care about anything they ever did, right?
There's no responsibility.
And that's really what Pinocchio is offered.
And that's what the coachman offers him.
And that's interesting, because You know, so far it's been the fox and the cat, and they're kind of two-bit hoods, and so the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways, but here, at least as far as the imagination,
the collective imagination that created this movie is concerned, is this is where you get to the most pathological form of, let's call it temptation, and that's the temptation to engage in To abandon responsibility and to engage in impulsive pleasure-seeking, short-term pleasure-seeking.
So here's the fox pretending to be a doctor investigating Pinocchio's illness, and he makes some notes which is all just meaningless.
Scribble, right?
It's like white noise, and it doesn't matter that the arguments that he's making are completely incoherent, and it doesn't matter that he actually doesn't know anything.
What he's selling is easy to buy, and so Pinocchio buys it.
And by the end of the conversation with the fox, he's pretty convinced that he's useless, and that he needs a vacation.
This is an edible situation as well, which I touched on in the other lecture.
Let's imagine that you have a child that is a little on the neurotic side, so high negative emotion, and maybe one that's also a little bit on the sickly side, so has a variety of, let's say, relatively minor ailments, but ailments nonetheless.
And so what that means as a parent, we'll say mother for this example, because I want to use the Oedipal example, you have to make a decision all the time about exactly how you're going to treat that child.
One decision is, well, you don't have to go to school today because you're not feeling well.
It's like, fair enough.
But do you make the same decision the next day?
And do you make the same decision the next day?
And let's imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of capitalizing on their illness.
Well, then that's not going to be very good for the child.
The rule with a sickly child has to be something like, I'm going to push you right to your limit.
Because otherwise, how is the person going to figure out what they can do?
And if they can't figure out what they can do, then they're not going to be able to make their way in the world at all.
And then that gets muddied very badly if you're not exactly sure that you want them to make their way in the world, you know?
Maybe you're just as happy because you'd be sitting at home alone if your child was there with you.
And maybe you'd be just as happy at some level if they never grew up at all.
Because then they won't leave.
And maybe that's because you have a terrible marriage, and you're lonesome.
Maybe it's an abusive marriage, and your husband has chased away all your friends, and so you don't have anything at all.
And maybe that's because he didn't stand up for yourself very well, apart from the fact that he was tyrannical in his central nature.
And so then, all those little warps and bends in your psyche are going to manifest themselves right in the background of every single one of those decisions.
My daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent and they were very serious and it was very difficult to figure out what to do about that because you couldn't exactly apply normative rules, right?
And we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us, how seriously to take those.
And the answer was the least amount of serious possible.
It's something like that because We needed to know, and she needed to know, what she could do in spite of the fact that she had problems.
And one of the things I really tried to instill in her, and I think it worked, is that you don't ever want to use your illness as an excuse for not doing anything.
Not consciously.
You know, sometimes you might not know.
I'm not feeling well.
What can I do?
Well, you don't know, right?
Because...
Sometimes when you're not feeling well, you can do more than you think, and sometimes you can do less than you think.
It's not like it's obvious.
But sometimes it's obvious, you know, this little temptation flits through your mind, and you think, well, I don't really want to do what I'm doing today, and I'm not feeling very well, so I don't have to do it.
You do that a hundred times, then you don't know how sick you are anymore.
And then you're in real trouble, because not only are you sick, but you actually have...
you've muddied the waters.
And so you have both problems then, is you're actually ill, and you've betrayed yourself by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities.
And that, I think, if you do both, if both of those things happen to you at the same time, you're in real trouble.
And it's really hard not to have that happen.
So anyways, Pinocchio gets enticed into believing that he's a victim.
The fact that he's insufficient is used as an excuse by the fox and the cat to offer him a trip to Pleasure Island.
And this is, I think, where the movie gets particularly dark.
And so off they go, singing away.
They have to carry him.
So you could say, in some sense, he's carried by societal pathology and his own trouble.
He's carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island.
And so the cricket...
The cricket is again left behind.
He's not the world's best conscience at this point.
So, Pinocchio goes off to meet the coachman, and the coachman has already said he's collecting bad little boys, and He's got them all in the coach.
They're all delinquent types here.
The ticket on the coach was the ace of spades, which is what Pinocchio is holding.
And he's with this character here called Lampwick.
That's an interesting name.
So he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light, Lampwick.
And that's interesting because it's a play on Lucifer.
Because Lucifer means bringer of light.
And so Lampwick is a play on that.
And Lampwick is really a nasty piece of work.
He's got this false arrogance about him.
He's got this cynical voice, really deeply cynical voice.
And he's only...
I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this, maybe 12 or something like that, or 13.
And so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical.
I'll tell you a story about that.
So I used to live in Montreal.
I lived in a poor neighborhood.
And...
One day I was out in the back alley building a fence, because I was putting a little fence around my little tiny backyard, and there was a house across the alley down the street a ways where there was a lot of, like, not good partying, a lot of bikers were hanging around there, and I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well.
Anyways, I was out there in the back alley pounding away on my fence, and these little kids came up, and they were little, they were like three and four years old, hey, and they spoke I'll write really heavily accented Quebecois French, and my French isn't good, so I could hardly understand them,
but they were watching me hammer, and they got a little closer, and they had one kid who was clearly the leader, had a real scowl on his face, and so they were watching, and I kind of motioned to one of them that they could use the hammer, and that kid said, and I'm gonna mangle this, but he said, je voulais, or something like that, and what it meant is, I'll steal that.
And so, I thought, you know, and then he came over and he tugged on it, and he wanted me to take it, and he was quite angry, and, well, I wasn't gonna let him take it, and then so...
So I couldn't engage him, I couldn't get him to play, you know, and his buddies were sort of hanging around behind him, and they wouldn't come and play because he wouldn't, and so he was hostile right away to me, and then...
So the fence piece was laying out in the alley, and these little monsters started running across it, which I thought was really remarkable, you know?
But it was terrible at the same time, because they were really little kids.
That shouldn't be happening when you're like three or four.
If that's happening at that age, things are not good.
And so that kid was already, like, seriously not happy with the world.
And, you know, I'd been studying antisocial behavior for a long time by that point, and I knew that the kids who are destined to jail later in their lives are kids who are rough and tough when they're two years old, but then don't get socialized.
Or maybe worse, they get antisocialized, which is exactly what happened to this kid.
He'd obviously been ignored and abused.
Certainly no one had ever played with him in any real way, because he wouldn't play.
And it's not good if a kid is that little, and you can't get them to play.
Something's gone seriously wrong.
Because they're so playful at that age that it's like 90% of them.
Anyway, so they were running back and forth on this fence, I thought, stomping on it, you know?
And I was right there!
I thought...
Well, first of all, I thought that was remarkable, but I also thought it was absolutely horrifying, because, you know, in some sense I could see where this kid was headed and why, at that early stage in his life.
It's really...
it's not a pleasant thing to behold, you know.
But there was nothing that could be done about it, and that's kind of what this Lampwick is like.
He's prematurely cynical.
This kid was already cynical, and he was like four years old.
You know, most kids don't get cynical until they're teenagers.
you know, and then often they don't get completely cynical and usually they more or less grow out of it but it had happened to him much earlier so this Lampwick character, he's already decided that he knows everything that everyone else's opinion is worth nothing and that there's nothing in culture or society that holds any utility whatsoever for someone like him now you can imagine developing that way If you were raised in a family where people were generally lying to you,
and that they randomly treated you or neglected you, and that you couldn't discern anything about them that was admirable or positive, you know, of course you'd assume that the whole structure is corrupt, and that you had to take care of yourself and no one else.
Well, not of course.
Not everyone assumes that under those situations.
I shouldn't say of course.
But it's a logical set of conclusions.
So, and of course it's proportionate to some degree to how much abuse you take, although there are lots of stories of people who've been terribly abused as children who grew up to be, you know, kind, remarkable, responsible, thoughtful people who were absolutely opposed to abuse instead of propagating it.
There's no direct causal pathway.
Anyways, Lampwick is pretty happy to be on this On this coach way to Pleasure Island, which he's heard about, he said, well, It's all you can eat.
It's all you can smoke.
You don't have to do any work.
You can do anything you want.
So, you might say, well, it's too good to be true.
Like the gingerbread house in the Hansel and Gretel story.
Right?
The kids are lost.
There's a gingerbread house.
It's a house, which is something they need, and it's made out of cookies.
It looks like it's a little bit too good to be true.
And, of course, in the house, there's the negative part of that, which is the old witch who wants to eat children.
And that's a story about what happens to people if they're offered more than they should be offered so anyways, Lampwick is firing off he has a little slingshot, and he's firing off pebbles at the horses who are pulling the carriage, and that's just kind of the guy that he is so he takes Pinocchio under his wing And the cricket is down there in the dust.
He's caught back up to the carriage, but he's having a rough time at this point.
This is also a story, to some degree, about the transition into adolescence.
You know, because adolescence is a time people are still pretty impulsive, and their view is quite short-term, and they're more likely to pursue immediate pleasures and all of that, and that can get really out of hand.
So...
Anyways, they separate from the mainland and go on a boat, and so they're off to Pleasure Island.
Dark place.
And the coachman opens the gates and lets the delinquents into Pleasure Island, and they basically have a riot.
And this is Pleasure Island here.
It's full of amusement park rides.
You know, one of the things that's kind of interesting about horror movies, I'm sure you've noticed this, is that they're often set in amusement parks.
And clowns are often characters of horror.
We'll leave the clowns aside for now, but the amusement park thing, that's pretty interesting.
It's like, why in the world would an amusement park be a place of horror?
And the first question might be, well, have you ever been to an amusement park?
Because there is something about them that's really They have a dark side, a clear dark side, and part of it is that people with nothing better to do are spending money stupidly and they're being fleeced by the people who operate the The amusement park.
You know, and they have, let's say, a stereotypically dark reputation.
And they're moving around all the time, which is also something that psychopaths do.
And all they're doing is moving from community to community and taking the money from the rubes, fundamentally.
And so, the amusement park, well, if you walk through an amusement park with that sort of thing in mind, Maybe that's also coloring your vision, of course, but it's something that you can see very immediately.
So there's something about them that's sort of deeply sad, but there's also an underlying horror that characterizes them, that it's easy for horror movie or horror novel writers to immediately expand upon, and there's something about it that makes sense to people.
So...
It's too easy.
Maybe that's...
And it's also all short-term gratification.
That's the other thing.
So you spend your money very rapidly, and it's gone.
Yep?
Well, it seems like a celebration of meanings divorced from reality.
Yes, exactly.
Well, that's the impulsive element.
The comment was it's a celebration of meanings divorced from reality.
Yeah, that's...
Well, it's also outside of reality, right?
That's why it's on an island.
It's a separate universe, and it's a universe where nothing that's happening is connected to anything outside.
And you're spending your hard-earned money, let's say, but it isn't that much...
It's certainly not an investment.
It's not that much different than burning it.
Well, it is, because of course you get some pleasure out of it, but...
But...
It isn't...
Going there every day is probably not the wisest move that you could make.
So...
The animators do a good job of, well, of presenting the, what would you call it, the enforced hedonism, I guess I would say, of a place like that.
This is a place where you're gonna have fun, that's what it's for.
So...
Anyways, Lampwick, who's got this very arrogant look on his face, and this kind of strut, it's a bravado, that's what that's called, it's a false confidence, and it's the sort of thing that people do when they're trying to impress upon others that they're high in the dominance hierarchy, but really they're not.
So it's a mimicry of dominance, but it's something that can be intimidating, there's no doubt about it.
I had a friend He didn't come to a good end, this person.
He was a real good friend of mine when I was in junior high and high school, and he was kind of crazy.
And he was tall.
He was about 6'7", and he was pretty thin.
And we used to go out to the bar now and then, and in many of the bars that we were in, we lived in this little town, there were bullies.
And these were guys, and I worked in the bars, and I used to watch these guys, and they'd basically...
There was a handful of them in town, pretty psychopathic types.
And they'd go to the bar, and all they'd do is sit there and wait for someone to come in who they could beat up.
And they knew who it was as soon as they walked in.
That's actually why they were at the bar.
And so they'd wait until someone came in who didn't look very confident, and who could likely be intimidated by this sort of thing, and then they'd tell them to come outside for a fight, and if they didn't, well, then they'd, of course, make fun of them, and if they did, well, generally, they'd beat them up!
My friend kind of cottoned on to this trick and he started going to bars and every time that someone like that came near him he'd go outside and fight with them and one of the things he observed right away is that almost inevitably when he went outside with them they'd shake hands and make friends so as soon as he...
and it was really remarkable watching him because he wasn't He wasn't a particularly physically powerful person, although he was extraordinarily tall.
But he had started to play this game, and he did it for a long time, and I don't remember him ever actually having to fight.
He just stared them down, fundamentally.
So, it was a very interesting thing to watch.
But it was an indication to me of exactly how shallow this kind of bravado bullying actually is.
But people don't People don't find that out because they won't stand up, and it's not surprising, but...
Anyways, they load up on food.
Pinocchio's carrying a pie and an ice cream cone simultaneously, and then they're off to have a fight, and...
Lampwick says something like, it's good to punch someone in the nose sometimes, just for the...
I think he says, heck of it.
And so Pinocchio adopts this strut, and in they go to the roughhouse.
And then in the next scene you see this model home up for destruction.
It's quite an interesting scene symbolically.
You see In the middle of this house here, there's a stained glass window that has a mandela on it.
We'll see it more clearly in a minute.
And a mandela is a sacred symbol of the self.
That's the Jungian interpretation.
It's a symbol.
It's very difficult to describe, but it's a symbol.
Music is a mandela, except it's played out across time.
So you could say that that thing is the same as music, but it's kind of like a slice of music.
It's the same idea, you know, sometimes you see those slow motion or sped up motion videos of a flower unfolding?
That's the same, it's the same idea.
You can imagine that being set to music and somehow that would make sense and the Mandela is like a symbol of the unfolding of being and or the source of meaning or something like that and it's also a symbol of the self from the Jungian perspective,
and so there you see it more clearly the kids are starting to burn this place and to trash it, and they're dragging a grand piano down the stairs the destruction of high culture, about which they're nothing but cynical because they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can produce something of any value and they want to bring it down and destroy it and that's partly because you can see this in the story of Cain and Abel Abel is hard-working,
and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, and so his life goes really well.
And that's part of the reason that Cain hates him, and he's jealous and resentful.
But worse than that, if you're around someone, if you're not doing very well, especially if that's your own fault, if you're not doing very well, and you're around someone who's doing very well, it's very painful, because the mere fact of their being judges you.
And so it's very easy to want to destroy that, to destroy that ideal, so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you.
And so part of the reason that people want to tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad, and that's exactly what's happening here.
The kids are destroying all of this culture, roughly speaking, because It judges them.
The fact that it exists judges them, and I've often thought this about Michelangelo's statue of David, which is this heroic...
So David was a shepherd, obviously, and it doesn't sound like much, but back in those times, being a shepherd was a big deal, because there were lions, and you had a slingshot, and so, like, you got to defend your sheep from lions with a slingshot.
So you weren't exactly this, like, 19th century English guy dressed in a, you know, frilly blue suit.
You were tough as a bloody...
Well, as someone who would go after a lion with a slingshot, it's no joke!
Anyways, the statue is very heroic, and, you know, you look at that, and you think, well, that's the possibility of humankind, but by the same token, it's also what you're not.
And so, as well as being an ideal, it's a judge, and every ideal is a judge.
So, yes?
Going back to your example of Cain and Abel, so you're using that as an example to illustrate Becoming bitter as a result of not being able to achieve...
Sure.
...status as a result...
Success, even.
...success as a result of hard work.
But in the example of Cain and Abel, like, one was a shepherd and the other was a farmer, and the one who...
No, no, one is...
Yes, that's right.
And the one who was a shepherd was the one who was favored.
Yes, that's right.
So was that a result of the hard work, or was that a result of...
Good question.
Well, that's a good question.
Those stories are very, very complicated.
And the story is very ambivalent about whether Cain is not rewarded because he makes bad sacrifices or because God's just in a bad mood.
And I like that.
If you read the story, I've read multiple translations of the story.
And when Cain comes to God to complain, God basically tells him, look, buddy...
Before you go about criticizing the structure of reality, you should look to your own inadequacies.
He says, sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal, and you invited it in to have its way with you, and something has emerged as a consequence, so don't be bothering me about my creation before you look to yourself.
So, there's a very strong hint that the reason that God has not favored Cain's sacrifices is because they weren't of particularly good quality.
So, but it is ambivalent in the story, and there is the shepherd versus farmer motif as well, and of course that motif runs through the entire corpus of stories to some degree, especially the shepherd motif.
So, it's only about a paragraph long, that whole story, and it packs all that into that tiny little amount of space.
But...
The idea that Cain kills Abel to get rid of his ideal and also to punish God, roughly speaking.
It's a brilliant story.
I mean, these guys who go around shooting up high schools, or shooting up high schools in particular, but, you know, they're definitely out for revenge, and what they're revenging themselves against or to who is not exactly clear.
Anyway, so these kids are just tearing down this model home.
Tearing down Western civilization, I suppose, is another way of looking at it, or just tearing down civilization, period.
And Pinocchio's having a pretty good time, he's got his axe, and he's looking a little malevolent there, and happy to be destroying things, which is, of course, a pretty simple thing to do.
So there's that image that I told you about the Mandela, and that's a flower in this image.
And so, what happens is that, I think it's Lampwick, throws a brick through it.
And so, what that means symbolically, the self is a symbol of your potential, among very many other things.
But, by engaging in this sort of impulsive, destructive activity, Lampwick and Pinocchio are making it impossible for them to further their development.
and they're doing that to some degree consciously, you know, they basically say to hell with it and toss a brick through this highest ideal, the thing through which light shines so, also that harkens back to the star as well so anyways,
the coachman is paying attention to all this and he's actually pretty happy about the fact that these boys are so involved in their stupid amusements that That they're not paying any attention to what's actually going on, and he calls these people out of the darkness, these creatures out of the darkness, so you get these black, you can hardly see them there, but they're black cloaked figures with glowing eyes, and they're shutting the door of the amusement park.
That's very interesting.
It's an extraordinarily interesting happening.
It's like, okay, so all of a sudden the amusement park is...
we already know that the coachman is up to no good, but now he's got these minions that are faceless in some sense.
They're clearly creatures of the night, and they're up to no good.
And so you have the sense that The boys are being offered bread and circuses, roughly speaking.
But there's something, there's a real reason for it.
There's a manipulative reason for it.
They're being enticed into a trap.
And the doors are closed, and these underground beings are involved in the plot.
And obviously the coachman understands this perfectly well, and so one of the ways to understand this is to think about what totalitarian states have to offer their populace, and what they offer them, and this happened particularly as Rome declined, let's say.
That's where the term bread and circuses originally came from, is that as the situation degenerates, then people have to be offered stupid amusements more and more frequently in order for them to ignore what's actually going on in the background.
And, you know, a war can be that kind of stupid amusement.
Anyways, later that night, the entire place is completely devastated, and all we see is the wreckage of everything that was there before.
And again, the cricket has got separated from Pinocchio, and so he's trying to find him, and Pinocchio ends up in this bar that's shaped like an eight ball.
Eight ball is kind of the random ball in Poole.
And anyways, he's inside the eight ball, and he's shooting Poole with lamp wick.
And that's just another indication of wasting his time, basically.
And you can see in the forefront there, there's some cards for gambling.
And so he's engaged in these sort of, you might say, pointless hedonic pursuits.
And he's enticing Pinocchio along the same route.
And so he teaches him to smoke.
First, that doesn't go very well, so Pinocchio takes a huge drag on a cigar, and it just about kills him, and when Lampwick asks him how he likes it, he shakes his head and says, you know, that it was really quite good, but he's so sick that he can hardly stand up,
and he's hallucinating double balls on the pool table, and then the cricket shows up and stands on the eight ball and kind of gives one of those declamatory speeches again, you know, because he still hasn't quite figured out that Standing up proud and spouting off the rules isn't exactly the right way for the conscience to behave.
And Lampwick picks him up by the scruff of the neck, roughly speaking, and first of all asks who he is, so obviously he's divorced from his own conscience, and then makes fun of Pinocchio for paying attention to this little bug.
And that's kind of a nice indication of what happens in adolescence, you know, because Of course, as children move away from their parents and into their groups, especially when the groups are misbehaving, often what happens is that the other members of the group will torture a person who isn't willing to try something dangerous or foolish by making fun of the fact that they're, you know, too attached to their conscience.
And there's a positive element to that, because You should take some risks when you're a teenager, and also later in life, and so if you won't take any risks, there's actually something wrong with you, but there's a negative element in that, well, you know, teenagers do all sorts of stupid things,
and perhaps it's amazing that we all live through it, actually, as far as I'm concerned, and some people take extraordinary risks, and they don't make it through at all, or they end up In the permanently anti-social population.
And then they're, you know, basically career criminals.
5% of the criminals commit 95% of the crimes.
It's another Pareto distribution.
So...
Anyways, Lampwick isn't going to listen to Pinocchio, or to the cricket.
He laughs at him with this kind of braying laugh, which is some foreshadowing, and the cricket gets all upset, puts his coat on backwards, and ends up Dumped down a pool table hole, and otherwise abused, and so he stomps on out of there.
He tells Pinocchio that he can take care of himself, and he stomps on out of there.
And so Pinocchio is left without the guidance of conscience, and the cricket is trying to figure out how to get off Pleasure Island.
But!
He goes through the gates, and he sees what's actually going on.
And what's going on is that the coachman has this, like, slave boat, Down in the bowels of the island, and he's got all these black-suited minions with the glowing eyes working for him, and they're rounding up what look like donkeys.
And so they're beasts of burden, right?
And so there's an idea here that if you pursue impulsive pleasure to the detriment of the development of your character, you're going to end up a beast of burden.
You're going to end up a slave to a tyrant.
And that's exactly right.
And so, anyways, you can see one of those black-suited horrors here hauling donkeys out of this crate, and one of them has a hat on.
And they look very sad and they're in different crates and one of them says sold to the salt mines and one says sold to the circus and so they're shipped off to be To be slaves, roughly speaking.
And they look very sad.
And then one of them gets hauled out of a crate, and he's still got a hat, he has a hat on and a sweater, and he can still talk.
He's a boy, it turns out, that's been half-transformed into a jackass, a braying jackass, prior to being enslaved.
And so that's another thing that's quite interesting about the story.
You know, it also makes the case that if you Replace your voice with stupid braying that the probability that you're going to become enslaved by a tyrant is extraordinarily high, and I always can't help but think about ideologues in that manner, you know?
Solzhenitsyn wrote about the radical left ideologues that got thrown in the gulag archipelago, you know, so they were party stalwarts, this happened to a lot of people, true believers who were vacuumed up by the Stalinist machine and thrown into the gulag anyways!
and He said that those people suffered in some ways more than everyone else, because, what did he say?
They were bit by the beloved hand that fed them.
And so the first while, when they were in the camps, Solzhenitsyn really didn't know what to do with people like that, because on the one hand, well, they were in the camps, and wasn't that awful, and they'd been torn away from their families, and, you know, stripped of all their identity and their status, and so that's pretty rough.
But on the other hand, they were writing letters protesting their innocence and assuming that everyone else in the camp was guilty, but they were innocent, and they were still strident believers in the communist process.
And so, you know, it was a conundrum.
Here they are being terribly punished, but by the same token, they're also the perpetrators of their own demise, so how do you deal with them?
They used to play comrades.
He said they used to play comrades with people like that and invite them into an ideological discussion about the camp situation and the situation in the country as a whole and let them rattle out their ideological justifications for everything that had happened in trying to make them parody themselves, roughly speaking.
It was a rough game.
And Solzhenitsyn also concluded that There was no helping someone like that when they were still ensconced inside that braying ideology.
You could predict everything they were going to say.
It's like someone had a crank, you could just crank it and out would come the proper ideological formulas.
But then he realized that as soon as they, let's call it, repented of that and started to realize their own role in it or the error of the system, then he would start communicating with them, you know, as if they were people who Who you could communicate with.
Yeah.
So that was very interesting as far as I'm concerned.
Anyways, this kid is still a little bit human.
He starts to cry for his mom.
And the coachman basically throws him back into the crate and says that he's not ready yet.
And the reason for that is that he could still...
He still had the power of independent speech.
You remember, right at the beginning of the movie, when the mouth was painted on Pinocchio, we saw that mask that was really glaring at the process.
And I said that character recurs continually throughout the movie, and this is a good example of that, because the coachman is the enemy of anything that has its own voice.
So he's the anti-Geppetto, that's a good way of thinking about it.
He's the tyrannical aspect of the culture.
But insofar as...
one of these mostly donkeys, mostly jackasses can still talk then they're not completely fit for slavery and you remember this movie was also being made at about the same time that the Nazi transformation of Germany was taking place and so all these terrible underground things,
you know, this process whereby people were being reduced to to ideological slaves, say, and in this terrible process that was all playing out in Europe in a very big way and it's not like people weren't aware of that,
you know, it was in the air so Anyways, the donkeys, the jackasses that can still talk are crying and complaining and repenting and the coachman turns into a full tyrant again and cracks a whip, if I remember correctly, and says, you've had your fun and now you're gonna pay for it.
So...
The cricket gets word of all this, he gets wind of it, he starts to understand what's happened is that all these bad kids were enticed out onto this island so that they could be enslaved and he's really taken aback by that to say the least but he realizes what's going on so he runs back to find Pinocchio and then the scene switches back to the eight ball bar where Lampwick is drinking beer and complaining about what the conscience said.
You know, because he's kind of guilty and ashamed, but he won't admit it.
Because he doesn't admit anything.
He knows everything.
He's not going to admit anything about himself that isn't perfect.
He's a real totalitarian in training.
And he drinks this beer and he's laughing about the conscience and putting him down.
And then he says, well, what does he say exactly?
What does he think I am?
A jackass?
Or something like that.
Maybe that's not the words exactly.
And then he grows these ears.
And Pinocchio sees that and immediately takes a look at the beer and stops drinking it, and then Lampwick transforms one more time, and his face turns into the face of a donkey, and he's laughing still, and then his hands...
Oh yes, he laughs, and he starts to bray like a jackass, and he's horrified by that, and then Pinocchio laughs, and...
The brain comes out as well, and so now they're absolutely horrified, and Lampwick actually figures out what's going on.
He figures out that he's been tricked and that he's transforming, and he's completely horrified by it.
He becomes conscious of what's happening to him, and there's one particularly, I would say, dramatic scene where his hands have transformed into hooves, and he's Kicking and leaping around the room in panic, and he comes up to a mirror and sees himself as a jackass, and then he turns around and breaks the mirror, and so, you know, he's self-conscious for a moment, then he destroys his capacity for self-consciousness, then he transforms entirely into a jackass.
He's farther down the road than Pinocchio, and he comes crawling to Pinocchio to save him, and asks that the conscience comes back, so that he can get out of this, but of course it's a bit too late, and so then Pinocchio Grows jackass ears.
And he's absolutely terrified by it as well.
He knows what's coming.
And the cricket comes back and guides him off Pleasure Island.
And so then they end up on a cliff.
Because this is an island after all.
And they have to jump into the unknown.
Right?
Out of this impulsive, adolescent, hedonic playground into the unknown.
And that's how they escape.
So that's the first time that Pinocchio has to leave This is the first scene where he has to jump into the water to make a clean break from something pathological.
So, tyranny.
You see this echoed.
You see echoes of this in the story of Moses leading his people from Egypt, because Moses is a master of water.
Right?
He hits this rock with a stick and water comes out of it and he's floating on water when he's an infant and he parts the Red Sea and so he's a master of water and transformation and the Pharaoh's kingdom is represented as desert stone roughly speaking and so the idea there is that while the kingdom is solid ground But it can be a tyranny.
And the water is chaos, but it can be the thing that you have to leap into to free yourself from the tyranny.
It's not like in the Moses story that that comes easy, right?
Because the Hebrews leave Egypt, which is a terrible tyranny.
And you think, well that's good, they've escaped from the tyranny.
But that isn't what happens.
They escape from the tyranny, they actually end up somewhere arguably worse.
Because they're wandering around in the desert for 40 years.
And it's a brilliant element of that story, because it states clearly that when you go from a bad place to a better place, you go to a worse place first.
And that's a great thing to know, because it also tells you why you might be unwilling to take the next step.
You're aiming up, but in order to aim up, you have to let go of something you already have.
And then that'll put you into a state of chaos.
And unless you're willing to undergo that intermediary state of chaos, and you might not recover from it, you're not going to get to the next level.
So that's rough.
Well, so Pinocchio, he decides that chaos is better than tyranny, and guided by his conscience, jumps into the water.
And then, we don't see anything happening in the water in this particular scene.
They come back to shore, all half drowned and exhausted by their adventure, and they go back home.
And I think maybe we'll take a break now.
Let's see, this is a good time to take a break.
1.30.
Perfect.
So, let's break for 15 minutes, okay?
Alright.
All right, so...
Carl Jung talked about this phenomenon.
He cried phenomenon.
He described as retrogressive restoration of the persona.
And so it's a complicated idea, but basically what it means is that sometimes you take a leap forward and you learn some things, but you can't catalyze a new identity, so you try to go back and hide in your old identity.
And that actually doesn't work because...
things have changed and you've learned something and that isn't who you are anymore and so it's like you have to cut parts of yourself off in a destructive manner to fit back into the person that you were now what happens here is that Pinocchio Escapes from this tyrannical situation and undergoes this descent into chaos, but he tries to go back home.
He tries to go back to what he was.
And he can't do that anymore.
His father isn't at home anymore.
And so...
So when he goes home, he finds that there's no home there.
Now...
This happens to people sometimes and it's often a shock to them, so...
One of the things I've noticed about Peter Pan type, I'm going to speak about men here, because I've observed it more in men, is that they'll often stay under the thumb of their father.
And you think, well, why would someone do that?
Because it means they're subject to the tyrannical judgment of their father.
They're always concerned about what their father would think, or whether their father approves of them, and so forth.
And you think, well, that's got to be an unpleasant place to be.
Why would you do that?
One of the things that I've suggested to my clients and to other people sometimes is that here's a weird little exercise that you can undertake, a little thought experiment.
So you have your parents, and of course your parents have friends who are about their age, and maybe some of them are people you only know peripherally.
And I might ask you, well, Do you care more about what your parents think than you care about what these peripheral people who know your parents think?
And then the answer to that is, well, of course.
And then the question that arises out of that is, why?
I mean, for someone else, your parents are the peripheral people, and their parents are central.
Like, why is it logical that your parents' opinion makes any more difference to you than the opinion of some randomly selected people who are approximately that age?
Why is it the case that you would consider that they would know more than someone else?
I mean, I know they know you better, and fair enough, but that's not the point.
And then another point there is that to the degree that your parents' opinion about you matters more than some randomly selected people of approximately the same age, Jung would say, well, you haven't exactly separated out the God image from your parents, and so you're still under that combination.
It's like, it's a complicated thing to talk about, but think about the Harry Potter Series, Harry has two sets of parents, right?
He's got the Dursley parents, and then he's got these, like, magical parents that sort of float behind, and he should know the difference between them.
They shouldn't be one and the same.
They're not for him.
And it's like, well, you have your parents, and you have nature and culture as parents, and you shouldn't be thinking that your parents are nature and culture as well.
You shouldn't have final dominion over you.
It means that you're not an individual yet, if that's the case.
Freud said, for example, that no...
No one could be a man unless his father had died.
And Jung said, yes, but that death can take place symbolically.
Okay, so there's that part of the idea.
And then another part of the idea is...
One of the times in your life when you actually realize that you're an individual is when you'll go and ask your parents something, and you'll realize they actually don't know any more about what you should do than you do.
And that sucks.
And that's partly why people are often willing to maintain a tyrant-slave relationship with their fathers.
Like, on the one hand, you have to be inferior in a relationship like that.
You know, you've always got the judge watching you.
But on the other hand, there's always someone who knows what to do.
There's always someone standing between you and the unknown that you can go ask, what should I do?
Well, at some point, you'll realize that the reason you can't ask that anymore is because they actually don't know any more than you do.
And then that's a pain.
Like, that is a symbolic death.
And that's also when you establish a more individual relationship with your parents.
It's at that point that you could conceivably start taking care of them instead of the reverse.
And that's a time that should come.
But you have to let that image of perfection go.
And that exposes you.
Well, that's what happens here.
You know, Pinocchio goes home.
And he wants things to be the way they were, and he wants to stay under the careful care of the benevolent father, but that's no longer possible.
He's past that point, and that's why the father has disappeared.
And so, Geppetto has gone off to look for Pinocchio, because he also needs a son, but in any case, the house is abandoned.
And so then...
We see inside the house that everything's covered with cobwebs and everything's gone, and Pinocchio and the crickets sit on the steps, and they're very concerned.
First of all, they wonder where he went, so they're actually concerned that he's gone, but they also don't know what to do because there's just no going home.
And so, you know, that's also the case that once you hit a certain point in your development, Well, it's the same thing we already talked about.
The answers that you're looking for are not going to be found in your parents' house.
It's as simple as that.
Now, you could artificially maintain your dependency.
But, you know, if you do that for too long, things get pretty ugly.
So you get pretty stale, and, you know, you're like bread that's been on the shelf for too long.
So, now they're wondering what to do, and where he could be.
And then there's something very strange happens.
The star shows up again.
And it turns into a dove, and the dove flies down and puts a piece of paper bathed in light with gold writing on it in front of the cricket and the puppet.
So what in the world's going on there?
Well, we know what the star is.
We've seen it multiple times, right?
It's also the place that the Blue Fairy came from.
But it's this transcendent place.
It's this place that occurs sort of as the ultimate ideal.
And this time it delivers a message.
So what's happening here is that Pinocchio is fundamentally oriented by the wish that his father made so long ago, right?
And the wish was that he would become a fully functioning individual.
And so that's that transcendent place.
And Jung would say...
When you orient your vision, different things appear to you in the world.
So, and I mean this literally.
So, because you can't see everything, Your vision calculates what's necessary, your brain calculates what's necessary for you to see so that you get to the point that you're aiming at.
And I don't mean that metaphorically.
I mean it literally.
Things that aren't relevant to what you're seeking, you won't see them.
Unless they get in your way, and they have to really block your pathway before they'll be literally visible.
So you orient yourself towards something, and that makes some things visible that wouldn't be visible, and makes other things invisible that you might have seen.
And so when you change your orientation, what manifests itself in the world also changes.
Now, Pinocchio is in despair here, and he asks himself, where could my father have gone?
And so, the question is, what exactly is he asking under those circumstances?
And what he's asking is something like, I had a structure that was orienting me properly in relationship to the world.
And as far as it was embodied in my actual father, it's now gone.
Is there any possibility that I can find that again?
And that is what you want.
You see, like, if you're in a chaotic circumstance, maybe you've escaped, let's say, from a bad relationship or something like that, and you're out of it, but now you don't know what to do.
What you're hoping is that you can get your life back together.
Right?
That you can put the pieces that have fallen apart back together.
And so you're automatically going to generate a fantasy about producing another, let's call it stable state.
You're going to be looking for the spirit that would enable that stable state to be generated.
Because really what it is, in some sense, is your new personality.
You're in chaos.
You have to become something new in order to get out of chaos.
And so you're hoping for that.
You're hoping that you'll see it.
And so...
That's going to make certain things visible to you.
That's the proper way of thinking about it.
You know, when you get curious about something, and maybe you're curious about something and you walk into a bookstore, that curiosity is going to guide you to a certain set of books.
The fact that you have the question in mind is going to open your eyes to certain kinds of possibilities.
And so if your goal is to re-establish your union with the positive father, let's say, Then certain things are going to appear and other things aren't, and that's really what this represents.
The transcendent star is the goal, which is this developmental process.
It's capable of, let's say, delivering a message to you.
In some sense, that's what's happening when you're thinking, you know, because you have a problem you want to solve, you have somewhere you want to go with your thoughts, and as a consequence of that, Information reveals itself to you in the interior landscape.
It's a very strange thing.
You know, in some sense it feels as if you're producing the thoughts, but it could equally be said that you're watching the thoughts reveal themselves.
And which of those is the more accurate description is by no means obvious.
You can certainly have thoughts that surprise you, which is very strange.
It's like, they're your thoughts.
How in the world can they surprise you?
But they do.
So it's like you didn't know them before you thought them up.
And then the question is, well, where did they come from if you didn't know them before you thought them up?
They sort of spring out of the void.
That's one way of thinking about it.
Anyways, this is a Holy Ghost symbol, this dove, as well.
So that put some Christian imagery in here again.
You could think of it as a manifestation of the spirit of transformation.
That's another way of looking at it.
Anyways, it's the conscience that interprets the letter.
So it's sort of figuring out what the next thing should be, and weirdly enough, what the letter says is that Geppetto was out looking for Pinocchio, and he got swallowed by a whale, which makes very little sense, to put it bluntly.
Geppetto went to search for Pinocchio, and now he's at the bottom of the sea in a giant whale.
And we leap right over that tremendous gap in logic and follow the story nonetheless.
Okay, so what's the idea here?
The idea is that if you're...
if you fall into a chaotic state and everything falls apart, there's the possibility that Things can come back together, including what you've just learned, in a new state.
And so you can conceptualize that symbolically as the existence of the dead father at the bottom of the chaotic landscape.
That's the proper way, as far as I can tell, to think about it.
It's like there's something down there that's capable of reforming and re-emerging that's That incorporates the previous state, but that takes it farther.
And you're not going to find that unless you descend into this chaotic place where it feels like all order is gone.
While you generate order, it's going to be akin to the order that you had before, but there's going to be something new about it as well.
So it's down to the bottom of the chaotic state to bring up what you're missing.
That's one level of analysis.
Another level of analysis you think is, well, that's also what you're doing, that's what you should be doing in principle when you're going to university.
You know, you come to university in roughly the same state as Pinocchio.
You know, you're a bit of a puppet, and you're kind of a jackass, and what the hell do you know?
And it's chaotic, because you haven't found your place in the world properly.
And I don't mean merely for career, not that that's not relevant, because it is.
But it's more important than that.
It's because you're a historical creature.
Because you are a product of history.
Unless you are inculturated properly, which means you understand your past in the sense that the humanities can allow for that, then you haven't...
Being able to incorporate the wisdom of your ancestors into your day-to-day pursuits, and that's going to make you weak.
That's the idea anyways.
And so when you come to university, this is what university is for.
It's so that you can go into the chaos, And you can pull something out of it that's truly of value.
And you can incorporate that in your own personality, and that makes you much, much stronger.
Like, literally stronger.
Not more educated.
It's not like you know more facts.
It's that you literally are a better person.
And better means...
You can do far more things.
You can articulate...
That's something that's of crucial importance, is that you can articulate yourself properly, which is more useful than anything else you could possibly manage.
Like, if you guys come out of university capable of making coherent arguments and using language properly, you're so powerful that it's ridiculous.
You always...
You can lay out a strategy and pursue it successfully.
And maybe the strategy is actually oriented towards something good, something that will actually work.
Work for you and work for other people as well.
And I don't really understand why people aren't told this when they come to university, is that your goal is to make yourself as articulate in writing and thinking and speaking as you possibly can, because that opens the door to everything that you'll want to do in the future, no matter what it is.
The more articulate person, always.
Rises.
Always.
Because they lay out strategies more effectively.
They lay out the reasons for doing something or for not doing something more particularly.
They convince people, and properly so, that they can grapple with potentials that lies ahead effectively.
And they can defend themselves when they're challenged.
And so all of that is...
Going into the past, into the chaos of the past, you could even say, and pulling up the spirit that inhabits that from the bottom and uniting with it.
And if you don't do that, well, you're defenseless in the case of, in the face of the tragedy of life.
And then that's not so good, because if you're defenseless in the face of the tragedy of life, then you get way more hurt than you would otherwise get, and so do the people around you.
And then the probability that you're going to be resentful and bitter about that is really high, because no one likes to fail continually.
And then you get bitter and resentful, and then once you're bitter and resentful, well, being vengeful and mean is the next step.
It doesn't take much of a transformation to move you from that place to the next.
So now Pinocchio has to face the thing that he's afraid of most.
And that's a complicated...
Idea as well.
So Jung had this phrase that he liked, that he took from the alchemists, which was insturquilinus invinitur.
And what it meant was, what you most want to find will be found where you least want to look.
There's this old story that's from King Arthur, and King Arthur has these knights, right?
They all sit around a round table, which means they're roughly equal.
That's what the round table means.
And they're off to find the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is the most valuable object.
That's what it means.
So they're off to find the most valuable thing.
But they don't know what it is, and they don't know where it is.
But they know that there's a most valuable thing, so in some sense it's akin to them orienting themselves by the star.
And they don't know where to look, and so what they decide is they have the castle and it's the middle of a forest and so each knight decides to start looking for the Holy Grail by entering the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and so what's the idea there?
well imagine there are things that come easy to you and that you're fond of pursuing and that you're happy about pursuing so you've found those and pursued them and you've mastered them so you know all that, but then there's another place That you don't want to go.
And so you haven't gone there, and you haven't mastered it.
And you're very small in comparison to it, because you haven't mastered it.
And so it has this monstrous aspect.
And...
But it has...
If what you're working, where you...
If what you're doing isn't working, it's where you haven't gone that you need to go.
And so I can give you another example of this.
So let's say you're an agreeable person.
And so, you don't like conflict, and you won't stand up for yourself, and you regard anger and the proclivity to provoke and to engage in conflict as something that's positively terrible.
It's not only that you're not good at it, it's actually that it's wrong.
So that's where you have to go if you're gonna learn how to stand up for yourself.
And imagine that you're afraid.
Maybe you have something like agoraphobia.
And so there's a whole bunch of things that you're afraid of, and you don't wanna go there.
but if you want to put yourself together then that's exactly where you have to go and so it's frequently the case that what you want to find is to be found where you least want to find it and that idea is echoed in the Prominent stories of dragons and gold.
It's exactly the same idea.
Is that the dragon is this terrible thing.
It's this terrible predatory thing that lives forever and is very, very wise.
And it lives underground.
And it'll kill you.
It'll burn you up in a second.
But it hoards gold.
And so you have to go there into the dragon's lair if you're gonna get the gold.
And that's a representation of people's paradoxical relationship with reality.
It's like, you have to go out there and confront it in order to incorporate what it has to offer to you.
But the probability that that's going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit, first of all, those are actually the same thing.
If it didn't push you to the limit, you wouldn't gain anything valuable from it.
So...
You don't get one without the other.
You don't get the gold without the dragon.
That's a very strange, very, very strange idea.
But it seems to be accurate.
So all of that's lurking underneath this, in this imagery of the whale.
The thing that's at the bottom of...
Now, the whale...
You can think of the story of Jonah.
What happens with Jonah is that, roughly speaking, he's a prophet and God tells him that he has to, if I remember correctly, God tells him that he has to go to this city and straighten it out because it's veered off the path and it's heading towards doom.
And Jonah thinks, I'm not going to that city to tell those people anything like that because they're not going to be very happy With me just showing up there and telling them, you know, everything they're doing wrong, and so he hops on a boat and tries to get out of there.
And then God conjures up this huge storm, and the boat is about to be swamped, and the sailors, they're worried, I think, about making the boat lighter, something like that.
They all draw lots to see who gets tossed overboard, and Jonah admits that it's actually his fault, because God's upset with him, because he got this direct command to go straighten out the city, and he ran off, and so The sailors throw...
they're not happy about this, but they throw Jonah overboard, and the sea's calm, and a great fish comes up, a whale, and swallows him, and then he's down in the fish for three days, and it throws him up on the dry land, and then he's learned his lesson by that time, and he goes off to have this...
pursue the proper destiny, to pursue his proper destiny.
So that's echoed in this story as well, that...
if you don't follow the pathway that you're supposed to follow, That the seas will become stormy for you, and something will come up and pull you down, and you'll be in a terrible place for some length of time until you learn your lesson.
And if you're lucky, you'll get spit back up on shore, and then you can go do what you should do.
Well, I mean, that's not a lesson that anybody needs to have interpreted.
I think everybody understands that.
Anyways...
The cricket tells Pinocchio what he has to do.
And then something kind of paradoxical happens.
Pinocchio decides he's going to go do this.
And then the cricket has got this weird paradoxical response to that.
On the one hand, he's sort of pulling Pinocchio back, saying, look, you know, this is foolhardy.
You're going to go all the way down to the ocean.
You're going to confront this terrible whale.
This is really, really dangerous.
But at the same time...
When Pinocchio's on the edge of the cliff, the cricket helps him tie his tail around a rock, and he holds his finger in place so that Pinocchio can tie the knot.
It's like the conscience is conflicted about this.
It's really dangerous and foolhardy, but it's also necessary.
And so he plays this dual role.
But Pinocchio's leading at this point, so into the ocean he goes.
I guess partly what this means is that if you're not oriented properly in the world, you should take your doubts and the chaos that you're enveloped in seriously.
You should face it and think it through.
You should go into it as far as you can go into it, because maybe you'll find something at the bottom of it.
I mean, the alternative is to pretend that it doesn't exist.
So then Pinocchio is at the bottom of the water.
He can actually breathe down there, it turns out.
So you could think that he's gone into the unknown.
He's outside of dry land.
He's in the unconscious.
All of those things are true.
And you might think, well, why would it be the world outside of what's known and the unconscious at the same time?
This weird intermingling of those two things.
And as far as I can tell, that's because When you're in chaos and you don't know what's going on, then you start imagining what might be going on.
And that imagination is partly the world, as it might be.
But it's also partly the structure of your unconscious mind, which is producing the fantasies.
And so when you're truly in chaos, then the distinction between your fantasies and reality isn't clear.
That's actually part of what constitutes the chaos.
So imagine this.
So you're in a relationship and the person betrays you.
And you knew who they were, or at least you thought you did, before that moment.
But now, you're looking at them, and you don't know who they are.
And you don't know what the past was.
And you don't know what the present is.
And you don't know what the future is going to be.
All of that's been thrown up into the air in a major way.
That's traumatic.
So much has fallen apart that it's traumatic.
So what do you start to do?
You start to imagine what might be the situation.
well then the reality, like the reality is your imagination and the reality at the same time they're not pulled apart at all you cannot distinguish between them and so it was a Jungian idea I could say that's the snitch that Harry Potter's chasing, by the way.
I know that's a terrible leap, but that is what it is.
It's that weird intermingling of potential and reality that can manifest itself as the world if you pursue it.
It's roughly that.
So Pinocchio is in this situation that's half fantasy and half reality, in this chaotic state.
And he has to go down to find the thing that he least wants to find.
And he's hoping that he's got this intuition that in facing that thing, that chaos, that life really is that chaos, that he's going to find his father and reunite with him.
So you could also say that in some sense it's a decision of faith, I suppose, because you might ask yourself, well, why bother confronting chaos?
If chaos is the ultimate reality, then what the hell use is there in facing it?
Because it's just going to reveal itself as the ultimate reality and drown you.
But the myths always say the same thing.
They say, no, no, if you confront what's really disturbing you, if you really confront it, you do it voluntarily, you're going to find order in it eventually.
Or at least that's the only way you're gonna find order.
Now, it's not like these stories are optimistic, and it's not as if they give you a sure guide to success.
That's the other thing.
It's not like they're unerringly accurate, because you can be subsumed by chaos that's so total that even if you face it, you're not gonna prevail.
I mean, that's why people die.
That's one way of looking at it anyways.
But the mythology basically says this is your best bet.
If there's a process that's going to work, this is it.
And so, and then you might think, well, the better you do it, the better the chances are of success, or the more consistently you do it, the better the chances of success are.
And I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it.
Okay, so anyways, Pinocchio's down at the bottom of the ocean, and every time he says, he's trying to find out where Monstro is.
And they ask questions to the fish that are down there, but every time they mention Monstro's name, all the fish disappear.
And it's like Voldemort, right?
He's the guy whose name you cannot say.
And Monstro is precisely that, it's the thing that frightens everyone.
And so...
asking questions down there isn't helping very much, and so Pinocchio, what he does is he's calling for his father, and he keeps going deeper and deeper into the depths.
And...
we're in a scene, there's a scene where The darkness of the ocean turns into an even more profound darkness, and that's what Pinocchio disappears into.
And then we see Monstro, he's in this sort of foggy representation, this huge thing that lies very much at the bottom.
And there's no life or anything around him, except I think these are mackerel, but maybe they're tuna.
They're animated anyway, so it doesn't matter.
But there's no life down there.
He's so far down at the bottom of the ocean that there's nothing that's alive down there.
So, and then we go inside the whale, which is of course absurd, and we see that the whale has eaten a boat at some point in the past.
This is one whopping whale.
And Geppetto is sitting with the kitten, of all things.
He's also got that little goldfish bowl full of goldfish with him too, which is quite the feat.
Anyways, he's sitting there, and he knows that he's trapped in the belly of the whale, too, and that he can't get out.
And so that's an interesting issue.
It's because not only is Pinocchio lacking his father, which isn't a good thing, but the father is lacking the son.
And there's some indication that the father can't get out of the whale without the son.
And so it's like the possibility for order is down there in this chaotic state, but unless there's an active agent to go seek it out, it can't pull itself off.
It's not animated enough to get out by itself.
You know, and you could say, well, there's wisdom in the libraries, but it's not going to...
Like, without you going in there and gathering it and embodying it, all it does is sit there in potential in all of that implicit form.
That's a good way of thinking about it.
So anyways, Geppetto is feeling pretty hopeless because...
He can't figure out any way of getting out of the whale, and he's also starving.
He's starving in the belly of the whale.
and here's a way of thinking about that Geppetto's a good guy, but he's old And that means his way of doing things is no longer fruitful.
That's why he's starving.
And it's especially not fruitful because he's missing his son.
He's missing the active element that the child represents, say the playful and transformative element that the child represents.
And so if you get stuck doing something the same old way, at some point it's no longer going to work, even if it was good at some point.
It has to be updated.
And it's updated by, let's call it the spirit of youth, or the spirit of attention, or the spirit of play, something like that.
The willingness to break boundaries and take risks.
And Geppetto is very, very skilled, but he doesn't have that.
And that's symbolized by the loss of his son.
That's why he was out looking for his son, too.
He needs him.
And so they're in despair down there, trying to fish and not getting anything, and so...
Monstro wakes up.
A mackerel happens to swim by, and Monster wakes up, and so...
Then he starts...
I think they're tuna, actually.
They look like tuna to me.
And so Monster wakes up, and he opens his mouth, and a bunch of water starts to come in.
And so...
And then you see Pinocchio with the fish.
Now...
There's very intense, implicit Christian symbolism in this part of the film, and I'm gonna lay it out point by point.
So, you may remember, and perhaps you don't know, that one of the symbols for Christ is a fish, ichthys, right?
And that's a play on the Greek representation of Christ's name.
But there's more to it than that, because all of Christ's followers are fishermen.
And he performs a bunch of miracles with fish.
And fish are strange things because, well, you can pull them up out of the depths.
That's part of it.
And so there are things that can be pulled out of the depths.
And you could say that...
It's going to be very difficult for me to take this apart.
But you could say in some sense that Christ is a meta-fish.
A fish is something that you can dine on.
But a way of being is something that provides you with something to dine on on a continual basis.
And so, you might say, well, is it better to have a fish or to be a fisherman?
That's another way of thinking about it.
And obviously it's better to be a fisherman, because then you can get more fish.
And so, it's one thing to have something, but it's another way, it's another thing completely to know how to generate good things.
And so, if you had any sense, you'd take the latter over the former, even though the former is more instantaneously gratifying and requires less work and responsibility.
And so, anyways, the whale opens his mouth and goes chasing these fish.
And Pinocchio tries...
he's trying to get the hell out of there, even though he wants to find the whale.
When he actually sees the whale, he leaves.
And that's also a very common mythological...
What would you call it?
Plot element.
It's very frequently that what happens when the hero first sees the terrible thing, the dragons say, the terrible thing that he's come to conquer, he, like, freezes and gets the hell out of there, because it's far worse than he thought it was going to be.
And so Pinocchio is like, no way, man.
I'm not going near that whale.
The way he swims, and he's actually at the forefront of all the fish, which is quite interesting, too.
So, in the meantime, Monstro has opened his mouth, and the fish are pouring in, and Geppetto is fishing like mad, and he's catching fish like crazy.
And so the little cat is...
Geppetto is flinging the fish backwards into this, like, box, and the little cat is there whacking them to kill them while they're flopping around.
And so they're pretty excited about this because They have a problem.
The problem is how to get out of the whale.
That's the actual problem.
But a nested problem inside that is how not to starve to death.
And so Geppetto's pretty happy that even though he's not getting out of the whale, that he gets to have something to eat.
So you could say, as well, that he's not exactly focused on the right thing.
He's focused on the micro-problem instead of the macro-problem.
And that makes him kind of blind.
So anyways...
The whale swallows up Pinocchio, and Geppetto keeps fishing.
And then he snags Pinocchio.
Now this is cool, because...
And this is another example of that meta-fish idea.
It's like...
Geppetto's actually looking not for a fish, he's looking for a way out of the damn whale.
And then he catches a bunch of fish, and he's, like, focused on that, like mad.
And then he catches Pinocchio.
And Pinocchio represents what would get him out of the whale, but he's so bloody obsessed with the fish that he doesn't even notice.
So he catches Pinocchio and flings him into the fish basket.
And so it signifies the blindness of Geppetto's orientation when he's inside the whale.
And that's kind of a comment on his aged and insufficient nature.
He's solving the problem very well, but it's the wrong problem.
So anyways, he fires Pinocchio into the fish bin.
Pinocchio says, Father, I'm here.
And Geppetto says, Don't bother me right now, Pinocchio.
I'm busy fishing.
So Well, then that's fine.
So then he kind of wakes up.
He has this little moment of insight, this little revelation that, well, he's caught Pinocchio, so who cares about the damn fish?
So then he runs over to the fish box to grab Pinocchio, and instead he grabs a fish and gives it a kiss.
And so it's another way of hammering home the fact that there's this confusion that he's suffering from.
He can't distinguish the local truth from the transcendent truth.
And so anyways, he does figure it out.
He tosses the fish aside and he grabs Pinocchio, and they're all thrilled to death to see each other, and so they're united.
So Pinocchio has found his father.
But they're still trapped in the belly of the whale.
Now, Pinocchio takes off his hat, he gets covered with a blanket, he takes off his hat, and he reveals his jackass ears.
And so, he's found his father, but he's damaged and not Pinocchio.
He's damaged and not in good shape.
He isn't becoming what he was supposed to be.
In fact, he's actually degenerated since since Geppetto saw him last and so he becomes embarrassed and he says he has a tail he says, that's nothing, I have a tail too and then he spins that around kind of laughing then he brays and gets really embarrassed and so that's what you see here,
he looks like, well he's revealed himself as a jackass to his father but you know, that's actually a good thing because he is a jackass and if he was unwilling to admit his insufficiency he wouldn't have ever gone on this pursuit so it's this perverse willingness
to note that he isn't all that he could be that's part of what drives him to find everything that his father represents it's a humility and it's an admission of insufficiency and you need that before you're going to learn anything because before you learn anything you have to admit that there are things that are important that you don't know and that you're a fool and maybe that you're a brain jackass and so that's why there are injunctions in many religious writings that
are positively, that portray humility positively as the antidote to arrogance.
That's the right way of thinking about it.
Is that humility means I still have something to learn.
I still have something to learn.
I'm insufficient.
I still have something to learn.
It's exactly the opposite, say, of Lampwick's attitude.
Anyways, Geppetto decides that a son puppet who's half jackass is better than no son at all, which is another indication of his relatively positive orientation towards the world, and they reunite.
And then, Pinocchio immediately sets his eyes on the main problem.
It's like, hey, we're stuck in this whale, we need to get out of here, and it turns out that Geppetto's already built a raft, but there's a problem, and the problem is, is that, as Geppetto says, Pinocchio says, well, we'll wait for his mouth to open, and Geppetto says, that doesn't work, because when he opens his mouth, Monster opens his mouth, everything comes in and nothing goes out.
So, raft, fine, but there's no way of using it.
And so, Geppetto decides that they're not going to bother with that problem, and they're gonna go have some fish.
But Pinocchio, his eye is still on the main prize.
He thinks, no way man, we're getting out of this whale.
That's the fundamental thing.
We're not going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
We're going to attend to the fact that it's sinking.
We're going to keep our eye on the primary problem.
So he's a little more awake by now.
So, Pinocchio says, we'll make a fire.
Now that's cool, I think, because...
He's down in chaos, where his father is trapped, and the first thing he does is to use fire, and of course that's exactly what people do, right?
Because we're fire users, and so this, and Shaman, for example, are masters of fire, but there's this really primordial element to the story right here, and it's an indication that the The thing that can transform chaos into productive order is also the same spirit that mastered fire.
And so Pinocchio lays that out.
And he says, we're going to build a fire!
And Geppetto says, and we'll fill him up with smoke.
And Geppetto says, great!
Smoked fish!
So he's still stuck on this whole fish thing.
And so Pinocchio runs around gathering up All the spare wood on the boat, including the furniture, which he starts to break.
And Geppetto says, well, what are we going to sit on while we eat our smoked fish?
And Pinocchio basically says, politely, you know, enough with the damn fish thing.
I'm going to fill the whale with smoke, and that's going to make him sneeze, and then we can get the hell out of here.
And Geppetto says, that's going to make him mad, it's not a good idea.
Well, I would say that that's the stance of the benevolent state against innovation.
Even if the innovation is positive and even if it's transformative and freeing, the old state, even if it's good, is going to stand in opposition to that.
And so that's also something that's very useful to know, because otherwise you can get bitter about that.
Anyways, Pinocchio makes this big fire, Geppetto's pretty worried about it, and he starts to fill the whale up with smoke.
And so this is where the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon, which is quite cool.
It's like in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent turns into a fire...
spewing dragon as well, and if you watch The Little Mermaid, what's her name, Ursula, she turns into a gigantic snake-like creature as well, although she doesn't exactly spew fire, but the transformation of the ultimate monster into something like a dragon is very, very common, because it's the ultimate symbol of the unknown, for a variety of reasons that we'll discuss later.
So anyways, yes, it's a symbol of chaos.
Anyways, and this is quite a horrifying scene.
When my son watched, he watched Pinocchio when he was about four.
And he watched this scene over and over and over and over.
I don't know how many times he watched that movie, but it must have been a hundred times.
But he was really Fascinated by this scene and, you know, he was like locked onto it.
It was frightening, but there was something in it that he was processing and cottoning onto.
So anyways, you see the whale is starting to prepare to sneeze and it's belching out huge quantities of smoke and fire and Pinocchio and Geppetto and the cat and the goldfish bull are all on the raft Trying desperately to get out of the whale which inhales and pulls them back and then sneezes and pushes them forward and at some point they actually break free and there's a good gates of hell image there with the whale belching out smoke like mad and its jaws open and so
they're paddling madly away to get away from this whale and the whale is very angry just as Geppetto suggested and there's interesting sound effects that go along with this The whale actually turns into a That's what happens when your phone is smarter than you are.
The whale actually turns into something that's like a locomotive, and the sound effects become industrial.
So it's this monstrous machine-like locomotive dragon that's bent on the destruction of Pinocchio.
And you could say it's an amalgam of natural and social forces completely unleashed.
Everything's unleashed against Pinocchio and his father.
And so, they're having a hell of a time, there's big waves, and they end up...
The whale actually abandons them, but before it does that, it nails them with its tail and blows the raft into smithereens, and so then they're both in the water, and Geppetto and Pinocchio are drowning.
And Geppetto actually goes down for the third time, so to speak, and as he's going down, he says to Pinocchio, save yourself.
Save yourself.
And so that's kind of Pinocchio's last temptation, because Geppetto's had it, and he could just get to shore on his own, but he would have abandoned his father.
And so that's the thing, and that's one of the issues that this movie grapples with, is what exactly is your responsibility?
And you could say, well, it's to save yourself.
But the myth that underlies this says, no, it's not.
That's not exactly right.
It's to rescue your father from the chaotic depths, and integrate with that, and to save both.
And that's your duty to your culture, but more than that, it's also your duty to your soul.
It isn't gonna work if you just save yourself, because you're still gonna be a jackass puppet, even though you're gonna be back on shore.
So anyways, Pinocchio grabs Geppetto, And carries him to shore, and the whale shows back up, and gives him one more good wallop.
And then we see everybody on shore, and it's peaceful again.
Geppetto is on his back on the dry land, and the kitten washes up, and the goldfish bull washes up, and the cricket washes up.
He's been outside the whale all of this time.
And we see the cricket calling for Pinocchio, and then we see him lying in a pool of water, dead.
So he's died.
Rescuing his father, he died.
Well, why?
Well, he is a jackass puppet, and maybe he was supposed to die if he rescued his father.
Because that insufficiency that characterized him is something that's destroyed by the process of encountering the chaos, which was so difficult it reforms the personality.
And the same occurs when he rescues his father and incorporates that.
So it's like...
Bilbo, in the first part of the, what is it called, the Lord of the Rings?
The Hobbit.
He's this sort of jackass puppet guy, a little overprotected shire dweller at the beginning and he goes on this tremendous adventure and he has to develop the negative parts of his character, he actually has to become a professional thief and he has to develop his bravery and so the old personality in some sense has to die to give Life to the new one.
And so you see in Harry Potter series too, at the very end, Potter dies.
And then he's resurrected, right?
And that actually happens to a slightly lesser degree in the second movie, where the resurrection is aided by the phoenix tears after he gets chomped by that big snake, which is, roughly speaking, the same thing that's happening here.
Sorry about that.
Okay, so anyways, Pinocchio's dead.
That's not good.
So, the next scene we see them back at home, and he's lying dead on the bed, and Geppetto and everyone else are mourning his loss, and then we see this magic transformation, and we hear the blue fairy's voice,
and so it's like he's pushed himself to his limits, and the natural process kicks back in and revivifies him, but now he's no longer a jackass puppet, he's actually something that's real and so then he tells, he wakes up and he notices that now you know,
he's undergone this proper transformation he notices his hands in particular and then he tells Geppetto, who refuses to even notice, he says, no no Pinocchio, you're dead, lie down so, you know, Pinocchio convinces him that he's not dead and then,
in celebration, they start the clocks again and so time kicks back in at that point and so, then they have a big celebration music happens again, because this is a celebratory moment and they dance, and the harmony is restored the good old guy has his son,
and so the house is properly set up and the old state has its vision and its capacity for transformation and the thing that transforms has the stability of the culture behind it, and so, perfect And then the cricket goes outside and he's talking to the star and the blue fairy and he says he's pretty happy about how this has gone.
And so then She gives him this little medal, which is made out of gold, and it's a sun, and it's a Mandela, all at the same time.
And it's made out of gold, and gold is a noble medal.
It doesn't mate indiscriminately with other medals.
It doesn't tarnish.
And so it's a medal that represents the sun, and then he flashes his little badge at the star, establishing a relationship between his function as the proper conscience and his orientation towards the highest good.
and that's it there, so he's got this little sun, he's wearing this little sun so he's also transformed and developed as a consequence of this entire process and now Pinocchio's conscience is properly oriented it's oriented towards the highest value and then the movie closes and that's Pinocchio So,
I'll give you a minute and I'll take some questions and try to figure out how to shut my phone up.
So does anybody have any questions?
Yes?
You seem to use the bigly psychoanalytic approach to kind of extracting the inarticulated messages from the mythology and the stories and the religion that's developed over time.
So could you almost say that those are kind of constructing this to a societal level, out of an individual level?
These are kind of the dreams of the collective unconscious?
Sure.
That's exactly what they are.
They're the fantasies of the collective unconscious.
That's one way of looking at it.
I mean, they also take a socially determined form, right?
Because it's animated, and that's a technology, and it's obviously something that exists in a particular time and place.
But yeah, it's a collective attempt to give voice to the oldest of behavioral patterns.
So here's one way of thinking about that.
Which we'll talk about in some detail, which you should have read about, at least to some degree already.
The question is, where is that knowledge represented?
And Jung would say, well, it's part of the collective unconscious, and it's got a biological origin.
But his description of the biological nature of the collective unconscious is quite ambiguous.
And I think that that's because it actually is ambiguous.
For example, we know that primates, and humans in particular, are at least biologically predisposed to be afraid of snakes.
So we can learn that very easily.
Now, you could make a case that it's more than biological predisposition, that it's actually built in, but I would say the predisposition idea is actually a better one, because you at least need the exposure to the snake to get it going.
So that would take place as a consequence of your experience, so it's not purely biological, although it is the case that snake fear tends to become more intense as you get older, which is not necessarily what you would expect.
And I just read a paper this week localizing snake fear in primates, and it was hypothalamic.
It's really old, because the hypothalamus is a very, very old part of the brain.
It's older than the amygdala, and amygdala is involved in snake fear as well.
It's really, really old.
So you could say, well, you're prepared to develop snake fear, like you're prepared to develop language, and like you're prepared to walk by your biological structure.
Now, whether that actually constitutes the contents of your memory, which is what Jung seems to imply, is an open question.
But it doesn't really matter, because...
So, one time when I went to visit my nephew, he was running around in a night suit.
He was only about four or five.
So he's acting out this...
Mythological pattern, roughly speaking.
And you'd say, well, how did he know how to do that?
And the answer would be, well, it was represented all around him in the culture.
In fragments.
And, like...
Kids are pretty good at putting fragments of stories together.
That's really what understanding is, is to put fragments into story form.
And so he'd watched Disney movies, and his parents had read him stories, and he did pretend play with the other kids, and all of those were like exemplars of this underlying narrative.
There are variants of it, and because he can abstract and generalize, he's pulling out the central features of those narratives, the heroic features, and then embodying them.
So you could say, well...
The central features of these narratives are fragmented and distributed around, across the entire culture.
And so they don't have to be exactly inside your head.
They don't have to be part of your memory.
They're distributed in the behavior and the actions and the stories of the entire culture.
And they just, you can put them together out of that.
So, and people do that.
That's why they're so hungry for stories like Well, like this one, or like Star Wars, or like Star Trek, or like the Marvel movies, or like Harry Potter.
Yeah, what you said about the last scene, your son watching it over and over again, my little brother did the same thing with the last scene of the first Harry Potter movie.
The guy with the two faces, he watched that probably 20 or 30 times.
Yeah, it's really interesting watching little kids interact with, like, because movies are unbelievably complex.
I mean, you know, by the time you're your age and you've seen, you know, Several hundred of them, at minimum.
The impact wears off, but it's really something sitting down with a four-year-old who hasn't watched very many movies and walking through one with them.
I mean, they're so turned on.
It's just...
I took my daughter, when she was too young, actually, I took her to see The Mask, the Jim Carrey movie.
Jesus.
I mean, she survived it.
I don't think I traumatized her.
But she was sitting on my lap, and it was really like gripping a bundle of...
Barbed wire.
She was just like that the entire movie, you know, and halfway through I thought, well, that's probably a little too much psychophysiological intensity for one small body, you know, but she...
those movies, they just have a massive impact on little kids, and they will do exactly that.
They'll watch it over and over and over, and you think, what is...
what are they doing exactly?
Well, they're trying to understand.
They're gripped by...
they're gripped by it somehow.
Right?
And it's like they're deeply curious.
They know there's something in it.
And they're trying to extract out what it is.
And they'll repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it.
So, they're hungry for the information.
Because it's part of rescuing their father from the chaos.
That's one way of thinking about it.
So...
Other questions?
Well, good enough then.
Let's call it a day.
Whoop, there is one more question.
So, in maps of meaning, there's the idea that you keep returning to about, like, when you first encounter the unknown, it's like, it's first fearful.
Yep.
And then Jung has the idea of architects.
So, are there other kinds of meaning that people will find in new information that's already patterned into them?
That's patterned into them, or into the new information?
That's patterned into them, like, by the archetype.
Do people actually...
Sure, well, they project the contents of their fantasy onto the unknown thing.
And that's partly a process of self-discovery.
You know, so, for example, let's say that you...
You know, you're gripped by love at first sight, or something like that.
Now, you don't know anything about the person that you're tremendously attracted to.
But you'll have fantasies about them.
And in fact, your image of them is a fantasy.
And if you take that fantasy apart, you'll find out what you value.
So you're projecting yourself into the world, and you can discover...
I mean, you may also discover something about them, because there may be elements of them that match the ideal quite nicely, if you're fortunate, and if your ideal is, you know, of a reasonable sort.
But you definitely encounter yourself when you look at the unknown, because you use your fantasy to structure the contact.
You know, and the fundamental structuring is the heroic encounter with the unknown, because that's the pathway, that's the fundamental pathway of human beings, because we're information foragers, fundamentally.
So it's that automatic response, then the fantasies as well, that are part of the first...
Sure, sure, well that's also, yes, absolutely, that's exactly right, yes, so...
I mean, imagine this.
Imagine that you're attracted to someone and you're too terrified to go speak to her.
Well, what's happening?
Well, you have a fantasy of a judge.
And that's your imagined representation of your own insufficiency in relationship to the ideal.
And you project that on this person as a judge, and then you're too paralyzed to even open your mouth around her.
Very common experience.
Okay.
Let's call it a day.
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