2017 Maps of Meaning 04: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 3)

so I hope we can... my plan is to finish this today and then we'll go into the more concrete details now that you've got some sense of the way that a narrative like this can unfold if you remember, we were just leaving this terrible little bar, which I think was called the Red Lobster something like that; where the fox and the cat had met the coachman and the Coachman is obviously someone who takes you somewhere, he takes you on a trip and the coachman basically revealed himself, first he kinda looks like a, I guess a somewhat jolly old man although his expression doesn't precisely read as jolly and then he reveals himself as something positively satanic and that's enough to terrify these two-bit thugs, the Fox and the Cat who think they're tough, but really aren't tough at all and so they see at some point what they're really tangled up in and I think I mentioned to you that that was something akin... Jung had this idea that people's shadows reach all the way down to hell which is actually a very frightening concept, and what he meant by that is if you take a look at the impulses that drive you that are actually malevolent, if you can admit to such impulses that if you basically follow those all the way down to their origin, you can find some very nasty things and what you find down there basically is what allies you with people who've done terrible things and that's not a very pleasant experience, I would say although one thing that's worth thinking about is that it is something that can protect you against being very very badly hurt because one of the things that characterizes people who develop post-traumatic stress disorder is that they're often naive, and then they encounter something that's really not within their framework of thinking and it's usually something bad, and because there isn't anything in their philosophy, their way of looking at the world that has prepared them for that, they end up fragmented and devastated it's actually protective to you if you can figure out what your full range of capabilities is because that can help you understand other people a lot better, and to be wiser and more careful in your actions it's also useful, I think, if you want to convince yourself to act properly because if you regard yourself as harmless, which is a big mistake, then nothing you can do is really that bad right? because you're harmless, after all; but if you understand that you're seriously not harmless then that can make you a lot more careful with yourself and I would say that's especially true maybe when you're dealing... when you have kids, and you start dealing with your kids if you know that... what you're capable of, because you're human then that can motivate you to be much more careful with what you say and do and I don't mean cautious, I don't mean timid, I don't mean any of that I just mean that you wanna keep things pristine between you and your children, let's say because that way they're on your good side, and you want them on your good side because children who get on their parents' bad side suffer very badly for it, and sometimes it's because they're literally abused but more often it's because they get, well they get abused, let's say, or neglected, in much more subtle ways and you're definitely capable of that, I mean, all you have to do is think about the way you've interacted with someone that you've decided to not like, or maybe someone you genuinely don't like and that can range from just not paying any attention to them, especially if they're doing something good to really pursuing them, and making their life miserable, and you can certainly do that with your family members and you can do that with your intimate partners, and you can do that with your friends, and you can do it with yourself so it's really worth knowing that, so... well... the Fox thinks he's a royal rule breaker, but he's really just a two-bit thug, and this is where he learns that so... sorry, I have a new phone, and I'm kind of stupid with it, still so... well, hypothetically that would work, probably won't anyways, the Coachman's got these guys in his grasp now, regardless partly because they're already down this road, and they can't back off, and partly 'cause he also offers them more money than they've seen before so as bad as they are, they're going to get worse... many of you, I presume, have seen Breaking Bad that's a really good example of the incorporation, at least in part, or maybe the possession by the shadow from a Jungian perspective right, because you have this ordinary high school teacher who really thinks that he's an axe [?] and his family as well you know, like your typical persona, roughly speaking, he's just a normal guy but part of the reason that he's a normal guy is 'cause he actually hasn't been put in abnormal circumstances and then all of a sudden he is, and he has a genuine moral conundrum, right, he's gonna die of lung cancer and he has a son who's got a lot of health problems and he's terrified that he's going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing and then of course as the story... and so he decides to do something that... temporarily... that he regards as... that he would normally regard as reprehensible and of course he just gets tangled up in that, but then, as the story unfolds, you see that there's... it's more complicated because it's not that he was just innocent good guy, and he decided to turn bad, he's also very resentful and angry, and it's partly because he's a bit of a pushover at the beginning, or maybe more than a bit of a pushover and also that he didn't really fulfill his own potential, and that, you know he had friends who walked down the entrepreneurial path and maybe they weren't quite fair to him, but whatever he ends up not very successful as a high school teacher, so he's really angry about that, and so there's more motivation for him opening up the door to the terrible elements of his personality than just the fact that he's got good motivations to do so and that unfolds, so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character increasingly manifest themselves as he walks down this road to, really, total brutality, and it's quite good there's a book called "Ordinary Men" that's a lot like that I don't think I've mentioned that to you before, but "Ordinary Men" is a book about... it's the best book of its type maybe it's the only book of its type... it's possible, but it's plotted much like Breaking Bad in some sense it's a story about these German policemen in the early stages of World War II and they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian propaganda came out in full force if you were a teenager, say, in the 1930s, you were gonna be pulled right into the propaganda machine and maybe you were part of the Hitler Youth, like you were raised in that, you know but if you were older, then you were raised before that and you're not as amenable to propaganda once you're older than about, well, I would say, about 22 or something like that it's pretty young, actually; if you're gonna make a soldier, you have to get a soldier young 'cause once people are in their early twenties, say, they already have their personality developed anyways, these policemen were sent into Poland after the Germans marched through and, you know, it was wartime, and there was this hypothesis in Germany that the Jews in particular were operating as a fifth column in undermining the German war effort because of course the Germans blamed the Jews and a variety of other people for actually setting up the conditions that made the war necessary and the police were sent into Poland, they were also required to make peace, roughly speaking they started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 65 and gathering them in stadiums, and then shipping them off on trains, but that isn't where they ended they ended in a very, very dark place, I mean these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women and shooting them in the back of the head by the end of their training and what's really interesting about that is that their commander told them that they could go home at any time so this is not one of those examples of people following orders and the reason they didn't, roughly speaking, there's many reasons, but one of the reasons they didn't is because they didn't think it was comradely, so to speak, to leave the guys they were working with to do all the dirty work and run off; and that's a really interesting fact because in different circumstances you wouldn't think about that as reprehensible you'd think: well, that's part of team work under rough circumstances; and that's at least in part how they viewed it they were also made physically ill multiple times, physically and psychologically ill, by the thing that they had to do but they kept doing them anyways, so one step at a time and that's the thing, is that you end up in very bad place one step at a time, so you better watch those steps anyways, Pinokio has now decided, after his latest misadventure, to return to the proper pathway he's off to school again, and he's still pretty naive, although perhaps not as much so as he was before so he decided that he's gonna do things right, he's gonna go get educated, he's going back to school he's gonna take the conventional route to discipline, and be a good boy, roughly speaking and so, he's off to school, and the fox waylays him again this is a really interesting scene, took me quite a long time to unpack this too and so, the fox, first of all, starts out by acting like he's sympathetic again, sympathetic towards Pinocchio and so, he's empathetic, you could say, and... so this is an interesting analysis of empathy so what happens is the fox convinces Pinokio through a variety of maneuvers that he's actually not feeling very well, that he's sick, he really convinces him that he's a victim and one of the things... I had a graduate student named Maya Maja Djikic, who had worked with the UN in Bosnia and she had toured some of the mass grave sites there, and we wrote a paper one time, called: "You can neither remember nor forget what you don't understand" and it was a paper about the idea, for example, it was partly about the idea that we should never forget the Holocaust and that the idea there is that, well, we should never forget it and we should never repeat it but the thing is, if you don't understand how those things come about, you can't really remember them, right? you think about them as a set of historical facts, but that's not the kind of remembering that actually makes any difference you have to understand the causal pathways, you have to understand how a society would transform in that manner and more importantly, you have to understand the role of the individuals within that society unless you're going to assume that they're so completely unlike you that there's no connection whatsoever in which case you haven't remembered it at all, you haven't learned anything at all because the right lesson from what happened in the 20th century is: this is what human beings are like that's the correct lesson, and you can say: well, not me; but... but probably you too, that's the thing, probably and probably me too, and least under normal circumstances; anyways... the Fox convinces Pinocchio that he's sick, he performs a lot of tricks to do this now, you could say that Pinocchio is susceptible to this because maybe there's still a part of him that's looking for the easy way out, and so... one of the things that Maja and I found when we were writing this paper we were looking at the discourse that precedes genocide and genocidal states and the enhancement of a sense of victimization on the part of one of the groups usually the group that's going to commit the genocide first of all, their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues who are trying to stir up this sort of hatred, so they basically say: look, you've been oppressed in a variety of ways and these are the people who did it, and they're not gonna stop doing it, and this time we're gonna get them before they get us it's something like that; and so there's something very pathological about the enhancement of victimization which is, well... see the problem as far as I'm concerned with it is, it's not thought through very well because there's a point that's being made, and the point is that people have been oppressed and they suffer and that's true, that point; but then the proper framework from within which to interpret that I believe is that that's characteristic of life, you can't take it personally in some sense and you can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims and you certainly can't divide the whole world neatly into perpetrators and victims and then assume that you're only in the victim class and then assume that that gives you certain... like access to certain... forms of redress, let's say it gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing, so... For example, one of the things that characterized the Soviet Union - and this was particularly true in the 1920's - but also afterwards the Soviets were very much enamored of the idea of class guilt. So, for example, although it was only about 40 years previously that the serfs had been emancipated, they weren't much more than slaves, right? So that was the bulk of the Russian population. They were bought and sold along with the land. So, they had been emancipated and some of them - many of them - had turned into independent farmers and some of them had become reasonably prosperous, because, at least in principle well, I presume a certain proportion of them from being crooked, but I presume a larger proportion from actually being able to raise food and of course, at that time the bulk of the Russian food population [sic] was produced by these relatively successful peasant farmers; and relatively successful would mean maybe they had a brick house or something, and maybe they had a couple of cows, and maybe they were able to hire a few people so you know, it wasn't like they were massive land owners or anything but I talked to you a little bit about the Pareto principle and the notion that in any domain of activity a small proportion of people end up producing most of what's in that domain of activity the same was true in Russia with regards to these peasant farmers, some of them were extraordinarily efficient and they produced most of Russia's food when the communists came in, they described those land holders as parasites, essentially predicated on the Marxist idea that if someone had extracted profit from an enterprise that the had basically stolen that profit from the people, say, that they had employed or otherwise oppressed so you could be a member of the kulak [spells it out] class and then because you were a member of that class, you were automatically guilty so what happened was... and you gotta think this through to really understand what happened so what happened was the intellectual communists were sent out in cadres out into these little towns to find people who would help them round up the kulaks; now you gotta think about what a small town is like because... so imagine you're in a town, and there's three or four people, or maybe ten people or something like that who are a little more successful than everyone else, and a certain number of people are gonna be fine with that any maybe eve happy about it, because they regard those people as particularly productive and, you know, as stalwart members of the community, regardless of their flaws but there's gonna be some people who are not happy about it at all, that are gonna be very resentful about that and jealous and so those are gonna be people whose characters, I would say, are of the less positive type and so when the intellectuals came in and described the reason that these people should be treated as parasites and profiteers then it was the resentful minority in those towns, and that would be the kind of guy that hangs around in the bar all the time and is completely unconscientious, and fails at everything, and then blames everyone else for it the intellectuals came in and said: this is unfair that this happened to you you've actually been victimized and now it's your opportunity to go have your revenge; and that's exactly what happened now, in some of the villages sometimes the peasants would actually surround the farmsteads of these more successful people and try to defend them, but that never worked out for very long so then these mobs, these angry mobs, would go into the farmhouses and strip the place right down to nothing and they packed these people up and sent them on trains with no food, out to Siberia where there was no place to live so they were packed into houses, maybe they had a square meter each to live in and their children died of typhoid and many of them froze to death many, many people died, millions of people died as a consequence of the dekulakization at least in... as a consequence of its total effect so what happened then was that there wasn't any food produced and so then six million Ukrainians starved to death in the 1920s, it's something you never hear about, right? you never hear about that, why do you never hear about that? that's a question worth asking you know, it was an absolute catastrophe, they used to... so these people were starving, right to the point of cannibalism, right, I mean it was ugly it was ugly as anything you could possibly imagine if you were a mother and... so you're supposed to hand all your grain in to the central committee most of it for distribution into the cities, you didn't get to keep any food yourself and so maybe then afterwards, if you were a mother, you'd go out in the fields that had already been harvested and you'd pick up individual grains of wheat, and if you didn't turn those in, they'd sh... that was death for you so that's how far it was pushed, so... well, so that's a little story about how the idea of victimization and perpetration can get out of hand extraordinarily rapidly so whenever people are beating the victim drum, you know, they'll cover that up with empathy, roughly speaking we're speaking on behalf of the oppressed; it's like, maybe you are, but maybe you're no saint because, you know, you're so sure that you're a saint and you're only speaking from the position of good highly unlikely; anyways, so Pinocchio is enticed into believing that he's a victim now, the logical part of that is that it is the case that, you know, you can make a very strong case that every human being is in some sense involved in a tragic enterprise right? because you're biologically vulnerable, you're not what you could be as a biological specimen, right? you're full of imperfections and plus, you're going to be sick, and those you love are going to be sick and everything ends up in death, and so there's a very tragic element to that and then, by the same token, you're also subject to the tyrannical aspect of your culture right, 'cause it's forcing you to be a certain way all the time socialization does that, you're required to modify your own intrinsic nature in order to come into conformity with the broader community and you can think about that from the Piagetian sense, which is that socialization makes you a more and more sophisticated person and there's some truth in that, but you can also be subject just to tyranny, you know I see people in my practice, for example, they've had very tyrannical fathers, for example sometimes they have tyrannical mothers as well, but they not so much encouraged to integrate properly into the social community, as they are harassed and abused or made to feel insufficient and, you know, basically subject to tyranny and so it's quite... and that's true of everyone to some degree you know, you come to university and there's a tyrannical aspect to it; especially in a big institution like this you're not really marked out as an individual in any sense, you know you're a number along with 60 thousand other people, and you know, there's something cold and impersonal about that which is well represented in the design of this classroom, say but by the same token, you know, the university provides you with an identity while you're exploring an intellectual landscape, you know, you have a lot of freedom compared to the vast majority of people, perhaps you don't have as much freedom as you might if you compared it to some utopian notion of freedom, but in any real world sense, you're unbelievably well protected by the university partly because it stamps you with the identity "student", which is a respectable identity and so you can go off and educate yourself as much as you can and everyone in society says that's okay, they carve out the protected space for you so at the same time as you're being tyrannized by the institution and forced in some ways also to adopt the viewpoints, say, of the professors, depending on the professor you're also the beneficiary of that, just like you're the beneficiary of this huge industrial infrastructure that underlies everything that you do; so anyways, the fact that your life is tragic necessarily and that you are subject to oppression makes the victimization story really easy to swallow but then there's a dark side of that, too; and this is actually what happens with Pinokio so, what happens here is that he's told that he's ill and convinced that he's ill, and they do use trickery, and... so again you could look at him in some sense as an innocent victim, but the innocence... the filmmakers do a good job of hedging against the innocent interpretation because what he's offered and accepts because he's ill is an easy way out and so what the fox basically tells him is that he needs to have the vacation, because he's sick and he can go off to Pleasure Island, which is this place of impulsivity, roughly speaking and whim, it's like reversion to being two years old in some sense and that he really needs that, because otherwise he's not going to be able to live properly he's not going to be able to recover his health; and so what Pinokio is offered... is the opportunity to abandon your responsibility as a reward for adopting the guise of victim and that's really worth thinking about, because one of the things I thought about for a long time is that... I've been trying to figure out what gives people's lives meaning and tragedy gives life its negative meaning, and nobody disputes that even if you're nihilistic, you're not going to dispute the fact that tragedy gives life negative meaning so when nihilists say that life is meaningless, that isn't exactly what they mean they mean that life is suffering, but there isn't anything transcendent about it that you could set against that suffering that's nihilism, it's not that life is meaningless, that would just be neutral it's like... no one believes that, they certainly don't act like they believe it if you look at it technically, and we will as we progress through this class in order to have any positive meaning in your life you have to have identified a goal and you have to be working towards it, and there is a technical reason for that and the technical reason, as far as I can tell is that the circuitry that produces the kind of positive emotion that people really like is only activated when you notice that... when you're proceeding towards a goal that you value and so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value, you can't have any positive emotion so technically that's the incentive reward system, and it's... the underlying circuitry is dopaminergic and when that circuitry is activated then it's part of the exploratory circuit, it gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile and that's, you know, you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward but there's two kinds of positive emotion, one is the reward that's associated with satiation and that's consummatory reward, and that's the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat but the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which you were operating it's time to eat, well, you eat, and that framework's no longer relevant, so the consummatory reward eliminates the value framework and then you're stuck with: well, what are you gonna do next? and so, the consummatory reward has with it its own problems, but the incentive reward is constantly what keeps you moving forward and incentive reward, because it's dopaminergic, also is analgesic literally analgesic; so if you are in pain, you take opiates, and that will cut the pain but so will psychomotor stimulants, like cocaine or amphetamines and so, it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging, you're working towards a goal that you're going to feel less pain; and you can see this happening with athletes, you know, they'll break their thumb or something or maybe sometimes even their ankle, and they'll keep playing the game, 'course afterwards they're suffering like mad but the fact that they're so filled with goal-directed enthusiasm means that, well, the pain systems are in some sense shut off so that's an interesting thing, because what it suggests... I mean, then you can imagine... I might say: well, how happy are you that you've made a certain amount of progress? and if you think about it what you'd say is: well, it depends on how much progress and in relationship to what so hypothetically you're gonna be happier if you'd made quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal and then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important, 'cause that's not obvious now, you could say: you're in this class, and you're listening to some information and maybe there's two reasons for that: you might find the information interesting per se, but let's forget about that for a minute you need to listen to the information so that you can do well on the assignment, so that you can do well in the class you need to do well in your class so that you can finish up your degree you need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world you need to do that so that you're financially stable and maybe you can start a family and have a life and that's all part of being a good person, something like that and so, that's a hierarchy of goals, and you might say that being a good person would be the thing, however vaguely thought through, that's at the top of that hierarchy and then, when you're doing things that serve that ultimate purpose, then you're gonna find those more meaningful and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the engagement of this exploratory circuit that's nested right down in your hypothalamus, it's really, really, old it's as old as thirst, and it's as old as hunger, it's really an old system and so, you wanna have that thing activated, I mean, at least from a... well, it isn't only from a hedonic point of view, you know, it's a matter of being happy it's the wrong way of thinking about it, it's much more complicated than that, it's... yes? [student] I was actually just about to ask like a hedonic element, 'cause I'm just trying to understand [student] this... I guess... not relationship but the differentiation between hedonism and satiation [student] and you... like going back to when you mentioned that it's not that life is meaningless [student] but hedonism isn't exactly... like it's not satiation, because [student] at that point people are just doing what they're doing for the sake doing [student] it's not just for activation of the dopaminergic system [student] so I was trying to understand... well, what I would say, we're going to into that A LOT once we're done with this, like a lot but I'll go over it briefly, I mean, it's not merely hedonism because there's an analgesic and also a fear-reducing element to pursuing a proper path right, so there's control of negative emotion, but there's not just control of negative emotion and generation of positive emotion in the immediate future which is kinda what you think about with regards to hedonism; actually, Pinokio takes a hedonic route next the problem with the hedonic route is that... so the pursuit of pure happiness, let's say is that what makes you happy in the next minute might not be something that will make you happy in the next hour well you know that, there's this comic, what's his name, they call him king of the one-liners he talked about drinking wine; don't you know that's gonna cause a hangover? and he said: yeah, at the end, but the beginning and middle are excellent and so that's really the problem with hedonism, right, is that to pursue something that makes you happy in the immediate present risks sacrificing your, well, many things, but at least, let's say, your hedonism in the medium to long term and of course that is one of the major problems with drug use, and alcohol's a really good example of that because whatever hedonic kick you might get from it that moment at night you're going to pay for almost completely or maybe even more so, because the next day you're much more jittery and anxious, and that's a direct consequence of withdrawing from the drug so when you're in... when you have a hangover you're in alcohol withdrawal so that's how fast you get, roughly speaking, addicted to it and so if you take another drink when you're hungover it'll cure it, but it's not a very useful cure because all you do is push the inevitable hangover one more step into the future and so part of the problem with the hedonic answer is: happy when? exatly; and over what period of time? and also: who's happy? because maybe something makes you happy but makes your family miserable now, you could say, well, I don't care, but you do care if you have to live with your family because they're gonna take it out on you; so the impulsive hedonism, which is also fostered, say, by a positive emotion it tends to put people into a state of... the pursuit of short-term hedonism, it's not a good medium to long-term solution I actually think that's why people evolved conscientiousness right, 'cause conscientiousness is not happy, conscientious people aren't conscientious because it makes them happy we're starting to think that they're conscientious because they actually feel terrible if they're just sitting around doing nothing and so it's a way of staving off stress that's related to enforced leisure, something like that you know, if you know industrious people, some of you are industrious some of you will have industrious parents, they just can't sit around and do nothing, they have to be working they don't feel good unless they're working; so one thing about conscientiousness is that it involves continual sacrifice, right, you're doing difficult things in the present, hypothetically to make the future better but that's not driven by hedonism by any stretch of the imagination; and conscientiousness is actually a pretty good predictor of long-term life success in stable societies; 'cause there's also no point in being conscientious and saving things up and storing things if a bunch of thugs are gonna just come in randomly and take it all away so conscientiousness actually only works intelligently in societies that have some medium to long-term stability you know, 'cause you can get wiped out by hyperinflation, too, 'cause hyperinflation kills off the conscientious people the people who accrued debts are thrilled when hyperinflation kicks in, because it wipes out their debts but of course those debts are the things they owed to people who were conscientious enough to save so anyways, Pinocchio is transformed into a victim, and he's offered this identity, and he takes it now, it's partly 'cause he's deceived and manipulated but it's also partly because the Fox offers him the abandonment of responsibility as payment for adopting the victim identity so this is where his own lack of morality, let's say, 'cause this is all about Pinocchio's development as a character plays a role in his demise if I'm a victim, everyone else owes me something, and I don't have to take any responsibility and so, one of the things I've wondered... here's something to think about: it might be that the sense of meaning that life can provide to you is proportionate to the amount of responsibility you decide to take on and that'd be very strange if it was the case, you know, because responsibility of course is a kind of weight, obviously and it's difficult to take on responsibility; but if any positive emotion that you feel and your control of anxiety and the control over pain is dependent on the activation of the systems that watch you move towards a desired goal then the more complete and weighty the goal is, the more kick there's going to be in the observation that you're moving towards it and you know, you kinda already know this, because you'll have observed in your own life that when you're engaged in something that you believe in, that the time passes properly you know, you can see this even if you're... maybe you're reading a paper and it's actually related in some intelligible manner to something that you wanna learn so even though it's difficult, you get engaged in it, you can remember it better, you process it better and you're not so likely to fall asleep, and you're not so likely to wanna find distractions, all of that you can get into it; and it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the degree of responsibility that you're willing to shoulder, and I think you can make a strong case for that I've also often wondered: imagine you could offer people a choice here's the choice: you can say, well, your life isn't meaningful, the nihilists have got it right there's no meaning in your life, and because of that there's no reason for you to accept any responsibility so you can live a responsibility-free life and maybe one of impulsive pleasure-seeking but a responsibility-free life; but the price you pay is that it doesn't get to be meaningful or you could say to someone: no, we're gonna do the opposite, we're gonna say: you can live a meaningful life but it's only gonna be as meaningful as the amount of responsibility that you're willing to bear and then you might say: well, what would people choose? 'cause everybody always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life but if the price you pay for that is the adoption of responsibility, then it's not so obvious people would choose meaning over pointless pursuits if they had to... if the benefit they got for choosing the pointless pursuits was that they didn't have to care about anything they ever did there's no responsibility, and that's really what Pinocchio is offered, and that's what the Coachman offers him and that's interesting, because, you know, so far it's been the Fox and the Cat, and they're kinda two-bit hoods and so, the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways but here, at least as far as the imagination, the collective imagination that created this movie is concerned this is where you get to the most pathological form of, let's call it temptation and that's the temptation to engage in... to abandon responsibility and to engage in impulsive pleasure seeking short-term pleasure seeking so here's the Fox, pretending to be a doctor investigating Pinocchio's illness and he makes some notes, which is all just meaningless scribble it's like white noise, and it doesn't matter that the arguments that he's making are completely incoherent and it doesn't matter that he actually doesn't know anything, what he's selling is easy to buy and so Pinocchio buys it and by the end of the conversation with the Fox he's pretty convinced that he's useless and that he needs a vacation; you know... this is an oedipal situation as well, which I touched on the other lecture, I mean... let's imagine that you have a child that is a little on the neurotic side, so high negative emotion and maybe one that's also a little bit on the sickly side, so it has a variety of relatively minor ailments, but ailments nonetheless and so what that means as a parent, we'll say mother for this example, 'cause I want to use the oedipal example you have to make a decision all the time about exactly how you're gonna treat that child one decision is: well, I'm not gonna... you don't have to go to school today, because you're not feeling well, but fair enough, but do you make the same decision the next day? and do you make the same decision the next day? and let's imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of capitalizing on their illness well then that's not gonna be very good for the child, the rule with a sickly child has to be something like: I'm gonna push you right to your limit; because otherwise how is the person gonna figure out what they can do? and if they can't figure out what they can do, then they're not gonna be able to make their way in the world at all and then that gets muddied very badly if you're not exactly sure that you want them to make their way in the world, you know maybe you're just as happy, because you'd be sitting at home, alone if your child was there with you and maybe you'd be just as happy at some level if they never grew up at all because then they won't leave; and maybe that's because you have a terrible marriage, and you're lonesome, you know maybe it's an abusive marriage and your husband has chased away all your friends and so you don't have anything at all, and maybe that's 'cause you didn't stand up for yourself very well apart from the fact that he was, you know, tyrannical in his central nature and so then all those little warps and bends in your psyche are gonna manifest themselves right... right in the background of every one of those decisions my daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent, and they were very serious, and it was very difficult to figure out what to do about that, because you couldn't exactly apply normative rules, right? and we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us, how seriously to take those and the answer was: the least amount of serious possible, it's something like that, because we needed to know, and she needed to know, what she could do in spite of the fact that she had problems and one of the things I really tried to instill in her, and I think it worked, is that: you don't ever wanna use your illness as an excuse for not doing anything not consciously, you know, sometimes you might not know, "I'm not feeling well, what can I do?" well you don't know, right, because sometimes when you're not feeling well, you can do more than you think, and sometimes you can do less than you think it's not like it's obvious, but sometimes it's obvious, you know, this little temptation flits through your mind, and you think: well, I don't really wanna do what I'm doing today, and I'm not feeling very well, so I don't have to do it you do that a hundred times, and *you* don't know how sick you are anymore and then you're in real trouble, because not only are you sick, but you actually have... you've muddied the waters and so you have both problems, is you're actually ill, and you've betrayed yourself by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities and that, I think, if both of those thing happen to you at the same time, you're in real trouble and it's really hard not to have that happen so anyways, Pinokio gets enticed into believing he's a victim the fact that he's insufficient is used as an excuse by the fox and the cat to offer him a trip to Pleasure Island and this is, I think, where the movie gets particularly dark and so off they go, singing away; they have to carry him so you could say in some sense he's carried by societal pathology and his own trouble he's carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island; and so the Cricket... the Cricket is again left behind, he's not the world's best conscience at this point so, Pinokio goes off to meet the Coachman, and the Coachman has already said he's collecting bad little boys and he's got them on the coach, they're all delinquent types here and the ticket on the coach was the ace of spades, which is what Pinocchio is holding and he's with this character here, called Lampwick and that's an interesting name, so he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light, lamp wick and that's interesting, because it's a play on Lucifer, 'cause Lucifer means 'bringer of light' and so Lampwick is a play on that, and Lampwick is really a nasty piece of work he's got this false arrogance about him, he's got this cynical voice, really deeply cynical voice and he's only... I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this, maybe 12 or something like that, 13 And so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical I'll tell you a story about that so I used to live in Montreal, I lived in a poor neighborhood and one day I was out in the back alley, building a fence, 'cause I was putting a fence around my little tiny back yard and there was a house across the alley down the street aways, where there was a lot of, like not good partying, a lot of bikers were hanging around there, ans I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well anyways, I was out there in the back alley, pounding away on my fence, and these little kids came up and they were little, they were like 3 and 4 years old, hey, and they spoke joual a kind of really heavily accented quebecois french, and my french isn't good so I could hardly understand them; but they were watching me hammer, and they got a little closer and they had one kid who was clearly the leader, had a real scowl on his face, eh? and so they were watching, and I kinda motioned to one of them, that they could use the hammer and that kid said, and I'm gonna mangle this, but he said "je voulai" or something like that and what it meant is "I'll steal that"; and so I thought... you know, and then he came over and he tugged on it and he wanted to take it, and he was quite angry that I wasn't gonna let him take it, and then so... so I couldn't engage him, I couldn't get him to play, you know, and his buddies were sort of hanging around behind him, and they wouldn't come and play, because he wouldn't, and so he was hostile right away to me and then... so the fence piece was laying out in the alley, and these little monsters started running across it which I thought was really remarkable, you know, but it was terrible at the same time, because they were really little kids that shouldn't be happening when you're like 3 or 4; if that's happening at that age, things are not good and so that kid was already like seriously not happy with the world and you know, I've been studying antisocial behavior for a long time by that point, and I knew that the kids who are destined to jail later in their lives are kids who are rough and tough when they're two years old, but then don't get socialized or maybe worse, they get anti-socialized, which is exactly what happened to this kid, he'd obviously been ignored and abused certainly no one had ever played with him in any real way, because he wouldn't play; and it's not good if a kid is that little and you can't get them to play, something's gone seriously wrong, 'cause they're so playful at that age, that it's like 90% of them anyways, so they were running back and forth on this fence, I thought, stomping on it, you know and I was right there, I thought, well, first of all I thought that was remarkable, but I also thought it was absolutely horrifying, because you know, in some sense I could see where this kid was headed and why at that early stage in his life, it's really... it's not a pleasant thing to behold but there was nothing that could be done about it, and that... kinda what this Lampwick is like he's prematurely cynical, this kid was already cynical, and he was like 4 years old you know, most kids don't get cynical 'till they're teenagers, and then often they don't get completely cynical and usually they more or less grow out of it but it happened to him much earlier; so this Lampwick character, he's already decided that he knows everything, that everyone else's opinion is worth nothing and that there's nothing in cultre or society that holds any utility whatsoever for someone like him now, you can imagine developing that way, if you were raised in a family where people were generally lying to you and that they randomly treated you or neglected you, and that you couldn't discern anything about them that was admirable or positive of course you assume the whole structure is corrupt, and that you had to take care of yourself, and no one else well, not of course, not everyone assumes that under those situations, I shouldn't say "of course" but it's a logical set of conclusions, so... and of course it's proportionate to some degree to how much abuse you tak, althought there are lots of stories of people who've been terribly abused as children who grew up to be, you know, kind, remarkable, responsible, thoughtful people who were absolutely opposed to abuse, instead of propagating it there's no direct causal pathway anyways, Lampwick is pretty happy to be on this coach way to Pleasure Island which he's heard about he said, "well, it's all you can eat, all you can smoke, you don't have to do any work, you can do anything you want" so you might say, well, it's too good to be true, like the ginger bread house in the Hansel and Grettel story right, the kids are lost, there's a ginger bread house, it's a house, which is something they need, and it's made out of cookies it looks like it's a little bit too good to be true, and of course in the house there's the negative part of that which is the old witch who wants to eat children; and that's a story about what happens to people if they're offered more than they should be offered so... anyways, Lampwick is firing off... he has a little slingshot and he's firing off pebbles at the horses who are pulling the carriage, and that's just the kind of guy that he is so he takes Pinocchio under his wing; and the Cricket is down there in the dust, he's caught back up to the carriage but he's having a rough time at this point this is also a story, to some degree, about transitioning to adolescence you know, because adolescence is a time when people are pretty impulsive, and their view is quite short-term and are more likely to pursue immediate pleasures and all of that, and that can get really out of hand, so... anyways, they separate from the mainland, and go on a boat, and so they're off to Pleasure Island a dark place; and the Coachman opens the gates and lets the delinquents into Pleasure Island, and they basically have a riot; and this is Pleasure Island, here, it's full of amusement park rides, and you know, one of the things that's kind of interesting about horror movies, I'm sure you've noticed this, is that they're often set in amusement parks and clowns are often characters of horror, we'll leave the clowns aside for now, but the amusement park thing, that's pretty interesting why in the world would an amusement park be a place of horror? and the first question might be: well, have you ever been to an amusement park? because there is something about them, that's really... they have a dark side, a clear dark side, and part of it is that people with nothing better to do are spending money stupidly, and they're being fleeced by the people who operate the amusement park you know, and they have, let's say, a stereotypically dark reputation and they're moving around all the time, this is also something that psychopaths do and all they're doing is moving from community to community, and taking the money from the rubes, fundamentally and so, the amusement park, well... if you walk through an amusement park with that sort of thing in mind, maybe that's also coloring your vision, of course, but it's something that you could see very immediately; so there's something about them that's deeply sad, but there's also an underlying horror that characterizes them it's easy for a horror movie or horror novel writers to immediately expand upon, there's something about it that that makes sense to people, so... it's too easy, maybe that's... and it's also all short-term gratification, that's the other thing so you spend your money very rapidly, and it's gone; yes? [student] seems like a celebration of meanings divorced from reality (?) yes, exactly, well, that's the impulsive element; the comment was it's a celebration of meanings divorced from reality yeah, it's also outside of reality, right, that's why it's on an island, it's a separate universe and it's a universe where nothig that's happening is connected to anything outside and you're spending your hard-earned money, let's say, but it isn't that much... it's certainly not an investment it's not that much different than burning it, well, it is, because of course you get some pleasure out of it, but it isn't... going there every day is probably not the wisest move that you could make, so... the animators do a good job of, well, of presenting the, what would you call it the enforced hedonism, I guess I would say, of a place like that; this is a place where you're gonna have fun, that's what it's for, so... anyways, Lampwick, who's got this very arrogant look on his face, and this kind of strut it's a bravado, that's what it's called, it's a false confidence it's the sort of thing that people do when they're trying to impress upon others that they're high in the dominance hierarchy but really they're not, so it's a mimicry of dominance but it's something that can be intimidating, there's no doubt about it I had a friend, he didn't come to a good end this person who was a real good friend of mine, when I was in junior high and high school, and he was kind of crazy and he was tall, he was a bout six foot seven, and he was pretty thin and we used to go out to the bar now and then, and in many of the bars that we were in, we lived in this little town there were bullies, and these were guys... and I worked in the bars, and I used to watch these guys, and they'd basically... there was a handful of them in town, pretty psychopathic types and they'd go to the bar, and all they'd do is sit there and wait for someone to come in who they could beat up they knew who it was as soon as they walked in, that's actually why they were at the bar and so they'd wait 'till someone came in, who didn't look very confident, and who could likely be intimidated by this sort of thing, and then they'd tell him to come outside for a fight, and if they didn't, well then they'd of course make fun of him, and if they did, well, generally they'd beat them up my friend kinda caught on to this trick, and he started going into bars, and every time that someone like that came near him he'd go outside and fight with them; and one of the things he observed right away is that almost inevitably when he went outside with them, they'd shake hands and make friends so as soon as he... and it was realy remarkable, watching him, 'cause he wasn't a particularly physically powerful person although he was extraordinarily tall; but he had started to play this game, and he did it for along time, and I don't remember him ever actually having to fight, he just stared them down, fundamentally so it was a very interesting thing to watch, but it was an indication to me of exactly how shallow this kind of bravado, bullying actually is but people don't find that out, because they won't stand up, and it's not surprising, but... anyways, they load up on food, Pinocchio's carrying a pie and a an ice cream cone simultaneously and then they're off to have a fight, and Lampwick says something like: it's good to punch someone in the nose sometimes just for the, I think he says, heck of it and so Pinokio adopts this strut, and in they go to the roughhouse and then, in the next scene, you see this model home up for destruction, it's quite an interesting scene symbolically, you see... in the middle of this house here there's a stained-glass window that has a mandala on it, we'll see it more clearly in a minute and a mandala is a sacred symbol of the Self, that's the Jungian interpretation it's a symbol... it's very difficult to describe, but it's a symbol... music is a mandala, except it's played out across time, so you could say that thing is the same as music, but it's kinda like a slice of music it's the same idea, you know sometimes you see those slow-motion or sped-up-motion videos of a flower unfolding? that's the same idea, you can imagine that being se to music, and somehow that would make sense and the mandala's like a symbol of the unfolding of being, or the source of meaning, or something like that and it's also a symbol of the Self from the jungian perspective so there you see it more clearly; the kids are starting to burn this place and trash it, and they're dragging the grand piano down the stairs, it's a destruction of high culture about which they are nothing but cynical, 'cause they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can can produce something of any value, and they want to bring it down and destroy it, and that's partly because... you can see this in the story of Cain and Able Able is hardworking and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, and so his life goes pretty well and that's part of the reason Cain hates it, and he's jealous and resentful, but worse than that if you're around someone, if you're not doing very well, especially if that's your own fault if you're not doing very well, and you're around someone who's doing very well, it's very painful, because the mere fact of their being judges you, and so it's very easy to wanna destroy that to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you and so part of the reason that people wanna tear things down is so that they don't have anything to contrast themselves against and to feel bad and that's exactly what's happening here, the kids are destroying all of this culture, roughly speaking because it judges them; the fact that it exists judges them; and I've often thought this about Michelangelo's statue of David which is this heroic... so David was a shepherd, obviously, and it doesn't sound like much, but back in those times being a shepherd was a big deal, because there were lions, and you had a slingshot so like, you've got to defend your sheep from lions with a slingshot so you weren't exactly this, like, 19th century English guy dressed in a, you know, frilly blue suit you were tough as a bloody... well, someone who would go after a lion with a slingshot, it's no joke anyways, the statue is very heroic, and, you know, you look at that, you think, well, that's the possibility of human kind but by the same token it's also what you're not, and so, as well as being an ideal, it's a judge and every ideal is a judge, so... yes? [student] going back to your example of Cain and Able, um, so you're using that as an example illustrating [student] becoming bitter as a result of not being able to achieve status... success as a result of hard work [student] but in the example of Cain and Able, um, like one was a shepherd, and one was a farmer, and the one who was favored [student] so was that a result of the hard work or was that a result of... (agriculture being favored?) good question, those stories are very compicated and the story is very ambivalent about whether Cain is not rewarded because he makes bad sacrifices or beause God's just in a bad mood; I like that... if you read the story I read multiple translations of the story, and when Cain comes to God to complain God basically tells him: look, buddy, before you go about criticizing the structure of reality you should look to your own inadequacies; he says: sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal and you invited it in to have its way with you, and something has emerged as a consequence so don't be botherin' me about my creation before you look to yourself so there's a very strong hint that the reason that God has not favored Cain's sacrifices because they weren't of particularly good quality but it is ambivalent in the story, and there is the sheperd versus farmer motif as well and of course that motif runs through the entire corpus of stories to some degree, especially the shepherd motif so, it's only about a paragraph long, that whole story and it packs all that into that tiny little amount of space but the idea that Cain kills Abel to get rid of his ideal and also to punish God, roughly speaking, it's a brilliant story; I mean... these guys who go around shooting up highschools, they're shooting at... highschools in particular, but... you know, they're definitely out for revenge, and what they're revenging themselves against or to who is not exactly clear anyways, so these kids are just tearing down this model home tearing down western civilization, I suppose is another way of looking at it, or just tearing down civilization, period and Pinokio's having a pretty good time, he's got his axe, and he's looking a little malevolent there and happy to be destroying things, which is of course a pretty simple thing to do so there's that image that I told you about, the mandala, and that's a flower in this image and so, what happens is that, I think it's Lampwick, throws a brick through it and so, what that means symbolically: the self is a symbol of your potential, among very many other things but by engaging in this sort of impulsive, destructive activity Lampwick and Pinocchio are making it impossible to further their development and they're doing that to some degree consciously, they basically say: to hell with it and toss a brick through this highest ideal, the thing through which light shines, so also that harkens back to the star as well so, anyways, the coachman is paying attention to all this and he's actually pretty happy about the fact that these boys are so involved in their stupid amusements that they're not paying any attention to what's actually going on he calls these people out of the darkness, these creatures out of the darkness, so... you get these black... you can hardly see them there, but theyre black cloaked figures with glowing eyes and they're shutting the door of the amusement park and that's very interesting, it's an extraordinarily interesting happening it's like, ok, so all of a sudden the amusement park... we already know that the Coachman is up to no good but now he's got these minions that are faceless in some sense, they're clearly creatures of the night and they're up to no good, and so you have this sense that... that the boys are being offered bread and circuses, roughly speaking but there's something... there's a real reason for it, there's a manipulative reason for it, they're being enticed into a trap, the doors are closed, and these underground beings are involved in the plot and obviously the coachman understands this perfectly well; so one of the ways to understand this is to think about what totalitarian states have to offer their populace, and what they offer them, and this happened particularly as Rome declined, let's say that's where the term bread and circuses originally came from, is that as the situation degenerates, then people have to be offered stupid amusements more and more frequently in order for them ignore what's actually going on in the background you know, a war can be that kind of stupid amusement anyways, later that night the entire place is completely devastated, and all we see is the wreckage of everything that was there before and again the Cricket has gotten separated from Pinocchio, and so he's trying to find him and Pinocchio ends up in this... this bar that's shaped like an 8-ball the 8-ball is kind of the random ball in pool, and anyways he's inside the 8-ball, and he's shooting pool with Lampwick, and that's just another indication of wasting his time, basically, and you can see in the forefront there's some cards for gambling, so he's engaged in these sort of you might say, pointless, hedonic hedonic pursuits, and he's enticing Pinocchio along the same route, and so he teaches him to smoke, first, that doesn't go very well, so Pinocchio takes a huge drag on his cigar and it just about kills him, and when Lampwick asks him how he likes it he shakes his head and says, you know, that it's really, was really quite good, but he's so sick that he can hardly stand up and he's hallucinating double balls on the pool table, and then the cricket shows up and stands on the 8-ball, and kinda gives him one of those declamatory speeches again you know, 'cause he still hasn't quite figured out that standing up proud and spouting off the rules isn't exactly the right way for the conscience to behave; and Lampwick picks him up by the scruff of the neck roughly speaking, and first of all asks who he is, so obviously he's divorced from his own conscience and then makes fun of Pinocchio for paying attention to this little bug, and that's kind of a nice indication of what happens at adolescence, you know, because of course as children move away from their parents and into their groups, especially when the groups are misbehaving often what happens is that the other members of the group will torture a person who isn't willing to try something dangerous or foolish by making fun of the fact that they're, you know, too attached to their conscience there's a positive element to that, because you should take some risks when you're a teenager, and also later in life, and so if you won't take any risks, there's actually something wrong with you, but there's a negative element in that well, you know, teenagers do all sorts of stupid things, and perhaps it's amazing that we all live all live through it actually, as far as I'm concerned some people take extraordinary risks, extraordinary risks and they don't make it through at all or they end up in the permanently antisocial population and then they're, you know, basically carreer criminals; five percent of the criminals commint 95% of the crimes it's another Pareto distribution, so... anyways, Lampwick isn't gonna listen to Pinocchio or to the Cricket, he laughs at him with this kind of braying laugh which is some foreshadowing, and the Cricket gets all upset, puts his coat on backwards and ends up dumped down a pool table hole, and otherwise abused, and so he stomps on out of there, he tells Pinocchio that he can take care of himself, and he stomps on out of there and so Pinocchio is left without the guidance of conscience, and the Cricket is trying to figure out how to get off Pleasure Island BUT! he goes through the gates and he sees what's actually going on and what's going on is that the Coachman had this like slave boat down in the bowels of the island, and he's got all these black-suited minions with the glowing eyes working for him, and they're rounding up what looked like donkeys and so they're beast of burden, right? and so there's an idea here that if you produce... if you pursue impulsive pleasure to the detriment of the development of your character you're going to end up a beast of burden, you're going to end up a slave to a tyrant and that's exactly right, and so, anyways, the Cricket doesn't... you can see one of those black-suited horrors here, hauling donkeys out of this crate and one of them has a hat on, and they look very sad and they're in different crates, and one of them says: sold to the salt mines, and one of them says: sold to the circus so they're shipped off to be slaves, roughly speaking and they look very sad, and then one of them gets hauled out of a crate, and he's still got a hat on he has a hat on and a sweater, and he can still talk, he's a boy, it turns out that's been half-transformed into a jackass, a brying jackass prior to being enslaved so that's another thing that's quite interesting about the story, you know, it also makes the case that if you replace your voice with stupid braying, that the probability that you're going to become enslaved by a tyrant is extraordinarily high and I always can't help but think about ideologues in that manner, you know Solzhenitsyn wrote about the radical left ideologues that got thrown in the gulag archipelago, you know so they were part stalwarts, this happened to a lot of people, true believers who were vacuumed up by the stalinist machine and thrown into the gulag anyways, and he said that those people suffered in some ways more than everyone else, because what did he say? they were bit by the beloved hand that fed them and so the first while when they were in the camps, Solzhenitsyn didn't really know what to do with people like that because on the one hand, well, they were in the camps, and wasn't that awful, and they've been torn away from their family and you know, stripped of all their identity, and their status, so that's pretty rough but on the other hand they were writing letters protesting their innocence and assuming that everyone else in the camp was guilty, but they were innocent, and they were still strident believers in the communist process and so, you know, it was a conundrum, here they are being terribly punished but by the same token they're also the perpetrators of their own demise, so how do you deal with them? they used to play "comrades", he said they used to play "comrades" with people like that and invite them into an ideological discussion about the camp situation, and the situation in the country as a whole and let them rattle out their ideological justifications for everything that had happened trying to make them parody themselves, roughly speaking, it was a rough game and Solzhenitsyn also concluded that there was no helping someone like that when they were still ensconced inside that braying ideology, you could predict everything they were going to say it's like someone had a crank, you could just crank it, and out would come the proper ideological formulas but then he realized that as soon as they, let's call it, repented of that and started to realize they're own role in it or the error of the system then he would start communicating with them, you know, as if they were people who you could communicate with yeah, that was very interesting, as far as I'm concerned anyways, this kid is still a little bit human, he starts to cry for his mom and the Coachman basically throws him back into the crate and says that he's not ready yet and the reason for that is that he could still... he still had the power of independent speech you remember, right at the beginning of the movie, when the mouth was painted on Pionokio we saw that mask that was really glaring at the process, I said that character recurrs continuously throughout the movie and this is a good example of that, because the Coachman is the enemy of anything that has it's own voice so he's the anti-Gepetto, that's a good way of thinking about it, he's the tyrannical aspect of the culture but insofar as one of these mostly donkeys, mostly jackasses can still talk then they're not completely fit for slavery; and you remember this movie was also being made at about the same time that the Nazi transformation of Germany was taking place, and so all these terrible ounderground things you know, this process whereby people were being reduced to ideological slaves, say and in this terrible process that was all playing out in Europe in a very big way It was not that people were not aware of that. It was in the air. So... Anyway, the donkeys and the jackass can still talk. Crying and complaining and repenting, and the Coachman turns into a full tyrant again cracks a whip if I remember correctly, and says: "You had your fun, and now you're gonna pay for it." The Cricket gets word of all this, he gets wind of it, he starts to understand what happened is that all these bad kids were enticed out onto this island so that they could be enslaved and he's really taken aback by that, to say the least when he realizes what's going on, so he runs back to find Pinokio, and then the scene switches back to the 8-ball bar where where Lampwick is drinking beer and complaining about what the conscience said you know, 'cause he's kinda guilty and ashamed, but he won't admit it, 'cause he doesn't admit anything he knows everything, he's not gonna admit anything about himself that isn't perfect, he's a real totalitarian in training and he drinks this beer, and he's laughing about the conscience and putting him down and then he says, well, what does he say exactly...? "what does he think I am, a jackass?" or something like that, maybe that's not the words exactly and then he grows these ears, and Pinokio sees that and immediately takes a look at the beer and stops drinking it and then Lampwick transforms one more time, and his face turns into the face of a donkey and he's laughing still, and then his hands... oh yes, he laughs and then he starts to bray like a jackass, he's horrified by that, and then Pinokio laughs, and the braying comes out as well so now they're absolutely horrified, and Lampwick actually figures out what's going on he figures out that he's been tricked and that he's transforming and he's completely horrified by it he becomes conscious of what's happening to him; and there's one particularly, I would say, dramatic scene where his hands have transformed into hooves, and he's kicking and leaping around the room in panic and he comes up to a mirror, he sees himself as the jackass, and then he turns around and breaks the mirror so, you know, he's self-conscious for a moment, then he destroys his capacity for self-consciousness then he transforms entirely into a jackass, he's farther down the road than Pinokio [should be 'further'] and he comes crawling to Pinokio to save him, and asks that the conscience comes back so that he can get out of this, but of course it's a bit too late, and so then Pinokio grows jackass ears, and he's absolutely terrified by it as well, he knows what's coming and the cricket comes back, and guides him off Pleasure Island, and so then they end up on a cliff because this is an island, after all, and they have to jump into the unknown right, out of this impulsive, adolescent, hedonic playground into the unknown and that's how they escape; so that's the first time that Pinokio has to leave... this is the first scene where he has to jump into the water to make a clean break from something pathological so tyranny... you see this echoed... you see echoes of this in the story of Moses leading his people from Egypt because Moses is a master of water, right? he hits a rock with a stick and water comes out of it and he's floating on water when he's an infant, and he parts the red sea, and so he's a master of water and transformation, and the pharaoh's kingdom is represented as desert stone, roughly speaking and so, the idea there is that, well, the kingdom is solid ground but it can be a tyranny, and the water is chaos, but it can be the thing that you have to leap into to free yourself from the tyranny it's not like in the Moses story that that comes easy, right, because the Hebrews leave Egypt, which is a terrible tyranny and you think, well, that's good, they escaped from the tyranny that isn't what happens, they escape from the tyranny, they actually end up somewhere arguably worse 'cause they're wandering around in the desert for forty years and that's... it's a brilliant element of that story, because it states clearly that when you go from a bad place to a better place you go to a worse place first and that's a great... it's a great thing to know because it also tells you why you might be unwilling to take the next step you know, you're aiming up, but in order to aim up you have to let go of something you already have and then that will put you into a state of chaos and unless you're willing to undergo that intermediary state of chaos, and you might not recover from it you're not gonna get to the next level so that's rough, well, so Pinokio, he decides that chaos is better than tyranny and guided by his conscience we don't see anything happening in the water in this particular scene they come back to shore all half-drowned and exhausted by their adventure and they go back home, and I think maybe we'll take a break now, let's see, this is a good time to take a break 1:30, perfect, so let's break for 15 minutes, okay? alright alright, so Carl Jung talked about this phenomenon he... he described as retrogressive restoration of the persona and so, it's a complicated idea, but basically what it means is that sometimes you take a leap forward and you learn some things, but you can't catalyze a new identity, so you try to go back and hide in your old identity and that actually doesn't work, because, well, things have changed, and you've learned something, and that isn't who you are anymore and so it's like you have to cut parts of yourself off in a destructive manner to fit back into the person that you were now, what happens here is that Pinokio escapes from this tyrannical situation and undergoes this descent into chaos, but he tries to go back home, he tries to go back to what he was and he can't do that anymore, his father isn't at home anymore, and so so when he goes home he finds that there's no home there, now this happens to people sometimes, and it's often a shock to them, so one of the things I've noticed about Peter Pan type... I'm gonna speak about men here, because I've observed it more in men is that they often stay under the thumb of their father, and you think, well why would someone do that, because it means they subject to the tyrannical judgment of their father they're always concerned about what their father would think or whether their father approves of them and so forth and you think, well, that's gotta be an unpleasant place to be, why would you do that? one of the things that I've suggested to my clients and to other people sometimes is that... here's a weird little exercise that you can undertake, a little thought experiment so you have your parents and of course your parents have friends who are about their age, and maybe some of them are people you only know peripherally, and I might ask you, well do you care more about what your parents think than you care about what these peripheral people who know your parents think? and then the answer to that is, well, of course, and then the question that arises out of that is: why? I mean, for someone else your parents are the peripheral people, and their parents are central, like why is it logical that your parents' opinion makes any more difference to you than the opinion of some randomly selected people who are approximately that age why is it the case that you would consider that they know more than someone else? I mean, I know that they know you better, and fair enough, but that's not the point and then another point there is that to the degree that your parents' opinion about you matters more than some randomly selected people of approximately the same age, Jung would say, well you haven't exactly separated out the God-image from your parents, and so you're still under that combination it's like... it's a complicated thing to talk about, but think about the Harry Potter series Harry has two sets of parents, right, he's got the Dursley parents, and then he's got these, like, magical parents that sort of float behind and he should know the difference between them, they shouldn't be one and the same, they're not - for him it's like, well, you have your parents and you have nature and culture as parents and you shouldn't be thinking that your parents are nature and culture as well, they shouldn't have final dominion over you it means that you're not an individual yet if that's the case Freud said for example that no one could be a man unless his father had died and Jung said yes, but that death can take place symbolically ok, so there's that part of the idea, and then another part of the idea is one of the times in your life when you actually realize that you're an individual is when you'll go and ask your parents something, and you'll realize they actually don't know any more about what you should do than you do, and that sucks and that's partly why people are often willing to maintain a tyrant-slave relationship with their father; it's like on the one hand you have to be inferior in a relationship like that, you know, you've always got the judge watching you but on the other hand there's always someone who knows what to do there's always someone standing between you and the unknown that you can go ask: what should I do? well, at some point you'll realize that the reason you can't ask that anymore is because they actually don't know any more than you do and then that's a pain, that is a symbolic death that's also when you establish a more individual relationship with your parents it's at that point that you can conceivably start taking care of them instead of the reverse and that's a time that should come, but you have to let that image of perfection go and that exposes you well, that's what happens here, you know, Pinokio goes home and he wants things to be the way they were and he wants to stay under the careful care of the benevolent father but that's no longer possible, he's passed that point, and that's why the father has disappeared and so, Gepetto has gone off to look for Pinokio, because he also needs a son but in any case, the house is abandoned and so then we see inside the house that everything's covered in cobwebs, and everything's gone and Pinokio and the Cricket sit on the steps and they're very concerned; first of all they wonder where he went so they're actually concerned that he's gone, but they also don't know what to do, because there's just no going home and so, you know, that's also the case that once you hit a certain point in your development... well, it's the same thing we already talked about, the answers that you are looking for are not going to be found in your parents' house it's as simple as that, now you could artificially maintain your dependency, but, you know if you do that for too long, things get pretty ugly, so you get pretty stale, and you know, you're like bread that's been on the shelf for too long so, now they're wondering what to do, and where he could be and then something very strange happens, the star shows up again, and it turns into a dove and the dove flies down and puts a piece of paper bathed in light with gold writing on it in front of the Cricket and the puppet so what in the world is going on there? well, we know what the star is, we've seen it multiple times, right it's also the place that the blue fairy came from, but it's this transcendent place, it's this place that occurs sort of as this ultimate ideal and this time it delivers a message; so what's happening here is that... Pinokio is fundamentally oriented by the wish that his father made so long ago, right? and the wish was that he would become a fully functioning individual; and so that's that transcendent place and Jung would say... when you orient your vision, different things appear to you in the world so, and I mean this literally, so, because you can't see everything - you vision calculates what's necessary, your brain calculates what's necessary for you to see so that you get to the point that you're aiming at and I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally things that aren't relevant to what you're seeking, you won't see them unless they get in your way, and they have to really block your pathway before they will be literally visible so you orient yourself towards something, and that makes some things visible that wouldn't be visible and makes others invisible that you might have seen and so when you change your orientation, what manifests itself in the world also changes now, Pinokio is in despair here, and he asks himself: where could my father have gone? and so, the question is: what exactly is he asking under those circumstances? and what he's asking is something like: I had a structure that was orienting me properly in relationship to the world and as far as it was embodied in my actual father it's now gone is there any possibility that I can find that again? and that is what you want, you see, like if you're in a chaotic circumstance, maybe you've escaped, let's say, from a bad relationship or something like that, and you're out of it, but now you don't know what to do what you're hoping is that you can get your life back together, right? that you can put the pieces that have fallen apart back together and so you're automatically going to generate a fantasy about producing another, let's call it stable state you're gonna be looking for the spirit that yould enable that state to be generated 'cause really what it is in some sense is your new personality you're in chaos, you have to become something new in order to get out of chaos, and so you're hoping for that, you're hoping that you'll see it and so, that's going to make certain things visible to you, that's the proper way of thinking about it you know, when you get curious about something, maybe you're curious about something and you walk into a bookstore that curiosity is going to guide you to a certain set of books the fact that you have a question in mind is going to open your eyes to certain kinds of possibilities and so if your goal is to reestablish your union with the positive father, let's say then certain things are gonna appear, and other things aren't, and that's what this represents the transcendent star is the goal, which is this developmental process it's capable of, let's say, delivering a message to you; in some sense that's what's happening when you're thinking you know, because you have a problem you wanna solve, you have somewhere you wanna go with your thoughts and as a consequence of that information reveals itself to you in the interior landscape it's a very strange thing; you know, in some sense it feels as though you're producing the thoughts, but it could equally be said that you're watching the thoughts reveal themselves and which of those is more accurate is by no means obvious; you can certainly have thoughts that surprise you which is very strange, it's like, they're your thoughts. How in the world can they surprise you, but they do so, it's like you didn't know them before you thought them up and then the question is well where did they come from if you didn't know them before you thought them up? Well, they sort of spring out of the void. That's one way of thinking about it. Anyways... this is a Holy Ghost symbol, this dove, as well, so that puts some Christian imagery in here again You could think of it as a manifestation of the spirit of transformation. That's another way of looking at it. Anyways, it's the conscience that interprets the letter figuring out what the next thing should be, and weirdly enough, what the letter says is that Geppetto was out looking for Pinocchio and he got swallowed by a whale which makes very little sense to put it bluntly Geppetto went to search for Pinocchio and now he's at the bottom of the sea in a giant whale. We leap right over that tremendous gap in logic and follow the story nonetheless. Okay, so what's the idea here? The idea is that if you fall into a chaotic state and everything falls apart... there's the possibility that things can come back together including what you've just learned, in a new state. And so you can conceptualize that symbolically as the existence of the dead father at the bottom of the chaotic landscape That's the proper way, as far as I can tell, to think about it. It's like there's something down there that's capable of re-forming and reemerging that's that incorporates the previous state but that takes it farther. And you're not going to find that unless you descend into this chaotic place where it feels like all order is gone. well, you generate order, it's going to be akin to the order that you had before but there's going to be something new about it as well, so it's down to the bottom of the chaotic state, to bring up what you're missing. And, that's one level of analysis. Another level of analysis you think is well that's also what you're doing that's what you should be doing, in principle, when you're going to university You know, you're...you come to university in roughly the same state as Pinocchio. You know, you're a bit of a puppet, and you're kind of a jackass, and what the hell do you know? And it's chaotic because you haven't found your place in the world properly. And I don't mean merely for career, not that that's not relevant, because it is, but it's more important than that. It's because you're a historical creature. Because, you are a product of history, unless you are encultureated properly, which means you understand your past, in the sense that the humanities can allow for that, then you haven't been able to incorporate the wisdom of your ancestors into your day to day pursuits, and that's going to make you weak, that's the idea anyways. And so when you come to university, this is what university is for. It's so that you can go into the chaos, and you can pull something out of it that's truly of value. and you can incorporate that in your own personality, and that makes you much, much stronger, like literally stronger, not more educated, but not, it's not like you know more facts, it's that you literally are a better person, and "better" means you can do far more things. You can articulate your - that's something that's of crucial importance is that you can articulate yourself properly, which is more useful than anything else you can possibly manage, like if you guys come out of university capable of making coherent arguments, and using language properly, you're so powerful that it's ridiculous. You always you can lay out a strategy and pursue it successfully and maybe the strategy is oriented towards something good, something that will actually work work for you, and work for other people as well and I don't really understand why people aren't told this when they come to university, is that your goal is to make yourself as articulate in writing and thinking and speaking as you possibly can because that opens the door to everything that you'll wanna do in the future, no matter what it is the more articulate person always rises, always because they lay out strategies more effectively, they lay out the reasons for doing something or for not doing something more particularly; they convince people, and properly so, that they can grapple with potential that lies ahead effectively; and they can defend themselves when they're challenged and so, all of that is going into the past, into the chaos of the past, you could even say and pulling up the spirit that inhabits that from the bottom and uniting with it and if you don't do that, well, you're defenceless in the case of... in the face of the tragedy of life and then, that's not so good, because if you're defenceless in the face of the tragedy of life then you get way more hurt than you would otherwise get, and so will the people around you; and then the probability that you're gonna be resentful and bitter about that is really high, because no one likes to fail continually; and then you get bitter and resentful and then once you're bitter and resentful, well, being vengeful and mean is the next step it doesn't take much of a transformation to move from that place to the next so now Pinokio has to face the thing that he's afraid of most and that's a complicated idea as well; so Jung had this phrase that he took from the alchemists, which was "in sterqualinas invenetur" and what it meant was: "what you most wanna find will be found where you least wanna look" there's this old story that's from King Arthur, and King Arthur has these knights, right they all sit around the Round Table, which means they're roughly equal, that's what the round table means and they're off to find the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is the most valuable object, that's what it means so they're off to find the most valuable thing, but they don't know what it is, and they don't know where it is but they know that there's a most valuable thing, so in osme sense it's akin to them orienting themselves by the star and they don't know where to look, and so what they decide is they have the castle and it's in the middle of a forest; so each knight decides to start looking for the Holy Grail by entering the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and so what's the idea there? well, imagine there are things that come easy to you and that you're fond of pursuing and that you're happy about pursuing; so you've found them and pursued them and you've mastered them, so you know all that; but then there's another place that you don't wanna go and so you haven't gone there and you haven't mastered it, and you're very small in comparison to it, because you haven't mastered it, and so it has this monstrous aspect ... but if what you're doing isn't working, it's where you haven't gone that you need to go and so, I can give you another example of this, so let's say you're an agreeable person, and so you don't like conflict and you won't stand up for yourself and you regard anger and the proclivity to provoke and to engage in conflict as something that's positively terrible it's not only that you're not good at it, it's actually that it's wrong so that's where you have to go if you're gonna learn how to stand up for yourself and imagine that you're afraid, maybe you have something like agoraphobia so there's a whole bunch of things that you're afraid of, and you don't wanna go there but if you wanna put yourself together, then that's exactly where you have to go and so it's frequently the case that what you wanna find is to be found where you least wanna find it and that idea's echoed in the prominent stories of dragons and gold it's exactly the same idea, is that the dragon is this terrible thing, it's this terrible predatory thing that lives forever and is very, very wise and lives underground, and it'll kill you, it'll burn you up in a second but it hoards gold; and so you have to go there, into the dragon's lair if you're gonna get the gold and that's a representation of peoples' paradoxical relationship with reliaty, it's like you have to go out there and confront it in order to incorporate what it has to offer to you but the probability that that's going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit... first of all, those are actually the same thing; if it didn't push you to the limit, you wouldn't gain anything valuable from it so you don't get one without the other, you don't get the gold without the dragon that's a very strange, very very strange idea, but it seems to be accurate so all of that's lurking underneath this in this imagery of the whale the thing that's at the bottom of... now, the whale, you can think of the story of Jonah what happens with Jonah is that, roughly speaking, he is a prophet and God tells him that he has to, if I rmember correctly, God tells him that he has to go to this city, and straighten it out, because it's veered off the path and it's heading towards doom, and Jonah thinks: I'm not going to that city to tell those people anything like that, because they're not gonna be very happy with me just showing up there and telling them, you know, everything they're doing is wrong, and so he hops on a boat and tries to get out of there, and then God conjures up this huge storm, and the boat is about to be swamped and the sailors, they're worried, I think, about making the boat lighter, something like that they all draw lots to see who gets tossed overboard, and Jonah admits that it's actually his fault because God's upset with him, because he got this direct command to go straighten out this city and he ran off, and so the sailors throw... they're not happy about this, but they throw Jonah overboard, and the seas calm and a great fish comes up, a whale, and swallows him, and then he's down in the fish for three days and it throws him up on the dry land, and then he's learned his lesson by that time, and he goes off to have this... to pursue his proper destiny; so that's echoed in this story as well that if you don't follow the pathway that you're supposed to follow the seas will become stormy for you, and something will come up and pull you down and you'll be in a terrible place for some length of time, 'till you learn your lesson and if you're lucky, you'll get spit back up on shore, and then you can go do what you should do well, I mean that's not a lesson that anybody needs to have interpreted, I think everybody understands that anyways, the Cricket tells Pinokio what he has to do and then something kind of paradoxical happens, Pinokio decides he's gonna go do this and then the Cricket has got this weird, paradoxical response to that; on the one hand he's he's sort of pulling Pinokio back, saying: look, you know, this is foolhardy you're gonna go all the way down to the ocean, you're gonna confront this terrible whale, this is really, really dangerous but at the same time, when Pinokio's on the edge of the cliff, the Cricket helps him tie his tail around a rock and he holds his finger in place, so that Pinokio can tie the knot, it's like the conscience is conflicted about this really dangerous and foolhardy, but it's also necessary, and so he plays this dual role and Pinokio's leading at this point; so into the ocean he goes I guess partly what this means is that if you're not oriented properly in the world, you should take your... you should take your doubts and the chaos that you're enveloped in seriously you should face it and think it through, you should go into it as far as you can go into it because you'll find something at the bottom of it; the alternative is to pretend that it doesn't exist so then Pinokio is at the bottom of the water; he can actually breathe down there, it turns out, so you could think that he's gone into the unknown, he's outside of dry land, he's in the unconscious, all of those things are true, and you might think, well, why would it be the world outside of what's known and the unconscious at the same time? this weird intermingling of those two things; and as far as I can tell, that's because when you're in chaos and you don't know what's going on, then you start imagining what might be going on and that imagination is partly the world as it might be but it's also partly the structure of your unconscious mind, which is producing the fantasies, and so when you're truly in chaos, then the distinction between your fantasies and reality isn't clear that's actually what constitutes the chaos; so imagine this, so you're in a relationship, and the person betrays you and you knew who they were, at least you thought you did, before that moment but now you're looking at them and you don't know who they are and you don't know what the past was, and you don't know what the present is and you don't know what the future's going to be; all of that's been thrown up into the air in a major way that's traumatic, so much has fallen apart that it's traumatic so what do you start to do? you start to imagine what might be the situation well, then the reality, like, the reality is the reality and your imagination at the same time they're not pulled apart at all, you cannot distinguish between them, and so it was a Jungian idea... I could say that's the snitch that Harry Potter's chasing, by the way I know that's a terrible leap, but that is what it is, it's that weird intermingling of potential and reality that that can manifest itself as the world if you pursue it, it's roughly that so Pinokio's in this situation that's half-fantasy and half-reality, in this chaotic state and he has to go down to find the thing that he least wants to find and he's hoping that it... he's got this intuition that in facing that thing, that chaos that life really is, that chaos that he's going to find his father and reunite with him so you could also say that in some sense it's a decision of faith, i suppose, because you might ask yourself, well, why bother confronting chaos? if chaos is the ultimate reality, then what the hell use is facing it? because it's just gonna reveal itself as the ultimate reality and drown you but the myths always say the same thing, they say: "no, no, if you confront what's really disturbing you if you really confront it, and you do it voluntarily, you're gonna find order in it eventually" or at least that's the only way you're gonna find order now, it's not like these stories are optimistic, and it's not as if they give you a sure guide to success that's the other thing, it's not like they're unerringly accurate, because you can be subsumed by chaos that's so total that even if you face it, you're not gonna prevail I mean, that's why people die, that's one way of looking at it anyways but the mythology basically says that this is your best bet if there's a process that's going to work, this is it and so, and then you might think, well, the better you do it, the better the chances are of success or the more consistently you do it, the better the chances of success are and I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it ok, so anyways, Pinokio's down at the bottom of the ocean and every time he says... he's trying to find out where Monstro is and they ask questions to the fish down there, but every time they mention Monstro's name, all the fish disappear that's like Voldemort, right? he's the guy whose name you cannot say and Monstro is precisely that, it's the thing that frightens everyone, and so asking questions down there isn't helping very much, and so Pinokio, what he does is he's calling for his father, and he keeps going deeper and deeper into the depths and there's a scene where the darkness of the ocean turns into an even more profound darkness, and that's what Pinokio disappears into and then we see Monstro, he's in this sort of foggy representation, this huge thing that lies very much at the bottom and there's no life or anything around him except, I think these are mackerel, but maybe they're tuna they're animated anyway, so it doesn't matter but there's no life down there, he's so far down at the bottom of the ocean that there's nothing that's alive down there so, and then we go inside the whale, which is, of course, abzurd we see that the whale has eaten a boat at some point in the past, this is one whopping whale and Gepetto is sitting with the kitten, of all things, he's also got that litte goldfish bowl full of goldfish with him too, which is quite the feat anyways, he's sitting there and he knows that he's trapped in the belly of the whale too, and that he can't get out and so that's an interesting issue, because it's not only Pinokio is lacking his father, which isn't a good thing but the father is lacking the son, and there's some indication that the father can't get out of the whale without the son and so it's like the possibility for order is down there in this chaotic state but unless there's an active agent to go seek it out, it can't pull itself... it's not animated enough to get out by itself you know, and you could say, well, there's wisdom in the libraries, but it's not going to.. without you going in there and gathering it, and embodying it, all it does is sit there in potential in all of that... imlicit form, that's a good way of thinking about it so anyways, Gepetto is feeling pretty hopeless because he can't figure out any way of getting out of the whale, and he's also starving he's starving in the belly of the whale here's a way of thinking about that: Gepetto's a good guy, but he's old and that means his way of doing things is no longer fruitful, that's why he's starving and it's especially not fruitful, 'cause he's missing his son he's missing the active element that the child represents, say, the playful and transformative element that the child represents and so, if you get stuck doing something the same old way, at some point it's no longer going to work even if it was good at some point; it has to be updated and it's updated by, let's call it the spirit of youth, or the spirit of attention, or the spirit of play, something like that the willingness to break boundaries and take risks; and Gepetto is very, very skilled, but but he doesn't have that, and that's symbolized by the loss of his son that's why he was out looking for his son too, he needs him; and so, they're in despair down there trying to fish and not getting anything, and so... Monstro wakes up a mackerel happens to swim by and Monstro wakes up, and so... I think they're tuna, actually, they look like tuna to me and so, Monstro wakes up and he opens his mouth, and a bunch of water starts to come in and so, and then you see Pinokio with the fish, now... there's very intense implicit Christian symbolism in this part of the film and I'm gonna lay it out point by point, so you may remember and perhaps you don't, and perhaps you don't know, that one of the symbols for Christ is a fish, ichthys, right? and that's a play on the Greek representation of Christ's name, buyt there's more to it than that, because all of Christ's followers are fishermen and he performs a bunch of miracles with fish; and fish are strange things because, well, you can pull then up out of the depths, that's part of it and so they're things that can be pulled out of the depth; and you could say that... it's going to be very difficult for me to take this apart, but you can say in some sense that Christ is a meta-fish a fish is something that you can dine on but a way of being is something that provides you with something to dine on on a continual basis and so, you might say, well, is it better to have a fish or to be a fisherman? that's another way of thinking about it, and obviously it's better to be a fisherman, because then you can get more fish and so, it's one thing to have something, but it's another thing completely to know how to generate good things and so, if you had any sense, you'd take the latter over the former even though the former is more instantaneously gratifying and requires less work and responsibility and so, anyways, the whale opens his mouth and goes chasing these fish and Pinokio tries... he's trying to get the hell out of there, even though he wants to find the whale when he actually sees the whale, he leaves and that's also a very common mythological, umm, what would you call it? plot element it's very frequently that what happens when the hero first sees the terrible thing, the dragon, say the terrible thing that he's come to conquer he freezes and gets the hell out of there, because it's far worse than he thought it was going to be; and so Pinokio is like: no way, man I'm not going near that whale; and away he swims, and he's actually at the forefront of all the fish, which is quite interesting too so, in the mean time Monstro has opened his mouth, and the fish are pouring in, and Gepetto is fishing like mad, and he's catching fish like crazy; and so, the little cat is... Gepetto is flinging the fish backwards into this, like, box and the little cat is there, whacking them to kill them while they're flopping around and so they're pretty excited about this, because... they have a problem, the problem is how to get out of the whale that's the actual problem; but a nested problem inside that is how not to starve to death and so, Gepetto's pretty happy that even though he's not getting out of the whale, that he gets to have something to eat so you could say as well, that he's not exactly focused on the right thing he's focused on the micro-problem instead of the macro-problem, and that makes him kind of blind so anyways, the whale swallows up Pinokio, and Gepetto keeps fishing; and then he snags Pinokio now this is cool, because... and this is another example of that meta-fish idea it's like... Gepetto's actually looking not for a fish, he's looking for a way out of the damn whale and then he catches a bunch of fish, and he's like focused on that like mad and then he catches Pinokio, and Pinokio represents what would get him out of the whale but he's so bloody obsessed with the fish tha he doesn't even notice so he catches Pinokio and flings him into the fish basket and so, it signifies the blindness of Gepetto's orientation when he's inside the whale, that's kind of a comment on his aged and insufficient nature he's solving the wrong... he's solving the problem very well, but it's the wrong problem so anyways, he fires Pinokio into the fish bin, and Pinokio says: Father! I'm here; and Gepetto says: Don't bother me right now, Pinokio, I'm busy fishing well then, that's fine, so then he kinda wakes up, he has this little moment of insight, this little revelation, that well, he's caught Pinokio, so who cares about the damn fish; so then he runs over to the fish box to grab Pinokio and instead he grabs a fish, and gives it a kiss and so that is another way of hammering home the fact that he's... there's this confusion that he's suffering from he can't distinguish the local truth from the transcendent truth and so anyways, he does figure it out; he tosses the fish aside and he grabs Pinokio they're all thriled to death to see each other, and so they're united so Pinokio has found his father, but they're still trapped in the belly of the whale; now Pinokio takes off his hat, he gets covered with a blanket, he takes off his hat, and he reveals his jackass ears, and so he's found his father, but he's damaged, and not... Pinokio, he's damaged and not in good shape he isn't becoming what he was supposed to be; in fact, he's actually degenerated since Gepetto saw him last and so, he becomes embarrassed, and he says he has a tail he says: that's nothing, I have a tail too, and then he spins that around kinda laughing and he brays and gets really embarrassed, and so, that's what you see here, he looks like, well... he's revealed himself as a jackass to his father but you know, that's actually a good thing, because... he is a jackass, and if he was unwilling to admit his insufficiency he wouldn't have ever gone on this pursuit, so... it's this perverse willingness to note that he isn't all that he could be that's part of what drives him to find everything that his father represents it's a humility, and it's an admission of insufficiency and you need that before you're going to learn anything, because before you learn anything you have to admit that there are things that are important that you don't know, and that you're a fool and maybe that you're a braying jackass and so, that's why there are injunctions in many religious in many religious writings that positively portray humility, as the antidote to arrogance that's the right way of thinking about it, is that humility means: I still have something to learn I'm insufficient, I still have something to learn it's exactly the opposite, say of Lampwick's attitude anyways, Gepetto decides that son puppet who's half-jackass is better than no son at all which is another indication of his relatively positive orientation towards the world and they reunite; and then Pinokio immediately sets his eyes on the main problem, it's like: hey, we're stuck in this whale, we need to get out of here! and it turns out that Geppetto has already built a raft, but there's a problem, and the problem is that as Gepetto says... Pinokio says: well, we'll wait for his mouth to open and Gepetto says: that doesn't work, because when he opens his mouth, Monstro opens his mouth, everything comes in, and nothing goes out so, raft - fine, but there's no way of using it and so, Gepetto decides that they're not going to bother with that problem and they're gonna go have some fish but Pinokio, his eyes is still on the main prize, he thinks: no way, man, we're getting out of this whale that's the fundamental think, we're not going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic we're going to attend to the fact that it's sinking, we're gonna keep our eye on the primary problem so he's a little more awake by now; so Pinokio says: we'll make a fire; now that's cool, I think, because he's down in chaos, where his father is trapped, and the first thing he does is to use fire and of course that's exactly what people do, right, 'cause we're fire-users; and so and shaman, for example, are masters of fire; but there's this really primordial element to this story right here, and it's an indication that the thing that can transform chaos into productive order is also the same spirit that mastered fire and so, Pinokio lays that out; and he says: we're gonna build a fire! and we'll fill him up with smoke! and Gepetto says: great, smoked fish! so he's still stuck on this whole fish thing and so Pinokio runs around gathering up all the spare wood on the boat including the furniture, which he starts to break; and Gepetto says: well, what are we going to sit on? you know, while we eat our smoked fish and Pinokio basically says, politely: you know, enough with the damn fish thing I'm going to fill the whale with smoke, and that's gonna make him sneeze, and then we can get the hell out of here and Gepetto says: that's gonna make him mad, it's not a good idea and, well, I would say that that's the stance of the benevolent state against innovation you know, even if the innovation is positive, and even if it's transformative and freeing the old state, even if it's good, it's going to stand in opposition to that and so that's also something that's very useful to know, because otherwise you can get bitter about that anyways, Pinokio makes this big fire, Gepetto's pretty worried about it and he starts to fill the whale up with smoke; and so this is where the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon which is quite cool, it's like in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent turns into a fire-spewing dragon as well and if you watch the Little Mermaid, that... what's her name? Ursula she turns into a gigantic snake-like creature as well, although she doesn't exactly spew fire but the transformation of the ultimate monster into something like a dragon is very, very common 'cause it's the ultimate symbol of the unknown for a variety of reasons that we'll dusciss later so anyways... yes, it's a symbol of chaos anyways, and this is quite a horrifying scene; when my son watched, and he watched Pinokio when he was about 4 he watched this scene over, and over, and over; I don't know how many times he watched that movie, but it must've been a hundred times but he was really fascinated by this scene and you know, he was like locked on to it, it was frightening, but there was something in it that he was processing and catching (?) on to so anyways, you see the whale is starting to prepare to sneeze, and he's belching out huge quantities of smoke and fire and Pinokio and Gepetto and the cat and the goldfish bowl are all on the raft trying desperately to get out of the whale, which inhales and pulls them back, and then sneezes and pushes them forward and at some point they actually break free, and there's a 'gates of hell' image there with the whale belching out smoke like mad and its jaws open so they're paddling madly away, to get away from this whale and the whale is very angry, just as Gepetto suggested and there's interesting sound effects that go along with this the whale actually turns into a... that's what happens when your phone is smarter than you are the whale actually turns into into something that's like a locomotive and the sound effects become industrial; so it's this monstrous, machine-like locomotive dragon that's bent on the destruction of Pinokio and you could say it's an amalgam of natural and social forces, completely unleashed everything's unleashed against Pinokio and his father, and so... they're having a hell of a time, there's big waves, and they end up... the whale actually abandons them, but before he does that, it nails them with its tail, and blows the raft into smithereens and so then they'e both in the water, and Gepetto and Pinokio are drowning and Gepetto actually goes down for the third time, so to speak; and as he's going down, he says to Pinokio: save yourself, save yourself and so that's kinda Pinokio's last temptation, because Gepetto's had it, and he could just get to shore on his own but he would've abandoned his father; and so that's the thing, is... and that's one of the issues that this movie grapples with, is: what exactly is your responsibility? and you could say: well, it's to save yourself, but the myth that underlies this says: no it's not, that 's not exactly right it's to rescue your father from the chatic depths, and integrate with that, and to save both and that's your duty to your culture; but more than that, it's also your duty to your soul it isn't gonna work, if you just save yourself, 'cause you're still gonna be a jackass puppet even though you're gonna be back on shore so anyways, Pinokio grabs Gepetto and carries him to shore; and the whale shows back up and gives them one more good wallop; and then we see everybody on shore and it's peaceful again, Gepetto is in his back on the dry land and the kitten washes up, and the goldfish bowl washes up, and the cricket washes up, he's been outside the whale all this time and we see the Cricket calling for Pinokio, and then we see him lying in a pool of water, dead so he's died rescuing his father, he died well, why? well, he is a jackass puppet, and maybe he was supposed to die if he rescued his father because that insufficiency that characterized him is something that's descroyed by the process of encountering the chaos which was so difficult it reforms the personality and the same occurs when he rescues his father and incorporates that, so it's like... Bilbo in the first part of the... what is it called? The Lord of the Rings... The Hobbit! he's this sort of jackass puppet guy, little overprotected Shire-dweller at the beginning and he goes on this tremendous adventure, and he has to develop the negative parts of his character, he actually has to become a professional thief and he has to develop his bravery, and... and so the old personality in some sense has to die to give life to the new one and so... you see in the Harry Potter series, too, at the very end Potter dies, and then is resurrected, right, that's... and that actually happens to a slightly lesser degree in the second movie where the resurrection is aided by the phoenix tears, after he gets eaten by the... or he gets chomped by that big snake which is, roughly speaking, the same thing that's happening here sorry about that okay, so anyways, Pinokio's dead, that's not good so, the next scene we see them back at home, and he's lying dead on the bed and Gepetto and everyone else are mourning his loss and then we see this magic transformation, and we hear the Blue Fairy's voice and so, it's like he's pushed himself to his limits, and a natural process kicks back in, and revivifies him but now he's no longer a jackass puppet, he's actually something that's real and so then he wakes up and he notices that now, you know, he's undergone this proper transformation he notices his hands in particular and then he tells Gepetto, who refuses to even notice; he says: no, no, kid, you're dead, lie down so, you know, Pinokio convinces him that he's not dead, and then in celebration they start the clocks again, and so time kicks back in at that point and so, then they have a big celebration, music happens again, because this is a celebratory moment and they dance, and the harmony's restored, the good old guy has his son, and so the house is properly set up, and the old state has its vision, and its capacity for transformation and the thing that transforms has the stability of the culture behind it, and so - perfect and then the Cricket goes outside, and he's talking to the Start and the Blue Fairy, and he says that he's pretty happy about how this has gone and so, then she gives him this little medal which is made out of gold, and it's a sun, and it's a mandala, all at the same time and it's made out of gold, and gold is a noble metal, it doesn't mate indiscriminately with other metals it doesn't tarnish, and so it's a metal that represents the sun; and he flashes his little badge at the Star establishing a relationship between his function as the proper conscience and his orientation towards the highest good and that's it there, so he's got this little sun, he's wearing his little sun so he's also transformed and developed as a consequence of this entire process no Pinokio's conscience is properly oriented it's oriented towards the highest value; and then the movie closes and that's "Pinokio" so, I'll give you a minute, and I'll take some questions, and try to figure out how to shut my phone up so does anybody have any questions? yes -> [student] you seem to have a vaguely psychoanalytic approach to kind of extracting the inarticulated messages from the mythologies and the stories and religion that's developed over time so could you almost say that those are kind of constructing this to a societal level out of the individual level that these are kind of the dreams of the collective unconscious? [Peterson] sure, that's exactly what they are they're the fantasies of the collective unconscious, that's one way of looking at it I mean, they also take a socially determined form right, because it's animated, and that's a technology, and it's obviously something that exists in a particular time and place but yeah, they're... it's a collective attempt to give voice to the oldest of behavioral patterns and so, here's one way of thinking about that which we'll talk about in some detail, which you should have read about, at least to some degree, already the question is: where is that knowledge represented? and Jung would say, well it's part of the collective unconscious, and it's got a biological origin, but his description of the biological nature of the collective unconscious is quite ambiguous and I think that that's because it actually is ambiguous, like for example, we know that primates, and humans in particular, are at least biologically predisposed to be afraid of snakes so we can learn that very easily; now, you could make a case that it's more than biological predisposition, and that it's actually built in but I would say the predisposition idea is actually a better one, because you at least need the exposure to the snake to get it going so that would take place as a consequence of your experience, so it's not purely biological, although it is the case that snake fear tends to become more intense as you get older, which is not necessarily what you would expect and the... I just read a paper this week, localizing snake fear in primates, and it was hypothalamic it's really old, because the hypothalamus is a very old part of the brain, it's older than the amygdala and the amygdala is involved in snake fear as well, it's really, really old so you could say, well, you're prepared to develop snake fear, like you're prepared to develop language and like you're prepared to walk by your biological structure now, whether that actually constitutes the contents of your memory, which is what Jung seems to imply is an open question, but it doesn't really matter, because... so, one time when I went to visit my nephew, he was running around in a knight suit he was only about 4 or 5; so he's acting out this mythological pattern, roughly speaking and you'd say, well, how did he know how to do that, and the answer would be: well, it was represented all around him in the culture in fragments, and like kids are pretty good in putting fragments of stories together that's really what understanding is, is to put fragments into story form and so, he watched Disney movies and his parents had read him storeis, and he did pretend play with the other kids, and all of those were like exemplars of this underlying narrative they're variants of it; and because he can abstract and generalize, he's pulling out the central features of those narratives the heroic features, and then embodying them; so you could say, well the central features of these narratives are fragmented and distributed across the entire culture and so, they don't have to be exactly inside your head, they don't have to be part of your memory they're distributed in the behavior, and the actions, and the stories of the entire culture and they just... you can put them together out of that so, and people do that, that's why they're so hungry for stories like... well, like this one, or like Star Wars, or like Star Trek, or like the Marvel movies, or like Harry Potter [student] yeah, what you said about the last scene, your son watching it over and over again my little brother did the same thing with the last scene of the first Harry Potter movie, the guy with the two faces? he watched that probably 20 or 30 times yeah, that's really interesting, watching little kids interact... like those movies are unbelievably complex I mean, you know, by the time you're your age, and you've seen, you know, several hundred of then at minimum the impact wears off, but it's really something, sitting down with a four-year-old who hasn't watched very many movies, and walking through one with them, I mean they're so turned on it's just... I took my daughter when she was too young, actually... I took her to see "The Mask", the Jim Carrey movie Jesus, I mean she survived it, I don't think I traumatized her but she was sitting on my lap, and it was really like gripping a bundle of barbed wire she was just like that the entire movie, you know and half way through I thought: well, that's probably a little too much psychophysiological intensity for one small body you know, but she... those movies, they just have a massive impact on little kids and they will do exactly that, they'll watch it over and over, and over, and you think: what are they doing exactly? they're trying to understand, they're gripped by it somehow right, and it's like they're deeply curious, they know there's something in it and they're trying to extract out what it is, and they'll repeat it, and repeat it, so... they're hungry for the information 'cause it's part of rescuing their father from chaos, that's one way of thinking about it other questions? well, good enough then, let's call it a day; oh, there is one more question [student] so, in Maps of Meaning there is the idea that you keep returning to about when you first encounter the unknown it's like, it's first fearful; and then Jung has the idea of archetypes, so are there other kinds of meaning that people will find in new information that's already patterned into them? [Peterson] that's patterned into them or into the new information? [student] that's patterned into them, like ???, do people actually...? sure, well, they project the contents of their fantasy onto the unknown thing and that's partly a process of self-discovery you know, so, for example, let's say that you, you know, you're gripped by love at first sight or something like that now, you don't know anything about the person that you're tremendously attracted to but you'll have fantasies about them and that fantasy... in fact, your image of them is a fantasy and if you take that fantasy apart, you'll find out what you value so you are projecting, you're projecting yourself into the world; and you can discover... I mean you may also discover something about them, because there may be elements of them that match the ideal quite nicely, if you're fortunate and if your ideal is, you know, of a reasonable sort but you can... you definitely encounter yourself if you look at the unknown because you use your fantasy to structure the contact you know, and the fundamental structure is:the heroic encounter with the unknown because that's the pathway... that's the fundamental pathway of human beings, 'cause we're information foragers, fundamentally [student] so it's that automatic response and the fantasies as well, that are part of the first contact... [Peterson] sure, sure, well, that's also... yes, absolutely, that's exactly right, yes, so... I mean, imagine this, imagine that you're attracted to someone, and you're just too terrified to go speak to her well, what's happening? well, you have a fantasy of a judge and that's your imagined representation of your own insufficiency in relationship to the ideal and you project that on this person as a judge, and then you're too paralyzed to even open your mouth around her very common experience okay, let's call it a day, we'll see you in a week

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,094,978

Keywords: archetype, jordan, peterson, jordan b peterson, lecture, personality, psychology, Carl Jung, Freud, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, Pinocchio, fairy tale, existentialism, psy, course, archetypes, conscientiousness, clinical psychology, mythology, education, jordan peterson, university of toronto, maps of meaning, christianity, religion

Id: bV16NEWld8Q

Length: 132min 26sec (7946 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2017