Jordan Peterson Comments on the Lion King

Jung was actually trying to answer the question that Nietzsche posed fundamentally which is why part of the reason why it's incorrect historically to consider him a Freudian he was so Nietzsche basically stated let's say explicitly that scientific empiricism slash rationalism had resulted in the death of the mythological tradition of the West roughly speaking that's Nietzsche's comment on the death of God and in that comment he also said that the fact that God was dead was going to produce tremendous ideational and social historical upheavals that would result in the deaths of millions of people that that he didn't say all that in one place it's it's spread between part of it's in Will To Power and and I I can't remember the source of the other one some of it's referenced and thus speaks arathustra but Nietzsche believed that in order to overcome the collapse of Traditional Values with the idea say of God as its Cornerstone people would have to become creatures that could produce their own values as a replacement that we would have to become capable of generating autonomous values and Jung but but that's easier said than done because trying to impose a set of values on yourself is very difficult because you're not very cooperative and you know that if you try to get yourself to do something that you don't want to do or that's hard you just won't do it and so it's not like you can just invent your own values and then go along with that that just doesn't work and so what Jung and the freudians did Freud first I would say was to start looking into looking into people's fantasies autonomous fantasies unconscious fantasies to see if they could um to and and discovered that values bubbled up of their own accord into those fantasies and you can imagine for example if you've become enamored of someone that you might start fantasizing about them and if you read off the fantasy then you can tell what you're after and what you're up to and so the motivational Force composes the fantasy and Freud was more interested not in a personal sense so in insofar as your fantasies might reveal your personal history so for example if you have a burst of negative emotion in a clinical session there'll be a fantasy that goes along with that an association of ideas that that that kind of manifest themselves of their own accord and they're not necessarily coherent and logical they're linked by emotion that's the free association technique in Freudian psychology and they also might manifest themselves in dreams and Fantasies and so Freud started doing the analysis of these spontaneous let's call them fantasies and Jung linked that more Freud did this first with the edible edible complex but then Jung Linked UP spontaneous fantasies and dreams with with myth mythology and fantasy across history and of course Piaget did the same thing thing from a completely different standpoint so and then a lot of that's embedded in this movie so we might as well just walk through it so uh the first question might be well why is a lion a king right and because it makes sense to people that a lion could be a king and of course a lion is an apex predator and so which means it's at the top of the food chain roughly speaking and it's sort of golden like the Sun so that's also useful and you know it has that Mane that makes it look Majestic and of course it's very physically powerful and it's it's uh and and and it's intimidating and so it's something that you run away from as well right or you're awestruck by so the fact that you know it's like snail King just doesn't make any sense right but Lion King that works and and you got to think about those things because it's not self-evident why a lion would work as a king but a but a snail wouldn't but it fits in with the your metaphorical understanding of the way the world works much better and so the Lion King makes sense and it well and when things like that that aren't rationally self-evident makes sense you have to ask yourself in what metaphorical context do they make sense so you have The Lion King now the movie opens with a sunrise and the sunrise is equivalent to the dawn of Consciousness so that in many archaic Stories the sun was a hero like a a Horus if I remember correctly was a solar King but but uh um Apollo in particular but Apollo Greek Greek myth the idea was that the sun was this was the uh uh the hero the hero who illuminated the sky in the day and so heroism and illumination and Enlightenment are all tangled together metaphorically and then at night what would happen would be that sun would fight with the with the dragon of Darkness basically or with evil all night and then Rise Again victorious in the morning and so it's a death and rebirth theme and it's very very very common mythological theme and the reason the sun is associated with Consciousness as far as I can tell is that we're not nocturnal creatures right we're awake during the day and we're very very visual half our brain is devoted to visual processing and to be enlightened and illuminated means to Devout to move towards a higher state of consciousness and we naturally use light symbolism to to represent that you know like the light bulb on the top of someone's head you know you don't say I I was in darkened when you learned something new and so again that fits into this underlying metaphorical substrate that that's I think deeply biologically grounded but but also sociolog socially grounded so it's a new day it's the start of a new day and a day day actually means like French Journey means day the day Trek in some sense and how to comport yourself during the day is the fundamental question the day is the canonical unit of time and so you have to know how to comport yourself during the day and part of that is a journey from Consciousness into unconsciousness and that's and that return so like Apollo you you you descend into unconsciousness and then re-emerge and of course that's not metaphorical at all that's exactly what you do you descend into the underworld of darkness and dreams and strange things happen down there and so and then you awake if you're you're fortunate or unfortunate depending on your state of mind you awake in the morning and it's a new day right and so the dream world seems to help you sort out your thoughts by the way if you keep people awake for an extended period of time then they uh they they they they lose their minds essentially you the dream that the unconsciousness and the dream state seem absolutely critical in the maintenance of mental health although people don't exactly understand why it looks like dreams might help you forget because forgetting is really important you just can't re I mean you just can't remember everything that happened to you get so damn cluttered that that you you'd fall apart and so you reduce things to the gist and when you're doing that you pack them in it's like you compress them in some sense you pack them into a smaller space and get rid of everything that isn't relevant and the dream seems to you know be part of that it also seems to be a place where you deeply encode learning that might have been done that day which is something that Freud actually noted in his interpretation of Dreams which is a great book if you're ever going to read a book that Freud wrote The Interpreter nation of Dreams is the proper one to read in my estimation it's a brilliant book and it laid the groundwork for a lot of what Jung did and so anyways that's how the movie starts and the animals come out into the light and that's that's a metaphor for the dawning of Consciousness to come out into the light where you can see and so this is a baby giraffe and babies emerge into the light roughly speaking and that's that's like I said that that's a representation of of the emergence or expansion of consciousness and so this is how the movie starts it starts with very expansive music as well celebratory music and that's to indicate to you to set the tone for the movie but also to indicate to you that you're about to watch something of import and the opening scene is actually a real scene of Genius in my estimation the animators did a great job and it goes along very nicely with the music and so you see this lit place and then you see this rock Pride Rock I believe it's called in in the middle of it and it's the center it's the center it's like the spot that's marked by a cathedral which is an X or a cross and you're right in the middle of that and so it's the center of the light that's another way of thinking about it or it's the center of the territory or it's the home or it's the fire in the in the wilderness or it's the tree in the center where you live it's all of those things at once it's inhabited territory with you at the center and the The Rock represents tradition because people tend to inscribe their traditions on Rock right or to to build them into rock like the pyramids so you could think about that as a pyramid as an Egyptian pyramid and it's the right way to think about it you could also think about it as a dominance hierarchy with the apex predator at the top and that's the lion so it makes sense that the lion would be in the light on the Rock that's a pyramid in the middle of the territory right that makes sense to people psychologically so because that's what the state is the state is a hierarchy with with something at the top that occupies a space that has been illuminated and made safe by Consciousness that's what the state is and that's all represented right away in this movie and all the animals come to to observe what's happened happening in the pyramid and at the top because they need to know what happens as at the top partly to organize their world that's the pyramid but also to see how the organizational principle works and that's why they're all Gathering and so they're gathering in the light in the morning to observe something new that's going to be born that's of significant importance and that's the birth of the hero and this little bird here is a zoo right the zoo is like Horus the Egyptian God who was a falcon and an eye at the same time he is the King's eye in this king's eyes in this movie right he flies up above outside of the pyramid so he can see everything that goes on and reports to the king and so partly what that indicates is that the thing that's at the top of the pyramid needs to be an eye and that's partly why you see an eye on the top of the pyramid on the back of the American dollar bill it's exactly the same idea or if you look at the Washington Monument which is a pyramid at the top you see that it's capped with aluminum and you think well why aluminum and the answer to that was it was the most expensive metal at that time and so the notion is is that at the top of the pyramid there's something that actually doesn't belong in the pyramid it's something that goes up above the pyramid and can see everything and so you could think about it this way is that you're going to be in a lot of pyramids in your life dominance hierarchies and different states and families and all of that and they'll arrange themselves into a hierarchy and there'll be something at the top and the top is the thing that can do well across hierarchies so it's not stuck in any one pyramid and it's partly associated with vision and the ability to see a long long distance also to see what you don't want to see and to report that back to the king and so the king fundamentally as far as you guys are concerned from a psychological perspective that's your super ego that's the Freudian perspective or it might be the moral system by which you comport yourself but your eyes are the thing that updates that right you need it to orient yourself in the world you need it to orient yourself among other people but your eye and your capacity to pay attention especially to what you don't want to pay attention to is the thing that continually updates that model exactly as Piaget laid out with children so and all of that's packed into the imagery in the first you know few minutes of this movie and that's actually why it relies on imagery why this isn't just a lecture by a psychologist you know when you go to see the movie it's because the images they say a picture is worth a thousand words but and there's thousands of pictures in this movie obviously but maybe a picture is worth more words than you can actually use to describe it if the picture is is profound enough and we have many many pictures like that any deeply symbolic pictures virtually inexhaustible in terms of its of semantically with regards to its explanation

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Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: jKqtQDFnxes

Length: 11min 38sec (698 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 11 2022