131. Maps of Meaning 3: Marionettes & Individuals (Part 2)

[0] Welcome to Season 3, Episode 18 of the Jordan B. Peterson podcast.

[1] I'm Westwood -Wan Podcast Network's Joey Salvia, and I help produce this series.

[2] We thank you for joining us for these 2017 lectures based on Jordan Peterson's book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

[3] This week, we present part two of a three -part lecture called Marionettes and Individuals.

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

[5] We'll be back in a moment with Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

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[17] Westwood One Podcast Network presents Marionettes and Individuals, Part 2.

[18] And now, Dr. Peterson.

[19] Okay.

[20] So, the last time we were here, we got about maybe a third of the way through this story, this story of Pinocchio and the transformation of a marionette into something.

[21] something hypothetically real and I'm gonna backtrack a few slides and it'll get us into it again.

[22] So you remember that the blue fairy, so I would say the benevolent element of mother nature in the schemata that we're going to use to investigate mythology, had more or less been allowed her entrance because Geppetto was a good guy and because he wished for the right thing.

[23] And so in some sense, here's a way of thinking about that.

[24] You know, genetic studies, genetic slash environmental studies of children's temperament have revealed something quite interesting, which is that the shared environment that children have within a family, so that would be what's the same about your environment and your brother's environment to say, doesn't have that much effect on your temperament or his temperament.

[25] Because the presumption always was that within a family there was a shared environment, right?

[26] that something was common about the environment to every child within that environment.

[27] But there isn't much of a shared environmental effect on temperament.

[28] So then you could say, well, that makes it appear as though parenting isn't that relevant in relationship to the development of temperament.

[29] But you could also suggest something else.

[30] You could suggest that if parenting is occurring properly, the effect of the shared environment should be very close to zero.

[31] And the reason for that is that you establish an identity.

[32] an individual relationship with each child and the environment is actually a micro environment that's composed of your observations of your child and that specific child's interaction with you and to some degree if there's a shared environment that means that you're enforcing the same principles on every child and so my suspicions are although I don't know this because and the research hasn't been done that in bad families there's a shared environmental effect but in good families there are that minimizes and so that That's the child's biological predisposition, roughly, manifest itself with support and in some positive manner.

[33] Well, I don't want to extend the analogy too far, but you could imagine that, and this is what this film proposes, is that if you aim properly in relationship to your child, what you're trying to do is to establish an individual relationship and to allow them to move towards whatever their particular expression of individuality happens to be.

[34] And that's, well, that would be the same as allowing nature to take its course in some sense, at least nature and its positive guise, and that's exactly what happens here.

[35] Now, the other thing that happens, of course, is that the cricket, for reasons that aren't clear, precisely, is knighted by the Blue Fairy and serves as Pinocchio's conscience, although he isn't very good at it, which is a very peculiar thing, and quite a marked point that the film is making, that that conscience actually has something to learn too.

[36] And there's actually a Freudian element to that, you know, because Freud thought of the super ego as the internalization, roughly speaking of the father, and it could be very severe the superego.

[37] So it'd be like a really strict father, really tyrannical father inside your head.

[38] Although I think it's better to think about the super ego as the internalized representation of society at large, mediated to some degree through your parents, because it's not as if your father, even assuming he's tyrannical, is the inventor of all those tyrannical.

[39] tyrannical rules.

[40] He's the propagator of them, but he's actually a proxy voice, even if it's just for the harsh side of society.

[41] He's a proxy voice for society.

[42] And because we're a social creatures, the utility of having an internal social voice to guide you, although, again, you seem to be able to follow it or not follow it, which I also find spectacularly interesting, because obviously if it was an unerring guide, you could just follow it.

[43] And if it was an unerring guide, you could just follow it.

[44] And if it was an unerring guide, Well, you wouldn't need free will either, because you could just act out the dictates of this internal representation, and that isn't what you do.

[45] So, anyways, the proposition here is that the conscience exists, but it's a relatively flawed entity, and it needs to be modified as well by nature, which is quite interesting, because the Blue Fairy Knights him, because you also might think of the conscience as only something that's socially constructed, right, which is the more typical viewpoint, but I don't buy that for a second, because I believe firmly and I think the Piagetian interpretation of child development more or less bears this out is that there are parameters within which conscience has to operate and that it's sort of like this it's like it's the same parameters that govern fair play will say that and so you can say there's fair play within a game and there's fair play across sets of games and the set of games is pretty much indistinguishable from the actual environment, right?

[46] If you think about all the things you do as nested games, at some point, the spread of that is large enough, so it encompasses everything you do, which includes the environment.

[47] And so I believe that you're adapted to the set of all possible games, roughly speaking, all possible playable games, something like that.

[48] And that you know the rules for that, which is why we talked about this a little bit, why you're so good at identifying cheaters.

[49] You have a module for that according to the evolutionary psychologists, and not only do you identify them, but you really remember them, it really sticks in your mind.

[50] And there's other evidence, too.

[51] So one piece of evidence that I love, I think it's so, well, there's a couple.

[52] One, I would derive from Franz Du Wall, who's a famous primatologist, and he studied the prototype morality that emerges in chimpanzees.

[53] And it's very much nested in their dominant structures, you know, because you could think of morality.

[54] in some sense as the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates, right?

[55] And so you could say, well, the biggest, ugliest, meanest chimp, and the male dominance hierarchies in chimp seem to be the predominant ones, although the females also have a dominance hierarchy in it.

[56] It's not quite so clear in Bonobos, which seem to be more female dominated.

[57] But in any case, the primary chimp dominant structure is male, and you could think, well, it's like the caveman chimp, who's biggest and toughest, who necessarily rules and who rules longest.

[58] But that isn't what DeWal found.

[59] See, the problem with being mean, let's say, and not negotiating your social landscape and not trading reciprocal favors, is that no matter how powerful you are as an individual, two individuals, three quarters of your power, can do you in.

[60] And that happens with the chimps fairly regularly.

[61] If the guy on top is too tyrannical and doesn't make social connections, then weaker chimps, males make good social connections.

[62] And when he's not in such good shape, they take him down and viciously too.

[63] DeWal has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of, let's call it regicide among the chimpanzee troops that he's studied mostly in the Arnhem Zoo.

[64] They have a big troop there that's been there a long time.

[65] But he's very interested in prototypical morality.

[66] And here's some other examples of prototypical morality emerging among animals.

[67] There's many of them.

[68] But one is, you know, if two wolves have a dominance dispute, again, that would be more likely among the male wolves, but it doesn't really matter.

[69] They basically display their size, and they growl forociously and puff up their hair so they look bigger.

[70] And, you know, you can see cats do that when they go into fight or flight, right?

[71] Not only do they puff up, including their tail, but they stand sideways.

[72] And the reason they do that is because they look bigger, right?

[73] because they're trying to put out the most intimidating possible front.

[74] So anyways, if two wolves are going at it, what they're really trying to do is to size each other up.

[75] And they're trying to scare each other into backing off fundamentally.

[76] Because, see, the worst case scenario is like, you're wolf number one and I'm wolf number two, and we tear each other to shreds, but I win, but I'm so damaged after that, that wolf number three comes in and takes me out.

[77] So, like, there's a big cost to be paid even for victory in a dominance dispute if it degenerates into violence and animals and human beings, but animals in particular have evolved very, very specific mechanisms to escalate dominance disputes towards violence step by step so that the victor doesn't risk incapacitating himself by winning.

[78] So what happens with the wolves is that they growled each other in posture and display and maybe they even snap at each other, but the probability that they're going to get into a full -fledged fight is pretty low and what happens is one of the wolves backs off and flips over and shows his neck and that basically means all right tear it out you know and the other wolf says of course he doesn't well you're kind of an idiot and you're not that strong but we might need you to take down a moose in the future and so you know despite your patheticness i won't tear out your throat and then they've established their dominance position and then from then on at least for some substantial period of time this subordinate wolf gives way to the dominant wolf but at least the subordinate wolf is alive and you know he might be dominant over other wolves and so everyone in the whole hierarchy has sorted that out through either through mock combat or through combat itself and you know the low ranking members aren't in the best possible position but at least they're not getting their heads torn off every second of their existence and so there's even some utility in the stability of the dominance hierarchy for the low ranking members because at least they're not getting pounded they're getting threatened which is way better i mean it's not good But it's way better than actual combat.

[79] And then there's the example of rats, which I love.

[80] This is Yak Panksep's work, and he wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which I would highly, highly recommend.

[81] I have a list of readings, recommended readings on my website.

[82] It's a brilliant book, and he's a brilliant psychologist, really, one of the top psychologists, as far as I'm concerned, both theoretically and experimentally, a real genius.

[83] He's the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them.

[84] They laugh ultrasonically.

[85] So you can't actually hear them, but if you record it and slow it down, then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an eraser, which is sort of like their mother's tongue.

[86] It's often what lab people use as a substitute for the licking of the little rat by the mother.

[87] So, and he discovered the play circuit in mammals, which is like a major deal, right?

[88] He should get a Nobel Prize for that.

[89] That's a big deal to discover an entire motivational circuit whose existence no one had really predicted, you know, apart from the fact that obviously mammals play.

[90] And even lizards maybe, some of the more social lizards seem to play.

[91] You know, so anyhow, what Panksap observed, I think this is a brilliant piece of science, is that, first of all, juvenile males in particular, like to rough and humble play.

[92] They like to wrestle.

[93] And they actually pin each other, just like little kids do, or like adult wrestlers do.

[94] They pin their shoulders down, and that basically means you win.

[95] And so, okay, so that's pretty cool.

[96] But what's even cooler, I think, well, there's three things.

[97] the rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur.

[98] And so that's one of the scientific ways of testing an animal's motivation, right?

[99] So imagine you have a starving rat and it knows that it's got food down the end of a corridor.

[100] You can put a little spring on its tail and measure how hard it pulls and that gives you an indication of its motivational force.

[101] Now imagine the starving rat that's trying to get to some food and you have a little spring on his tail and you waft in some cat odor.

[102] So now that rat is starving and wants to get out of there.

[103] He's going to try to pull even farther towards the food.

[104] So getting away plus getting forward are separate motivational systems.

[105] And if you can add them together, it's real potent.

[106] And part of the reason why in the future authoring exercise that you guys are going to do as the class progresses, you're asked to outline the place you'd like to end up, which is your desired future, and also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart, is so that your anxiety chases you and your approach systems pull you forward you're maximally motivated dead and it's important because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue right and that's very common and so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward but it makes you weak because you're afraid you want to get your fear behind you pushing you and so what you want to be is afraid more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them it's very very helpful and lots of times in life and this is something really worth knowing you know and this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult is you don't get to pick the best thing you get to pick your poison you have two bad choices and you get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through and every choice has a bit of that element in it and so if you know that it's really freeing because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking well maybe there's a good solution to this you know compared to the bad solution.

[107] It's like, no, no, sometimes there's just risky solution one and risky solution two.

[108] And sometimes both of them are really bad, but you at least get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through.

[109] And that actually makes quite a bit of difference because you're also facing it voluntarily then instead of it chasing you.

[110] And that is an entirely different, entirely different psychophysiological response.

[111] Challenge versus threat, it's not the same, even if the magnitude of the problem is the same and so putting yourself in a challenging let's call it mind frame you can't just do that by magic putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much better much easier on you psychophysiologically because you don't produce you don't go into the generalized stress response to the same degree and you're activating your exploratory and seeking systems which are dopaminergically mediated and that involve positive emotion so if you can face something voluntarily rather than having it chase you, it's way better for you psychophysiologically.

[112] So that's partly why, well, it's worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair instead of waiting for it to come and eat you.

[113] So, and especially when you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its layer, you might find it when it's a baby instead of a full -fledged bloody monster that is definitely going to take you down.

[114] And so that's part of the reason why, well, there's a whole bunch of things that that emerge out of that observation like don't avoid small problems that you know are there face them because they'll grow into big problems all by themselves and you can think about imagine the tax department sends you a notification you owe them like three hundred dollars well it's you know that's annoying maybe you don't even want to open the letter or maybe if you do you just put it on the shelf but that damn thing doesn't just sit there like a piece of paper on the shelf right you ignore that for five or six years, it's going to become attached to all sorts of horrible things.

[115] And if you ignore it long enough, you get the idea.

[116] It's going to turn into something that is completely unlike the little piece of paper that it's written on.

[117] And many, many problems in life are like that.

[118] You'll see that they pop their ugly little head up and you know, and you might want to turn away, might not want to think about it, which is the easiest way of turning away, right?

[119] You just don't attend to it.

[120] It's not like you repress it or anything like that.

[121] You just fail to attend to it.

[122] And that's a really, as a long -term strategy, it's dismal.

[123] It's also something I think that's more characteristic of people who are high in neuroticism and high in agreeableness, because agreeable people don't like conflict.

[124] And people who are high in neuroticism, who are high negative emotion, are hit harder per unit of uncertainty or threat.

[125] And so, you know, and that's partly why in psychotherapy, a lot of times the people you see need assertiveness training, so that would be the opposite of agreeableness.

[126] or they need to help get their anxiety and emotional pain under control.

[127] Those are not the only reasons.

[128] There's antisocial behavior, but you can't fix that in therapy in all likelihood.

[129] There's alcoholism.

[130] There's lots of lots of other reasons, but those are two major reasons.

[131] So anyways, that was all to tell you that, oh yes, back to the rats.

[132] Okay, the rats are pulling on the, you can measure rat motivation by how hard they pull on the spring, let's say.

[133] and they're more motivated if they're running away and running towards, but let's go back to play.

[134] So you can take juvenile rats who haven't been able to play for a while, maybe they've been isolated, or maybe they just haven't been able to engage in physical activity, like many schoolchildren that you might be thinking about, neither allowed to play nor allowed to engage in physical activity, and there's a reason I'm telling you that.

[135] So anyways, you get one of these little rats and you can measure how hard he wants, how hard he'll pull to go out and play, or how many buttons he'll push, you know?

[136] And that gives you an indication of his motivation.

[137] So anyways, you can see that the play -deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than a non -play -deprived juvenile rat.

[138] And so you can infer that the rat wants to go play.

[139] And, you know, you do that.

[140] You do the same measurement with everyone around you.

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

[142] You'll object, even if you don't really object.

[143] It's like, it's a measurement device.

[144] And if they're willing to overcome a bunch of your objections, then you think, oh, well, maybe they really want to.

[145] And that's another thing to really know.

[146] If there's something you want, you need about five arguments about why you want it.

[147] Because the probability that the person who's opposing you will have five arguments about why you shouldn't have it is very low.

[148] They just won't have thought it through enough.

[149] So the other thing that happens in the future authoring exercise is that you're asked to articulate the reasons for all.

[150] all the goals that come out of your vision of the future.

[151] So you're asked, like, why would it be good for you?

[152] Why would it be good for your family?

[153] Why would it be good for broader society?

[154] So that gives you three levels of argumentation right there.

[155] And if you have it articulated down into detail and it's related to other important goals, then you're a hell of a thing to argue with because people just aren't that deep, by which I mean, they just don't have that many levels of explanation or objection.

[156] And it's also really useful in relationship to your own.

[157] mind because if you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections.

[158] It's like, well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now.

[159] Maybe you should be doing the dishes or vacuuming or watching TV or looking at YouTube.

[160] If you're really sneaky, when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to because you're doing something else useful.

[161] And if you give into that temptation, which you often will, then it wins, and because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick and it grows stronger.

[162] Anything you let win, the internal argument, grows.

[163] And anything you let be defeated shrinks, because it's punished.

[164] It doesn't get to have its way.

[165] So that's another thing really to remember.

[166] Don't practice what you do not want to become.

[167] And because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man. They're not going anywhere.

[168] You can build another little machine to inhibit.

[169] That's the best you can do.

[170] Once they're in there, you can't get them out.

[171] And then the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress, and the old habits will come back up.

[172] So you've got to be careful what you say and what you do, because you build yourself that way.

[173] So, anyways, back to the rats.

[174] Okay, so the little rat gets to go out there and play.

[175] Now imagine one little rat is paired with another rat, but the other little rat is 10 % bigger.

[176] 10 % in juvenile rats is enough to attain permanent.

[177] dominance so the 10 % bigger rat will win the first wrestling contest okay and so that's what happens and then so the little rat gets pinned and maybe they play a bit and then they're done with it and so you separate them then you let them play again and the next time what happens is that the subordinate rat does the invitation to play and that's like you know like a dog does when it wants to play you can recognize that kind of splays its feet apart and it looks up and looks interested and sort of dances around and you can do it with any kid that has a clue, you know, that hasn't been destroyed by adults, if you're a little three -year -old kid or four -year -olds are better for this.

[178] If you go like this, like, they know exactly what's going to happen, you know, they're ready to dart back and forth, and they'll usually smile.

[179] And kids love rough and tumbled play, which is now basically illegal in all daycares.

[180] It seriously, it seriously is.

[181] Kids need it so desperately because it teaches them the limits of their body and your body, and it teaches them what's painful and what isn't, and it teaches them the dance of play and without that they're just little disembodied blobs like they have no finesse what that's what you're checking out when you dance with someone you know you're seeing if they have that that fluency and facility for mutual reciprocal action embodied in them and if they're kind of like this you know and just have no sense of rhythm and don't pay any attention to you and all of that you have reason to question whether they actually inhabit their body and whether they can engage in a mutual interaction, a physical interaction that's going to be reciprocal and mutually satisfying.

[182] It's really important to check out.

[183] And a lot of that rough and tumble play, even interactions between a child and its mother.

[184] If you have a happy mother and a happy infant and you videotape them and you speed up the videotape, you'll see that they're dancing.

[185] So one responds, then the other responds, then the other responds.

[186] It might just be with eye gaze and movement and all of that, but there's a dynamic interplay, which you don't see with depressed mothers and their infant.

[187] So, okay, so back to play.

[188] So the little rat who got, is the subordinate one, he has to do the invitation, and then the big rat can agree to play, because he's in the dominant position.

[189] But if you pair them repeatedly, and this is really worth thinking about, because, see, morality emerges out of repeated interactions, because you might say, well, if you're only going to interact with someone once, you might as well just take advantage of them and run off.

[190] That's what a psychopath does, by the way.

[191] And there is room in the environmental niche for psychopaths, but they have to keep moving around, because otherwise people figure out who they are.

[192] So they just move around, and they can take advantage of one person, you know, maybe five times or ten times or something, and then the reputation spreads and they've got to get the hell out of there.

[193] So it's not a good long -term strategy, unless you can't think of a better one.

[194] So anyways, if you repeatedly pair these rats, unless the big rat lets the little rat win at least 30 % of the time, time, the little rat will not ask the big rat to play.

[195] And that is, it's a staggering discovery.

[196] It's a staggering discovery because you've got the emergence there of a implicit morality, essentially, that's even incarnated in rats that emerges across multiple play sessions.

[197] It's like, yes, exactly.

[198] That's exactly what Pierset said about the emergence of morality.

[199] It's exactly the same idea at the rat level.

[200] So it's a massively, and the fact that there's a circuit, a separate neurophysiological circuit that's actually specialized for that sort of thing is also a big deal.

[201] Now, the other thing Panks have figured out is that if you deprive juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly.

[202] And they become impulsive and restless.

[203] And then you can fix them with methylphenidate or riddlin.

[204] And those are the drugs that are used to fix hyperactive kids, most of whom are male.

[205] And that's because, well, really, you're going to take your six -year -old, your five -year -old, you're going to put them in a desk, you're going to get them to sit there for six hours.

[206] That's your plan, right?

[207] That's a stupid plan.

[208] And they're denied the opportunity to engage in play.

[209] And that means that their ability to become social is being impaired.

[210] It may cause neurological impairment.

[211] That's what the rat evidence suggests.

[212] And then you suppress that with amphetamines, because amphetamines actually don't activate the play circuit they activate a different circuit which will suppress the play circuit so it's very very it's not very wise and i'm not going to go off on that tangent because i could tell you why the school systems were set up that way which i probably will at some point because it's quite an interesting story in and of itself and it's the reason all you guys are sitting in desks right now somebody laughingly referred to this once as grade 15 which i thought That was pretty funny given a look at the bloody place, you know, oh, hideous.

[213] And, okay, so now, this is an interesting thing.

[214] So you got the emergence of morality in, say, chimps, you got the emergence of morality in wolves, you got the emergence of morality in rats, and the morality governs sequential interactions or group interactions.

[215] They have to repeat because it's an emergent property of social or repetitive interactions.

[216] That's why.

[217] You can't just localize it in one instance.

[218] It's repeated.

[219] And there's been computer simulations of this to help you figure out how you might attain victory across games across time.

[220] Maybe you need a strategy.

[221] And there's a very simple strategy, which I believe is called modified tit for tat.

[222] So if you're nice to me, I'm nice back.

[223] And if you do something bad to me, I do something bad back.

[224] But imagine you run that out in sequences of behavior and see who does best with what strategy across time.

[225] or an alternative strategy.

[226] Here's the best strategy.

[227] I trust you.

[228] You trust me. We start interacting.

[229] You screw up.

[230] I whack you.

[231] And then I forgive you when we start again.

[232] That's modified tit for tat.

[233] And there hasn't been an...

[234] It's a very simple algorithm.

[235] No one has come up with a better algorithm in the computerized simulation of game space than that particular strategy.

[236] So it's like trust, but don't be a pushover.

[237] If someone violates the rules, you've got to nail them.

[238] But then you don't hold it.

[239] to grudge, you open the door to further interactions.

[240] So pretty smart, pretty smart.

[241] And okay, so anyways, so what this means, because rats can't talk and wolves can't talk and chimpanzees can't talk.

[242] And what that means, just as PHA suggested, was that the morality, the development of the morality precedes the development of the linguistic ability to describe the rules for the morality.

[243] He said exactly the same thing about kids, right, is they learn how to games before they know how what the rules are to the games and so you see that if you're playing peekaboo with a kid who they can pick that up like it really young they get that right away and there's you can play with kids almost immediately after they're born if you play simple enough games and so they've got that deep and they're unbelievably playful so they've got that circuitry ready to go right off the bat and it's one of the things that makes kids so much fun because they just like to play all the time and so if you're if the play circuit and you hasn't died, which is a bad thing, then you can use that a lot with your kids and it's one of the things that helps you love them.

[244] So that's a good thing.

[245] So, okay, so the point is that the damn morality emerges before the representation of the morality.

[246] It's a big deal to know that and that it emerges as a consequence of repeated social interaction.

[247] So it's not a top -down thing.

[248] It's a bottom -up thing.

[249] Now, Piaget says, well, it's not just, bought them up because what happens with human beings is that they learn to play the games.

[250] One of his experiments was watch seven -year -olds, I think that's the right age, play marbles.

[251] And then you notice that they can play with each other and that they can follow the rules.

[252] But then if you take the individual seven -year -olds out of the game and you say, what are the rules, they give incoherent and incomplete explanations of the rules.

[253] So what that means is they don't really represent the rules, but they can act them out.

[254] and they have a partial representation of what they're acting out.

[255] Now, when they get older, the rule representation starts to fall into alignment with the actual rules of the game.

[256] And you can imagine that's why, because when they're playing something like Marbles, they're going to have discussions like you're cheating or you're not allowed to do that because they're always going to be pushing the envelope a little bit, and then the group is going to render a judgment on whether or not that's appropriate, and out of that the rules are going to emerge.

[257] But they're not rules to begin with.

[258] They're patterns of behavior.

[259] It's not the same thing as a rule.

[260] A rule describes a pattern of behavior, but a pattern of behavior is a pattern of behavior.

[261] It's something that's acted out.

[262] So, there's the individual within the group, and then the interactions of the individuals within the groups produce as a hierarchical arrangement or multiple hierarchical arrangements.

[263] Those are games, roughly speaking, or stories, nested inside an overarching story, which is the fundamental culture.

[264] Right, and then that's nested in a whole bunch of competing cultures that have some commonalities, or they would just be at war all the time, which, you know, to some degree they are.

[265] So, okay, now you see that, back to the movie, you see that happening in this movie.

[266] I mean, it's very, very quick, but the blue fairy turns the bug into the conscience, and then the bug tries to explain to Pinocchio what the rules of morality are.

[267] But the thing is the bug doesn't know because he's just a bug and, you know, he's just not omniscient.

[268] So the best he can do is to come up with like a propagandistic, semantic verbal representation that's internally contradictory.

[269] And when he tells Pinocchio, Pinocchio has no idea what he's talking about.

[270] And neither does the bug.

[271] That's the thing.

[272] And so, well, so what happens is this.

[273] The cricket says, well, Pinoc, maybe you and I had better have a little heart -to -heart talk.

[274] And the puppet says, why?

[275] And the cricket says, well, you want to be a real boy, don't you?

[276] All right, sit down, son.

[277] Now you see the world is full of temptations.

[278] Temptations?

[279] Yes, temptations.

[280] They're the wrong things that seem right at the time.

[281] But even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time, or vice versa.

[282] Understand?

[283] No. No. And neither did the cricket.

[284] And that's actually very nicely done in that piece of the movie.

[285] Because as soon as you just want to slap him as soon as he starts talking like that, because while he gets up on his little matchbox and lectures, and he's dull and tyrannical, both at the same time.

[286] And so there's nothing genuine about what he's saying.

[287] He's sort of imitating.

[288] He's imitating something that isn't him.

[289] So he's really acting like a puppet at that point, too.

[290] And it doesn't work at all.

[291] And so Pinocchio says, I'm going to try to be a good boy, and the cricket says, well, that's the spirit, son, and then away they go.

[292] So, all right, so then we're at the next day, because this all happens in one night.

[293] We're at the next day, and, you know, it's a nice day, and there's these birds flying around.

[294] That's actually, that's a bit of foreshadowing there, you know.

[295] So, you have to remember when you watch something like this movie, not a single bit of it, is.

[296] random or accidental, none of it.

[297] Because, you know, they had to draw, I don't remember how many frames per second these things are, 30 maybe.

[298] Maybe it's a little less than that, but it's high quality animation.

[299] And so someone had to paint 30 pictures to get a second of this.

[300] You're not doing that accidentally.

[301] It's really expensive.

[302] And everyone has to agree on exactly what's going to happen.

[303] And you might say, well, do the people who are doing this consciously know what they're doing?

[304] And the answer to that is, well, sort of, just like you do.

[305] You know, it's yes, they.

[306] They know and no they don't and they know because they're really smart and gifted and all that, but they don't know because it's not all articulated, plus they're working in a group.

[307] So they know and don't know, just like you do when you're watching it.

[308] And so, and when you do anything else.

[309] So now, they're also guided by what you might call, they're guided by their unconscious in the Freudian and in the cognitive way, partly because your unconscious value structures determine the direction and content of your perceptions.

[310] And so it's built right into the way you move your eyes, because you tend to look at things you value, right?

[311] Or at things you're afraid of, like you look at things with valence, and part of the decision about what has value is dependent on the implicit structure of your moral system, because morality is about what's good and what isn't, and that's been partly a conscious construction of you, but it's partly something you've been, you've picked up by interacting with people like mad ever since you were born.

[312] You don't know all the rules any more than the damn cricket did.

[313] You just don't and you can't because you're too complicated, but you act them out, and then you also have representations of how people act in your imagination.

[314] Dreams are, that's what a dream is, that's what a fantasy is.

[315] That's what that little movie that plays inside your head when you remember what you did is, and you only remember the gist, you know.

[316] So even the imagistic representation of your behavior in your past, which is basically your episodic memory, it's already selecting and mold.

[317] and turning it into a relatable story.

[318] It can't help but do that.

[319] It's the only way you can represent it.

[320] And so you don't know how you do that or why you do that, but part of it's governed by this implicit morality that's part of your procedural memory system, part of the way you act and part of the way you move your eyes and listen to things and focus on them.

[321] And that's all being instantiated inside of you because of this immense social, your biology, but also this immense social project that you're continually engaged in.

[322] And so that informs what you're, remember it informs what you imagine it informs what we collectively imagine it informs what we can collectively understand and partly what you're doing well you become conscious of yourself is to map the implicit structures that already constitute you from society into explicit representation that's what self -understanding means and you know when you have that moment of insight about something you've done it's like you're watching your this repetitive behavior that you've manifested It's probably that got you in trouble.

[323] You know, it's your characteristic way of falling accidentally into chaos, and you talk about it and your problems.

[324] You talk about them with your friends.

[325] You talk about them, and maybe you have dreams about them, and you're trying to relate them, and you have memories about them that you can't get rid of because they're negatively toned, so you talk about them.

[326] And then someone comes up with a little statement that links them together causally, and you think, aha, that's what I'm doing.

[327] And then maybe you can stop doing it, or at least maybe then you can think up some strategies for not doing it anymore.

[328] But it's not like you know.

[329] It's like you're acting it out.

[330] You know it that way.

[331] But until the representation matches that pattern, that click of insight doesn't occur.

[332] And that's like a revelation.

[333] It's a really good way of thinking about it.

[334] Because the knowledge is there in its implicit form, and all of a sudden, bang, it's been made explicit, as a fantasy maybe, or also as a set of semantic statements.

[335] You know, maybe you have a crush on someone and you don't notice it, and maybe you find yourself having a fantasy about them.

[336] You think, oh, that means something, that indicates something.

[337] Maybe you don't want to know that that's what you want, but the fantasy will tell you.

[338] And one of the things Jung suggested, and this is sort of out of the Freudian tradition of free associations, is watch yourself, watch your fantasies, because they're always happening.

[339] And they'll tell you something.

[340] And so one of the things I do when I'm interacting with my clients is we'll have a discussion and then their eyes will drift a little bit and I'll know that something's flitted through their mind, you know, and that means we've touched on something that has a multiplicity of elements.

[341] And so I'll stop and say, look, I noticed that you, maybe you teared up.

[342] That's another thing to really watch.

[343] Or maybe you laughed or you drifted at least.

[344] It's like it's because some other thought has entered your field of consciousness.

[345] And then if you can get the person to grab those thoughts, to notice them, then you can often figure out the avenues along which that particular conversation might unfold.

[346] That's a complex.

[347] That's a union complex or a psychoanalytic complex.

[348] It's like there's an emotional core that produces a whole range of associated ideas.

[349] And that thing's got a life.

[350] It's like a micro personality.

[351] And it might have resentment in it, might have anger.

[352] It's often negative emotion tinged because though negative emotion tinged, Hinged episodes are still problems, and they will emerge automatically because your threat detection systems Force them onto your consciousness, essentially.

[353] So you watch and when you drift, you'll drift.

[354] And the fantasy is partly a representation of the problem space.

[355] You know that happens when you wake up at 3 in the morning and you're worried about things, right?

[356] Because actually what happens is you wake up during threat processing.

[357] And if you're depressed, actually that gets so intense, you can't sleep.

[358] So then you just lay there all night worrying.

[359] not fun.

[360] And those are fantasies about the negative elements of your past, present, and future.

[361] And the fantasies can also breed solutions.

[362] And that's partly why Freud regarded dreams as wish fulfillment.

[363] It's partly, and he wasn't, that was where he stopped.

[364] It's not correct.

[365] It's partially correct.

[366] It's like the fantasy will provide you with a problem and a potential solution.

[367] but they're more like problem identification mechanisms, the fantasies, with the possibility of a solution built in.

[368] And so a way of thinking about that is that you can generate potential futures.

[369] So they're like each segregatable environments according to the rules of your fantasy.

[370] Then you can generate little avatars of yourself that inhabit each of those little universes and you can run them as simulations.

[371] And then you can watch what happens in the simulation.

[372] and if it's a catastrophe, then you don't have to act it out.

[373] And that's exactly, not exactly.

[374] That's akin to what you're doing when you go watch a movie, except that is much more coherent and well thought through than just a dream, which is often quite fragmentary.

[375] And that's partly because the dream is willing to sacrifice coherence to play with category structures.

[376] And that's why in dreams things can change from one thing into another, really weirdly, or scenes can change from one scene into another.

[377] out of logic.

[378] The logic gets loosened so that the expanse of your thinking can widen.

[379] And it's dangerous to do that.

[380] And that's partly why you do it when you're asleep and paralyzed.

[381] You know, you don't run around and act out your pseudopodal fantasies, you know, where you're stretching yourself out into the world.

[382] There's no risk exactly.

[383] And so, although it can be bad enough so you'll wake up in terror, you know, but that's better than being in a crocodile's mouth by a large margin.

[384] Anyways, back to these.

[385] these birds, these are used later in the movie as manifestations of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking.

[386] And of course, that's a standard Christian symbol, although, as I mentioned, the dove, often represents the Holy Spirit.

[387] And we'll talk about that later.

[388] But this movie has very strong pagan elements in it, as I mentioned before, as opposed to strictly Christian symbolism.

[389] But that's a foreshadowing.

[390] And what it foreshadows is that, well, a new day has dawn.

[391] It's the emergence of new consciousness.

[392] And everything last night went well, really well, everything in the, let's call it the unconscious say after time stops.

[393] That all went well.

[394] And so the new day is full of promise.

[395] And so the birds are singing and the sun is shining and like hooray.

[396] And so that's exactly, so that sets, this is the next scene, right?

[397] So it sets the tenor for that scene just like the introductory song does.

[398] So anyways, then you see all these kids playing and enthusiastic.

[399] So they're off to school, which is presented in a positive light.

[400] And so that's out where you get socialized.

[401] So Pinocchio is ready to go beyond the boundaries of the familial home.

[402] And he's ready because his father prepared him and because his mother prepared him.

[403] And so he goes off and he's not going off alone.

[404] He's going with his conscience.

[405] And which is sort of the intern, you could think about it again as the internalized representation of nature and society.

[406] And so he's not going out there alone, even though he's not very good at it.

[407] And so he's pretty excited about this.

[408] And he's, And so is Geppetto.

[409] See, Geppetto isn't standing there, paralyzed with terror, and the kid isn't phobic of the outside world.

[410] And so that's, he's treating it as an adventure.

[411] I mean, even though, well, it's an adventure, but adventures can be dangerous.

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

[413] Their primary idea might be, well, what if the other kids don't like me?

[414] That's a big one.

[415] What if the teachers don't like me?

[416] What if the other kids won't play with me?

[417] It's like, yeah, what if?

[418] That's rough, man. And if you're not a playful kid, it could easily be the case.

[419] But that's not Pinocchio.

[420] He's like spinning out, ready to go.

[421] And so good, good.

[422] He's got naive, but enthusiastic.

[423] Okay, well, that at least gets the ball rolling.

[424] Now, you've got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat.

[425] I think this one's based on one of the Marx brothers, actually, Harpo Marx, who I believe never said anything, but be that as it may, there are these near -do -well characters, the fox in particular.

[426] Now, fox is a standard trickster animal, right?

[427] It's a, it's a classic animal, maybe because it's good at hiding and it's good at hunting.

[428] I don't know exactly why, but it's, and coyotes are like that, too.

[429] They're classic trickster animals.

[430] He's kind of like Wiley Coyote, in fact.

[431] the Warner Brothers character whose genius at large and of course whose arrogance continually gets him walloped and this character has a lot of features like that but he he's he fains being an English gentleman of like the 1890s and pretends to be educated and and he has a kind of high -blown way of talking and he's a fraud through and he's got he's got this you know sidekick who is barely there at all and He doesn't treat him that well, but he's got someone to lord it over, so that keeps his dominance hierarchy thing going well.

[432] And the fact that he's like a second -rate companion, well, he never really notices that, although he'll treat him contemptuously whenever he gives a chance.

[433] So anyways, they're walking down the street, and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he's done and how he pulled the wool over someone's eyes.

[434] And he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence.

[435] And one of the things that you see, this is worth knowing too, because if you're preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life, the psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you're stupid and that you deserve to be taken advantage of because you're not even stupid.

[436] So it's actually a good thing that he's doing it.

[437] And his proof for, and I'm saying he, because there are more male psychopaths, the, uh, the, uh, the proof that you're stupid naive is that he can take advantage of you and so like if you were wiser you'd be you know you'd know his tricks and then it wouldn't be morally necessary for him to show you just exactly who knows what about what and so the psychopath will use his ability to to fool you as proof of his own grandiose grandiose omnipotence omniscience and narcissism and the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath and virtually anybody can, so that Robert Hare, for example, who studied psychopaths for a long time, and interviewed a lot of them, like hundreds of them, and videotaped many of the interviews.

[438] He said, when he was talking to the psychopath, he always believed what they were saying.

[439] And then he'd watched the video afterwards and see where the conversation went off the rails.

[440] But, you know, the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong.

[441] And if you're polite, you don't object to the way that the person unfolds their strategy, you know, and cyclopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate, obviously, how to manipulate people.

[442] And the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low.

[443] Go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on, on YouTube.

[444] That's bloody.

[445] That's enlightening, man. Paul Bernardo, he's like the CEO of a meeting in that video, you know.

[446] He gives the cops hell, he gives the lawyers hell, he protests his innocence.

[447] He basically tells them that they're rude and untrustworthy because they don't trust him because he did a few little things 17 years ago.

[448] And he gets away with a few little things, right?

[449] I mean, he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his girlfriend at the time.

[450] And, you know, he was a repeat sexual offender and murderer.

[451] It's like, but he basically goes, well, you know, that's a long time ago.

[452] It's like, we're past that, aren't we?

[453] I mean, I'm having a discussion with you.

[454] I'm trying to help you solve some crimes, which, by the way, I committed.

[455] But we won't bring that up.

[456] You know, and you're, you're accusing me of being a liar.

[457] Like, you're not playing fair.

[458] What's up with you?

[459] And then when they answer, he looks at his fingernails, which is like, that's a lovely little manipulative thing, because it basically means whatever happens to be under my fingernail at the moment is much higher priority than listening to your foolish story.

[460] And you watch, you'll see people do that to you.

[461] And then you get a little insight into what they're up to.

[462] He's very good at that.

[463] And so, or he looks outside, or he just looks at his hands, or he looks out the window, immediately dismiss.

[464] in his non -verbal behavior.

[465] It's brilliant.

[466] The courts were forced to release that, by the way.

[467] But look it up.

[468] Paul Bernardo on YouTube.

[469] Wow.

[470] It's just mind -boggling.

[471] He's so good at what he does.

[472] And he's good -looking and he's charismatic and, you know, he can really pull it off.

[473] And you can't tell what's happening with the cops and the lawyers, whether they're just letting him play as a routine to get some information from him or whether he's actually setting them back on his heels.

[474] And I suspect it's a bit of both.

[475] It's masterful performance.

[476] If you didn't know who he was, and you were watching it without the audio, you'd think he's the CEO of some company given his employees hell for not being up to scratch.

[477] That's all his body language, his eye contact, everything, just speaks that.

[478] It's amazing.

[479] So anyways, you got these two -bit hoods here who think they're really something.

[480] They also think they're tough and dangerous, and they're not.

[481] They're just cowardly and corner dwellers.

[482] and they confuse their unwillingness to abide by reasonable rules as indication of their heroic courage, which is something else that low rent hoods like to do, you know.

[483] And it's partly because lots of people who just attend to the law do do that because they're cowardly, which is a Nietzschean observation.

[484] Are you good, or are you just afraid?

[485] Let's start with afraid first, before we proceed to good, and that the reason that you follow the rules is because you're afraid of getting caught.

[486] Yeah, well, you know those kids who, often university kids who are in like a hockey riot and they end up breaking windows and stealing things and, you know, they get nailed for it and afterwards they're really blown away by their own behavior.

[487] It's like, well, they're in that camp.

[488] It's like they think they're good people, but they're not.

[489] They're just never anywhere where you could be bad.

[490] And as soon as you put them somewhere where they could be bad, it's like out it comes just like that.

[491] And that's really worth thinking about.

[492] Because most of you, many of you, but not all of you, I suspect, have never really been somewhere that you could be really bad and get away with it.

[493] And so you might think, well, you wouldn't do it, but people do it all the time.

[494] So anyways, they're talking about some exploits, and then they see that this character named Strombole, who's a marionette, he has a puppet show, right?

[495] And he's kind of a wheeler dealer too.

[496] Remember, I showed you that mask that was glaring at Pinocchio when he got his voice.

[497] It's like, Strombole is one of his manifestations.

[498] The fox here is another one of his manifestations.

[499] And all the negative characters throughout the movie are manifestations of the same thing.

[500] It's partly the adversarial individual, and it's partly the tyrannical aspect of society.

[501] It's the negative masculine.

[502] That's one way of thinking about it.

[503] And, you know, when men go bad, they often go bad by being antisocial.

[504] and tyrannical.

[505] So, you know, where there's way more antisocial men than there are antisocial women, which is why there's 20 times as many men in jail as there are women.

[506] You know, so each gender, let's say each sex, has its own characteristic pathologies.

[507] And there are some anti -social women, you know, and there are some high neuroticism guys who are, who are, or some guys who are really agreeable as well.

[508] So, but they're rarer.

[509] So anyways, he sees this, this poster advertising Stromboli's puppet show.

[510] So Stromboli is a puppet master.

[511] Now that's really worth thinking about because that's an archetypal theme, or it's at least attached to an archetypal theme.

[512] Something's behind the scenes pulling the strings.

[513] And everybody always wonders what that is, right?

[514] What's actually going on?

[515] What's actually going on with Trump?

[516] Who's actually in control?

[517] Is it Putin?

[518] I mean, that's the fantasies of the It's Putin.

[519] It's like, well, the question always is, what's going on behind the seed, right?

[520] And the question is, that's the case certainly on the political landscape, business landscape, interpersonal relations.

[521] What are you really up to?

[522] Everyone's always wondering that, right?

[523] That's why they're watching your eyes.

[524] Because your eyes point at things, and they can infer what you're interested in and what you're up to by looking at what you look at.

[525] And that's why your eyes have whites is so that we can see where you're pointing.

[526] because gorillas don't.

[527] And so what that means, roughly speaking, is that all of your ancestors whose eyes couldn't be reliably tracked were either killed or didn't mate.

[528] It's a big deal for us to see where people's eyes are pointed.

[529] And so we're always watching each other's eyes constantly.

[530] What are you up to?

[531] What are you up to?

[532] What are you looking at?

[533] What do you want?

[534] And I want to know because if I know what you want, I can predict how you're going to behave.

[535] And that also means I can cooperate with you.

[536] Or I can compete with you.

[537] or I can lie to you, but all the information is in the eyes surrounded by the facial display, right?

[538] Because that's also an indication of motivation and emotion.

[539] And so we're trying, like, our eyes are so good at that that for you guys sitting there in the back, I can tell if you're looking at my eyes or at my chin.

[540] And the deviation in your eyes is so tiny that it's a kind of miracle that we're capable of making that perceptual observation.

[541] It's really important to us.

[542] So, and we have really good eyes, so that's another thing about us.

[543] So anyways, what's going on behind the scenes?

[544] Well, if you look at Strombole, you might be thinking, it's not clear he's someone you'd want to have pulling your strings.

[545] Like there's a little bit of forced enthusiasm, let's say, there, and he's just not a very savory looking character.

[546] So anyways, the fox knows him, and they start talking about Strombole, that old Joker, and then what they could, how they could possibly involve him in some sort of scam because he's back in town.

[547] And then they see the puppet.

[548] And the Fox does his equivalent of thinking, which is pretty sad and nasty, but that's what he does.

[549] And then they see this puppet with no strings.

[550] And they think, hey, man, a puppet master would pay a lot for something that is capable of semi -autonomous movement like that.

[551] It would be kind of a miracle.

[552] And so they decide that they're going to take him to Stromboli.

[553] And so they grab them.

[554] And he's got an apple to take to the teacher, which I think it's the cat promptly eats.

[555] And the fox acts out this sort of false enthusiasm about what Pinocchio is up to and pretends that he's his friend, which is, of course, what your typical pedophile will do.

[556] And so this is in the same kind of category, and it truly is.

[557] So one of the things that's interesting to know about pedophiles is that, is that, They're predatory, right?

[558] And so they don't go after kids that are assertive and likely to be noisy.

[559] They watch.

[560] And they watch to see if they can find a kid who's defeated, and that's good enough, who's defeated, and who is going to need a friend and who's not going to object.

[561] And so when they check out, these are the ones who do the stranger abductions, which are, by the way, extraordinarily rare.

[562] They look for a victim type.

[563] They look for a kid who's going to be easy to take down.

[564] And so, you know, that's one thing you don't want.

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

[566] It's like, no, wrong.

[567] That is not what you teach them.

[568] Because all you do is teach them then to be timid and fearful.

[569] And the real predatory types, they're pretty much thrilled about that.

[570] Because you'll also make them sheltered and naive, you know, so that isn't, you make your kids courageous and you get their damn eyes open and that's the best thing you can do to protect them against people who are truly dangerous.

[571] So none of that terrifying.

[572] It's not good idea.

[573] Anyways, the fox befriends the puppet and then they come up with this evil scheme to get them off to Strombole, the puppet master, and the way they go.

[574] And they sing a little song about being an actor, an actor's life for me. This took me a long time to figure out.

[575] I thought, they're taking Pinocchio away to be an actor.

[576] Now, why in the world are actors getting such a rough time in this movie?

[577] It's like, it's a Hollywood movie, you know, it's acting, obviously, the voiceovers and all that are acting.

[578] It's, why, what is this thing about being an actor?

[579] And then I thought, oh, I get it.

[580] I see what's going on.

[581] They sing to Pinocchio about the delights of unearned celebrities.

[582] So he doesn't have to go and get an education.

[583] He doesn't have to take the difficult route.

[584] He can take the easy way to dominance, to success, to dominant success.

[585] He can circumvent all the hard work and go right to the top.

[586] And when you think about phenomena like the Kardashian family and how popular they are, part of that is, is this desire that people have for unearned celebrity because you can get to the top without any sacrifices and without any work.

[587] And if you're really cynical, you know, you think that the people at the top are just there by accident anyways, and it might as well be you.

[588] And of course, there's a lot of naivety in that as well, and a fair bit of, you know, not a fair lack of wisdom and all of that.

[589] But the actor idea here is that you can pretend to be something you're not, and that that's the proper root of anyone wise to success.

[590] It's the ultimate in cynicism.

[591] And it's a nihilistic perspective as well.

[592] And that's how they entrap them.

[593] They say, look, why are you bothering to go to school?

[594] That's going to take 18 years.

[595] With all of your talents, you can just go on the stage.

[596] Your name will be up in lights.

[597] You'll be at the top in no time.

[598] And what does the puppet know?

[599] And plus he does have some talents.

[600] He is, after all, a semi -autonomous puppet.

[601] Now, he doesn't exactly know how special that makes him.

[602] But the fox can obviously see something in him.

[603] And he's good at playing that naivity off and then offering these false promises.

[604] But, see, the thing is, one of the things that Carl Jung said that I thought was really interesting when he was talking about the Oedipal situation in families, I never forgot this.

[605] So the Edipal situation, roughly speaking, is when, I'll lay out the classic story, is when a child is seriously overprotected, usually a male child by his mother.

[606] Now, the reverse can be the case, and it can be a female child by the mother and all of that.

[607] But I'll just talk about the classic case to begin with.

[608] Now, what Freud observed was that there were usually not very good boundaries in families like that.

[609] And so the relationship between the husband and the wife was either strained or non -existent.

[610] And the wife would often turn to the child to be what she isn't getting from the husband.

[611] And so there's a great South Park episode about this.

[612] A wonderful South Park episode where they, where I don't remember that horrible little guy is the, that's him.

[613] Yeah, yeah.

[614] Yeah, and his mother brings in the dog whisperer to train him, and it's a brilliant, it's a brilliant episode.

[615] If you want to learn about the Freudian Edipal situation, you watch that, you've got it down cold, because she brings in this expert who then she wants to have an affair with, so that's a boundary issue.

[616] And he basically separates her son from him and imposes the same discipline on him that he would impose on a bad dog.

[617] although he also trains the dog's owners all the time because maybe it's not the dog maybe it's the owner there's a horse whisperer movie too about the original horse whisperer that does a beautiful job of laying that out too because he's very good at fixing problem horses and unbelievably good at diagnosing psychopathology on the part of the owner it's he's got a gift for it but anyways what happens in the south park episode is that the dog whisper gets cartman Yeah?

[618] Straightened out.

[619] And he starts like dressing properly and doing his homework.

[620] And the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisper, but he's professional.

[621] He keeps his distance.

[622] Like he keeps boundaries around him.

[623] And then he leaves.

[624] And then the first thing that she does when he leaves is bribe Cartman, basically, out of doing his homework so that he can accompany her to, I don't know, a fast food restaurant or something like that.

[625] And so the reason she does that is because she's lonesome and doesn't have anybody else around.

[626] You know, maybe she's also deeply, deeply, deeply terrified that if she helps that boy grow up, he will leave.

[627] And she'll have nothing.

[628] You know, and so mothers who don't have something, say, outside their infants, not merely their children, are more likely to fall into that.

[629] And it's no wonder, you know, you've got to think that through.

[630] And lots of women, really, most women, really fall in love with their babies, you know.

[631] And so even if they start growing into larger children, that can be threatening.

[632] Because, well, when the child turns into a, when the infant turns into a toddler, the infant is dead.

[633] The toddler is there now.

[634] And you can radically interfere with that process.

[635] That happens all the time, all the time.

[636] That's the classic Freudian Edipal Nightmare.

[637] And that episode is brilliant.

[638] It's bloody brilliant.

[639] It just nails it.

[640] And some of you have been in my personality class and watched Crum, the documentary Crumb.

[641] And that's another staggering exposition of exactly that.

[642] kind of pathology.

[643] Anyways, one of the things Jung pointed out, so I knew this guy once who had a mother who basically was trying that trick and she had lots of, she was very smart and had lots of tricks up her sleeves, and there's just no way he was going to go for it.

[644] He rebelled at every possible moment and he basically became, I would say, somewhat hypermasculine in response, which is an interesting lesson with regards to the hypermasculinity that boys often develop if they're raised by single mothers, because they tend to go one of two ways.

[645] And he just fought her at every step of the way, and it didn't happen.

[646] But one of the things Jung said, which I loved, and you can really see this in the Crumb documentary, is that the Edipal mother basically entices the child, says, look, here's the deal.

[647] You don't have to do anything, but you don't get to leave.

[648] But if you don't leave and you don't do these difficult things, then I'll take care of you.

[649] And the child has a choice all the way along there.

[650] I mean, obviously, he's outclassed in some sense, But it's not as obvious as you'd think.

[651] Little kids are tough, and they make decisions all the time.

[652] And so Jung thought about it more as a conspiracy than as something imposed on the child by the mother.

[653] And I really like...

[654] It's actually a conspiracy between mother, father, and child, actually.

[655] And I think that's a good way of looking at it, even though it's really rough, because, well, should you hold the child responsible?

[656] Well, yes, but judiciously and not completely, because then if you deal with someone like that as an adult, and they're trying to escape from it, You have to go all the way back and figure out how the hell it happened and then they have to adjust They have to figure out where they opened the door like inviting a vampire in because they can't come in unless you invite them in So don't invite them in because once they're in they're really hard to get rid of and they'll take all your blood So that's a cautionary tale So anyways Pinocchio doesn't know any better and he's got the egotism of you know of youth and he's offered the easy way to success which is exactly what the Fox tells them and off they go to see Stromboli.

[657] So this is the song, I'm not going to read it all.

[658] It's great to be a celebrity in actor's life for me. You sleep till after two, you promenade a big cigar, you tour the world in a private car, you dine on chicken and caviar, an actor's life for me. So it's all this idea of wealth and public exposure and zero attention whatsoever to anything regarding responsibility or discipline or learning.

[659] And so it's a dual attraction, right?

[660] You get everything you want and you don't have to do anything.

[661] Jeez, what a deal.

[662] And so that's what the actor represents.

[663] It's a liar fundamentally.

[664] It's someone who's acting out a deception.

[665] They're a persona in the Jungian sense.

[666] So the persona is the mask you wear in public that you might even think you are, but you're not.

[667] It's this mask and that's the actor.

[668] That's the persona.

[669] So the fox and the cat are inviting the puppet to only become a persona and and that's that's see for young you start as a persona and then when you start to investigate the parts of you that don't really fit in that persona that would be the shadow then you start understanding who you really are and that's shocking because the persona contains everything roughly speaking that you think is good and maybe even that your immediate culture thinks is good and then the shadow contains everything that's not part of that and some of that's really bad but some of it is good disguised as bad and you can't break out of the persona and transcend it until you incorporate a lot of what's in the shadow and so for example if you're an extraordinarily compassionate person let's say 98th percentile will say you're going to be sacrificing yourself to other people all the time and there are people who will find that extraordinarily endearing and it will be under some But the problem is, is that you will sacrifice yourself.

[670] And that's a really bad attitude to have, for example, towards adult males.

[671] It's a great thing for infants, but for adult males, it is the wrong approach.

[672] And so you will get taken advantage of continually by people who are looking for someone like you until you grow some teeth.

[673] And you'll think, no, no, that's the opposite of compassion.

[674] Being able to bite hard is the opposite of compassion, which it is.

[675] And so you'll have that pushed into the.

[676] the predator category.

[677] I'm not doing that.

[678] I'm not getting angry.

[679] I don't like conflict.

[680] It's like until you bring that out of the depths and put it on so you can use it, you're going to be in trouble.

[681] And that's kind of Nietzsche's idea of the revaluation of good and evil, right?

[682] You have a sense of what's good and a sense of what isn't with your conscience, but it's not very smart.

[683] It's got things in the wrong boxes.

[684] And a lot of the things that, even nature itself, a lot of the things that you accept as untrammeled goods like compassion, let's say have a very dark side first of all and second are not enough to get you through life you need the opposite virtues too and so you have to develop them and so you get outside the persona to do that but anyways pinocchio is invited to be a false persona to take the gains of celebrity without having to do anything to be educated he's just going to go right to the top from right where he is and you know people are kind of fascinated by that idea that's why why you watch America's Got Talent or the X Factor, which are shows I actually love, by the way.

[685] You never see narcissism in its purer forms.

[686] Then you see it when you watch people who display an absolute lack of talent and become homicidal when someone dares pointed out, right?

[687] Accusatory and homicidal instantly.

[688] It's really something.

[689] And then now and then you do see one of these people who's so introverted and so out of society and have this.

[690] unbelievable gift which is also something really remarkable to see and it's no wonder those things are so popular they're psychologically extraordinarily interesting so okay so that's the actor first of Pinocchio's temptations and of course it's the first one because he's entering the social world and the temptation in the social world is to be exactly what other people want you to be and the thing that's cool about that is that is what you should be doing right when you go out in your peers you should be not Subjugating your individuality to your peers, because that's not exactly right.

[691] That's kind of based on an inhibition model.

[692] You know, you've got aggression, you've got bad habits, they have to be inhibited.

[693] You learn that by interacting with your peers.

[694] It's not the right model.

[695] Pige, that's a Freudian model.

[696] Piage was correct about that.

[697] He basically pointed out that what should happen is, let's say with your aggression, and hopefully you have some, is that it gets socialized.

[698] And so you learn how to play games, but you don't drop your drive to win.

[699] You integrate that.

[700] in the games.

[701] And so you try to win, you try to play hard, but if you're defeated or you hit something negative, you don't respond negatively.

[702] And you can keep that all bounded within being a fair, a good player, a fair player.

[703] And that means what's happened is you've learned how to play a game or a set of games that also includes the darker parts of you, and they actually become part of your force of character.

[704] It's way better if you can pull that off.

[705] And that's what you definitely want to do as an adult.

[706] All you people are going to have to learn to negotiate on your own behalf.

[707] And that's really hard.

[708] It means that you have to know what you want.

[709] You have to be able to communicate it.

[710] And you have to be able to say no. And to say no, you have to be built on a solid foundation.

[711] You have to have options.

[712] So you've got to remember that as you go through your life.

[713] It's like, if you don't have options, you can't negotiate with someone.

[714] And if you're not willing to use them, they win, period.

[715] Because if you're asking your boss, more money, say, the answer is no, because he doesn't have any spare money lying around that he can just give to you.

[716] And lots of other people are asking.

[717] So some of that's zero -sum stuff, you know, not all of it, because often you cooperate with people and the whole pot can grow, but some of it's zero -sum.

[718] And so you better have a case made.

[719] It's like, here's how much money I should, here's how much money I should have, here's why.

[720] Here's the benefit to you that will accrue if you don't, if you do it.

[721] Here's the consequences that you don't.

[722] They're actually real.

[723] They will cost you and I will do them.

[724] It's like, then you can negotiate.

[725] And you don't do that rudely.

[726] But those arguments, you better have them in order.

[727] Like so, for example, if you're going to negotiate for a raise or a status shift, you better have your resume at hand, all polished up and know where else you're going to look for a job and you better be able to get one.

[728] Because otherwise you're just, you're weak and you will not win the negotiation.

[729] And if you're too agreeable, so you're conflict avoidant, you will make less money across time.

[730] That's already been well established.

[731] And that's because you don't have teeth, not enough.

[732] And so in the little microcontests that you're going to have every day, you're going to incrementally lose to people who are more aggressive, who have bigger teeth.

[733] And that's what happens.

[734] So don't let that happen.

[735] You want to you place yourself so you can negotiate because otherwise You're just a facade and in a real battle a facade is just torn down right away So yes, well Say no more, right?

[736] Well the cricket he's supposed to be helping to pop it out, but he overslept.

[737] It's like That's just another indication that he's not everything he could be yet and that's really That took me a long time to puzzle out with regards to interpreting this movie I could not figure out all right I told you this if the bug is the person who opens the hero narrative and who can guide the transformations of time and who has the same initials as Jesus Christ it's like and is like knighted by nature herself why is he such an idiot it's a very difficult thing to figure out but but the idea that the conscience isn't omniscient even though it has that sort of that voice of let's say common sense and that fits very nicely with the Freudian idea of the super ego again because the super ego can be flawed can be too harsh it cannot be it can not be properly developed you see that often with people who are orderly so they're high in conscientiousness conscientiousness fragments into industriousness and orderly people like willpower they're very judgmental and they like things to be exactly where they're supposed to be but they're also very self -punitive so conservatives are much more likely to be orderly by the way it's it's one of the best predictors of conservative low openness is the best predictor but right after that is high high orderliness so and it's associated with disgust sensitivity which is really an amazing thing we'll talk about that later anyways this cricket well he falls down his first day on the job he's not as conscientious a conscious he's not as conscientious a conscience as he should be so he's feeling pretty stupid he's got his little millionaire clothes on there but he's really not living up to them.

[738] So, he does catch up to the fox and the puppet, however, and tries to dissuade Pinocchio from going down this road.

[739] And of course, the cat, well, you can see what the cat's doing there.

[740] He's got a big hammer, big mallet, and he's going to, he also shows you just exactly how much of a clue he has.

[741] He's going to wallop the bug who's sitting on the fox's hat, which I think he actually does.

[742] And, you know, then the fox can't get out of his hat and has to talk through his hat which basically is what he's doing the whole time anyways so this i really like so you see on the left here the cricket is is speaking inside this flower you know and like i said there's nothing accidental in these in these representations so these are artists who are coming up with these compositions and they their fantasy has a structure and so the cricket is speaking out of this flower that has well you could think about it as it has a sexualized element So you could think about that as a phallic part of it and that part of the feminine part of it.

[743] Well, they are flowers after all.

[744] They are the sex organs of plants.

[745] And so, and that's very much the same over here as this is the Yonian lingam.

[746] This is from Hindu cultures.

[747] And so, and you see, there's a snake wrapped around that.

[748] And so that's masculine and feminine with a snake wrapped around it.

[749] And that's a holy representation, you know, a sacred representation.

[750] And it represents the deepest reality.

[751] That's one way of thinking about it, like chaos and order, surrounded by the snake.

[752] It's the same, exactly the same idea.

[753] And so the cricket speaks out of that.

[754] I already know that because the cricket is the conscience, and he's been awakened in part by Jepetto and the good father and awakened in part by the good fairy and nature.

[755] And so he speaks with those voices.

[756] And he's also a manifestation of the underlying chaos itself.

[757] nature and culture spring out of chaos.

[758] You know, I already showed you that schematic representation.

[759] Okay, so I'll just end this scene and then we'll have like a 15 -minute break, okay?

[760] So anyways The cricket tries to make a case for why Pinocchio shouldn't go off to be a celebrity, but you know, it's a hard case to make because the fox is very manipulative and Pinocchio is naive and it sounds like a good offer and also the fox is actually quite forceful you know he basically takes him by the hand so the temptation is and this is something else I like about the movie you can't just say well the puppet gets what he deserves because he's little naive and what he's facing is really malevolent truly malevolent and physically overpowering and so the movie does a nice job of not minimizing the threat that's posed by this particular temptation and that's part of what makes it art okay good so we'll stop there we'll have a break for 50 minutes and then we'll start with the stage so all right so here we are at the big event and pinocchio's off to be a celebrity and uh the cricket is watching and uh pinocchio basically well he's got some natural talent because he's he's a puppet he doesn't have strings and he goes on stage and with strings and then he drops his strings and the whole crowd is a amazed and the crowd should be amazed when that happens right you can imagine when a kid goes to school um and shows some independence that that's actually going to people are going to notice that his peers are going to notice that the teachers are going to notice that maybe it's too much independence even right but it's still a it is a remarkable thing too like it's so interesting you know you can see marked signs of independence and children well right from the time they're born basically because what's one of the things that's really funny about infants is that you know when they're crying you always think oh the baby's well you're crying it's baby sad it's like no a lot of the time that baby is angry and the way that we know that is because you could do facial expression coding on infants just like on on adults and you can tell what a emotion they're expressing and very frequently like when the kid starts to recognize as mom explicitly because He or she knows the smell right away, pretty much in the sound of the voice.

[761] But visually, if someone comes in and it isn't who the baby wants, so generally it isn't mom, the baby will start to cry.

[762] But it's not because the baby's sad, generally.

[763] It's because it's angry that mom didn't show up.

[764] And that's an early sign of will.

[765] It's like this kid has, this kid wants things.

[766] And it's perfectly willing to tell you about that.

[767] And of course, a two -year -old who's having a temper tantrum is in some sense doing the same thing.

[768] It's poorly integrated will and independence, obviously, but it certainly runs contrary to what you want.

[769] You don't want your two -year -old having a temper tantrum in the middle of the toy store.

[770] It's extraordinarily embarrassing for you and, well, for you, but it's also embarrassing for the two -year -old.

[771] This is one of the reasons I think that that sort of thing should be carefully socialized rapidly, because it's actually humiliating for the kid because other people don't like that.

[772] And they're very judgmental about, like they won't say anything usually, but sometimes they will.

[773] But they're not happy about the fact that that's happening and they will judge the child negatively And so you don't want your child to be behaving in a way in public that makes other people think badly of them It's it's really it's really not good and so you part of your job as a parent is to not expose your child to that sort of Experience especially not repeatedly.

[774] It's really hard on them Or they get narcissistic which is also really hard on them.

[775] It's just it takes a lot longer to to manifest itself.

[776] So anyways, he's off on stage and Stromboli introduces him and talks about how wonderful this is going to be and Pinocchio comes out on stage with the strings on and drops them and then he falls down the steps and put his nose in the hole makes a fool out of himself.

[777] And that's when Stromboli, first time Stromboli shows his true character because he just really yells and screams at him.

[778] And he has his back to the audience, Stromboli, while he's doing this.

[779] So he's not noticing how the audience is reacting.

[780] Typical tyrannical parent, right, who's not noticing that society is reacting a different way than him, and he's not happy about it.

[781] And Pinocchio, of course, is dazed and feels like a fool, and he is a fool, so that's appropriate.

[782] But then Stromboli hears the crowd laughing, and as soon as he turns around, he's like all smiles again.

[783] And so that's the first time you get insight into what sort of puppet master he is.

[784] He's there to please the crowd, and that's all.

[785] And he's there to look good in public, but fundamentally he's a tyrant.

[786] And so, and I guess that's the problem with false celebrity is that the negative spirit of the crowd becomes your master, right?

[787] Because to be a celebrity, you have to be a crowd pleaser.

[788] And if you're pleasing the kind of crowd who likes a celebrity like you, which is, and there's not much reason for that, then it's not exactly like you're appealing to the proper side of the crowd.

[789] And you've become its puppet one way or another.

[790] And maybe it's rewarding you with wealth, perhaps, and with attention.

[791] But fundamentally, it's not something I would recommend if you want to stay reasonably psychologically healthy for any reasonable amount of time.

[792] You're going to sell yourself out.

[793] And I don't mean that in any casual way, you know.

[794] All right, so anyways, Stromboli changes from the tyrant to the good father.

[795] In half a second, he gives Pinocchio pat on the head, despite the fact that he's made a mistake, looks all kind, and the show continues.

[796] Now, the cricket is not very happy about this.

[797] He's sitting in the stage watching.

[798] He's very angry and, let's say, disgusted by what's happening, partly because Pinocchio is making a fool of himself.

[799] Now, that's an interesting thing, you know, human beings blush.

[800] In fact, if I remember correctly, the name Adam, you know, like Adam and Eve, is related to the capacity to blush.

[801] Now, that comes from something I read a long time ago, and that might be wrong.

[802] But But Adam does manifest shame in the sight of God.

[803] So there is a relationship there.

[804] But anyways, people do make fools of themselves for public display.

[805] And you can tell you've done that in some sense, not always, if you blush.

[806] Because you've either said something you shouldn't have, and you know, you realize that, which is more like you've tried to be funny and gone a little bit too far.

[807] And sometimes that can be really funny.

[808] Or you've said something that you know to be.

[809] false, manipulative, deceitful, beneath you, any of those things, and you'll have an automatic response to it, be ashamed and blush.

[810] And one theory about that is that you can trust people who blush.

[811] And so, because you know that their conscience will betray them.

[812] And so that even if they are lying, they tell you.

[813] And so it's an interesting theory, you know, because blush is definitely, like it's a facial display, you know, it's right out there where people can see it.

[814] So, you know, maybe that's true, maybe it isn't, but it's kind of an interesting idea.

[815] Anyways, the cricket is not happy with what's going on.

[816] He's not happy about Strombole, and he's not happy about the willingness of Pinocchio to make a fool of himself to support this false celebrity.

[817] And so, I actually think that's why the celebrity types like that often get narcissistic and arrogant.

[818] You know, it's because they aren't paying attention.

[819] They're not paying attention really to what's happening.

[820] inside of them.

[821] They drown it out because the glory and the money and all that is so attractive and enticing.

[822] They don't notice, they refuse to notice what price they're paying for it and they magnify up their grandiosity and their arrogance to keep that stuff all under control.

[823] And then of course they get surrounded by sycophants, which is a really bad thing, right?

[824] They get surrounded by people who will tell them exactly what they want to hear.

[825] And that's really bad if what you want to hear from other people is not good for you to surround yourself with people who won't offer you genuine criticism or even genuine reward.

[826] It's the same thing.

[827] you want for me that I differentially reward and punish you in approximately the way that the good part of the crowd will.

[828] That's what you want from all your friends.

[829] Because then your interactions with them can generalize out to the broader community in a productive way.

[830] And so a good friend, you know, I mean, your friends tend to be on the supportive side.

[831] And perhaps that's appropriate, assuming there's reciprocity.

[832] But a good friend will also tell you when one way or another, when your behavior is starting to tilt in a direction that's going to make you unpopular with them and likely unpopular with other people.

[833] And of course, that's what a parent is supposed to.

[834] That's the prime job of a parent in my estimation.

[835] It's like, don't do that.

[836] Other people will hurt you if you do that.

[837] By exclusion, by threat, by failure to offer you an opportunity, bad things will happen to you.

[838] So you can't do that.

[839] And then you're a representative of the social situation, which is exactly what you should be, not a friend.

[840] So, or at least not precisely a friend.

[841] That doesn't make you an enemy, it makes you better than a friend.

[842] Well, so Pinocchio is on stage making a fool of himself, and then he gets all tangled up in other puppet strings.

[843] That's what happens to him.

[844] And then it all ends rather badly with everything being a tangled mess on stage, but it also turns out to be rather funny.

[845] It's funny because he's surrounded by angry Russians, you know, which, you know, you could kind of view that as a potential lesson, is that if you're a puppet on a stage and you mess around too much, you just might get tangled up with a bunch of angry Russians, and these are Cossacks.

[846] That's exactly what happens.

[847] So, anyways, of course, no, that's not what's happening here, but it's still funny.

[848] So, Stromboli is not happy with the tangled mess, but then the crowd reacts very positively, and then that confuses the conscience because he thinks, Well, look, this is horrible.

[849] This guy's a tyrant.

[850] Like Pinocchio is making a fool of himself.

[851] Everything turns into a tangled mess.

[852] But the crowd goes crazy.

[853] And, well, being a fool, that can be entertaining, right?

[854] So it's hard to tell when a crowd, especially at a spectacle, because this crowd is at a spectacle.

[855] You just don't know exactly why it is that they're responding positively, but you definitely give them what you want.

[856] And you can see this look on Strombole's face.

[857] It's like this false, again, this false kind.

[858] kindness and generosity public facing and oh well anyways the conscience is very confused and I really think this is an important thing because I've often thought I spent a lot of time thinking about Hitler and I was thinking well how do you get into a state like that you know and you think well he's a dictator and he led his people down a bad path it's like that's not right that is not what happened they had a conspiracy together and went down a bad path now think Think about it this way.

[859] If one person thinks something about you, it's like whatever, right?

[860] But if five people tell you that, well what?

[861] Then to start not taking that seriously is kind of narcissistic, right?

[862] And if it isn't five, let's say it's 15 people tell you the same thing or act the same way towards you.

[863] It's like probably you should clue in.

[864] Well, what if you're a politician and you're trying out a bunch of different ideas and And you're good at interacting with the crowd, you're charismatic, you watch the crowd, but you're not necessarily all that articulate.

[865] You don't have your values all straight now, but you're kind of angry too.

[866] And maybe that's because you spent a bunch of time in World War I in the trenches, which was like no joke, and all your friends got blown up.

[867] And then you were unemployed, and then you tried to be an artist, and that didn't work out even though you were moderately talented.

[868] And then maybe the economy fell apart completely on you, hyperinflation.

[869] And then maybe there was a communist menace coming in from the East and there genuinely was.

[870] And so you're not the world's happiest clam at that point.

[871] And you're talking to people who aren't that happy either because they were also badly defeated in World War I. And then they had a terrible treaty they had decided.

[872] They lost part of their territory.

[873] And so the crowd's not happy and neither are you.

[874] And there's reason for it.

[875] And so you start talking to them.

[876] You don't know what you're upset about.

[877] And neither does the crowd.

[878] So you start to articulate some things about why you might be upset.

[879] set.

[880] And some of them fall flat, but you're paying attention to the crowd.

[881] So you stop saying those things.

[882] And some of the things make the crowd really wake up and listen.

[883] And so you start saying more of those things, right?

[884] It's an unconscious dialectic between you and the crowd.

[885] It's mediated by consciousness.

[886] But it's not like you're sitting there saying, although you might be, I'm going to tell this crowd more what it wants to hear.

[887] It's more sophisticated than that.

[888] And so you do that thousand times and you do that to ever increasing crowds and the crowd really starts to go mad and they basically tell you that you're the savior of the nation it's like at what how many bloody people have to tell you that before you start to believe it you know i would say with a typical person a hundred will do it that'll get you going man if a hundred people tell you specifically why you're special you're going to be thinking even if you're kind of humble to begin with, you're going to be thinking, geez, there's got to be something to this, man. But if it's a million people and they're roaring their approval, well, and then when it's a whole nation, it's like, good luck withstanding that.

[889] There's just not a chance.

[890] How are you going to withstand that?

[891] Now, you could be like Gandhi, and you could have taken that into account beforehand because he did.

[892] He read Tolstoy, by the way.

[893] He was a student of Tolstoy, and that's very interesting because Tolstoy was the person who developed the techniques of non -violence that Gandhi used.

[894] And Tolstoy was also a deeply religious writer, apart from his novels, which are not, I wouldn't say, really in the religious category, although they're profound.

[895] Tolstoy stressed humility with nonviolence.

[896] He really stressed it, and that's what Gandhi took to heart.

[897] So he lived a very, very, very, very simple, bare -bones, ascetic life.

[898] And that was to kind of see if he could keep his damn ego tamp down while the groundswell was building behind him, you know, and he dressed really simply, and he didn't own much, and he ate very simply, and he just tried to stay away from the whole materialistic success element that would be an element of what would turn him into an actor and also inflate his ego.

[899] And, you know, he seemed to do that pretty well.

[900] You know, he certainly, well, he led a nonviolent revolution that resulted in the independence of India.

[901] It also produced a terrible civil war in the separation of the Muslim Indians from the Hindu Indians.

[902] But I don't think you can precisely lay that at the feet of Gandhi, right?

[903] But what I'm saying is that you have to be an extraordinary person.

[904] You have to be extraordinarily wise and you have to take ridiculous precautions if you're going to put yourself in the public sphere like that and expose yourself to that kind of adulation without becoming a puppet of the crowd.

[905] And that's what happened to Hitler.

[906] I mean, it's not like he wasn't also a conscious manipulator and surrounded himself by people who were propagandists and all of that.

[907] So there was a conscious element, but you've got to think these things through and see how that dialectic develops.

[908] Like, he learned how to appeal to the darkest fantasies of the crowd.

[909] He was really, really good at it.

[910] And that was a dialectic process, right?

[911] The crowd told him what they wanted to hear.

[912] And the crowd's a mob at that point.

[913] So I don't have to take responsibility for the fact that I'm screaming.

[914] my approval when I'm surrounded by a million people, so I can scream my approval for whatever I want, forever, whatever dark, revengeful fantasy might be playing out in my imagination, because I'm not going to be held accountable for it.

[915] Anyways, the cricket's confused, and it's no wonder.

[916] It's like the public has rendered its judgment, and the judgment is positive.

[917] So, when I wrote the book on which this course is based, I was thinking, how am I going to judge its success?

[918] And then I thought, well, there's sort of four, there's a two -by -two matrix of success.

[919] You could say, it's a great book, no one reads it.

[920] That happens.

[921] So what do you do about that?

[922] It's like Nietzsche sold virtually nothing in his lifetime, right?

[923] And you know that's happened to lots of artists.

[924] So then it's a terrible book and everyone loves it.

[925] That happens too.

[926] And then it's a great book and everyone loves it.

[927] And then it's a terrible book and everyone hates it.

[928] That's probably a better category, actually, that like it's a terrible book that and everyone loves it.

[929] I mean, you wouldn't pick a terrible book that everyone hates if you had a choice.

[930] But at least the quality and the response match.

[931] At least it's truthful, like great book, good response.

[932] But the problem with those four categories is you can't really tell which category your production falls into, right?

[933] Because how do you know?

[934] I think you should assume horrible book, bad response, because that's the most likely, of all four of those categories that's the one that's most likely to be true but just you know purely on on actuarial grounds let's say so all right so anyways the cricket wanders away because he obviously not only was he late for work that day but he turned out to be wrong about everything so he lets pinocchio go off on his adventure and stromboli puts him in this little kind of like a uh uh traveling a touring wagon you know And away they go, and the cricket thinks, well, he isn't any, the conscience isn't needed anymore on this journey towards unearned celebrity.

[935] Well, meanwhile, back at the ranch, as they say, the puppet is supposed to come home after school.

[936] But he doesn't.

[937] He doesn't show up.

[938] And the kitten and the fish and Jepetto are all.

[939] waiting there for him, ready to eat, but he doesn't show up.

[940] And so Jepetto goes out into the rain to look for him and he can't find him.

[941] And then we see the inside of the traveling show cart and Stromboli is having a snack and counting all the money that he's made from tonight's performance and hypothetically dividing it up with a puppet.

[942] So he's got this little stack of gold and some of it's false.

[943] So somebody paid with a, looks like a little washer, like a mechanical washer and it's bent.

[944] And so he curses about that for a while, even though it's interesting because he's made all this money, it's been really successful.

[945] But this one little error is enough to enrage him, which is very ungrateful and tyrannical.

[946] It's like, look, you got 100 gold pieces.

[947] someone slipped you a fake one.

[948] It's like you could have had a hundred and one.

[949] It's still a pretty good day, all things considered.

[950] You know, you've got to make a bit of allowance for error, which is something a tyrant does not do.

[951] So, and that's perfect because if you don't make allowance for error at all, then people are always guilty of something.

[952] And if you're a tyrant, that's exactly what you want.

[953] And people are always guilty of something.

[954] So the tyrant.

[955] who's willing to exploit that is always on solid ground so anyways he doesn't share with Pinocchio and he puts him in a bird cage a jail and then he also shows him this other puppet that has an axe through him that was the previous puppet who didn't precisely perform as he was supposed to and so there's a big threat there it's like you stay in that jail you do exactly what I want or it's off to the woodpile for you to be burned and so well that that's just worth thinking about because that's kind of what happens with tyrants and so and literally not just metaphorically so the cricket is basically wondering what in the world he should do and then the cart rolls by and he gets an inkling or hears and I don't quite remember this that Pinocchio is in there and might be in trouble or he thinks that up I'm sorry I can't remember that but he ends up anyways he ends up inside the cart he finally the traveling cart and he goes inside and then he tries to pick the lock because he's a bug he can climb inside he tries to pick the lock he tries to get pinocchio out of the jail that he's been that he's sort of collaborated himself into you know and it's it's interesting because if you read for example if you read solzhenits in school like archipelago which i would highly recommend one of the things you find is that if you were arrested by the by the kgb by the secret police in in the Soviet Union and you were hauled off to a to a to a to a like a tribunal a judge a judge they wanted you to admit that you were guilty you had to like they torture you until you confessed or you could just confess and that I always found that so mysterious it's like they kicked down your door they know perfectly well that they haven't got any more on you than they've got on anyone else and yet But you have to go through the damn trial and you have to admit that they're right.

[956] It's like why do they even bother with that?

[957] Why don't they just throw your sorry ass into the camp, which is essentially what's going to happen anyways?

[958] Why do they need your collaboration?

[959] You know, I've never quite figured that out.

[960] I think it's partly because they're not willing to let you stand in opposition to the rules.

[961] Because the mere fact that you'll do that means that you exist as something that is allowed to exist outside the rules and they're not having any of that so that's part of it but there's more to it there's more to it than that it's like the drama of collaboration so one of the things i learned about societies like the soviet union and this is true of all tyrannical societies is that the idea that that's top down and that people are just following orders they're good people but they're just following orders it's like you can forget about that's that's a stupid theory when a society becomes tyrannical like that the tyranny existence every single level of the society.

[962] You tyrannize your own conscience.

[963] So let's say you're a true believer.

[964] You're a true believer in Marxist utopia, let's say, or a national socialist third Reich that's going to last a thousand years and be racially pure.

[965] You really believe that.

[966] And that's supposed to be a perfect state.

[967] And that's already being delivered to you.

[968] And so what that means is that insofar as you're a true believer, your own suffering becomes heretical.

[969] because to the degree that you're suffering, you're living proof of the fact that the system is not delivering what it promised to deliver.

[970] And so you have to suppress that.

[971] You have to become your own tyrant.

[972] You can't admit that anything's gone wrong.

[973] And of course, you can't talk about it to your family because one out of three of them are government informers, just like one out of three of everyone.

[974] And you're certainly not going to mention it in the workplace, because unless you're a devout Communist Party member, you're not going anywhere.

[975] And if any of your ancestors were like landowners or bourgeoisie, it's like you're done, you're done.

[976] Class guilt, man, you're not going anywhere.

[977] And then every single level of the bureaucracy is exactly the same as that.

[978] And on the top there's a tyrant.

[979] But the tyrant is everywhere, everywhere from the peak to the soul.

[980] It's all tyranny.

[981] And everyone participates in that by lying about everything.

[982] And that's why you see what happens next in the movie.

[983] So Pinocchio is in jail and he's there because he was naive and he allowed himself to be enticed and because he did something that would have run contrary to his conscience.

[984] But the movie doesn't put up straw man. You know, the poor damn puppet got tangled into this.

[985] His conscience wasn't even around.

[986] So you have to have some sympathy for him, but doesn't matter.

[987] It doesn't matter because he ends up in jail and he can't get out.

[988] and the fact that it in some ways wasn't his fault doesn't change the fact that he's in jail and he can't get out and then his his i was watching louis k. the other night and he was talking about children lying he was talking about his nine -year -old daughter lying and he said well it's no it's no wonder your children lie and it's no wonder it's impossible for you to stop them because you know you're talking to someone whose his head would scrape the roof, they weigh like three times as much as you, and they're capable of force, and they're intimidating.

[989] And they say to you something like, did you, did you take that last cookie after I told you not to?

[990] And you're thinking, oh no, I took the cookie.

[991] What am I going to do?

[992] And then you get a genius idea in your head, which children, smarter children learn to lie earlier.

[993] Children with high IQs, learn to lie younger.

[994] And, and C .K. says, well, it's like you've just been handed a magic get out of jail free card.

[995] You can just say, no, I didn't take that cookie.

[996] And worse than that, it works in every single situation if you get away with it.

[997] And now you're supposed to learn not to do that.

[998] Said, well, great.

[999] That's the thing about comedians.

[1000] You know, they'll tell you the underlying truth, which is why people think they're so funny, like the gesture in a king's court, He's the only one who's allowed to tell the king the truth because he's beneath contempt.

[1001] That's what comedians do.

[1002] And so, well, so what happens is, well, Pinocchio is not very happy about this, right?

[1003] It's really breaking him up.

[1004] And the blue fairy appears again, from the star, same way.

[1005] So what this means is, and I think this is right.

[1006] This is something Jung talked about.

[1007] And it was also extraordinarily brilliant.

[1008] He said that it's one thing to break a rule when you don't really know the rule.

[1009] you can, for whatever reason, you seem to get a bit of a free pass for that.

[1010] But if then you know the rule, and then you break it anyways, you get hit a lot harder.

[1011] And I know that's true, and I even think I figured out why it was true at one point, but I can't remember at the moment.

[1012] But there's something about, it's like the severity of a moral error isn't quite as massive if you're genuinely ignorant and unconscious about the rule.

[1013] And maybe it's because you're not violating your own belief system as much when you engage in the misactivity.

[1014] It's something like that.

[1015] So, so anyways, Pinocchio is in there, and he's partly at fault, at least because he's naive, and he's very desperate about it.

[1016] But he's also because his conscience isn't functioning very well.

[1017] So he has his reasons, and so whatever, the Blue Fairy shows up again.

[1018] Mother Nature steps in to aid him.

[1019] And so, and that is true, I would say, because it's not like you get walloped or killed every time you make a mistake, right?

[1020] It's kind of interesting.

[1021] And especially that's the case with kids.

[1022] It's like we have more leeway for them.

[1023] Whether nature does, that's a different issue.

[1024] But I would say yes, because, you know, kids are really cute and they're appealing.

[1025] And so, and they're naive and they're kind of helpless.

[1026] They have those motions even that indicate helplessness.

[1027] associated with the natural apprehension of cuteness, right?

[1028] So cuteness is big eyes, small nose, symmetrical features, baby -like features, helpless movements, that elicits sympathy and compassion, and it doesn't cross species, and so does the cry.

[1029] And my roommate when I was in college had a niece, who was quite young, about a year and half old, I think, and we had a cat, wild cat, and it was really, fighty cat partly because of me because I would always play with it and it would and I let it fight with me quite a lot so it was a fighty cat and and uh that little girl would come over and you know maybe she'd cry that cat was like there right now trying to figure out what was wrong and that like the cat would use its claws on me but it would never use its claws on the little kid you know and I thought well that's that's indication of that cross species cuteness you know and you're all attracted to that more or less and the more maternal you are the more you're attracted to such things, but you know, you see something on YouTube and you go, ah, and that's like, that's so cute.

[1030] It's like, yeah, it is.

[1031] It appeals to exactly this, it appeals to this concomitation of infantile features.

[1032] And, and, uh, it brings out compassion unless you're psychopathic.

[1033] So it's a good thing, but, you know, it can be manipulated.

[1034] That's for sure.

[1035] Women actually manipulate it with makeup, which is quite sneaky and good of them.

[1036] So, anyways, so the Blue Fairy shows up, so that's nature.

[1037] So what I'm saying is that nature will cut kids a break.

[1038] If you think of nature in the guise of well, their mother, for example, but even the biology of other people, because we're wired to accept behavior from children that we wouldn't accept from other people.

[1039] So nature will forgive.

[1040] So she shows up in her heaven.

[1041] guys and says what's going on.

[1042] And Pinocchio, again because he's naive, but also because he's not good.

[1043] He's not evil either.

[1044] He's neither or both.

[1045] It depends on how you look at it.

[1046] And he also has no idea how smart he is and how smart he isn't or how smart the person he's talking to is.

[1047] And instead of admitting what he's done, he lies about it.

[1048] And that's interesting because it does suggest that he understands at some level that he set himself up for this.

[1049] Because, you know, he could just say, he could have just told the truth.

[1050] This horrible fox kidnapped me and sold me to this slaveholder, which is true.

[1051] It's a lot more true than the story he tells.

[1052] He tells a story about some monster, you know, a fictional monster.

[1053] He could have told even three quarters of the truth and had it work, but he doesn't.

[1054] He just obscures the story entirely.

[1055] And this is the part of the movie that people remember.

[1056] And I'd edited this out for years when I was talking about this movie.

[1057] I forgot why it was so significant.

[1058] His nose grows, right?

[1059] And it grows to ridiculous length.

[1060] And why is that?

[1061] I think it was Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, I think, who said, one of the advantages to telling the truth is that you don't have to remember what you said.

[1062] And that, God, that's worth listening to because, so there's a bunch of things I've learned as a clinician.

[1063] and one of them is because you're often in really weird situations with people if you're a clinician because things happen that don't happen normally and you don't know what to do and so what I've learned is I just say what I just say what's happening whatever it is regardless of what it is you know I'll just try to describe it as accurately as I can and not worry about in some sense not worry about the consequences you know like I'm not going out of my way to cause trouble but if you're in a really and I'm telling you this can save your life at times especially if you're dealing with someone who's paranoid who's really paranoid.

[1064] You do not lie to someone who's paranoid and violent.

[1065] Because as soon as you lie, you're aligned with the forces that are persecuting them.

[1066] And they're going to be, because paranoia makes people hypervigilant, like they're on amphetamines.

[1067] In fact, you can make people paranoid by giving them enough amphetamines.

[1068] And you can make paranoid people more paranoid by giving them amphetamines.

[1069] So they're hypervigilant because they feel that everything is predatory and against them.

[1070] And so they're watching you like you would not believe way more than you're watching them and if you flicker a lie while you're talking to them and they're really on the edge you you're done so it's what's one thing to really know if you're ever in a really bad situation and you don't know what to do you tell the truth minimally you don't disclose too much that's just another lie you tell the truth minimally and carefully and hopefully and you might get out of it You might get out of it, but if you falsify it, look the hell out.

[1071] So the truth is a real mechanism of protection in dangerous situations.

[1072] So if someone's trying to intimidate you and you think they might get violent, then they ask you if you're afraid, then you tell them that you're terrified and that you hope that things will go okay.

[1073] Or you say, I'll give you an example.

[1074] One time I was in an airport and we were in this lineup to fly back to Canada that said international flights and so it's a long lineup like 50 people and we got it I got about three from the front and there was still like 40 people behind me and the guy behind the counter decided that he was just going to shut down the line and that we could all go to this other line which was like 300 people long and I suggested that he not do that because we'd been standing there for half an hour and that he could just deal with the 20 of us that were left and like have a clue and so he called the sheriff right away and this was down in Florida and it wasn't that long after 9 -11 and so these guys came up and they were armed and they came and said looked at me because of course he told them that I was causing trouble which I wasn't I was just trying to not let what would you say an arrogant, bureaucratic scum rat take advantage of me. So, which is not the same as causing trouble.

[1075] So anyways, as soon as the cops came up, I said, look, I'm going to do exactly what you tell me to do right now, and I'm not going to cause any trouble.

[1076] But I would like you to hear what actually happened.

[1077] And so that's a good example of a situation like that.

[1078] It's like, if someone's got you, no bravado.

[1079] It's a very bad idea.

[1080] And I was going to do exactly what they told me. because, you know, they didn't know who I was, and I didn't know what they had been told.

[1081] So, anyhow, the problem with lying is that it's a hydra.

[1082] And kids find this out very early, because you tell one lie, and what happens is it has one of the consequences that you expect.

[1083] Maybe you get away with it, but it has three or four others that you don't expect.

[1084] And so it's like it grows some complexity.

[1085] And then you have to tack a lie on each of those little complexity outcrops, and then they grow three more complexities and soon this little lie turns into a great big ball of lies and at some point it becomes painfully evident to everyone and by that time you're in such you see this with politicians like that guy who was sexting Anthony Weiner yeah perfect name for him man it's so funny I shouldn't make that comment because it's so obvious but it's still funny but you know he that's exactly what happened to him it's like it wasn't even so much the event because you know, people are stupid, they make mistakes, and actually the public is somewhat forgiving if you say, yeah, geez, I'm a real moron and, you know, like really, seriously, how could I do that?

[1086] But I did.

[1087] And like, I'll try not to do it again.

[1088] But what happens with politicians is, and I'm not speaking specifically of politicians, is they'll make an error and it gets exposed and then they make three others trying to cover it up.

[1089] It happened with Nixon, for example, and then the whole thing just turns into a complete scandal.

[1090] And maybe they could have got out of it.

[1091] at the beginning by just telling the truth.

[1092] It's like, yes, I'm an idiot, you know, I'll try not to do it again.

[1093] Well, that isn't what happens in this case, and Pinocchio grows this elaborate series of lies, and the fairy is willing to be a little generous to him because he's little and cute and he's still a puppet, and she tells him not to do that, and that she's going to give him a pass this time, but that she isn't going to be able to intervene on his behalf again.

[1094] And that's partly one of the things that's quite interesting about people who have Rousseauian ideas about children.

[1095] So children are all good and they get corrupted by society, which is half true because they're also not good and they get shaped and disciplined by society.

[1096] But the Rousseauian types often are very interesting when their kids hit teenage years or when they're judging like say criminal kids.

[1097] It's like the child is perfect until they hit like 11, then they turn into a teenager, and then they're like thugs.

[1098] So they go from good to thug in one move, you know, and you often see that in families too that have treated, especially their daughters like a princess, you know, and then they hit puberty.

[1099] And the parents who have princessed them to death have no idea what to do with them.

[1100] And so then they become demonized.

[1101] And so that the overly good child turns into the overly wicked teenager.

[1102] And sometimes they'll act that out too.

[1103] One of the things I've seen with girls who are held in princess esteem when they're little and their parents have too tight a grip on them and too much of a demand for good behavior is they'll find some nasty character to associate with who will tear them out of the family.

[1104] You know, bikers are really good for that sort of thing.

[1105] So, and especially if you have some vengeful thoughts towards your parents, nice biker is your perfect solution to that problem.

[1106] Okay, we'll go through this scene.

[1107] and then I think we'll call it a day.

[1108] Okay, so now Pinocchio's gone free, he's been united with his conscience, he's learned a couple of lessons.

[1109] Don't be an actor and don't lie.

[1110] And those things are quite similar, right?

[1111] And especially once you're caught in your actor trap, don't lie to get out because that will just make it worse.

[1112] So that's the first of his trials, his moral trials on the road to becoming real.

[1113] All right, now here we're in a different place.

[1114] We're at this, I think it's called the Red Lobster Inn.

[1115] It's a shadowy place, right?

[1116] And it's kind of cave -like.

[1117] So it's like the it's it's an underground entrance to somewhere that's not good.

[1118] And so and it's a foggy night and you can't really see.

[1119] So everything's murky and and gloomy there.

[1120] And so inside we see the coachman and the fox and the cat.

[1121] And the coachman, the coachman's a bad guy.

[1122] He's that mask that we saw first of all.

[1123] He's the archetype of that mask that was judgmental about Pinocchio having a voice and it's like one of the things Jung said about the shadow and this is I would say one of the primary impediments to enlightenment is that if you start looking at your motives for for misbehaving and and I mean by that something very specific I mean I don't mean that you're misbehaving by someone else's standards I don't mean that I mean when you know by your own standards that you're doing something that's devious or malevolent or underhanded you know it And you still do it.

[1124] So it's your own judgment you're bringing to bear on yourself.

[1125] If you look at why you're doing that, the longer you look at it, the deeper a hole you dig.

[1126] And so this is the motif of Dante's Inferno fundamentally.

[1127] So Dante's Inferno is a story about, I can't remember his name, unfortunately, might be Dante, in fact, although I don't remember.

[1128] He's led into hell by Virgil, who's an ancient, who is an ancient, who is an ancient, philosopher, thinker.

[1129] And hell has levels.

[1130] And so the outer level is, and this is a Christianized version of hell because there's hells of all sorts, but this is a Christianized version.

[1131] And so on the outermost levels of hell, which is sort of like normal life, are the ancient philosophers.

[1132] And they're still in hell because they weren't Christian, but it's kind of like, it's like cheap motel hell instead of the full pit thing, you know?

[1133] And so then, Then Dante goes deeper and deeper into hell until he gets right to the bottom of it.

[1134] And it's been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, Satan himself is encased in ice at the bottom of hell, surrounded by people who betray others.

[1135] And so Dante's notion was that the worst of all possible violations of moral behavior was betrayal.

[1136] And they're in the deepest levels of hell.

[1137] And I really like that idea.

[1138] I think it's true because if you trust me, then you're manifesting the necessary courage that puts someone through life.

[1139] You know, if you're smart, you don't trust me because you're naive.

[1140] You trust me knowing that I'm full of snakes and so are you, but maybe we could cooperate and move things along nicely, you know, and we could reduce each other to the word, to our word, and we could cooperate.

[1141] But you're awake.

[1142] You know, and then I betray that.

[1143] Then I'm undermining your necessary faith in in life and humanity.

[1144] And you can really hurt someone that way.

[1145] Like, sometimes it's self -betrayal, but you can really do someone in that.

[1146] We can really traumatize them so that they can't recover.

[1147] And so it's a really terrible thing to do to someone.

[1148] And maybe it's the worst thing, and that was Dante's idea.

[1149] And it's tied in.

[1150] That makes very interesting reading if you read it at the same time as Milton's Paradise Lost, because those are metaphysical explorations.

[1151] This is what they are.

[1152] They're metaphysical explorations of the terrible places you can end up, and that people do end up.

[1153] and also a metaphysical explanation of what spirit takes you there.

[1154] So, because you might ask, well, why do you betray someone?

[1155] And that is a deep question.

[1156] And so you'll have your specific reasons, but under that there'll be some other reasons.

[1157] And under that, there'll be some other reasons.

[1158] And under that, there'll be some other reasons.

[1159] And if you go all the way to the bottom, you come up with the ultimate reasons why you betrayed someone.

[1160] And when you look at that, that will not be pretty.

[1161] That's when your proclivity for evil, let's say, unites with the general human proclivity for evil, and you discover just exactly what you're capable of.

[1162] And so, Jung's notion was that, well, that was a full encounter with the shadow, which is, I suppose, partly what this course is about, because one of the things that I believe I told you at the beginning was that I was going to try to help you understand how it might be that you could be in Auschwitz guard.

[1163] And to really understand that, that's a horrifying thing to understand.

[1164] But I'll tell you, if you want to grow some teeth, that's a really good thing to understand.

[1165] So we were talking about your capacity to negotiate before.

[1166] Like if you aren't a monster, you cannot negotiate.

[1167] But if you've got that under control, then you don't have to be a monster.

[1168] It's really paradoxical.

[1169] So if you're just naive, well, you end up in jail and a marionette master has control over.

[1170] That's not helpful.

[1171] So that's not good.

[1172] That just means you're useless and you can be manipulated.

[1173] You won't go out of your way to be malevolent, but it's mostly because you just don't have the skills, the organizational skills or even the depth to do that.

[1174] You're good because you're harmless.

[1175] That's not good.

[1176] That's easily manipulated.

[1177] And so you think, well, how do you get out of that?

[1178] Well, partly you watch people because you know what they're like, because you know what you're like.

[1179] But you also know what you could do.

[1180] do and would do if you were pushed.

[1181] And so you don't have to show much of that when you're negotiating with someone for them to take you really seriously.

[1182] So it's a strange thing, you know, but one of the things you pointed out too was that what you most need to know will be found where you least want to look and that's because you haven't already looked there.

[1183] And so it's a little different for everyone, right?

[1184] Because your particular place you don't want to look isn't going to be the same as your place, but you're going to have a place you don't want to look and what you haven't discovered, that's where it is.

[1185] And so that's partly going to be discovered by you looking at what you're capable of, what you're truly capable of.

[1186] And, you know, people, especially on the compassionate end, say, well, no, I could never be, like, brutal like that.

[1187] And that could be true, but you can kill people with compassion, no problem.

[1188] That's the Freudian -eatible situation.

[1189] So think about working in a nursing home.

[1190] So there's actually a rule of thumb, which I also use to guide my interactions with, children and also with my clients.

[1191] And I would say with people in general, do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves.

[1192] All you do is steal, you just steal it from them.

[1193] So imagine you're working with really elderly people, you know, they have Alzheimer's.

[1194] It's like really easy to do things for them because, well, it isn't because it's really a hard job.

[1195] But it might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it.

[1196] But you just speed their demise, right, by taking away the last vestiges of their independence.

[1197] And you do the same thing.

[1198] with kids.

[1199] It's like, struggle through it, man. Did you ever see my left foot?

[1200] That's a great movie.

[1201] It's about this author whose name escapes me at the moment.

[1202] Brilliant, it's a brilliant movie and the person who played the part, it's Daniel Day Lewis.

[1203] I think he won an Academy Award for it, but it's about this author in Ireland who was, I think he had cerebral palsy and all he could really do was use his left foot.

[1204] That was it.

[1205] The rest of him was pretty spastic and not.

[1206] not controllable.

[1207] But he was there.

[1208] He was very intelligent.

[1209] He was with it.

[1210] And his dad would not help him.

[1211] He had to drag himself up the damn stairs with his left foot.

[1212] He just would not help him.

[1213] And what happened was he learned how to live.

[1214] You know, he actually, he could function.

[1215] And the movie does the book, which is called My Left Foot, and the movie does a lovely job of laying that out.

[1216] But you have to be one hard -hearted son of a bitch to let your son crawl up the stairs with his left foot over and over.

[1217] Think about that.

[1218] But what's the alternative?

[1219] You know, if he would have been, and of course he lays this out in the book, if he would have been catered to, he would have ended up just like you'd expect someone who was always catered to.

[1220] So it's a very nice lesson in the triumph of fostering independence over the over too casual compassion.

[1221] That's what I would say.

[1222] Well, so you look at the coachman here.

[1223] It kind of looks like a demented Santa Claus, you know.

[1224] He doesn't have a beard, but it's a nice touch on the animator's part.

[1225] He's even got the pipe and the red suit.

[1226] And so he's listening to the fox and the cat brag about how much money they made selling Pinocchio to the puppet bastard, and how evil and terrible they are.

[1227] And they're bragging way.

[1228] And he's the real thing, hey?

[1229] He's the real thing.

[1230] And he can see through their little petty, narcissistic, grandiose tales of quasi -criminality and has nothing but contempt for it.

[1231] And you can see that in his facial expression.

[1232] Like he's sitting back a bit thinking, Keep talking, Bucco, pretty soon I'm going to have you right where I want you.

[1233] And so the fox and the cat are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking about how evil they are and bragging about how they got one over on the, what, like a four -year -old, real impressive guys, real impressive.

[1234] And the coachman is thinking up his own nefarious schemes right now for what he might do with that puppet if he got his hands on him.

[1235] And so that's what he reveals himself, right?

[1236] So what you see, filmmakers just do it for a second, and that's an archetypal trip.

[1237] It's like, you've got the fox and the cat, they're sort of petty examples of criminality and evil.

[1238] And then you've got the coachman, and he's the real thing, but he's not really shown anybody who he is.

[1239] And then at one scene in the bar, he lets his guard down, and he lets them see what he's really like.

[1240] And so you see this all teeth and predatory eyes and glee all at the same time, right?

[1241] That's a bad combination.

[1242] I'm going to eat you and it's going to make me very happy.

[1243] That's insanity.

[1244] You do not want to see that look on someone's face.

[1245] And so that's the look.

[1246] And the fox is traumatized by that.

[1247] He just, like, he thinks he's a bad guy.

[1248] And he's not.

[1249] He just can't be a good guy.

[1250] He hasn't got the talent to be a bad guy.

[1251] So, and then he's talking to the coachman and bragging and the coachman's had enough of it and shows his real face.

[1252] And it's like, that's not good.

[1253] the fox gets a real glimpse into hell and that just terrifies him like he's and the and the coachman the other thing the coachman does is reveal his plans and his plans are to kidnap pinocchio along with a bunch of other boys and to take them to this place called pleasure island and the fox knows what's going on there and so it's it's the foreshadowing of the next stage of the adventure and so after the fox and the cat are terrified the coachman who takes you along with him has a little chat with them and they describe exactly what they're going to do next and the fox and the cat know perfectly well that they're over their head but at this point in their misadventures there's no pulling back and I think we'll stop there even though it's a little early because that was a lot of material and this is a really good place to stop so we'll see you in a week we'll return next week with part three of marionettes and individuals.

[1254] Mikaela?

[1255] Consider picking up Dad's latest book, 12 Rules for Life, an antidote to chaos, or his first book, Maps of Meaning, The Architecture of Belief.

[1256] Available in text, e -book, and audiobook format wherever you buy books.

[1257] Follow me on my YouTube channel, Jordan B. Peterson, on Twitter, at Jordan B. Peterson, on Facebook, at Dr. Jordan B. Peterson, and at Instagram at jordan