https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=OSiLUddcE6k
So anyways, Pinocchio is transformed into a victim and he’s offered this, he’s offered this identity and he takes it, now it’s partly because he’s deceived and manipulated but it’s also partly because the fox offers him the abandonment of responsibility as payment for as payment for adopting the victim identity so this is where his own lack of morality, let’s say, because this is all about Pinocchio’s development as a character plays a role in his demise so if I’m a victim then everyone else owes me something and I don’t have to take any responsibility, and so one of the things I’ve wondered here’s something to think about it might be that the sense of meaning that life can provide to you is proportionate to the amount of responsibility you decide to take on that’d be very strange if it was the case, you know, because responsibility, of course, is a kind of weight, obviously and it’s difficult to take on responsibility but if any positive emotion that you feel, and your control of anxiety, and the control over pain is dependent on the activation of these systems that watch you move towards a desired goal then the more complete and weighty the goal is, the more kicked there’s going to be in the observation that you’re moving towards it and you know, you kind of already know this because you’ll have observed in your own life that when you’re engaged in something that you believe in that the time passes properly you know, you can see this even if you’re maybe you’re reading a paper and it’s actually related in some intelligible manner to something that you want to learn so even though it’s difficult, you get engaged in it, you can remember it better, you can process it better and you’re not so likely to fall asleep, and you’re not so likely to want to find distractions, all of that, you can get into it and it would be very interesting if that was proportionate to the degree of responsibility that you’re willing to shoulder and I think you can make a strong case for that I’ve also often wondered, imagine you could offer people a choice here’s the choice, you could say, well, your life isn’t meaningful, the nihilists have got it right, there’s no meaning in your life and because of that, there’s no reason for you to accept any responsibility so you can live a responsibility-free life, and maybe one of impulse of pleasure seeking, but a responsibility-free life, but the price you pay is that it doesn’t get to be meaningful or you could say to someone, no, we’re going to do the opposite, we’re going to say, you can live a meaningful life but it’s only going to be as meaningful as the amount of responsibility that you’re willing to bear and then you might say, well, what would people choose? because everybody also always makes noises about wanting to have a meaningful life but if the price you pay for that is the adoption of responsibility, then it’s not so obvious that people would choose meaning over pointless pursuits if the benefit they got for choosing the pointless pursuits was that they really didn’t have to care about anything they ever did there’s no responsibility and that’s really what Pinocchio is offered and that’s what the coachman offers him, and that’s interesting because so far it’s been the fox and the cat, and they’re kind of two-bit hoods so the pathological pathway that they offer Pinocchio is not the worst of the pathological pathways but here, at least as far as the collective imagination that created this movie is concerned this is where you get to the most pathological form of, let’s call it temptation and that’s the temptation to engage in, to abandon responsibility and to engage in impulsive pleasure seeking short-term pleasure seeking so here’s the fox pretending to be a doctor investigating Pinocchio’s illness he makes some notes which is all just meaningless scribble, right, it’s like white noise and it doesn’t matter that the arguments that he’s making are completely incoherent and it doesn’t matter that he actually doesn’t know anything, what he’s selling is easy to buy and so Pinocchio buys it and by the end of the conversation with the fox, he’s pretty convinced that he’s useless and that he needs a vacation you know, this is an edible situation as well, which I touched on in the other lecture I mean, it’s fair, let’s imagine that you have a child that is a little on the neurotic side, so high negative emotion and maybe one that’s also a little bit on the sickly side, so has a variety of, let’s say relatively minor ailments, but the ailments nonetheless and so what that means as a parent, we’ll say mother for this example, because I want to use the edible example you have to make a decision all the time about exactly how you’re going to treat that child one decision is, well, I’m not going to, you don’t have to go to school today because you’re not feeling well it’s like, fair enough but do you make the same decision the next day? and do you make the same decision the next day? and let’s imagine that you enable the child to avoid responsibility as a consequence of capitalizing on their illness well then that’s not going to be very good for the child, the rule with a sickly child has to be something like I’m going to push you right to your limit because otherwise, how is the person going to figure out what they can do? and if they can’t figure out what they can do, then they’re not going to be able to make their way in the world at all and then that gets muddied very badly if you’re not exactly sure that you want them to make their way in the world maybe you’re just as happy because you’d be sitting at home alone if your child was there with you and maybe you’d be just as happy at some level if they never grew up at all because then they won’t leave and maybe that’s because you have a terrible marriage and you’re lonesome maybe it’s an abusive marriage and your husband has chased away all your friends and so you don’t have anything at all and maybe that’s because he didn’t stand up for yourself very well apart from the fact that he was tyrannical in his central nature and so then all those little warps and bends in your psyche are going to manifest themselves right in the background of every single one of those decisions my daughter had a lot of illnesses when she was adolescent and they were very serious and it was very difficult to figure out what to do about that because you couldn’t exactly apply normative rules, right? and we always had to figure out if she was communicating her symptoms to us how seriously to take those and the answer was the least amount of serious possible it’s something like that because we needed to know and she needed to know what she could do in spite of the fact that she had problems and one of the things I really tried to instill in her and I think it worked is that you don’t ever want to use your illness as an excuse for not doing anything not consciously sometimes you might not know, I’m not feeling well, what can I do? well you don’t know, right? because sometimes when you’re not feeling well you can do more than you think and sometimes you can do less than you think it’s not like it’s obvious but sometimes it’s obvious, you know, this little temptation flits through your mind and you think, well, I don’t really want to do what I’m doing today and I’m not feeling very well, so I don’t have to do it you do that a hundred times, then you don’t know how sick you are anymore and then you’re in real trouble because not only are you sick but you actually have, you’ve muddied the waters and so you have both problems then is you’re actually ill and you’ve betrayed yourself by using that as an excuse not to pursue your responsibilities and that, I think, if you do both of those if both of those things happen to you at the same time you’re in real trouble and it’s really hard not to have that happen so anyways Pinocchio gets enticed into believing that he’s a victim the fact that he’s insufficient is used as an excuse by the fox and the cat to offer him a trip to Pleasure Island and this is, I think, where the movie gets particularly dark and so off they go singing away they have to carry him so you could say in some sense he’s carried by the fox and the fox is the one who’s going to take him and the fox is the one who’s going to take him so you could say in some sense he’s carried by societal pathology and his own trouble he’s carried like a puppet off to Pleasure Island