https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=qzpsh4yGkJw
He’s out there in his little adolescent paradise and with his dopey chums and back at Pride Rock Things are not good, right? Scar, who’s arrogant and refuses to learn and who will not establish a reasonable relationship with the females All he does is tyrannize over them He ends up ruling over a completely barren landscape And that’s really what happens in totalitarian states And we also know, quite interestingly, is that one of the best predictors of economic development in a state is the degree to which they extend rights to women It’s one of the best predictors And I would say, well if you’re gonna tyrannize your own women, you’re gonna tyrannize everything You’re gonna tyrannize ideas, you’re gonna tyrannize structures Like, if you have to enslave your own women, you’ve adapted a pretty damn pathological view of the world And the probability that that narrow, constrained, restricted viewpoint is gonna pay off for you economically is extraordinarily low So anyways, Scar, it’s like what happened in the Soviet Union Part of the reason it collapsed by 1989 is that it just could not move any farther It was like this really complicated motor that was worn completely out that no one had ever taken care of And it just ground to a halt It just stopped working because it didn’t work And so, if you’re totalitarian and you won’t update your system and adjust it, then it wears out and grinds to a halt And everything becomes unproductive Now, it’s not easy to figure out what makes a society productive Because you might say, well it’s natural resources or something like that First of all, natural resources are very often a curse to a country Because they produce corruption They call that the Dutch disease There’s a reason for that You can look it up But natural resources in and of themselves are by no means sufficient to guarantee the well-being of a country Japan has virtually no natural resources at all And it’s really rich And one of the prime natural resources actually seems, maybe there’s two One is honesty Another is trust And if you can set up a society where people are roughly honest, which means they do what they say they’re going to do And where the default bargaining position on both sides is trust Then the probability that that culture will become wealthy is very, very high And a functional legal system is also a natural resource of tremendous, tremendous value It’s partly why people in China, for example, wealthy people in China are dumping their money into the real estate market in North America like mad Because one of the things you do know, if you buy real estate in North America, is you actually own it It’s still going to be yours 20 years in the future, 30 years in the future There’s no doubt about that And so that fact of ownership is embedded in the functioning legal system And that’s what gives those sorts of properties crazy value You know, much to the problematic situation for all of you people who are, at some point, most of you are going to try to buy property in Toronto And that’s really going to be entertaining So, now look, the other thing about Scar is he’s got the little bird locked up, right? That’s the vision of the king Well, he doesn’t want to know anything, he already knows everything So why does he need this stupid bird flying around telling him what’s going on? The last thing he wants to know is what’s going on Stalin, I mean, God, you gave that guy bad news or good news, he was going to have you killed It kept the bad news to a minimum And that’s a real problem, right? Because if you torture people who bring you bad news, then you’re never going to learn anything Well, you don’t have to if you already know everything anyways And so that’s the situation here Well, his little minions, the hyenas, are getting pretty unhappy because they haven’t had anything to eat And the reason for that is they’ve just stripped the landscape bare Right? I mean, and I read at the demise of the Soviet Union that something like 10-15% of the entire landmass of the Soviet Union had been rendered permanently uninhabitable by industrial pollution So, you know, I don’t remember if that included Chernobyl, you know, where that terrible nuclear accident took place But there were massive domains of devastation in those countries that will take hundreds of years to fix So anyways, when scar rules, everyone starves That’s a good way of thinking about it, or everyone dies, but that’s okay because that’s really what he’s after anyways So that works out quite nicely Now back out here in paradise, I mean, look at him, how pathetic can you get? Look at the expression on that creature’s face You know, he’s sated like someone who’s just eaten a gallon of ice cream And he’s got this pathetic, self-satisfied, naive, clueless, unconscious grin on his face Which the animators did a very nice job of capturing, like that’s a complicated expression And you just want to slap him, and that’s exactly what should happen, and that’s exactly what does happen So anyways, he’s out there being an unconscious dingbat Well, his society is degenerating, and that’s bloody well worth thinking about Because that’s an archetypal trope, right? It’s like things are sinking around you The question is, what are you doing about it? You know, are you just staying in kind of a blithe unconsciousness? Because you can get your next meal, or are you going to wake up and do something about it? Well, that’s the call of the self, so now we go back to Rafiki here And he knows what’s going on in the kingdom, he’s a symbol of the self And he also has some inkling that Simba is still alive So the son of the king is still alive, despite the fact that the land has become ruled by a tyrant And the son is absent, he’s still around somehow And so, from the Jungian perspective, there isn’t much distinction between the self and the child The self is the sum total of all possibility, and the child is possibility itself And so, let’s say you’ve become an adolescent, and you’re all cynical And everything’s falling apart around you Which is the typical state of human beings, right? Because adolescents are cynical, generally speaking, and everything’s falling apart around them, generally speaking And so, what do you have to do in order to do something about that? Well, one is, you have to be drawn by the call of wisdom And the other part is that you have to rediscover that part of yourself that’s a childlike part That’s associated with the son, and associated with that early, you know, the early exposure of Simba to the son You have to find that again, and then trust that some childlike exploration and a bit of manifestation of faith might get you to the next place And so that’s what’s happening here with the little, you know, the baboon in the tree and the drawing So anyways, he knows that Simba’s alive now, and so he goes off to find him And meanwhile, Simba and his dopey companions are out hunting for bugs You know, because he’s a lion, you know, he shouldn’t be eating bugs for crying out loud, but they’re easy And so, you see this scene where Pumba goes after this bug, and then another lion shows up and chases him So she’s gonna kill him and eat him And, ha, see, that’s an interesting thing, because one of the things that happens I suppose you could think about this One of the things that happens in late adolescence is that the formation of male gangs is often broken up by the proclivity of one or more members of that gang to get involved in an individual romantic relationship And so the idea that the female lion is the carnivore, the female is the carnivore that will devour the group is exactly right And so what a girl will do often if she’s in a relationship with somebody like a young man or an older adolescent is She’ll try to separate him from his dopey friends, and like, no wonder, you know, why wouldn’t she do that? Because he does have dopey friends, and it’d be better for him if he could get beyond them And so anyways, they’re pretty freaked out about this And so then Simba goes out and has a fight with this lion to protect his dopey chums And I’m sure you don’t need any explanation about what that means And they have this huge fight, and Nella, who it turns out to be, pins him And so that goes back to the beginning of the story, where when he first encountered her, she pinned him all the time She’s an anima figure, right? And now what she does immediately is shame him So he’s an anima figure in part, she’s an anima figure in part, because she actually does shame him So she’s the gateway to higher consciousness, she makes himself conscious, and rightly so But she’s also a psychological figure, because imagine that when a young man is establishing a relationship with a young woman And he’s enamored, he’s falling in love, he projects an ideal onto her And that ideal is going to be partially fulfilled by the relationship To a degree to which is unspecified, and sometimes it’ll collapse completely But he projects an ideal onto her, because otherwise he wouldn’t be attracted to her And then the ideal judges him, and so that makes him feel all self-conscious and useless Which is useful, because he is useless, and should feel that way And so it’s part of the impetus to growing up And of course, you need necessity in order to mature you, because to mature is to take on responsibility And you’re not going to feel that impetus unless adopting the responsibility has some sort of payoff Women tend to mate across an up-dominance hierarchy, so they tend to actually like men who are useful And so if they encounter a man who isn’t useful at all, that’s exactly what’s going to happen They’re going to not be happy about that in the least And so, and no wonder, and I think the reason for that, it’s an economic and a biological reason The reason is that women are in the position of having to take care of infants primarily And an infant has a very heavy load And so even a woman who is extraordinarily competent is going to find herself substantially limited in her possibilities If she has an infant, and so then she’s looking around for someone who will pick up part of the load It’s perfectly reasonable, and you’re not going to pick up part of the load if you’re completely useless And so it’s in the woman’s best interest not to have two children, roughly speaking So anyway, she pins him, and then he’s all resentful about it immediately Because she’s calling him on his stupid friends, and the fact that he’s out there gallivanting impulsively in paradise when there’s real problems to be solved And so look at him, he’s all resentful and useless, and feeling put upon and picked upon You’ve got to slap him again fundamentally, and she’s just completely stunned by that And tells him, you know, where’s the Simba I used to know, right? He’s a little doubtful about the whole situation there The animators do a very nice job of this part of the movie, because one of the things you see is that his eyebrows are always pointing up in the middle Whereas his father’s eyebrows were pointing down in the middle, and so that’s the difference between this Which is sort of like, things are happening to me, and this, which is more like I’m imposing my will on things And that’s an immature face, and the animators capture that brilliantly So here’s where she shames him again, she tells him how much she liked him when he was little And you know, a potential king, and how hurt she is that he’s this useless, you know, wide-eyed, naive, impulsive, pleasure-seeking adolescent And she tells him that she missed him, and God only knows why, because look at him again It’s like, a completely appalling creature