https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=DSYjCgXKOXE
There’s this old story in King Arthur where the knights go off to look for the Holy Grail which is either the cup that Christ drank out of at the Last Supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified the stories vary, but it’s basically a holy object, like the phoenix in some sense that’s a representation of transformation so it’s an ideal, and so King Arthur’s knights who sit at a round table because they’re all roughly equal, go off to find the most valuable thing and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don’t know where it is? well, each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that’s a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality, which is exactly the same thing is precisely through the portal that you do not want to climb through and the reason for that is actually quite technical this is a union presupposition too, is that well, there’s a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things are because they’re things you’ve avoided looking at because you don’t want to look at them, and there’s parts of you you’ve avoided developing because it’s hard for you to develop those parts, and so it’s by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don’t want to look because that’s where you’ve kept it and that’s why there’s an idiosyncratic element of it for everyone your particular place of enlightenment and terror is not going to be the same as yours except that they’re both places of enlightenment and terror so they’re equivalent at one level of analysis and different at another so anyways, back to fiction and what it does it distills truth, and it produces characters that are composites and the more they become composites, the more they approximate a mythological character and so they become more and more universally true and more and more approximating religious deities but the problem with that is they become more and more distant from individual experience and so with literature there’s this very tight line where you need to make the character more than merely human but not so much of a god that, you know, one of the things that happened to Superman in the 1980s Superman started out, he’s got a heavenly set of parents by the way, and an earthly set of parents and he’s an orphan like Harry Potter, very common theme is that when Superman first emerged, he could only jump over buildings and maybe he could stop a locomotive, but by the time the 1980s rolled around he could juggle planets and swallow hydrogen bombs and he could do anything well, people stopped buying the Superman comics because how interesting is that? it’s like something horrible happens and Superman deals with it and something else horrible happens and Superman deals with it and it’s like, that’s dull he turned into such an archetype, he was basically the omniscient omnipresent, omnipotent god and that’s no fun, it’s like God wins, and then God wins again and then again, God wins, and you know so then they had to weaken him in different ways with kryptonite so green kryptonite kind of made him sick, and red kryptonite I think kind of mutated him, if I remember correctly anyways, they had to introduce flaws into his character so that there could be some damn plot and that’s something to think about, you know there’s a deep existential lesson in that in that your being is limited and flawed and fragile you’re like the genie, which is genius in the little tiny lamp this immense potential, but constrained in this tiny little living space as Robin Williams said when he played the genie in Aladdin but the fact that you have limitations means that the plot of your life is the overcoming of those limitations and that if you didn’t have limitations, well there wouldn’t be a plot and maybe there would be no life, and so that’s part of the reason why perhaps you have to accept the fact that you’re flawed and insufficient and live with it, and consider it a precondition for being it’s at least a reasonable idea so anyways, one of the main characters is the country, the known, the explored territory, we went over that a bit and it always has two elements, I mean, your country is your greatest friend and your worst enemy because it squashes you into conformity and demands that you act in a certain manner and reduces your individuality to that element that’s tolerated by everyone else and it constrains your potential in a single direction so it’s really tyrannical, but at the same time it provides you with a place to be and all of the benefits that have accrued as a result of the actions of your ancestors and all the other people that you’re associated with so there’s the good tyrant, or the bad tyrant and the good king, and those are archetypal figures and that’s because they’re always true and they’re always true simultaneously which is partly why I object to the notion of the patriarchy because it’s a mytholo… it’s the… what do you call that? it’s the apprehension of a mythological trope which is that of the evil tyrant without any appreciation for the fact that the archetype actually has two parts and the other part is the wise king you can tell an evil tyrant story about culture, no problem but it’s one-sided, and that’s very dangerous because you don’t want to forget all the good things that you have while you’re criticizing all the ways that things are in error that’s a lack of gratitude, and it’s a lack of wisdom and it’s founded in resentment and it’s very dangerous, both personally and socially I told you that Captain Hook is a tyrant because he’s got this crocodile chasing him and the crocodile has a clock in its stomach, and that’s death it’s like obviously, right? tick tick tick tick and it’s a crocodile, and it’s under the water and it’s already got a taste of him, so he’s being chased around by death and that makes him terrified and resentful and cruel and bitter, and so he’s a tyrant and he wants to wreak havoc everywhere and then Peter Pan, of course, looks at Captain Hook and thinks why the hell should I grow up to be a tyrant and sacrifice all the potential of childhood and the answer to that is, the potential sacrifices itself if you don’t utilize it as you mature and you just end up a 40 year old lost boy which is a horrifying thing to behold it’s almost as if you’re the corpse of a child the living corpse of a child because who the hell wants a 6 year old 40 year old? you’re a little on the stale side by that point and not the world’s happiest individual so, you know, your potential is going to disappear because you age anyways, and so you might as well shape that potential in a particular direction and at least become something no matter how limited, rather than nothing so you know, Peter Pan, that’s a great story it’s a great mythological story so well, so let’s talk about tyrants well, not only are they mythological figures but they exist, and they tend to be deified I mean, Stalin was, for all intents and purposes God the Father in Soviet Russia although he was pretty much only the worst elements of Old Testament God who was, you know, constantly smiting people and wiping out populations and doing all sorts of things that seemed to be quite nasty but, nonetheless, you know, people worshiped him in many ways and he’s a representation of just exactly what goes wrong when things really go wrong when people stop paying attention and when they all lie because one of the things that characterized the communist state was that no one ever got to say anything they actually believed ever and that was partly because one out of three people was an informer which meant if you had a family of six people two of them were informing on the government about you and that included your own children and if you were an informer you were often amply rewarded by the state so that if you lived in an overcrowded apartment building with three families in the same flat and you informed on, you know, the woman down the hall that you didn’t like she got shipped off to the old concentration camp and you got her apartment and so that was a lovely society and it only killed about 30 million people between 1919 and 1959 so that’s what happens when the archetypal structure gets tilted badly when people forget that they have a responsibility to fulfill as citizens, as awake citizens who are capable of stating the truth and the archetype shifts so there’s nothing left of the great father except the tyrant and let’s not have that happen I mean the one on the right is really interesting because consciously or unconsciously you know, there’s Stalin surrounded by what is for all intents and purposes fire you know, he looks like, he looks like Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty when she shows up at Aurora’s christening you know, she puts her arms up in the air and green fire surrounds her, it’s like it’s like he’s surrounded by fire and there’s Lenin above him who’s like king of the fiery realm and that’s for sure so I mean all the terrors that happened in the Soviet Union didn’t start under Stalin they started under Lenin Lenin was, or Stalin was definitely Lenin’s legitimate son let’s put it that way