Captions

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 00:04:45

so as bad as they are, they're going to get worse... many of you, I presume, have seen Breaking Bad 00:04:52

that's a really good example of the incorporation, at least in part, or maybe the possession by the shadow from a Jungian perspective 00:04:59

right, because you have this ordinary high school teacher who really thinks that he's an axe [?] and his family as well 00:05:08

you know, like your typical persona, roughly speaking, he's just a normal guy 00:05:14

but part of the reason that he's a normal guy is 'cause he actually hasn't been put in abnormal circumstances 00:05:19

and then all of a sudden he is, and he has a genuine moral conundrum, right, he's gonna die of lung cancer 00:05:24

and he has a son who's got a lot of health problems 00:05:29

and he's terrified that he's going to leave his wife and his child behind with nothing 00:05:34

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 00:05:39

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 00:05:48

because it's not that he was just innocent good guy, and he decided to turn bad, he's also very resentful 00:05:54

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 00:06:00

and also that he didn't really fulfill his own potential, and that, you know 00:06:05

he had friends who walked down the entrepreneurial path and maybe they weren't quite fair to him, but whatever 00:06:10

he ends up not very successful as a high school teacher, so he's really angry about that, and so 00:06:18

there's more motivation for him opening up the door to the terrible elements of his personality 00:06:23

than just the fact that he's got good motivations to do so 00:06:29

and that unfolds, so you see the warps and twists in his resentful character 00:06:33

increasingly manifest themselves as he walks down this road to, really, total brutality, and it's quite good 00:06:39

there's a book called "Ordinary Men" that's a lot like that 00:06:47

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 00:06:51

maybe it's the only book of its type... it's possible, but it's plotted much like Breaking Bad in some sense 00:06:56

it's a story about these German policemen in the early stages of World War II 00:07:03

and they were guys who were old enough to be raised in Germany really before the Hitlerian propaganda came out in full force 00:07:09

if you were a teenager, say, in the 1930s, you were gonna be pulled right into the propaganda machine 00:07:17

and maybe you were part of the Hitler Youth, like you were raised in that, you know 00:07:22

but if you were older, then you were raised before that 00:07:25

and you're not as amenable to propaganda once you're older than about, well, I would say, about 22 or something like that 00:07:28

it's pretty young, actually; if you're gonna make a soldier, you have to get a soldier young 00:07:35

'cause once people are in their early twenties, say, they already have their personality developed 00:07:40

anyways, these policemen were sent into Poland after the Germans marched through 00:07:46

and, you know, it was wartime, and there was this hypothesis in Germany that 00:07:52

the Jews in particular were operating as a fifth column in undermining the German war effort 00:07:58

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 00:08:03

and the police were sent into Poland, they were also required to make peace, roughly speaking 00:08:10

they started out by rounding up all the Jewish men between 18 and 65 00:08:17

and gathering them in stadiums, and then shipping them off on trains, but that isn't where they ended 00:08:23

they ended in a very, very dark place, I mean these guys were going out in the field with naked pregnant women 00:08:28

and shooting them in the back of the head by the end of their training 00:08:35

and what's really interesting about that is that their commander told them that they could go home at any time 00:08:38

so this is not one of those examples of people following orders 00:08:45

and the reason they didn't, roughly speaking, there's many reasons, but one of the reasons they didn't 00:08:50

is because they didn't think it was comradely, so to speak, to leave the guys they were working with 00:08:55

to do all the dirty work and run off; and that's a really interesting fact 00:09:02

because in different circumstances you wouldn't think about that as reprehensible 00:09:07

you'd think: well, that's part of team work under rough circumstances; and that's at least in part how they viewed it 00:09:12

they were also made physically ill multiple times, physically and psychologically ill, by the thing that they had to do 00:09:19

but they kept doing them anyways, so one step at a time 00:09:25

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 00:09:29

anyways, Pinokio has now decided, after his latest misadventure, to return to the proper pathway 00:09:35

he's off to school again, and he's still pretty naive, although perhaps not as much so as he was before 00:09:45

so he decided that he's gonna do things right, he's gonna go get educated, he's going back to school 00:09:52

he's gonna take the conventional route to discipline, and be a good boy, roughly speaking 00:09:56

and so, he's off to school, and the fox waylays him again 00:10:01

this is a really interesting scene, took me quite a long time to unpack this too 00:10:06

and so, the fox, first of all, starts out by acting like he's sympathetic again, sympathetic towards Pinocchio 00:10:12

and so, he's empathetic, you could say, and... so this is an interesting analysis of empathy 00:10:20

so what happens is the fox convinces Pinokio through a variety of maneuvers 00:10:26

that he's actually not feeling very well, that he's sick, he really convinces him that he's a victim 00:10:33

and one of the things... I had a graduate student named Maya Maja Djikic, who had worked with the UN in Bosnia 00:10:38

and she had toured some of the mass grave sites there, and we wrote a paper one time, called: 00:10:47

"You can neither remember nor forget what you don't understand" 00:10:52

and it was a paper about the idea, for example, it was partly about the idea that we should never forget the Holocaust 00:10:56

and that the idea there is that, well, we should never forget it and we should never repeat it 00:11:03

but the thing is, if you don't understand how those things come about, you can't really remember them, right? 00:11:07

you think about them as a set of historical facts, but that's not the kind of remembering that actually makes any difference 00:11:12

you have to understand the causal pathways, you have to understand how a society would transform in that manner 00:11:19

and more importantly, you have to understand the role of the individuals within that society 00:11:24

unless you're going to assume that they're so completely unlike you that there's no connection whatsoever 00:11:30

in which case you haven't remembered it at all, you haven't learned anything at all 00:11:35

because the right lesson from what happened in the 20th century is: this is what human beings are like 00:11:39

that's the correct lesson, and you can say: well, not me; but... 00:11:45

but probably you too, that's the thing, probably 00:11:50

and probably me too, and least under normal circumstances; anyways... 00:11:57

the Fox convinces Pinocchio that he's sick, he performs a lot of tricks to do this 00:12:02

now, you could say that Pinocchio is susceptible to this 00:12:10

because maybe there's still a part of him that's looking for the easy way out, and so... 00:12:15

one of the things that Maja and I found when we were writing this paper 00:12:19

we were looking at the discourse that precedes genocide and genocidal states 00:12:23

and the enhancement of a sense of victimization on the part of one of the groups 00:12:28

usually the group that's going to commit the genocide 00:12:32

first of all, their sense of being victims is much heightened by the demagogues 00:12:35

who are trying to stir up this sort of hatred, so they basically say: look, you've been oppressed in a variety of ways 00:12:41

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 00:12:46

it's something like that; and so there's something very pathological about the enhancement of victimization 00:12:51

which is, well... see the problem as far as I'm concerned with it is, it's not thought through very well 00:12:58

because there's a point that's being made, and the point is that people have been oppressed and they suffer 00:13:12

and that's true, that point; but then the proper framework from within which to interpret that 00:13:20

I believe is that that's characteristic of life, you can't take it personally in some sense 00:13:31

and you can't divide the world neatly into perpetrators and victims 00:13:38

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 00:13:42

and then assume that that gives you certain... like access to certain... forms of redress, let's say 00:13:48

it gets dangerous very rapidly if you do that sort of thing, so... For example, 00:13:55

one of the things that characterized the Soviet Union - and this was particularly true in the 1920's - but also afterwards 00:13:59

the Soviets were very much enamored of the idea of class guilt. 00:14:04

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? 00:14:12

So that was the bulk of the Russian population. They were bought and sold along with the land. 00:14:23

So, they had been emancipated and some of them - many of them - had turned into independent farmers 00:14:27

and some of them had become reasonably prosperous, because, at least in principle 00:14:35

well, I presume a certain proportion of them from being crooked, but I presume a larger proportion from actually being able to raise food 00:14:39

and of course, at that time the bulk of the Russian food population [sic] was produced by 00:14:47

these relatively successful peasant farmers; and relatively successful would mean 00:14:52

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 00:14:58

so you know, it wasn't like they were massive land owners or anything 00:15:04

but I talked to you a little bit about the Pareto principle and the notion that in any domain of activity 00:15:08

a small proportion of people end up producing most of what's in that domain of activity 00:15:14

the same was true in Russia with regards to these peasant farmers, some of them were extraordinarily efficient 00:15:19

and they produced most of Russia's food 00:15:25

when the communists came in, they described those land holders as parasites, essentially 00:15:29

predicated on the Marxist idea that if someone had extracted profit from an enterprise 00:15:35

that the had basically stolen that profit from the people, say, that they had employed or otherwise oppressed 00:15:42

so you could be a member of the kulak [spells it out] class 00:15:49

and then because you were a member of that class, you were automatically guilty 00:15:57

so what happened was... and you gotta think this through to really understand what happened 00:16:01

so what happened was the intellectual communists were sent out in cadres out into these little towns 00:16:05

to find people who would help them round up the kulaks; now you gotta think about what a small town is like 00:16:12

because... so imagine you're in a town, and there's three or four people, or maybe ten people or something like that 00:16:18

who are a little more successful than everyone else, and a certain number of people are gonna be fine with that 00:16:23

any maybe eve happy about it, because they regard those people as particularly productive 00:16:29

and, you know, as stalwart members of the community, regardless of their flaws 00:16:33

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 00:16:36

and so those are gonna be people whose characters, I would say, are of the less positive type 00:16:43

and so when the intellectuals came in and described the reason that these people should be treated as parasites and profiteers 00:16:48

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 00:16:55

and is completely unconscientious, and fails at everything, and then blames everyone else for it 00:17:01

the intellectuals came in and said: this is unfair that this happened to you 00:17:06

you've actually been victimized and now it's your opportunity to go have your revenge; and that's exactly what happened 00:17:11

now, in some of the villages sometimes the peasants would actually surround the farmsteads of these more successful people 00:17:17

and try to defend them, but that never worked out for very long 00:17:26

so then these mobs, these angry mobs, would go into the farmhouses and strip the place right down to nothing 00:17:30

and they packed these people up and sent them on trains with no food, out to Siberia where there was no place to live 00:17:37

so they were packed into houses, maybe they had a square meter each to live in 00:17:44

and their children died of typhoid and many of them froze to death 00:17:48

many, many people died, millions of people died as a consequence of the dekulakization 00:17:52

at least in... as a consequence of its total effect 00:17:58

so what happened then was that there wasn't any food produced 00:18:02

and so then six million Ukrainians starved to death in the 1920s, it's something you never hear about, right? 00:18:09

you never hear about that, why do you never hear about that? that's a question worth asking 00:18:15

you know, it was an absolute catastrophe, they used to... 00:18:20

so these people were starving, right to the point of cannibalism, right, I mean it was ugly 00:18:24

it was ugly as anything you could possibly imagine 00:18:29

if you were a mother and... so you're supposed to hand all your grain in to the central committee 00:18:31

most of it for distribution into the cities, you didn't get to keep any food yourself 00:18:36

and so maybe then afterwards, if you were a mother, you'd go out in the fields that had already been harvested 00:18:40

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 00:18:46

so that's how far it was pushed, so... well, so that's a little story about 00:18:52

how the idea of victimization and perpetration can get out of hand extraordinarily rapidly 00:19:00

so whenever people are beating the victim drum, you know, they'll cover that up with empathy, roughly speaking 00:19:07

we're speaking on behalf of the oppressed; it's like, maybe you are, but maybe you're no saint 00:19:18

because, you know, you're so sure that you're a saint and you're only speaking from the position of good 00:19:23

highly unlikely; anyways, so Pinocchio is enticed into believing that he's a victim 00:19:29

now, the logical part of that is that it is the case that, you know, you can make a very strong case that 00:19:34

every human being is in some sense involved in a tragic enterprise 00:19:40

right? because you're biologically vulnerable, you're not what you could be as a biological specimen, right? 00:19:46

you're full of imperfections and plus, you're going to be sick, and those you love are going to be sick 00:19:51

and everything ends up in death, and so there's a very tragic element to that 00:19:56

and then, by the same token, you're also subject to the tyrannical aspect of your culture 00:20:00

right, 'cause it's forcing you to be a certain way all the time 00:20:07

socialization does that, you're required to modify your own intrinsic nature in order to come into conformity with the broader community 00:20:12

and you can think about that from the Piagetian sense, which is that socialization makes you a more and more sophisticated person 00:20:22

and there's some truth in that, but you can also be subject just to tyranny, you know 00:20:28

I see people in my practice, for example, they've had very tyrannical fathers, for example 00:20:34

sometimes they have tyrannical mothers as well, but they not so much encouraged 00:20:40

to integrate properly into the social community, as they are harassed and abused 00:20:45

or made to feel insufficient and, you know, basically subject to tyranny 00:20:50

and so it's quite... and that's true of everyone to some degree 00:20:54

you know, you come to university and there's a tyrannical aspect to it; especially in a big institution like this 00:20:58

you're not really marked out as an individual in any sense, you know 00:21:05

you're a number along with 60 thousand other people, and you know, there's something cold and impersonal about that 00:21:10

which is well represented in the design of this classroom, say 00:21:17

but by the same token, you know, the university provides you with an identity 00:21:20

while you're exploring an intellectual landscape, you know, you have a lot of freedom 00:21:25

compared to the vast majority of people, perhaps you don't have as much freedom as you might 00:21:31

if you compared it to some utopian notion of freedom, but in any real world sense, you're unbelievably well protected by the university 00:21:38

partly because it stamps you with the identity "student", which is a respectable identity 00:21:45

and so you can go off and educate yourself as much as you can 00:21:51

and everyone in society says that's okay, they carve out the protected space for you 00:21:55

so at the same time as you're being tyrannized by the institution 00:21:59

and forced in some ways also to adopt the viewpoints, say, of the professors, depending on the professor 00:22:04

you're also the beneficiary of that, just like you're the beneficiary of this huge industrial infrastructure 00:22:10

that underlies everything that you do; so anyways, the fact that your life is tragic necessarily 00:22:16

and that you are subject to oppression makes the victimization story really easy to swallow 00:22:23

but then there's a dark side of that, too; and this is actually what happens with Pinokio 00:22:29

so, what happens here is that he's told that he's ill 00:22:34

and convinced that he's ill, and they do use trickery, and... 00:22:39

so again you could look at him in some sense as an innocent victim, but 00:22:42

the innocence... the filmmakers do a good job of hedging against the innocent interpretation 00:22:47

because what he's offered and accepts because he's ill is an easy way out 00:22:55

and so what the fox basically tells him is that he needs to have the vacation, because he's sick 00:23:02

and he can go off to Pleasure Island, which is this place of impulsivity, roughly speaking 00:23:07

and whim, it's like reversion to being two years old in some sense 00:23:11

and that he really needs that, because otherwise he's not going to be able to live properly 00:23:15

he's not going to be able to recover his health; and so what Pinokio is offered... 00:23:21

is the opportunity to abandon your responsibility as a reward for adopting the guise of victim 00:23:26

and that's really worth thinking about, because one of the things I thought about for a long time 00:23:34

is that... I've been trying to figure out what gives people's lives meaning 00:23:39

and tragedy gives life its negative meaning, and nobody disputes that 00:23:43

even if you're nihilistic, you're not going to dispute the fact that tragedy gives life negative meaning 00:23:48

so when nihilists say that life is meaningless, that isn't exactly what they mean 00:23:53

they mean that life is suffering, but there isn't anything transcendent about it that you could set against that suffering 00:23:57

that's nihilism, it's not that life is meaningless, that would just be neutral 00:24:03

it's like... no one believes that, they certainly don't act like they believe it 00:24:08

if you look at it technically, and we will as we progress through this class 00:24:15

in order to have any positive meaning in your life you have to have identified a goal 00:24:20

and you have to be working towards it, and there is a technical reason for that 00:24:25

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 00:24:29

is only activated when you notice that... when you're proceeding towards a goal that you value 00:24:35

and so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value, you can't have any positive emotion 00:24:44

so technically that's the incentive reward system, and it's... the underlying circuitry is dopaminergic 00:24:48

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 00:24:54

and that's, you know, you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward 00:25:03

but there's two kinds of positive emotion, one is the reward that's associated with satiation 00:25:08

and that's consummatory reward, and that's the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat 00:25:13

but the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which you were operating 00:25:18

it's time to eat, well, you eat, and that framework's no longer relevant, so the consummatory reward eliminates the value framework 00:25:24

and then you're stuck with: well, what are you gonna do next? 00:25:31

and so, the consummatory reward has with it its own problems, but the incentive reward is constantly what keeps you moving forward 00:25:34

and incentive reward, because it's dopaminergic, also is analgesic 00:25:41

literally analgesic; so if you are in pain, you take opiates, and that will cut the pain 00:25:45

but so will psychomotor stimulants, like cocaine or amphetamines 00:25:51

and so, it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging, you're working towards a goal 00:25:55

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 00:26:01

or maybe sometimes even their ankle, and they'll keep playing the game, 'course afterwards they're suffering like mad 00:26:06

but the fact that they're so filled with goal-directed enthusiasm means that, well, the pain systems are in some sense shut off 00:26:12

so that's an interesting thing, because what it suggests... 00:26:20

I mean, then you can imagine... I might say: well, how happy are you that you've made a certain amount of progress? 00:26:24

and if you think about it what you'd say is: well, it depends on how much progress and in relationship to what 00:26:31

so hypothetically you're gonna be happier if you'd made quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal 00:26:37

and then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important, 'cause that's not obvious 00:26:43

now, you could say: you're in this class, and you're listening to some information 00:26:48

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 00:26:53

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 00:27:00

you need to do well in your class so that you can finish up your degree 00:27:07

you need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world 00:27:10

you need to do that so that you're financially stable and maybe you can start a family and have a life 00:27:14

and that's all part of being a good person, something like that 00:27:18

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 00:27:22

and then, when you're doing things that serve that ultimate purpose, then you're gonna find those more meaningful 00:27:32

and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the engagement of this exploratory circuit 00:27:39

that's nested right down in your hypothalamus, it's really, really, old 00:27:44

it's as old as thirst, and it's as old as hunger, it's really an old system 00:27:49

and so, you wanna have that thing activated, I mean, at least from a... 00:27:53

well, it isn't only from a hedonic point of view, you know, it's a matter of being happy 00:27:59

it's the wrong way of thinking about it, it's much more complicated than that, it's... yes? 00:28:05

[student] I was actually just about to ask like a hedonic element, 'cause I'm just trying to understand 00:28:09

[student] this... I guess... not relationship but the differentiation between hedonism and satiation 00:28:15

[student] and you... like going back to when you mentioned that it's not that life is meaningless 00:28:25

[student] but hedonism isn't exactly... like it's not satiation, because 00:28:30

[student] at that point people are just doing what they're doing for the sake doing 00:28:35

[student] it's not just for activation of the dopaminergic system 00:28:39

[student] so I was trying to understand... 00:28:48

well, what I would say, we're going to into that A LOT once we're done with this, like a lot 00:28:51

but I'll go over it briefly, I mean, it's not merely hedonism 00:28:57

because there's an analgesic and also a fear-reducing element to pursuing a proper path 00:29:01

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 00:29:08

which is kinda what you think about with regards to hedonism; actually, Pinokio takes a hedonic route next 00:29:14

the problem with the hedonic route is that... so the pursuit of pure happiness, let's say 00:29:20

is that what makes you happy in the next minute might not be something that will make you happy in the next hour 00:29:25

well you know that, there's this comic, what's his name, they call him king of the one-liners 00:29:31

he talked about drinking wine; don't you know that's gonna cause a hangover? 00:29:36

and he said: yeah, at the end, but the beginning and middle are excellent 00:29:40

and so that's really the problem with hedonism, right, is that 00:29:45

to pursue something that makes you happy in the immediate present 00:29:49

risks sacrificing your, well, many things, but at least, let's say, your hedonism in the medium to long term 00:29:53

and of course that is one of the major problems with drug use, and alcohol's a really good example of that 00:30:00

because whatever hedonic kick you might get from it that moment at night 00:30:05

you're going to pay for almost completely or maybe even more so, because the next day you're 00:30:10

much more jittery and anxious, and that's a direct consequence of withdrawing from the drug 00:30:17

so when you're in... when you have a hangover you're in alcohol withdrawal 00:30:22

so that's how fast you get, roughly speaking, addicted to it 00:30:26

and so if you take another drink when you're hungover it'll cure it, but it's not a very useful cure 00:30:31

because all you do is push the inevitable hangover one more step into the future 00:30:36

and so part of the problem with the hedonic answer is: happy when? 00:30:40

exatly; and over what period of time? and also: who's happy? 00:30:45

because maybe something makes you happy but makes your family miserable 00:30:49

now, you could say, well, I don't care, but you do care if you have to live with your family 00:30:52

because they're gonna take it out on you; so the impulsive hedonism, which is also fostered, say, by a positive emotion 00:30:56

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 00:31:05

I actually think that's why people evolved conscientiousness 00:31:13

right, 'cause conscientiousness is not happy, conscientious people aren't conscientious because it makes them happy 00:31:17

we're starting to think that they're conscientious because they actually feel terrible if they're just sitting around doing nothing 00:31:24

and so it's a way of staving off stress that's related to enforced leisure, something like that 00:31:31

you know, if you know industrious people, some of you are industrious 00:31:38

some of you will have industrious parents, they just can't sit around and do nothing, they have to be working 00:31:43

they don't feel good unless they're working; so one thing about conscientiousness is that 00:31:47

it involves continual sacrifice, right, you're doing difficult things in the present, hypothetically to make the future better 00:31:53

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 00:31:59

in stable societies; 'cause there's also no point in being conscientious and saving things up 00:32:06

and storing things if a bunch of thugs are gonna just come in randomly and take it all away 00:32:12

so conscientiousness actually only works intelligently in societies that have some medium to long-term stability 00:32:18

you know, 'cause you can get wiped out by hyperinflation, too, 'cause hyperinflation kills off the conscientious people 00:32:23

the people who accrued debts are thrilled when hyperinflation kicks in, because it wipes out their debts 00:32:29

but of course those debts are the things they owed to people who were conscientious enough to save 00:32:34

so anyways, Pinocchio is transformed into a victim, and he's offered this identity, and he takes it 00:32:39

now, it's partly 'cause he's deceived and manipulated 00:32:47

but it's also partly because the Fox offers him the abandonment of responsibility as payment for adopting the victim identity 00:32:50

so this is where his own lack of morality, let's say, 'cause this is all about Pinocchio's development as a character 00:33:01

plays a role in his demise 00:33:08

if I'm a victim, everyone else owes me something, and I don't have to take any responsibility 00:33:13

and so, one of the things I've wondered... here's something to think about: 00:33:18

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 00:33:22

and that'd be very strange if it was the case, you know, because responsibility of course is a kind of weight, obviously 00:33:31

and it's difficult to take on responsibility; but if any positive emotion that you feel and your control of anxiety 00:33:36

and the control over pain is dependent on the activation of the systems that watch you move towards a desired goal 00:33:45

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 00:33:53

and you know, you kinda already know this, because you'll have observed in your own life 00:34:01

that when you're engaged in something that you believe in, that the time passes properly 00:34:07

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 00:34:13

so even though it's difficult, you get engaged in it, you can remember it better, you process it better 00:34:23

and you're not so likely to fall asleep, and you're not so likely to wanna find distractions, all of that 00:34:28

you can get into it; and it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the degree of responsibility 00:34:34

that you're willing to shoulder, and I think you can make a strong case for that 00:34:40

I've also often wondered: imagine you could offer people a choice 00:34:43

here's the choice: you can say, well, your life isn't meaningful, the nihilists have got it right 00:34:48

there's no meaning in your life, and because of that there's no reason for you to accept any responsibility 00:34:54

so you can live a responsibility-free life and maybe one of impulsive pleasure-seeking 00:35:00

but a responsibility-free life; but the price you pay is that it doesn't get to be meaningful 00:35:06

or you could say to someone: no, we're gonna do the opposite, we're gonna say: you can live a meaningful life 00:35:11

but it's only gonna be as meaningful as the amount of responsibility that you're willing to bear 00:35:16

and then you might say: well, what would people choose? 'cause everybody always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life 00:35:22

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 00:35:30

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 00:35:41

there's no responsibility, and that's really what Pinocchio is offered, and that's what the Coachman offers him 00:35:48

and that's interesting, because, you know, so far it's been the Fox and the Cat, and they're kinda two-bit hoods 00:35:53

and so, the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways 00:36:01

but here, at least as far as the imagination, the collective imagination that created this movie is concerned 00:36:08

this is where you get to the most pathological form of, let's call it temptation 00:36:13

and that's the temptation to engage in... to abandon responsibility and to engage in impulsive pleasure seeking 00:36:19

short-term pleasure seeking 00:36:28

so here's the Fox, pretending to be a doctor investigating Pinocchio's illness 00:36:30

and he makes some notes, which is all just meaningless scribble 00:36:37

it's like white noise, and it doesn't matter that the arguments that he's making are completely incoherent 00:36:44

and it doesn't matter that he actually doesn't know anything, what he's selling is easy to buy 00:36:51

and so Pinocchio buys it 00:36:56

and by the end of the conversation with the Fox he's pretty convinced that he's useless 00:37:01

and that he needs a vacation; you know... 00:37:06

this is an oedipal situation as well, which I touched on the other lecture, I mean... 00:37:10

let's imagine that you have a child that is a little on the neurotic side, so high negative emotion 00:37:20

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 00:37:25

and so what that means as a parent, we'll say mother for this example, 'cause I want to use the oedipal example 00:37:35

you have to make a decision all the time about exactly how you're gonna treat that child 00:37:42

one decision is: well, I'm not gonna... you don't have to go to school today, because you're not feeling well, but 00:37:46

fair enough, but do you make the same decision the next day? and do you make the same decision the next day? 00:37:54

and let's imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of capitalizing on their illness 00:38:02

well then that's not gonna be very good for the child, the rule with a sickly child has to be something like: 00:38:10

I'm gonna push you right to your limit; because otherwise how is the person gonna figure out what they can do? 00:38:15

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 00:38:22

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 00:38:27

maybe you're just as happy, because you'd be sitting at home, alone if your child was there with you 00:38:33

and maybe you'd be just as happy at some level if they never grew up at all 00:38:38

because then they won't leave; and maybe that's because you have a terrible marriage, and you're lonesome, you know 00:38:42

maybe it's an abusive marriage and your husband has chased away all your friends 00:38:49

and so you don't have anything at all, and maybe that's 'cause you didn't stand up for yourself very well 00:38:53

apart from the fact that he was, you know, tyrannical in his central nature 00:38:57

and so then all those little warps and bends in your psyche are gonna manifest themselves right... 00:39:02

right in the background of every one of those decisions 00:39:09

my daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent, and they were very serious, and 00:39:14

it was very difficult to figure out what to do about that, because you couldn't exactly apply normative rules, right? 00:39:20

and we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us, how seriously to take those 00:39:27

and the answer was: the least amount of serious possible, it's something like that, because 00:39:35

we needed to know, and she needed to know, what she could do in spite of the fact that she had problems 00:39:42

and one of the things I really tried to instill in her, and I think it worked, is that: 00:39:47

you don't ever wanna use your illness as an excuse for not doing anything 00:39:53

not consciously, you know, sometimes you might not know, "I'm not feeling well, what can I do?" 00:39:58

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 00:40:02

it's not like it's obvious, but sometimes it's obvious, you know, this little temptation flits through your mind, and you think: 00:40:08

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 00:40:14

you do that a hundred times, and you don't know how sick you are anymore 00:40:18

and then you're in real trouble, because not only are you sick, but you actually have... you've muddied the waters 00:40:22

and so you have both problems, is you're actually ill, and you've betrayed yourself 00:40:29

by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities 00:40:36

and that, I think, if both of those thing happen to you at the same time, you're in real trouble 00:40:40

and it's really hard not to have that happen 00:40:45

so anyways, Pinokio gets enticed into believing he's a victim 00:40:49

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 00:40:54

and this is, I think, where the movie gets particularly dark 00:41:04

and so off they go, singing away; they have to carry him 00:41:07

so you could say in some sense he's carried by societal pathology and his own trouble 00:41:11

he's carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island; and so the Cricket... 00:41:18

the Cricket is again left behind, he's not the world's best conscience at this point 00:41:24

so, Pinokio goes off to meet the Coachman, and the Coachman has already said he's collecting bad little boys 00:41:29

and he's got them on the coach, they're all delinquent types here 00:41:36

and the ticket on the coach was the ace of spades, which is what Pinocchio is holding 00:41:41

and he's with this character here, called Lampwick 00:41:46

and that's an interesting name, so he's the thing that burns in the middle of a light, lamp wick 00:41:51

and that's interesting, because it's a play on Lucifer, 'cause Lucifer means 'bringer of light' 00:41:56

and so Lampwick is a play on that, and Lampwick is really a nasty piece of work 00:42:02

he's got this false arrogance about him, he's got this cynical voice, really deeply cynical voice 00:42:07

and he's only... I don't know how old he's supposed to be in this, maybe 12 or something like that, 13 00:42:13

And so he's one of those kids who's become prematurely cynical 00:42:18

I'll tell you a story about that 00:42:22

so I used to live in Montreal, I lived in a poor neighborhood 00:42:26

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 00:42:31

and there was a house across the alley down the street aways, where there was a lot of, like 00:42:39

not good partying, a lot of bikers were hanging around there, ans I knew there was a little kid that lived there as well 00:42:45

anyways, I was out there in the back alley, pounding away on my fence, and these little kids came up 00:42:51

and they were little, they were like 3 and 4 years old, hey, and they spoke joual 00:42:56

a kind of really heavily accented quebecois french, and my french isn't good 00:43:02

so I could hardly understand them; but they were watching me hammer, and they got a little closer 00:43:07

and they had one kid who was clearly the leader, had a real scowl on his face, eh? 00:43:13

and so they were watching, and I kinda motioned to one of them, that they could use the hammer 00:43:17

and that kid said, and I'm gonna mangle this, but he said "je voulai" or something like that 00:43:22

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 00:43:27

and he wanted to take it, and he was quite angry that I wasn't gonna let him take it, and then so... 00:43:33

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 00:43:38

they wouldn't come and play, because he wouldn't, and so he was hostile right away to me 00:43:44

and then... so the fence piece was laying out in the alley, and these little monsters started running across it 00:43:49

which I thought was really remarkable, you know, but it was terrible at the same time, because they were really little kids 00:43:58

that shouldn't be happening when you're like 3 or 4; if that's happening at that age, things are not good 00:44:04

and so that kid was already like seriously not happy with the world 00:44:09

and you know, I've been studying antisocial behavior for a long time by that point, and I knew that 00:44:15

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 00:44:20

or maybe worse, they get anti-socialized, which is exactly what happened to this kid, he'd obviously been ignored and abused 00:44:28

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 00:44:35

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 00:44:43

anyways, so they were running back and forth on this fence, I thought, stomping on it, you know 00:44:50

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 00:44:54

you know, in some sense I could see where this kid was headed and why 00:45:02

at that early stage in his life, it's really... it's not a pleasant thing to behold 00:45:06

but there was nothing that could be done about it, and that... kinda what this Lampwick is like 00:45:12

he's prematurely cynical, this kid was already cynical, and he was like 4 years old 00:45:16

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 00:45:20

but it happened to him much earlier; so this Lampwick character, he's already decided that 00:45:29

he knows everything, that everyone else's opinion is worth nothing 00:45:35

and that there's nothing in cultre or society that holds any utility whatsoever for someone like him 00:45:40

now, you can imagine developing that way, if you were raised in a family where people were generally lying to you 00:45:46

and that they randomly treated you or neglected you, and that you couldn't discern anything about them that was admirable or positive 00:45:54

of course you assume the whole structure is corrupt, and that you had to take care of yourself, and no one else 00:46:01

well, not of course, not everyone assumes that under those situations, I shouldn't say "of course" 00:46:09

but it's a logical set of conclusions, so... 00:46:14

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 00:46:19

who grew up to be, you know, kind, remarkable, responsible, thoughtful 00:46:26

people who were absolutely opposed to abuse, instead of propagating it 00:46:33

there's no direct causal pathway 00:46:37

anyways, Lampwick is pretty happy to be on this coach way to Pleasure Island which he's heard about 00:46:40

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" 00:46:47

so you might say, well, it's too good to be true, like the ginger bread house in the Hansel and Grettel story 00:46:54

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 00:47:00

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 00:47:07

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 00:47:13

so... anyways, Lampwick is firing off... he has a little slingshot 00:47:24

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 00:47:32

so he takes Pinocchio under his wing; and the Cricket is down there in the dust, he's caught back up to the carriage 00:47:39

but he's having a rough time at this point 00:47:46

this is also a story, to some degree, about transitioning to adolescence 00:47:50

you know, because adolescence is a time when people are pretty impulsive, and their view is quite short-term 00:47:54

and are more likely to pursue immediate pleasures and all of that, and that can get really out of hand, so... 00:47:59

anyways, they separate from the mainland, and go on a boat, and so they're off to Pleasure Island 00:48:06

a dark place; and the Coachman opens the gates and lets the delinquents into Pleasure Island, and 00:48:13

they basically have a riot; and this is Pleasure Island, here, it's full of amusement park rides, and 00:48:24

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 00:48:35

and clowns are often characters of horror, we'll leave the clowns aside for now, but the amusement park thing, that's pretty interesting 00:48:42

why in the world would an amusement park be a place of horror? 00:48:50

and the first question might be: well, have you ever been to an amusement park? because there is something about them, that's really... 00:48:55

they have a dark side, a clear dark side, and part of it is that 00:49:02

people with nothing better to do are spending money stupidly, and they're being fleeced by the people who operate the amusement park 00:49:08

you know, and they have, let's say, a stereotypically dark reputation 00:49:16

and they're moving around all the time, this is also something that psychopaths do 00:49:22

and all they're doing is moving from community to community, and taking the money from the rubes, fundamentally 00:49:27

and so, the amusement park, well... 00:49:32

if you walk through an amusement park with that sort of thing in mind, maybe that's also coloring your vision, of course, but 00:49:37

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 00:49:45

it's easy for a horror movie or horror novel writers to immediately expand upon, there's something about it that 00:49:53

that makes sense to people, so... 00:50:00

it's too easy, maybe that's... and it's also all short-term gratification, that's the other thing 00:50:04

so you spend your money very rapidly, and it's gone; yes? 00:50:09

[student] seems like a celebration of meanings divorced from reality (?) 00:50:12

yes, exactly, well, that's the impulsive element; the comment was it's a celebration of meanings divorced from reality 00:50:18

yeah, it's also outside of reality, right, that's why it's on an island, it's a separate universe 00:50:24

and it's a universe where nothig that's happening is connected to anything outside 00:50:31

and you're spending your hard-earned money, let's say, but it isn't that much... it's certainly not an investment 00:50:35

it's not that much different than burning it, well, it is, because of course you get some pleasure out of it, but 00:50:41

it isn't... going there every day is probably not the wisest move that you could make, so... 00:50:48

the animators do a good job of, well, of presenting the, what would you call it 00:50:57

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... 00:51:05

anyways, Lampwick, who's got this very arrogant look on his face, and this kind of strut 00:51:13

it's a bravado, that's what it's called, it's a false confidence 00:51:19

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 00:51:24

but really they're not, so it's a mimicry of dominance 00:51:30

but it's something that can be intimidating, there's no doubt about it 00:51:34

I had a friend, he didn't come to a good end 00:51:42

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 00:51:48

and he was tall, he was a bout six foot seven, and he was pretty thin 00:51:54

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 00:51:59

there were bullies, and these were guys... and I worked in the bars, and I used to watch these guys, and they'd basically... 00:52:06

there was a handful of them in town, pretty psychopathic types 00:52:12

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 00:52:15

they knew who it was as soon as they walked in, that's actually why they were at the bar 00:52:20

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 00:52:24

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 00:52:32

my friend kinda caught on to this trick, and he started going into bars, and every time that someone like that came near him 00:52:39

he'd go outside and fight with them; and one of the things he observed right away is that 00:52:46

almost inevitably when he went outside with them, they'd shake hands and make friends 00:52:50

so as soon as he... and it was realy remarkable, watching him, 'cause he wasn't a particularly physically powerful person 00:52:55

although he was extraordinarily tall; but he had started to play this game, and he did it for along time, and 00:53:01

I don't remember him ever actually having to fight, he just stared them down, fundamentally 00:53:07

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 00:53:14

but people don't find that out, because they won't stand up, and it's not surprising, but... 00:53:23

anyways, they load up on food, Pinocchio's carrying a pie and a an ice cream cone simultaneously 00:53:32

and then they're off to have a fight, and Lampwick says something like: 00:53:38

it's good to punch someone in the nose sometimes just for the, I think he says, heck of it 00:53:44

and so Pinokio adopts this strut, and in they go to the roughhouse 00:53:48

and then, in the next scene, you see this model home up for destruction, it's quite an interesting scene symbolically, you see... 00:53:52

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 00:54:01

and a mandala is a sacred symbol of the Self, that's the Jungian interpretation 00:54:08

it's a symbol... it's very difficult to describe, but it's a symbol... 00:54:14

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 00:54:18

it's the same idea, you know sometimes you see those slow-motion or sped-up-motion videos of a flower unfolding? 00:54:26

that's the same idea, you can imagine that being se to music, and somehow that would make sense 00:54:34

and the mandala's like a symbol of the unfolding of being, or the source of meaning, or something like that 00:54:40

and it's also a symbol of the Self from the jungian perspective 00:54:47

so there you see it more clearly; the kids are starting to burn this place 00:54:52

and trash it, and they're dragging the grand piano down the stairs, it's a destruction of high culture 00:54:57

about which they are nothing but cynical, 'cause they don't believe that hard work and sacrifice can 00:55:03

can produce something of any value, and they want to bring it down and destroy it, and that's partly because... 00:55:08

you can see this in the story of Cain and Able 00:55:16

Able is hardworking and everyone likes him, and he makes the proper sacrifices, and so his life goes pretty well 00:55:20

and that's part of the reason Cain hates it, and he's jealous and resentful, but worse than that 00:55:25

if you're around someone, if you're not doing very well, especially if that's your own fault 00:55:31

if you're not doing very well, and you're around someone who's doing very well, it's very painful, because 00:55:36

the mere fact of their being judges you, and so it's very easy to wanna destroy that 00:55:40

to destroy that ideal so that you don't have to live with the terrible consequences of seeing it embodied in front of you 00:55:46

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 00:55:55

and that's exactly what's happening here, the kids are destroying all of this culture, roughly speaking 00:56:02

because it judges them; the fact that it exists judges them; and I've often thought this about Michelangelo's statue of David 00:56:11

which is this heroic... so David was a shepherd, obviously, and it doesn't sound like much, but 00:56:19

back in those times being a shepherd was a big deal, because there were lions, and you had a slingshot 00:56:25

so like, you've got to defend your sheep from lions with a slingshot 00:56:30

so you weren't exactly this, like, 19th century English guy dressed in a, you know, frilly blue suit 00:56:35

you were tough as a bloody... well, someone who would go after a lion with a slingshot, it's no joke 00:56:41

anyways, the statue is very heroic, and, you know, you look at that, you think, well, that's the possibility of human kind 00:56:48

but by the same token it's also what you're not, and so, as well as being an ideal, it's a judge 00:56:54

and every ideal is a judge, so... yes? 00:56:59

[student] going back to your example of Cain and Able, um, so you're using that as an example illustrating 00:57:02

[student] becoming bitter as a result of not being able to achieve status... success as a result of hard work 00:57:10

[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 00:57:22

[student] so was that a result of the hard work or was that a result of... (agriculture being favored?) 00:57:34

good question, those stories are very compicated 00:57:39

and the story is very ambivalent about whether Cain is not rewarded because he makes bad sacrifices 00:57:45

or beause God's just in a bad mood; I like that... if you read the story 00:57:51

I read multiple translations of the story, and when Cain comes to God to complain 00:57:56

God basically tells him: look, buddy, before you go about criticizing the structure of reality 00:58:02

you should look to your own inadequacies; he says: sin crouches at your door like a predatory, sexually aroused animal 00:58:09

and you invited it in to have its way with you, and something has emerged as a consequence 00:58:16

so don't be botherin' me about my creation before you look to yourself 00:58:21

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 00:58:26

but it is ambivalent in the story, and there is the sheperd versus farmer motif as well 00:58:35

and of course that motif runs through the entire corpus of stories to some degree, especially the shepherd motif 00:58:41

so, it's only about a paragraph long, that whole story and it packs all that into that tiny little amount of space 00:58:47

but the idea that Cain kills Abel to get rid of his ideal 00:58:53

and also to punish God, roughly speaking, it's a brilliant story; I mean... 00:58:58

these guys who go around shooting up highschools, they're shooting at... highschools in particular, but... 00:59:04

you know, they're definitely out for revenge, and what they're revenging themselves against or to who is not exactly clear 00:59:09

anyways, so these kids are just tearing down this model home 00:59:16

tearing down western civilization, I suppose is another way of looking at it, or just tearing down civilization, period 00:59:20

and Pinokio's having a pretty good time, he's got his axe, and he's looking a little malevolent there 00:59:26

and happy to be destroying things, which is of course a pretty simple thing to do 00:59:31

so there's that image that I told you about, the mandala, and that's a flower in this image 00:59:36

and so, what happens is that, I think it's Lampwick, throws a brick through it 00:59:42

and so, what that means symbolically: the self is a symbol of your potential, among very many other things 00:59:47

but by engaging in this sort of impulsive, destructive activity Lampwick and Pinocchio are making it impossible to further their development 00:59:54

and they're doing that to some degree consciously, they basically say: to hell with it 01:00:03

and toss a brick through this highest ideal, the thing through which light shines, so also that harkens back to the star as well 01:00:07

so, anyways, the coachman is paying attention to all this 01:00:16

and he's actually pretty happy about the fact that these boys are so involved in their stupid amusements 01:00:21

that they're not paying any attention to what's actually going on 01:00:28

he calls these people out of the darkness, these creatures out of the darkness, so... 01:00:32

you get these black... you can hardly see them there, but theyre black cloaked figures with glowing eyes 01:00:36

and they're shutting the door of the amusement park 01:00:42

and that's very interesting, it's an extraordinarily interesting happening 01:00:46

it's like, ok, so all of a sudden the amusement park... we already know that the Coachman is up to no good 01:00:50

but now he's got these minions that are faceless in some sense, they're clearly creatures of the night 01:00:55

and they're up to no good, and so you have this sense that... 01:01:00

that the boys are being offered bread and circuses, roughly speaking 01:01:05

but there's something... there's a real reason for it, there's a manipulative reason 01:01:09

for it, they're being enticed into a trap, the doors are closed, and these underground beings are involved in the plot 01:01:12

and obviously the coachman understands this perfectly well; so one of the ways to understand this 01:01:21

is to think about what totalitarian states have to offer their populace, and 01:01:28

what they offer them, and this happened particularly as Rome declined, let's say 01:01:33

that's where the term bread and circuses originally came from, is that 01:01:36

as the situation degenerates, then people have to be offered stupid amusements more and more frequently 01:01:40

in order for them ignore what's actually going on in the background 01:01:46

you know, a war can be that kind of stupid amusement 01:01:52

anyways, later that night the entire place is completely devastated, and all we see is the wreckage of everything that was there before 01:01:56

and again the Cricket has gotten separated from Pinocchio, and so he's trying to find him 01:02:03

and Pinocchio ends up in this... this bar that's shaped like an 8-ball 01:02:08

the 8-ball is kind of the random ball in pool, and anyways he's inside the 8-ball, and 01:02:14

he's shooting pool with Lampwick, and that's just another indication of wasting his time, basically, and 01:02:21

you can see in the forefront there's some cards for gambling, so he's engaged in these sort of 01:02:28

you might say, pointless, hedonic hedonic pursuits, and he's enticing Pinocchio along the same route, and so 01:02:33

he teaches him to smoke, first, that doesn't go very well, so Pinocchio takes a huge drag on his cigar 01:02:43

and it just about kills him, and when Lampwick asks him how he likes it 01:02:51

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 01:02:56

and he's hallucinating double balls on the pool table, and 01:03:03

then the cricket shows up and stands on the 8-ball, and kinda gives him one of those declamatory speeches again 01:03:06

you know, 'cause he still hasn't quite figured out that standing up proud and spouting off the rules isn't exactly 01:03:11

the right way for the conscience to behave; and Lampwick picks him up by the scruff of the neck 01:03:19

roughly speaking, and first of all asks who he is, so obviously he's divorced from his own conscience 01:03:25

and then makes fun of Pinocchio for paying attention to this little bug, and 01:03:32

that's kind of a nice indication of what happens at adolescence, you know, because 01:03:37

of course as children move away from their parents and into their groups, especially when the groups are misbehaving 01:03:42

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 01:03:49

by making fun of the fact that they're, you know, too attached to their conscience 01:03:56

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 01:04:01

if you won't take any risks, there's actually something wrong with you, but there's a negative element in that 01:04:09

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 01:04:14

some people take extraordinary risks, extraordinary risks 01:04:22

and they don't make it through at all or they end up in the permanently antisocial population 01:04:28

and then they're, you know, basically carreer criminals; five percent of the criminals commint 95% of the crimes 01:04:34

it's another Pareto distribution, so... 01:04:42

anyways, Lampwick isn't gonna listen to Pinocchio or to the Cricket, he laughs at him with this kind of braying laugh 01:04:46

which is some foreshadowing, and the Cricket gets all upset, puts his coat on backwards 01:04:53

and ends up dumped down a pool table hole, and otherwise abused, and so 01:04:58

he stomps on out of there, he tells Pinocchio that he can take care of himself, and he stomps on out of there 01:05:05

and so Pinocchio is left without the guidance of conscience, and the Cricket is trying to figure out how to get off Pleasure Island 01:05:10

BUT! he goes through the gates and he sees what's actually going on 01:05:17

and what's going on is that the Coachman had this like slave boat 01:05:23

down in the bowels of the island, and he's got all these black-suited minions with the glowing eyes 01:05:28

working for him, and they're rounding up what looked like donkeys 01:05:35

and so they're beast of burden, right? and so there's an idea here that if you produce... 01:05:40

if you pursue impulsive pleasure to the detriment of the development of your character 01:05:45

you're going to end up a beast of burden, you're going to end up a slave to a tyrant 01:05:50

and that's exactly right, and so, anyways, the Cricket doesn't... 01:05:54

you can see one of those black-suited horrors here, hauling donkeys out of this crate 01:05:59

and one of them has a hat on, and they look very sad 01:06:05

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 01:06:09

so they're shipped off to be slaves, roughly speaking 01:06:14

and they look very sad, and then one of them gets hauled out of a crate, and he's still got a hat on 01:06:19

he has a hat on and a sweater, and he can still talk, he's a boy, it turns out 01:06:24

that's been half-transformed into a jackass, a brying jackass prior to being enslaved 01:06:29

so that's another thing that's quite interesting about the story, you know, it also makes the case that if you 01:06:35

replace your voice with stupid braying, that the probability that you're going to become enslaved by a tyrant is extraordinarily high 01:06:42

and I always can't help but think about ideologues in that manner, you know 01:06:50

Solzhenitsyn wrote about the radical left ideologues that got thrown in the gulag archipelago, you know 01:06:57

so they were part stalwarts, this happened to a lot of people, true believers 01:07:02

who were vacuumed up by the stalinist machine and thrown into the gulag anyways, and 01:07:06

he said that those people suffered in some ways more than everyone else, because 01:07:12

what did he say? they were bit by the beloved hand that fed them 01:07:16

and so the first while when they were in the camps, Solzhenitsyn didn't really know what to do with people like that 01:07:20

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 01:07:24

and you know, stripped of all their identity, and their status, so that's pretty rough 01:07:29

but on the other hand they were writing letters protesting their innocence 01:07:34

and assuming that everyone else in the camp was guilty, but they were innocent, and they were still strident believers in the communist process 01:07:38

and so, you know, it was a conundrum, here they are being terribly punished 01:07:46

but by the same token they're also the perpetrators of their own demise, so how do you deal with them? 01:07:51

they used to play "comrades", he said they used to play "comrades" with people like that 01:07:56

and invite them into an ideological discussion about the camp situation, and the situation in the country as a whole 01:08:00

and let them rattle out their ideological justifications for everything that had happened 01:08:08

trying to make them parody themselves, roughly speaking, it was a rough game 01:08:14

and Solzhenitsyn also concluded that there was no helping someone like that 01:08:19

when they were still ensconced inside that braying ideology, you could predict everything they were going to say 01:08:28

it's like someone had a crank, you could just crank it, and out would come the proper ideological formulas 01:08:34

but then he realized that as soon as they, let's call it, repented of that 01:08:39

and started to realize they're own role in it or the error of the system 01:08:44

then he would start communicating with them, you know, as if they were people who you could communicate with 01:08:48

yeah, that was very interesting, as far as I'm concerned 01:08:57

anyways, this kid is still a little bit human, he starts to cry for his mom 01:08:59

and the Coachman basically throws him back into the crate and says that he's not ready yet 01:09:05

and the reason for that is that he could still... he still had the power of independent speech 01:09:09

you remember, right at the beginning of the movie, when the mouth was painted on Pionokio 01:09:14

we saw that mask that was really glaring at the process, I said that character recurrs continuously throughout the movie 01:09:19

and this is a good example of that, because the Coachman is the enemy of anything that has it's own voice 01:09:26

so he's the anti-Gepetto, that's a good way of thinking about it, he's the tyrannical aspect of the culture 01:09:32

but insofar as one of these mostly donkeys, mostly jackasses can still talk 01:09:38

then they're not completely fit for slavery; and you remember this movie was also being made at about the same time that 01:09:44

the Nazi transformation of Germany was taking place, and so all these terrible ounderground things 01:09:53

you know, this process whereby people were being reduced to ideological slaves, say 01:09:59

and in this terrible process that was all playing out in Europe in a very big way 01:10:06

It was not that people were not aware of that. It was in the air. So... 01:10:11

Anyway, the donkeys and the jackass can still talk. 01:10:18

Crying and complaining and repenting, and 01:10:25

the Coachman turns into a full tyrant again cracks a whip if I remember correctly, 01:10:28

and says: "You had your fun, and now you're gonna pay for it." 01:10:33

The Cricket gets word of all this, he gets wind of it, he starts to understand what happened 01:10:35

is that all these bad kids were enticed out onto this island so that they could be enslaved 01:10:41

and he's really taken aback by that, to say the least 01:10:46

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 01:10:50

where Lampwick is drinking beer and complaining about what the conscience said 01:10:57

you know, 'cause he's kinda guilty and ashamed, but he won't admit it, 'cause he doesn't admit anything 01:11:03

he knows everything, he's not gonna admit anything about himself that isn't perfect, he's a real totalitarian in training 01:11:07

and he drinks this beer, and he's laughing about the conscience and putting him down 01:11:14

and then he says, well, what does he say exactly...? 01:11:18

"what does he think I am, a jackass?" or something like that, maybe that's not the words exactly 01:11:22

and then he grows these ears, and Pinokio sees that and immediately takes a look at the beer and stops drinking it 01:11:26

and then Lampwick transforms one more time, and his face turns into the face of a donkey 01:11:34

and he's laughing still, and then his hands... oh yes, he laughs and then he starts to bray 01:11:40

like a jackass, he's horrified by that, and then Pinokio laughs, and the braying comes out as well 01:11:46

so now they're absolutely horrified, and Lampwick actually figures out what's going on 01:11:53

he figures out that he's been tricked and that he's transforming and he's completely horrified by it 01:11:57

he becomes conscious of what's happening to him; and there's one particularly, I would say, dramatic scene where 01:12:03

his hands have transformed into hooves, and he's kicking and leaping around the room in panic 01:12:08

and he comes up to a mirror, he sees himself as the jackass, and then he turns around and breaks the mirror 01:12:18

so, you know, he's self-conscious for a moment, then he destroys his capacity for self-consciousness 01:12:23

then he transforms entirely into a jackass, he's farther down the road than Pinokio [should be 'further'] 01:12:27

and he comes crawling to Pinokio to save him, and asks that the conscience comes back 01:12:32

so that he can get out of this, but of course it's a bit too late, and 01:12:37

so then Pinokio grows jackass ears, and 01:12:41

he's absolutely terrified by it as well, he knows what's coming 01:12:45

and the cricket comes back, and guides him off Pleasure Island, and so then they end up on a cliff 01:12:49

because this is an island, after all, and they have to jump into the unknown 01:12:56

right, out of this impulsive, adolescent, hedonic playground into the unknown 01:13:01

and that's how they escape; so that's the first time that Pinokio has to leave... 01:13:08

this is the first scene where he has to jump into the water to make a clean break from something pathological 01:13:13

so tyranny... you see this echoed... you see echoes of this in the story of Moses leading his people from Egypt 01:13:21

because Moses is a master of water, right? he hits a rock with a stick and water comes out of it 01:13:27

and he's floating on water when he's an infant, and he parts the red sea, and 01:13:34

so he's a master of water and transformation, and the pharaoh's kingdom is represented as desert stone, roughly speaking 01:13:39

and so, the idea there is that, well, the kingdom is solid ground 01:13:47

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 01:13:52

it's not like in the Moses story that that comes easy, right, because the Hebrews leave Egypt, which is a terrible tyranny 01:13:59

and you think, well, that's good, they escaped from the tyranny 01:14:07

that isn't what happens, they escape from the tyranny, they actually end up somewhere arguably worse 01:14:10

'cause they're wandering around in the desert for forty years 01:14:15

and that's... it's a brilliant element of that story, because it states clearly that 01:14:18

when you go from a bad place to a better place you go to a worse place first 01:14:22

and that's a great... it's a great thing to know 01:14:28

because it also tells you why you might be unwilling to take the next step 01:14:31

you know, you're aiming up, but in order to aim up you have to let go of something you already have 01:14:35

and then that will put you into a state of chaos 01:14:41

and unless you're willing to undergo that intermediary state of chaos, and you might not recover from it 01:14:43

you're not gonna get to the next level 01:14:49

so that's rough, well, so Pinokio, he decides that chaos is better than tyranny 01:14:54

and guided by his conscience 01:14:58

we don't see anything happening in the water in this particular scene 01:15:02

they come back to shore all half-drowned and exhausted by their adventure 01:15:06

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 01:15:13

1:30, perfect, so let's break for 15 minutes, okay? alright 01:15:22

alright, so 01:15:27

Carl Jung talked about this phenomenon he... 01:15:37

he described as retrogressive restoration of the persona 01:15:45

and so, it's a complicated idea, but basically what it means is that sometimes you take a leap forward 01:15:52

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 01:15:59

and that actually doesn't work, because, well, things have changed, and you've learned something, and that isn't who you are anymore 01:16:05

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 01:16:14

now, what happens here is that Pinokio escapes from this tyrannical situation 01:16:21

and undergoes this descent into chaos, but he tries to go back home, he tries to go back to what he was 01:16:28

and he can't do that anymore, his father isn't at home anymore, and so 01:16:34

so when he goes home he finds that there's no home there, now 01:16:42

this happens to people sometimes, and it's often a shock to them, so 01:16:48

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 01:16:52

is that they often stay under the thumb of their father, and you think, well 01:17:01

why would someone do that, because it means they subject to the tyrannical judgment of their father 01:17:07

they're always concerned about what their father would think or whether their father approves of them and so forth 01:17:12

and you think, well, that's gotta be an unpleasant place to be, why would you do that? 01:17:19

one of the things that I've suggested to my clients and to other people sometimes is that... 01:17:26

here's a weird little exercise that you can undertake, a little thought experiment 01:17:31

so you have your parents and of course your parents have friends who are about their age, and 01:17:37

maybe some of them are people you only know peripherally, and I might ask you, well 01:17:42

do you care more about what your parents think than you care about what these peripheral people who know your parents think? 01:17:48

and then the answer to that is, well, of course, and then the question that arises out of that is: 01:17:55

why? 01:18:01

I mean, for someone else your parents are the peripheral people, and their parents are central, like 01:18:04

why is it logical that your parents' opinion makes any more difference to you 01:18:09

than the opinion of some randomly selected people who are approximately that age 01:18:14

why is it the case that you would consider that they know more than someone else? 01:18:22

I mean, I know that they know you better, and fair enough, but that's not the point 01:18:26

and then another point there is that to the degree that your parents' opinion about you matters more 01:18:31

than some randomly selected people of approximately the same age, Jung would say, well 01:18:36

you haven't exactly separated out the God-image from your parents, and so you're still under that combination 01:18:41

it's like... it's a complicated thing to talk about, but think about the Harry Potter series 01:18:49

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 01:18:55

and he should know the difference between them, they shouldn't be one and the same, they're not - for him 01:19:02

it's like, well, you have your parents and you have nature and culture as parents 01:19:07

and you shouldn't be thinking that your parents are nature and culture as well, they shouldn't have final dominion over you 01:19:11

it means that you're not an individual yet if that's the case 01:19:17

Freud said for example that no one could be a man unless his father had died 01:19:20

and Jung said yes, but that death can take place symbolically 01:19:26

ok, so there's that part of the idea, and then another part of the idea is 01:19:31

one of the times in your life when you actually realize that you're an individual 01:19:36

is when you'll go and ask your parents something, and you'll realize they actually don't know any more about 01:19:40

what you should do than you do, and that sucks 01:19:46

and that's partly why people are often willing to maintain a tyrant-slave relationship with their father; it's like 01:19:50

on the one hand you have to be inferior in a relationship like that, you know, you've always got the judge watching you 01:19:56

but on the other hand there's always someone who knows what to do 01:20:03

there's always someone standing between you and the unknown that you can go ask: what should I do? 01:20:06

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 01:20:11

and then that's a pain, that is a symbolic death 01:20:18

that's also when you establish a more individual relationship with your parents 01:20:21

it's at that point that you can conceivably start taking care of them instead of the reverse 01:20:26

and that's a time that should come, but you have to let that image of perfection go 01:20:31

and that exposes you 01:20:35

well, that's what happens here, you know, Pinokio goes home 01:20:37

and he wants things to be the way they were 01:20:41

and he wants to stay under the careful care of the benevolent father 01:20:44

but that's no longer possible, he's passed that point, and that's why the father has disappeared 01:20:48

and so, Gepetto has gone off to look for Pinokio, because he also needs a son 01:20:55

but in any case, the house is abandoned 01:21:01

and so then we see inside the house that everything's covered in cobwebs, and everything's gone 01:21:04

and Pinokio and the Cricket sit on the steps and they're very concerned; first of all they wonder where he went 01:21:10

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 01:21:15

and so, you know, that's also the case that once you hit a certain point in your development... 01:21:21

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 01:21:27

it's as simple as that, now you could artificially maintain your dependency, but, you know 01:21:34

if you do that for too long, things get pretty ugly, so you get pretty stale, and 01:21:40

you know, you're like bread that's been on the shelf for too long 01:21:46

so, now they're wondering what to do, and where he could be 01:21:49

and then something very strange happens, the star shows up again, and it turns into a dove 01:21:53

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 01:21:59

so what in the world is going on there? well, we know what the star is, we've seen it multiple times, right 01:22:12

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 01:22:18

and this time it delivers a message; so what's happening here is that... 01:22:27

Pinokio is fundamentally oriented by the wish that his father made so long ago, right? 01:22:35

and the wish was that he would become a fully functioning individual; and so that's that transcendent place 01:22:41

and Jung would say... 01:22:47

when you orient your vision, different things appear to you in the world 01:22:53

so, and I mean this literally, so, because you can't see everything - 01:22:58

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 01:23:04

and I don't mean that metaphorically, I mean it literally 01:23:11

things that aren't relevant to what you're seeking, you won't see them 01:23:16

unless they get in your way, and they have to really block your pathway before they will be literally visible 01:23:23

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 01:23:31

and so when you change your orientation, what manifests itself in the world also changes 01:23:40

now, Pinokio is in despair here, and he asks himself: where could my father have gone? 01:23:45

and so, the question is: what exactly is he asking under those circumstances? 01:23:54

and what he's asking is something like: I had a structure that was orienting me properly in relationship to the world 01:24:00

and as far as it was embodied in my actual father it's now gone 01:24:10

is there any possibility that I can find that again? 01:24:17

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 01:24:21

or something like that, and you're out of it, but now you don't know what to do 01:24:27

what you're hoping is that you can get your life back together, right? 01:24:31

that you can put the pieces that have fallen apart back together 01:24:37

and so you're automatically going to generate a fantasy about producing another, let's call it stable state 01:24:41

you're gonna be looking for the spirit that yould enable that state to be generated 01:24:46

'cause really what it is in some sense is your new personality 01:24:51

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 01:24:55

and so, that's going to make certain things visible to you, that's the proper way of thinking about it 01:25:02

you know, when you get curious about something, maybe you're curious about something and you walk into a bookstore 01:25:11

that curiosity is going to guide you to a certain set of books 01:25:16

the fact that you have a question in mind is going to open your eyes to certain kinds of possibilities 01:25:20

and so if your goal is to reestablish your union with the positive father, let's say 01:25:26

then certain things are gonna appear, and other things aren't, and that's what this represents 01:25:32

the transcendent star is the goal, which is this developmental process 01:25:38

it's capable of, let's say, delivering a message to you; in some sense that's what's happening when you're thinking 01:25:43

you know, because you have a problem you wanna solve, you have somewhere you wanna go with your thoughts 01:25:49

and as a consequence of that information reveals itself to you in the interior landscape 01:25:54

it's a very strange thing; you know, in some sense it feels as though you're producing the thoughts, but 01:26:01

it could equally be said that you're watching the thoughts reveal themselves 01:26:06

and which of those is more accurate is by no means obvious; you can certainly have thoughts that surprise you 01:26:11

which is very strange, it's like, they're your thoughts. How in the world can they surprise you, but they do 01:26:17

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 01:26:21

if you didn't know them before you thought them up? 01:26:26

Well, they sort of spring out of the void. 01:26:28

That's one way of thinking about it. Anyways... 01:26:30

this is a Holy Ghost symbol, this dove, as well, so that puts some Christian imagery in here again 01:26:36

You could think of it as a manifestation of the spirit of transformation. 01:26:44

That's another way of looking at it. Anyways, it's the conscience that interprets the letter 01:26:48

figuring out what the next thing should be, and weirdly enough, what the letter says is that 01:26:53

Geppetto was out looking for Pinocchio and he got swallowed by a whale 01:26:57

which makes very little sense to put it bluntly 01:27:04

Geppetto went to search for Pinocchio and now he's at the bottom of the sea in a giant whale. 01:27:09

We leap right over that tremendous gap in logic 01:27:16

and follow the story nonetheless. Okay, so what's the idea here? 01:27:22

The idea is that if you fall into a chaotic state and everything falls apart... 01:27:27

there's the possibility that things can come back together 01:27:36

including what you've just learned, in a new state. 01:27:41

And so you can conceptualize that symbolically as 01:27:47

the existence of the dead father at the bottom of the chaotic landscape 01:27:52

That's the proper way, as far as I can tell, to think about it. 01:27:58

It's like there's something down there that's capable of re-forming and reemerging that's 01:28:01

that incorporates the previous state but that takes it farther. 01:28:07

And you're not going to find that unless you descend into this chaotic place where 01:28:12

it feels like all order is gone. 01:28:16

well, you generate order, it's going to be akin to the order that you had before 01:28:18

but there's going to be something new about it as well, so it's down to the bottom of the chaotic state, 01:28:22

to bring up what you're missing. 01:28:26

And, that's one level of analysis. Another level of analysis you think is well that's also what you're doing 01:28:30

that's what you should be doing, in principle, when you're going to university 01:28:36

You know, you're...you come to university 01:28:40

in roughly the same state as Pinocchio. 01:28:44

You know, you're a bit of a puppet, and you're kind of a jackass, and what the hell do you know? 01:28:47

And it's chaotic because you haven't found your place in the world properly. 01:28:51

And I don't mean merely for career, not that that's not relevant, because it is, 01:28:55

but it's more important than that. It's because you're a historical creature. 01:29:00

Because, you are a product of history, unless you 01:29:03

are encultureated properly, which means you understand 01:29:07

your past, in the sense that the humanities can allow for that, then 01:29:13

you haven't been able to incorporate 01:29:20

the wisdom of your ancestors into your day to day pursuits, and that's going to make you weak, 01:29:24

that's the idea anyways. And so when you come to university, 01:29:29

this is what university is for. It's so that you can go into the chaos, 01:29:32

and you can pull something out of it that's truly of value. 01:29:38

and you can incorporate that in your own personality, and that makes you much, much 01:29:42

stronger, like literally stronger, not more educated, but 01:29:46

not, it's not like you know more facts, 01:29:51

it's that you literally are a better person, and "better" means 01:29:53

you can do far more things. You can articulate your - that's something that's of crucial importance is that 01:29:57

you can articulate yourself properly, which is 01:30:02

more useful than anything else you can possibly manage, like if you guys come out of university 01:30:04

capable of making coherent 01:30:09

arguments, and using language properly, 01:30:13

you're so powerful that it's ridiculous. You always 01:30:16

you can lay out a strategy and pursue it successfully 01:30:22

and maybe the strategy is oriented towards something good, something that will actually work 01:30:26

work for you, and work for other people as well 01:30:30

and I don't really understand why people aren't told this when they come to university, is that 01:30:33

your goal is to make yourself as articulate in writing and thinking and speaking as you possibly can 01:30:37

because that opens the door to everything that you'll wanna do in the future, no matter what it is 01:30:46

the more articulate person always rises, always 01:30:52

because they lay out strategies more effectively, they lay out the reasons for doing something or for not doing something 01:30:59

more particularly; they convince people, and properly so, that they can grapple with potential that lies ahead 01:31:08

effectively; and they can defend themselves when they're challenged 01:31:17

and so, all of that is going into the past, into the chaos of the past, you could even say 01:31:23

and pulling up the spirit that inhabits that from the bottom and uniting with it 01:31:30

and if you don't do that, well, you're defenceless in the case of... in the face of the tragedy of life 01:31:35

and then, that's not so good, because if you're defenceless in the face of the tragedy of life 01:31:45

then you get way more hurt than you would otherwise get, and so will the people around you; and then 01:31:52

the probability that you're gonna be resentful and bitter about that is really high, because 01:31:56

no one likes to fail continually; and then you get bitter and resentful 01:32:01

and then once you're bitter and resentful, well, being vengeful and mean is the next step 01:32:07

it doesn't take much of a transformation to move from that place to the next 01:32:13

so now Pinokio has to face the thing that he's afraid of most 01:32:18

and that's a complicated idea as well; so Jung had this 01:32:24

phrase that he took from the alchemists, which was "in sterqualinas invenetur" 01:32:31

and what it meant was: "what you most wanna find will be found where you least wanna look" 01:32:36

there's this old story that's from King Arthur, and King Arthur has these knights, right 01:32:42

they all sit around the Round Table, which means they're roughly equal, that's what the round table means 01:32:46

and they're off to find the Holy Grail, and the Holy Grail is the most valuable object, that's what it means 01:32:51

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 01:32:56

but they know that there's a most valuable thing, so in osme sense it's akin to them orienting themselves by the star 01:33:01

and they don't know where to look, and so what they decide is 01:33:06

they have the castle and it's in the middle of a forest; so each knight decides to start looking for the Holy Grail 01:33:12

by entering the forest at the point that looks darkest to him 01:33:17

and so what's the idea there? 01:33:22

well, imagine there are things that come easy to you and that you're fond of pursuing 01:33:27

and that you're happy about pursuing; so you've found them and pursued them 01:33:32

and you've mastered them, so you know all that; but then there's another place that you don't wanna go 01:33:36

and so you haven't gone there and you haven't mastered it, and 01:33:43

you're very small in comparison to it, because you haven't mastered it, and so it has this monstrous aspect 01:33:46

... 01:33:52

but if what you're doing isn't working, it's where you haven't gone that you need to go 01:33:57

and so, I can give you another example of this, so let's say 01:34:03

you're an agreeable person, and so you don't like conflict and you won't stand up for yourself 01:34:07

and you regard anger and the proclivity to provoke and to engage in conflict as something that's positively terrible 01:34:13

it's not only that you're not good at it, it's actually that it's wrong 01:34:21

so that's where you have to go if you're gonna learn how to stand up for yourself 01:34:25

and imagine that you're afraid, maybe you have something like agoraphobia 01:34:29

so there's a whole bunch of things that you're afraid of, and you don't wanna go there 01:34:33

but if you wanna put yourself together, then that's exactly where you have to go 01:34:38

and so it's frequently the case that what you wanna find is to be found where you least wanna find it 01:34:42

and that idea's echoed in the prominent stories of dragons and gold 01:34:51

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 01:34:57

and lives underground, and it'll kill you, it'll burn you up in a second 01:35:05

but it hoards gold; and so you have to go there, into the dragon's lair if you're gonna get the gold 01:35:10

and that's a representation of peoples' paradoxical relationship with reliaty, it's like 01:35:16

you have to go out there and confront it in order to incorporate what it has to offer to you 01:35:22

but the probability that that's going to be intensely dangerous and push you right to the limit... 01:35:27

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 01:35:33

so you don't get one without the other, you don't get the gold without the dragon 01:35:40

that's a very strange, very very strange idea, but it seems to be accurate 01:35:45

so all of that's lurking underneath this in this imagery of the whale 01:35:51

the thing that's at the bottom of... now, the whale, you can think of the story of Jonah 01:35:56

what happens with Jonah is that, roughly speaking, he is a prophet 01:36:03

and God tells him that he has to, if I rmember correctly, God tells him that he has to go to this city, and 01:36:09

straighten it out, because it's veered off the path and it's heading towards doom, and 01:36:15

Jonah thinks: I'm not going to that city to tell those people anything like that, because they're not gonna be very happy 01:36:21

with me just showing up there and telling them, you know, everything they're doing is wrong, and so 01:36:27

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 01:36:31

and the sailors, they're worried, I think, about making the boat lighter, something like that 01:36:39

they all draw lots to see who gets tossed overboard, and Jonah admits that it's actually his fault 01:36:45

because God's upset with him, because he got this direct command to go straighten out this city and he ran off, and so 01:36:51

the sailors throw... they're not happy about this, but they throw Jonah overboard, and the seas calm 01:36:56

and a great fish comes up, a whale, and swallows him, and then he's down in the fish for three days 01:37:01

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... 01:37:06

to pursue his proper destiny; so that's echoed in this story as well 01:37:11

that if you don't follow the pathway that you're supposed to follow 01:37:19

the seas will become stormy for you, and something will come up and pull you down 01:37:25

and you'll be in a terrible place for some length of time, 'till you learn your lesson 01:37:31

and if you're lucky, you'll get spit back up on shore, and then you can go do what you should do 01:37:36

well, I mean that's not a lesson that anybody needs to have interpreted, I think everybody understands that 01:37:41

anyways, the Cricket tells Pinokio what he has to do 01:37:48

and then something kind of paradoxical happens, Pinokio decides he's gonna go do this 01:37:54

and then the Cricket has got this weird, paradoxical response to that; on the one hand he's 01:37:59

he's sort of pulling Pinokio back, saying: look, you know, this is foolhardy 01:38:04

you're gonna go all the way down to the ocean, you're gonna confront this terrible whale, this is really, really dangerous 01:38:09

but at the same time, when Pinokio's on the edge of the cliff, the Cricket helps him tie his tail around a rock 01:38:14

and he holds his finger in place, so that Pinokio can tie the knot, it's like the conscience is conflicted about this 01:38:22

really dangerous and foolhardy, but it's also necessary, and so he plays this dual role 01:38:29

and Pinokio's leading at this point; so into the ocean he goes 01:38:34

I guess partly what this means is that if you're not oriented properly in the world, you should take your... 01:38:41

you should take your doubts and the chaos that you're enveloped in seriously 01:38:48

you should face it and think it through, you should go into it as far as you can go into it 01:38:52

because you'll find something at the bottom of it; the alternative is to pretend that it doesn't exist 01:38:55

so then Pinokio is at the bottom of the water; he can actually breathe down there, it turns out, so 01:39:04

you could think that he's gone into the unknown, he's outside of dry land, 01:39:12

he's in the unconscious, all of those things are true, and 01:39:16

you might think, well, why would it be the world outside of what's known and the unconscious at the same time? 01:39:22

this weird intermingling of those two things; and as far as I can tell, that's because 01:39:28

when you're in chaos and you don't know what's going on, then you start imagining what might be going on 01:39:34

and that imagination is partly the world as it might be 01:39:39

but it's also partly the structure of your unconscious mind, which is producing the fantasies, and so 01:39:44

when you're truly in chaos, then the distinction between your fantasies and reality isn't clear 01:39:49

that's actually what constitutes the chaos; so imagine this, so 01:39:54

you're in a relationship, and the person betrays you 01:39:59

and you knew who they were, at least you thought you did, before that moment 01:40:03

but now you're looking at them and you don't know who they are 01:40:07

and you don't know what the past was, and you don't know what the present is 01:40:12

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 01:40:15

that's traumatic, so much has fallen apart that it's traumatic 01:40:20

so what do you start to do? you start to imagine what might be the situation 01:40:24

well, then the reality, like, the reality is the reality and your imagination at the same time 01:40:29

they're not pulled apart at all, you cannot distinguish between them, and so 01:40:34

it was a Jungian idea... I could say that's the snitch that Harry Potter's chasing, by the way 01:40:42

I know that's a terrible leap, but that is what it is, it's that weird intermingling of potential and reality that 01:40:48

that can manifest itself as the world if you pursue it, it's roughly that 01:40:56

so Pinokio's in this situation that's half-fantasy and half-reality, in this chaotic state 01:41:03

and he has to go down to find the thing that he least wants to find 01:41:09

and he's hoping that it... he's got this intuition that in facing that thing, that chaos that life really is, that chaos 01:41:13

that he's going to find his father and reunite with him 01:41:20

so you could also say that in some sense it's a decision of faith, i suppose, because 01:41:28

you might ask yourself, well, why bother confronting chaos? if chaos is the ultimate reality, then what the hell use is facing it? 01:41:35

because it's just gonna reveal itself as the ultimate reality and drown you 01:41:43

but the myths always say the same thing, they say: "no, no, if you confront what's really disturbing you 01:41:47

if you really confront it, and you do it voluntarily, you're gonna find order in it eventually" 01:41:52

or at least that's the only way you're gonna find order 01:41:56

now, it's not like these stories are optimistic, and it's not as if they give you a sure guide to success 01:41:59

that's the other thing, it's not like they're unerringly accurate, because 01:42:05

you can be subsumed by chaos that's so total that even if you face it, you're not gonna prevail 01:42:09

I mean, that's why people die, that's one way of looking at it anyways 01:42:17

but the mythology basically says that this is your best bet 01:42:21

if there's a process that's going to work, this is it 01:42:25

and so, and then you might think, well, the better you do it, the better the chances are of success 01:42:30

or the more consistently you do it, the better the chances of success are 01:42:35

and I think that that's a perfectly reasonable way of looking at it 01:42:39

ok, so anyways, Pinokio's down at the bottom of the ocean 01:42:42

and every time he says... he's trying to find out where Monstro is 01:42:45

and they ask questions to the fish down there, but every time they mention Monstro's name, all the fish disappear 01:42:51

that's like Voldemort, right? he's the guy whose name you cannot say 01:42:58

and Monstro is precisely that, it's the thing that frightens everyone, and so 01:43:02

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 01:43:08

and there's a scene where 01:43:16

the darkness of the ocean turns into an even more profound darkness, and that's what Pinokio disappears into 01:43:21

and then we see Monstro, he's in this sort of foggy representation, this huge thing that lies very much at the bottom 01:43:27

and there's no life or anything around him except, I think these are mackerel, but maybe they're tuna 01:43:34

they're animated anyway, so it doesn't matter 01:43:40

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 01:43:43

so, and then we go inside the whale, which is, of course, abzurd 01:43:49

we see that the whale has eaten a boat at some point in the past, this is one whopping whale 01:43:53

and Gepetto is sitting with the kitten, of all things, 01:43:58

he's also got that litte goldfish bowl full of goldfish with him too, which is quite the feat 01:44:02

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 01:44:06

and so that's an interesting issue, because it's not only Pinokio is lacking his father, which isn't a good thing 01:44:13

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 01:44:19

and so it's like the possibility for order is down there in this chaotic state 01:44:26

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 01:44:31

you know, and you could say, well, there's wisdom in the libraries, but it's not going to.. 01:44:39

without you going in there and gathering it, and embodying it, all it does is sit there in potential in all of that... 01:44:42

imlicit form, that's a good way of thinking about it 01:44:51

so anyways, Gepetto is feeling pretty hopeless 01:44:54

because he can't figure out any way of getting out of the whale, and he's also starving 01:44:58

he's starving in the belly of the whale 01:45:02

here's a way of thinking about that: 01:45:06

Gepetto's a good guy, but he's old 01:45:13

and that means his way of doing things is no longer fruitful, that's why he's starving 01:45:16

and it's especially not fruitful, 'cause he's missing his son 01:45:21

he's missing the active element that the child represents, say, the playful and transformative element that the child represents 01:45:25

and so, if you get stuck doing something the same old way, at some point it's no longer going to work 01:45:31

even if it was good at some point; it has to be updated 01:45:36

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 01:45:39

the willingness to break boundaries and take risks; and Gepetto is very, very skilled, but 01:45:45

but he doesn't have that, and that's symbolized by the loss of his son 01:45:51

that's why he was out looking for his son too, he needs him; and so, they're in despair down there 01:45:55

trying to fish and not getting anything, and so... 01:46:00

Monstro wakes up 01:46:04

a mackerel happens to swim by and , and so... 01:46:08

I think they're tuna, actually, they look like tuna to me 01:46:13

and so, Monstro wakes up and he opens his mouth, and a bunch of water starts to come in 01:46:17

and so, and then you see Pinokio with the fish, now... 01:46:23

there's very intense implicit Christian symbolism in this part of the film 01:46:30

and I'm gonna lay it out point by point, so 01:46:35

you may remember and perhaps you don't, and perhaps you don't know, that 01:46:39

one of the symbols for Christ is a fish, ichthys, right? 01:46:43

and that's a play on the Greek representation of Christ's name, buyt there's more to it than that, because 01:46:46

all of Christ's followers are fishermen 01:46:52

and he performs a bunch of miracles with fish; and fish are strange things 01:46:55

because, well, you can pull then up out of the depths, that's part of it 01:46:59

and so they're things that can be pulled out of the depth; and you could say that... 01:47:02

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 01:47:08

a fish is something that you can dine on 01:47:14

but a way of being is something that provides you with something to dine on on a continual basis 01:47:18

and so, you might say, well, is it better to have a fish or to be a fisherman? 01:47:25

that's another way of thinking about it, and obviously it's better to be a fisherman, because then you can get more fish 01:47:30

and so, it's one thing to have something, but it's another thing completely to know how to generate good things 01:47:35

and so, if you had any sense, you'd take the latter over the former 01:47:43

even though the former is more instantaneously gratifying and requires less work and responsibility 01:47:48

and so, anyways, the whale opens his mouth and goes chasing these fish 01:47:53

and Pinokio tries... he's trying to get the hell out of there, even though he wants to find the whale 01:47:58

when he actually sees the whale, he leaves 01:48:03

and that's also a very common mythological, umm, what would you call it? plot element 01:48:05

it's very frequently that what happens when the hero first sees the terrible thing, the dragon, say 01:48:13

the terrible thing that he's come to conquer he freezes and gets the hell out of there, because 01:48:18

it's far worse than he thought it was going to be; and so Pinokio is like: no way, man 01:48:22

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 01:48:27

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 01:48:33

like crazy; and so, the little cat is... 01:48:41

Gepetto is flinging the fish backwards into this, like, box 01:48:45

and the little cat is there, whacking them to kill them while they're flopping around 01:48:49

and so they're pretty excited about this, because... they have a problem, the problem is how to get out of the whale 01:48:54

that's the actual problem; but a nested problem inside that is how not to starve to death 01:49:00

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 01:49:06

so you could say as well, that he's not exactly focused on the right thing 01:49:11

he's focused on the micro-problem instead of the macro-problem, and that makes him kind of blind 01:49:16

so anyways, the whale swallows up Pinokio, and 01:49:20

Gepetto keeps fishing; and then he snags Pinokio 01:49:27

now this is cool, because... and this is another example of that meta-fish idea 01:49:31

it's like... Gepetto's actually looking not for a fish, he's looking for a way out of the damn whale 01:49:37

and then he catches a bunch of fish, and he's like focused on that like mad 01:49:44

and then he catches Pinokio, and Pinokio represents what would get him out of the whale 01:49:47

but he's so bloody obsessed with the fish tha he doesn't even notice 01:49:52

so he catches Pinokio and flings him into the fish basket 01:49:56

and so, it signifies the blindness of Gepetto's orientation 01:49:59

when he's inside the whale, that's kind of a comment on his aged and insufficient nature 01:50:04

he's solving the wrong... he's solving the problem very well, but it's the wrong problem 01:50:11

so anyways, he fires Pinokio into the fish bin, and 01:50:15

Pinokio says: Father! I'm here; and Gepetto says: Don't bother me right now, Pinokio, I'm busy fishing 01:50:19

well then, that's fine, so then he kinda wakes up, he has this little moment of insight, this little revelation, that 01:50:28

well, he's caught Pinokio, so who cares about the damn fish; so then he runs over to the fish box to grab Pinokio 01:50:34

and instead he grabs a fish, and gives it a kiss 01:50:39

and so that is another way of hammering home the fact that he's... 01:50:42

there's this confusion that he's suffering from 01:50:45

he can't distinguish the local truth from the transcendent truth 01:50:48

and so anyways, he does figure it out; he tosses the fish aside and he grabs Pinokio 01:50:53

they're all thriled to death to see each other, and so they're united 01:50:58

so Pinokio has found his father, but they're still trapped in the belly of the whale; now 01:51:02

Pinokio takes off his hat, he gets covered with a blanket, he takes off his hat, and 01:51:07

he reveals his jackass ears, and so 01:51:12

he's found his father, but he's damaged, and not... Pinokio, he's damaged and not in good shape 01:51:15

he isn't becoming what he was supposed to be; in fact, he's actually degenerated since Gepetto saw him last 01:51:21

and so, he becomes embarrassed, and he says he has a tail 01:51:27

he says: that's nothing, I have a tail too, and then he spins that around kinda laughing 01:51:31

and he brays and gets really embarrassed, and so, that's what you see here, he looks like, well... 01:51:35

he's revealed himself as a jackass to his father 01:51:40

but you know, that's actually a good thing, because... 01:51:44

he is a jackass, and if he was unwilling to admit his insufficiency 01:51:50

he wouldn't have ever gone on this pursuit, so... 01:51:58

it's this perverse willingness to note that he isn't all that he could be 01:52:06

that's part of what drives him to find everything that his father represents 01:52:13

it's a humility, and it's an admission of insufficiency 01:52:17

and you need that before you're going to learn anything, because before you learn anything you have to 01:52:22

admit that there are things that are important that you don't know, and that you're a fool 01:52:27

and maybe that you're a braying jackass 01:52:32

and so, that's why there are injunctions in many religious in many religious writings 01:52:35

that positively portray humility, as the antidote to arrogance 01:52:39

that's the right way of thinking about it, is that humility means: I still have something to learn 01:52:45

I'm insufficient, I still have something to learn 01:52:51

it's exactly the opposite, say of Lampwick's attitude 01:52:53

anyways, Gepetto decides that son puppet who's half-jackass is better than no son at all 01:52:57

which is another indication of his relatively positive orientation towards the world 01:53:03

and they reunite; and then 01:53:08

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! 01:53:11

and it turns out that Geppetto has already built a raft, but there's a problem, and the problem is that 01:53:17

as Gepetto says... Pinokio says: well, we'll wait for his mouth to open 01:53:22

and Gepetto says: that doesn't work, because when he opens his mouth, Monstro opens his mouth, everything comes in, and nothing goes out 01:53:26

so, raft - fine, but there's no way of using it 01:53:33

and so, Gepetto decides that they're not going to bother with that problem 01:53:36

and they're gonna go have some fish 01:53:41

but Pinokio, his eyes is still on the main prize, he thinks: no way, man, we're getting out of this whale 01:53:44

that's the fundamental think, we're not going to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic 01:53:49

we're going to attend to the fact that it's sinking, we're gonna keep our eye on the primary problem 01:53:54

so he's a little more awake by now; so Pinokio says: 01:53:59

we'll make a fire; now that's cool, I think, because 01:54:02

he's down in chaos, where his father is trapped, and the first thing he does is to use fire 01:54:06

and of course that's exactly what people do, right, 'cause we're fire-users; and so 01:54:11

and shaman, for example, are masters of fire; but there's this really primordial element to this story right here, and 01:54:15

it's an indication that the thing that can transform chaos into productive order 01:54:22

is also the same spirit that mastered fire 01:54:30

and so, Pinokio lays that out; and he says: we're gonna build a fire! 01:54:33

and we'll fill him up with smoke! 01:54:37

and Gepetto says: great, smoked fish! 01:54:41

so he's still stuck on this whole fish thing 01:54:45

and so Pinokio runs around gathering up all the spare wood on the boat 01:54:47

including the furniture, which he starts to break; and Gepetto says: 01:54:52

well, what are we going to sit on? you know, while we eat our smoked fish 01:54:55

and Pinokio basically says, politely: you know, enough with the damn fish thing 01:54:59

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 01:55:04

and Gepetto says: that's gonna make him mad, it's not a good idea 01:55:11

and, well, I would say that that's the stance of the benevolent state against innovation 01:55:16

you know, even if the innovation is positive, and even if it's transformative and freeing 01:55:24

the old state, even if it's good, it's going to stand in opposition to that 01:55:28

and so that's also something that's very useful to know, because otherwise you can get bitter about that 01:55:32

anyways, Pinokio makes this big fire, Gepetto's pretty worried about it 01:55:36

and he starts to fill the whale up with smoke; and so this is where the whale turns into a fire-breathing dragon 01:55:40

which is quite cool, it's like in Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent turns into a fire-spewing dragon as well 01:55:45

and if you watch the Little Mermaid, that... what's her name? Ursula 01:55:52

she turns into a gigantic snake-like creature as well, although she doesn't exactly spew fire 01:55:57

but the transformation of the ultimate monster into something like a dragon is very, very common 01:56:03

'cause it's the ultimate symbol of the unknown for a variety of reasons that we'll dusciss later 01:56:10

so anyways... yes, it's a symbol of chaos 01:56:14

anyways, and this is quite a horrifying scene; when my son watched, and he watched Pinokio when he was about 4 01:56:21

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 01:56:27

but he was really fascinated by this scene 01:56:32

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 01:56:36

so anyways, you see the whale is starting to prepare to sneeze, and he's belching out huge quantities of smoke and fire 01:56:44

and Pinokio and Gepetto and the cat and the goldfish bowl are all on the raft 01:56:51

trying desperately to get out of the whale, which inhales and pulls them back, and then sneezes and pushes them forward 01:56:59

and at some point they actually break free, and there's a 'gates of hell' image there with the whale 01:57:05

belching out smoke like mad and its jaws open 01:57:11

so they're paddling madly away, to get away from this whale 01:57:15

and the whale is very angry, just as Gepetto suggested 01:57:19

and there's interesting sound effects that go along with this 01:57:24

the whale actually turns into a... 01:57:28

that's what happens when your phone is smarter than you are 01:57:33

the whale actually turns into into something that's like a locomotive 01:57:36

and the sound effects become industrial; so it's this monstrous, machine-like locomotive dragon 01:57:40

that's bent on the destruction of Pinokio 01:57:47

and you could say it's an amalgam of natural and social forces, completely unleashed 01:57:52

everything's unleashed against Pinokio and his father, and so... 01:57:57

they're having a hell of a time, there's big waves, and they end up... 01:58:02

the whale actually abandons them, but before he does that, it nails them with its tail, and blows the raft into smithereens 01:58:06

and so then they'e both in the water, and Gepetto and Pinokio are drowning 01:58:11

and Gepetto actually goes down for the third time, so to speak; and as he's going down, he says to Pinokio: 01:58:15

save yourself, save yourself 01:58:22

and so that's kinda Pinokio's last temptation, because Gepetto's had it, and he could just get to shore on his own 01:58:25

but he would've abandoned his father; and so that's the thing, is... 01:58:31

and that's one of the issues that this movie grapples with, is: what exactly is your responsibility? 01:58:36

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 01:58:41

it's to rescue your father from the chatic depths, and integrate with that, and to save both 01:58:47

and that's your duty to your culture; but more than that, it's also your duty to your soul 01:58:53

it isn't gonna work, if you just save yourself, 'cause you're still gonna be a jackass puppet 01:58:58

even though you're gonna be back on shore 01:59:03

so anyways, Pinokio grabs Gepetto and carries him to shore; and the whale shows back up 01:59:06

and gives them one more good wallop; and then we see everybody on shore 01:59:12

and it's peaceful again, Gepetto is in his back on the dry land 01:59:17

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 01:59:21

and we see the Cricket calling for Pinokio, and then we see him lying in a pool of water, dead 01:59:28

so he's died 01:59:36

rescuing his father, he died 01:59:39

well, why? well, he is a jackass puppet, and maybe he was supposed to die if he rescued his father 01:59:41

because that insufficiency that characterized him 01:59:47

is something that's descroyed by the process of encountering the chaos 01:59:51

which was so difficult it reforms the personality 01:59:56

and the same occurs when he rescues his father and incorporates that, so it's like... 01:59:59

Bilbo in the first part of the... what is it called? The Lord of the Rings... The Hobbit! 02:00:06

he's this sort of jackass puppet guy, little overprotected Shire-dweller at the beginning 02:00:16

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 02:00:22

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 02:00:30

and so... 02:00:38

you see in the Harry Potter series, too, at the very end 02:00:43

Potter dies, and then is resurrected, right, that's... 02:00:47

and that actually happens to a slightly lesser degree in the second movie 02:00:51

where the resurrection is aided by the phoenix tears, after he gets eaten by the... or he gets chomped by that big snake 02:00:56

which is, roughly speaking, the same thing that's happening here 02:01:02

sorry about that 02:01:05

okay, so anyways, Pinokio's dead, that's not good 02:01:07

so, the next scene we see them back at home, and he's lying dead on the bed 02:01:10

and Gepetto and everyone else are mourning his loss 02:01:16

and then we see this magic transformation, and we hear the Blue Fairy's voice 02:01:21

and so, it's like he's pushed himself to his limits, and a natural process kicks back in, and revivifies him 02:01:28

but now he's no longer a jackass puppet, he's actually something that's real 02:01:35

and so then he wakes up and he notices that now, you know, he's undergone this proper transformation 02:01:41

he notices his hands in particular 02:01:48

and then he tells Gepetto, who refuses to even notice; he says: no, no, kid, you're dead, lie down 02:01:50

so, you know, Pinokio convinces him that he's not dead, and then 02:01:58

in celebration they start the clocks again, and so time kicks back in at that point 02:02:03

and so, then they have a big celebration, music happens again, because this is a celebratory moment 02:02:07

and they dance, and the harmony's restored, the good old guy has his son, and so 02:02:15

the house is properly set up, and the old state has its vision, and its capacity for transformation 02:02:23

and the thing that transforms has the stability of the culture behind it, and so - perfect 02:02:29

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 02:02:34

and so, then she gives him this little medal 02:02:42

which is made out of gold, and it's a sun, and it's a mandala, all at the same time 02:02:46

and it's made out of gold, and gold is a noble metal, it doesn't mate indiscriminately with other metals 02:02:50

it doesn't tarnish, and so it's a metal that represents the sun; and he flashes his little badge at the Star 02:02:58

establishing a relationship between his function as the proper conscience and his orientation towards the highest good 02:03:06

and that's it there, so he's got this little sun, he's wearing his little sun 02:03:14

so he's also transformed and developed as a consequence of this entire process 02:03:19

no Pinokio's conscience is properly oriented 02:03:24

it's oriented towards the highest value; and then the movie closes 02:03:28

and that's "Pinokio" 02:03:34

so, I'll give you a minute, and I'll take some questions, and try to figure out how to shut my phone up 02:03:45

so does anybody have any questions? yes -> 02:03:58

[student] you seem to have a vaguely psychoanalytic approach to kind of extracting the inarticulated messages 02:04:03

from the mythologies and the stories and religion that's developed over time 02:04:10

so could you almost say that those are kind of constructing this to a societal level out of the individual level 02:04:14

that these are kind of the dreams of the collective unconscious? 02:04:22

[Peterson] sure, that's exactly what they are 02:04:25

they're the fantasies of the collective unconscious, that's one way of looking at it 02:04:28

I mean, they also take a socially determined form 02:04:32

right, because it's animated, and that's a technology, and it's obviously something that exists in a particular time and place 02:04:37

but yeah, they're... it's a collective attempt to give voice to the oldest of behavioral patterns 02:04:47

and so, here's one way of thinking about that 02:04:53

which we'll talk about in some detail, which you should have read about, at least to some degree, already 02:04:56

the question is: where is that knowledge represented? 02:05:01

and Jung would say, well it's part of the collective unconscious, and it's got a biological origin, but 02:05:05

his description of the biological nature of the collective unconscious is quite ambiguous 02:05:13

and I think that that's because it actually is ambiguous, like 02:05:21

for example, we know that primates, and humans in particular, are at least biologically predisposed to be afraid of snakes 02:05:24

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 02:05:34

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 02:05:41

so that would take place as a consequence of your experience, so it's not purely biological, although 02:05:49

it is the case that snake fear tends to become more intense as you get older, which is not necessarily what you would expect 02:05:55

and the... I just read a paper this week, localizing snake fear in primates, and it was hypothalamic 02:06:03

it's really old, because the hypothalamus is a very old part of the brain, it's older than the amygdala 02:06:09

and the amygdala is involved in snake fear as well, it's really, really old 02:06:15

so you could say, well, you're prepared to develop snake fear, like you're prepared to develop language 02:06:20

and like you're prepared to walk by your biological structure 02:06:26

now, whether that actually constitutes the contents of your memory, which is what Jung seems to imply 02:06:30

is an open question, but it doesn't really matter, because... 02:06:36

so, one time when I went to visit my nephew, he was running around in a knight suit 02:06:42

he was only about 4 or 5; so he's acting out this mythological pattern, roughly speaking 02:06:50

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 02:06:57

in fragments, and like 02:07:03

kids are pretty good in putting fragments of stories together 02:07:06

that's really what understanding is, is to put fragments into story form 02:07:09

and so, he watched Disney movies and his parents had read him storeis, and he did pretend play with the other kids, and 02:07:14

all of those were like exemplars of this underlying narrative 02:07:21

they're variants of it; and because he can abstract and generalize, he's pulling out the central features of those narratives 02:07:25

the heroic features, and then embodying them; so you could say, well 02:07:32

the central features of these narratives are fragmented and distributed across the entire culture 02:07:36

and so, they don't have to be exactly inside your head, they don't have to be part of your memory 02:07:43

they're distributed in the behavior, and the actions, and the stories of the entire culture 02:07:49

and they just... you can put them together out of that 02:07:54

so, and people do that, that's why they're so hungry for stories like... 02:07:58

well, like this one, or like Star Wars, or like Star Trek, or like the Marvel movies, or like Harry Potter 02:08:02

[student] yeah, what you said about the last scene, your son watching it over and over again 02:08:10

my little brother did the same thing with the last scene of the first Harry Potter movie, the guy with the two faces? 02:08:15

he watched that probably 20 or 30 times 02:08:19

yeah, that's really interesting, watching little kids interact... like those movies are unbelievably complex 02:08:22

I mean, you know, by the time you're your age, and you've seen, you know, several hundred of then at minimum 02:08:27

the impact wears off, but it's really something, sitting down with a four-year-old 02:08:33

who hasn't watched very many movies, and walking through one with them, I mean they're so turned on it's just... 02:08:38

I took my daughter when she was too young, actually... I took her to see "The Mask", the Jim Carrey movie 02:08:44

Jesus, I mean she survived it, I don't think I traumatized her 02:08:49

but she was sitting on my lap, and it was really like gripping a bundle of barbed wire 02:08:53

she was just like that the entire movie, you know 02:09:00

and half way through I thought: well, that's probably a little too much psychophysiological intensity for one small body 02:09:03

you know, but she... those movies, they just have a massive impact on little kids 02:09:09

and they will do exactly that, they'll watch it over and over, and over, and you think: what are they doing exactly? 02:09:13

they're trying to understand, they're gripped by it somehow 02:09:18

right, and it's like they're deeply curious, they know there's something in it 02:09:23

and they're trying to extract out what it is, and they'll repeat it, and repeat it, so... 02:09:28

they're hungry for the information 'cause it's part of rescuing their father from chaos, that's one way of thinking about it 02:09:34

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