https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=AdAdf4watJQ
Okay, if I remember correctly, we stopped with the clocks. That’s true? Yes, good. Okay, so one of the things I mentioned was that the emphasis on the clocks here is to divide time up. And the filmmakers emphasized time to tell you in some sense that we’re in the prosaic normal world. And then in a sense you could say that when the clock stops, which you’ll see happening, we move into a different dimension completely. And I think I mentioned when we went through this last time that Jung hypothesized, for example, that there was no time in the collective unconscious. What that means is that there’s a strata of knowing, I suppose, that you can think of as outside the normal stream of individual life. So it’s sort of superordinate. And here’s one way to think about it. So it’s pretty obvious that your personality can transform. So then you might ask yourself, well, what is it that guides that transformation? Because in some sense it has to be outside the thing that’s transforming. And you could say that the place that’s outside of that transformation is this place out of time and space that Jung is describing. And it would be, it’s the same place as a long time ago, you know, in a fairy tale, which refers to some, it’s like the collapsed past. That’s another way of thinking about it. Or you could think about it like the amount of time that passes when you’re asleep, as far as your consciousness is concerned. Because there’s no real sense of duration. There is if you, obviously if you wake up and remember a dream, but even dreams take extreme liberties with time. I’m sure you’ve had the experience where your alarm goes off and the sound is incorporated into the dream, and it’s as if the dream has been going on for a very long period of time and the alarm makes sense in the context, even though it may have only been ringing for a few seconds. Freud observed how much time could dilate and extend in dreams in his book The Interpretation of Dreams. It’s a fairly well-known phenomena. So we’re in time. Now at this point, Pinocchio has already got his mouth, so in principle he’s capable of speaking. So now we’re in time and then the next, we’ve got the created creature at this point. So you might think about that as the first stage of development. And the way I look at it with regards to this movie is that, you know, really the next time we see Pinocchio with Geppetto, he’s off to school. And so you might say that this is the moment that ends childhood, and that’s the developmental stage we’re at. He’s ready to launch himself into the world, or he is at least after this next scene. And so that’s where we pick him up in the developmental progress, his entry into the world. So obviously all this is signifying the transition into unconsciousness. Hey girl, you say goodnight. Go on. Now go to sleep my little mermaid. Goodnight. Oh, this is my idea of company. Solid company. Look at him, Figaro. He almost looks alive. Wouldn’t it be nice if he was the real father? Oh wait. Come on, we’re going to sleep. Okay, so at that point, Geppetto expresses his, I would say, the key element of his value system as a father. Or you could say the key element of his archetypal role as the good father, because of course the father is separated archetypically into the positive father and the negative father. And, you know, we’ve already established the proposition that your values guide your perceptions and actions. And so if Geppetto’s fundamental desire is to produce something real, well first of all we don’t know exactly what real means at this point, but we obviously know that it’s not merely a wooden marionette, because it’s contrasted with his current state. And Geppetto is resigned to the fact that that’s a highly improbable event, and so it doesn’t necessarily always occur. And I would say that’s a hint in the context of the movie of a variety of things, but one of them is that it isn’t necessarily the case that people get out of the marionette stage. So, now I think the thing that makes Geppetto a good father rather than a terrible father, a son-devouring father let’s say, is that he’s actually aiming at developing an autonomous individual. And so that also means he’s aiming to produce something that will transcend him and leave him, right, and that’s capable of operating on his own. It’s the very definition of a good father. And so that’s why he’s invested in this process so far. That’s his goal. And we know the background, we know that he’s a master carver, and it looks like he’s a good guy. He likes kittens and he likes fish, and he likes to sing and he likes music and he likes to play and he likes to make toys. You know, those are all, and his place is comfortable and warm and inviting and all of those things. So, you know, there’s a very maternal element to it almost, because, you know, the house is so cosy and so well kept. You might ask yourself, well where’s the feminine element? But you don’t have to wait very long before you get a clue about that. Now, what happens next is that the star that we saw at the beginning of the film, when it was shining over a scene that looked very much like a Bethlehem nativity scene, that star makes its reappearance. We already talked about what a star might represent, but we’ll go over it very briefly. You could say, well a star represents a light shining in the darkness, and it’s a symbol of value and purity and light and illumination and enlightenment, and it’s also something that transcends the horizon. It’s above the horizon. And what happens is that Geppetto wishes on this star, and what he wishes is that Pinocchio could become a real boy. And so, partly what the film is indicating through that ritualistic gesture is that the desire to produce an individual, period, or the forces that have to conspire to produce an individual cannot be brought about unless the participants in that process have elevated their value structure to something that’s beyond what’s immediately evident, and you might even say secular or earthly, or I mean I know those are all medieval terms, but that’s really the idea, that unless you raise your eyes above the normal value structure, you won’t be able to participate in this process. Now, you know, if we make reference back to the story of the Buddha, you remember when the angel comes to visit the Buddha, he tells his, sorry, when the angel comes to visit the Buddha’s father before the Buddha is born, he tells him that his son is either going to be a spiritual leader or a great king, and of course the Buddha’s father being a practical man immediately goes for the great king theory. He’s stuck to earthly desires, so to speak, and instead of looking for something that’s transcendent. And then you might ask yourself, well what constitutes transcendent? And I would say a variety of things that we’ll explore in the course of the movie, but one of the ways that you might conceptualize it is that it’s the difference between Horus and Osiris, or maybe it’s the difference between Osiris and the union of Horus and Osiris. But either of those ways, you remember now when Horus goes to rescue Osiris, he has to go back into the underworld and haul his father out of the depths, and his father’s down there sort of half blind and three quarters dead. And so the transcendent things, which is often represented by the eye, it’s also often, you see this in Christian symbolism a fair bit, so on top of cathedrals, you know, in the dome, often what you’ll see is tears of people, or tears of angels, and then at the top you’ll either see God the Father or Christ. And the idea there is that what that represents, so let’s say the logos, which is roughly equivalent to Horus, I mean, by the way, I think I probably told you this, but Horus and Christ share many, many features in common, you know, and the notion is that as the mythology of Christianity developed, it encapsulated a tremendous amount of the symbolism and story that was already present in the Egyptian myths and incorporated into the new religion. So, it’s not that surprising that they share parallels, but it’s very useful to know what the parallels mean. There’s a pyramid of power, there’s a hierarchy, but there’s something that stands outside the hierarchy that fixes the hierarchy and reshapes it and gives rise to it. Well, that’s exactly it. It fixes it and shapes it and gives rise to it. And that’s something that you might think about as roughly equivalent to the autonomous individual, because at that point you’re no longer a marionette. It’s also Piaget’s highest stage of moral development, by the way, because when children hit that stage, if they do, and not all do, instead of conceiving of morality as following the rules, you conceive of morality as following the rules when that’s appropriate, but adjusting the rules when that’s necessary. And so you start to view yourself not only as a follower of the tradition, let’s say, and not only as something that’s obedient, but also as something that has a say in what the game is going to be going forward. And so, we’re going to surmise that what Geppetto is trying to produce, since he isn’t producing a marionette, is something that has a certain amount of autonomy, and thus the right to interact as an autonomous being with his own cultural context. Now he knows that’s unlikely, and it’s also a transcendent wish. It’s sort of outside the dominance hierarchy, because one of the things you could say is, oh, you know, do you want your child to become an engineer or a lawyer or a doctor, heaven forbid, a psychologist? And in some sense, all of that is irrelevant in relationship to this more transcendent goal, because you can get to the place of transcendence pretty much through any disciplinary pathway. There has to be a disciplinary pathway, but which one doesn’t matter? What matters is how you conduct yourself while you’re on the disciplinary pathway. And so, you know, that’s an interesting observation too, because it’s another thought that radically undermines the idea of moral relativism, because the idea is, well, there can be many disciplinary systems, and so in a sense that bows to the idea of moral relativism, but there can’t be a situation where there’s no disciplinary system. And, you know, part of that is obviously that human beings are enculturated creatures, and we just cannot exist in the absence of a disciplinary system. And you might say we can’t exist well in the absence of an optimized disciplinary system. Okay, so, Gepetto wishes upon a star, and so he makes contact with something that’s outside the normative world. And well, we’ll see how that unfolds. See, Gepetto is also a little bit of a trickster, you know, and you saw that quite repeatedly. He makes Pinocchio fall over, he kicks his little cat in the rear end with the puppet, now he’s making him go open the window like he’s playing little tricks all the time. You know, and the trickster figure is a very complex and interesting figure. Jung described the trickster as a psychopomp, and a psychopomp is someone who mediates between conscious and unconscious life. And you can think about that in relationship to comedians, because what comedians always do and what jokes often do is reveal truths that no one is willing to face. You know, and the more extreme the comedian, the more likely they are to transgress social norms while simultaneously making you laugh. You know, you can see Russell Peters, for example, all he does is tell racist jokes, you know, and everyone in the audience is thrilled about it, even though they’re all there, in essence, identifying with their ethnic group. You know, he calls on the Arabs and then he makes fun of them and they all cheer, and then he calls on the Indians and makes fun of them and they all cheer, and the Chinese, and it’s a relief for everyone to get out of that sphere of the unspeakable. And it puts everybody in a place of transcendence, because for a moment they’re outside their ethnic identity, you know, and they can laugh at themselves as something that can stand outside of their own definition. And so a psychopomp is, you know, Freud also talked a fair bit about this with regards to humour, because he said, like slips of the tongue and so forth, you can often use them as doorways in some sense into unconscious contents. And there’s just no doubt about that. Like if you listen to people very, very carefully, they’ll make little jokes or little unconscious slips and you can see, if you’re trained to see it, you can see whole complexes of often terribly chaotic messes underneath those sorts of things. And so they’re portals, in a sense, into the underworld. It also is very strange, you see this when people talk about their dreams, I’ve seen this numerous times where I’ll have someone, what I do is I have people bring me their dreams if they remember them, they’ve written them down, and then I listen to them once and let my imagination start playing with them, and then I go have the person, they read the dream out loud, and I have them go through it sentence by sentence, and we do what’s essentially free association from a psychoanalytic perspective, you know, if they talk about, let’s say, a big box department store, I might say, well, what first comes to mind when you think about that? And they’ll have associations and that sort of lays out the cloud of concepts that surround that particular image, and so you keep doing that, expanding it, and I’ll throw in my associations as well, and then we have a discussion about how that might pertain to the current state of their life. It’s like understanding a book in some sense, or understanding a movie, and often though what’s so cool is that if you really, really listen to people when they use words to describe their dreams, they’ll use sentences that mean two things at the same time, and one will mean it’ll be a description of the actual imagistic content of the dream, and at the same time it will be a description of what that means. And people don’t even notice when they’re doing it. It’s so cool. You have to detach yourself and listen carefully because if you’re following only the semantics of the conversation, all you’ll see is the reference to the dream, but if you remember simultaneously that the dream pertains to their life, then you can often… I wish I had an example for you, but it’s so complex. I actually have dreams recorded from one client, about fifty of them in a row, all laid out, and we’re thinking the plan is to put that into book form and publish it because there isn’t anything like that. So there are these holes, portals, through which you can pass into an unconscious realm. And you know this. Look, when you’re having a conversation with people, you know now and then, if it’s a group conversation, now and then someone will say something that brings the conversation to a halt. Right? You could think of it as a non sequitur. It’s something that… so a non sequitur is something that doesn’t follow. And so particularly an unconscious person who isn’t following the trail of the conversation will pipe up with something that brings everyone to a halt. And the reason for that is that the person has just manifested part of their own unconscious structure at an inopportune time. And it’s like everyone’s on one story and then bang, another one comes to join it. And that person isn’t on the same wavelength, so to speak. They’re somewhere else. And you know, sometimes you can figure out where they are, and generally speaking that is far from pleasant. So you know, because as Freud pointed out, the things that you tend to keep unconscious are not the most positive things about you. At least you don’t think so. There might be lots of positive down there, you know, but you’re going to only get to it through the negative. So anyways, a trickster figure who’s playing tricks. The other thing I think… I had an experience once when I was remembering… I had a memory from when I was very young. My father had this friend who was Russian, a very good friend, who basically served me as a grandfather. And I can remember when I was very little, three or four, sitting on the floor on a rug between this man and my father with a fireplace going in an old farmhouse, very warm place. They had a very nice family. I really enjoyed going there. And my dad and this gentleman whose name is Nick Sideroff would sit and talk, and while he was doing that I would take my fist and try to hit his toes. You know, and while he was conversing he’d move his toes around, and so we were playing this game. And now and then my dad would say rather kindly, you know, inquire whether or not I was bothering him, and he would say, no, no, it’s fine. And I realized just recently that partly what he was doing with his tricks was sharpening me up, you know, because I’m trying to hit a moving target, right, and so he keeps moving it and that means I have to adjust… it’s a goal-directed activity training. You know, and I know with kids the more you… it’s like you’re whittling in some sense, or carving them. I think carving is the right word. The more you interact with them attentively, the more sharp and focused they get. And I can see people walking down the street with no problem, who I know were never played with, because they sort of lumber along. They’re sort of like… they’re like dough. They’re not carved and attentive. They’re vague and unshaped, and I kind of think of them as uncarved blocks. It’s a Taoist idea. Uncarved block is what the world is made out of before you encounter it. It could be anything, but it’s nothing. And so, and often I’ve also dealt with children in places like preschool where I can see the kids who are sharp and who have been played with. They know exactly… all you have to do is look at them with a little bit of a playful glint and they’ll laugh and they’re ready. Whereas the kids that haven’t been played with, they’re so pathetic. You know, I mean this in the literal sense of the word. You know, it’s unbelievably pathetic to see them. So you’ll sit down and the kid will lumber over kind of blindly even and sit right on your lap. You know, and it’s basically… maybe that’s a four year old kid, three year old kid. That’s like pre-toddler behaviour. That’s all they know how to do. You know, and so if you have a kid that does that, to go and sit on a stranger, they’re so desperate for attention they can’t even help it. But they’re so far behind the other kids can’t even play with them because it’s like playing with an overgrown infant. You know, and by that time it’s damn near hopeless. So you know, this use of humour and tricks and teasing and all of that, I mean it can get mean if it’s not bounded properly. You have to stay on the funny side of teasing. But if you’re constantly playing with kids, they sharpen up. And so that’s another thing that tricksters do. So I used to steal my daughter’s dessert all the time when she was little. You know, right from the time she started sitting at the table, which was about probably ten months old or so. You know, I’d try to get her to look out the window or something like that and every time she did it I’d take her dessert. And so she got very good at it after a while. She could tell when I was joking and when there was actually something there. And by the time she was about three I could hardly ever fool her. And soon after that she learned a new trick, which was if I told her to look at something she’d grab her dessert and turn and look at it and put it back down. You know, but I could really see this with probably to some degree more with my son than my daughter because he was an ornery little rat and very disagreeable, very disagreeable child. And I mean in the big five traits sense. And you’d lay down a rule for that kid and he would worry that thing to death, you know. Here’s the rule. You have to be in bed at eight. Well do you mean seven fifty nine? Do you mean seven fifty nine and thirty seconds? Or about seventy nine, you know, seven fifty nine and fifty seconds or maybe eight oh two or maybe eight oh five and just constant battling right on that edge to find out exactly where the contours of the social structure was. And a lot of that is also playing around rules. And if you’re ever wondering why your children are teasing you and bothering you because they will do that non-stop, it’s partly because nothing is more valuable to a child than adult attention and partly because they’re trying to figure out who the hell you are. And so because you’re the, you know, you’re the avatar of the social structure and so they want to know everything they possibly can about you. They’re not going to leave you alone. So well that’s all a comment on the utility of the trickster. You know the other thing a trickster does sometimes from a mythological point of view is trick you into behaving properly, you know, with humour or something like that and that’s partly why the trickster is a mediator between the normal domain of consciousness and the sort of transcendent archetypal realm. Oh, Figaro, look! Look! The wishing star! Starlight, starlight, first star I see tonight. I wish I may, I wish I might have the wish I made tonight. Figaro, you know what I wished? I wished that my little Pinocchio might be a real part. Would that be nice? Just think. A real part. A very lovely thought, but not at all practical. Okay so there was a couple of interesting things that happened there. You know first you see the cuts back to the cricket so it’s clearly that he’s clearly involved in this and he’s listening to see what’s happening. And then of course he comments that that’s not a practical, that’s not, it’s not practical. In some sense that’s exactly right because practical basically means instruction in how to climb a particular hierarchy. You know impractical means no instruction whatsoever, but there’s a transcendent practicality which is more like how to operate in the space between hierarchies. And so that’s more than practical. You could think about it as meta-practical and I think really the purpose of most religious education when it’s still grounded in its original material so to speak is to catalyze this meta-identity, its sophisticated being. Well I would say the best example I know is the story of Horace, but if you want to relate it to your own consciousness, so here’s an example. Sorry? No, no it’s more than that, it’s outside of principles. Because principles have already been laid down as rules, but rules have their problems. You know because once you formulate something in a static manner, you limit the number of situations that it can apply to. You know because we could say well don’t, never kill another human being. That’s a pretty good rule of thumb, but there are situations where it’s not tenable. There has to be something that operates outside of the rule framework that extracts out the spirit of the rules. That’s a way of thinking about it. Well I mean by principles it’s more like universal truths, like something that could apply to the process in all situations. That is what this is, but I wouldn’t call it a principle. It’s more like a process, and the process is tightly aligned with paying attention. Let me give you an example. You’re playing a musical piece. Okay, now when you’re practicing that piece, what you’re doing is building a motor hierarchy. You know, you start, it’s very difficult to do it, you practice and practice, and you’re automating these motor routines, and you’re driving the action from your whole cortex to the left hemisphere and then backwards and making these little micro machines that are specialized for these operations. But let’s say you make a mistake. Well you attend to that, you know, so that’s a trigger of error. And then what you do is slow down and analyze the motor programs that you’ve already programmed and you see where the error is, and then you correct it slowly and practice the correction and practice the correction and practice the correction. So what you’re doing in a sense is tuning the hierarchy, the automated hierarchy. And the thing that I’m talking about is the thing that pays attention to error, and that might be the best way of conceptualizing it. There’s something that pays attention to error, or there can be, and it’s also the thing that moves up and down hierarchies and tries to find the optimal level of analysis for correction and then does the correction. And sometimes that can be minimal, you know, when it’s down at the real details of motor output, but sometimes it can be revolutionary. Now I can tell you a couple of mythological rifts on that. So Horus is represented, remember Marduk. Marduk is represented mostly as the force that goes into combat with Tyomat. So chaos, but that’s fine. So chaos is what emerges when the social order is disrupted, threatened. In a minor way, he also organizes society and comes out at the top, because you remember, before he’s willing to go fight Tyomat, he forces all the gods to meet, to organize themselves and to proclaim him king of the hierarchy. So he’s two things. He’s the principle at the top, or the process at the top of the hierarchy, eyes and mouth, and he’s the determiner of destinies, which is explicitly stated in the Mesopotamian myth, and as that thing, his primary role is to go and combat chaos. Okay, by the time the Egyptians come along, there’s two major problems that are emerging as sort of archetypal, I would say. One is, while there’s still the underworld to deal with, that’s chaos, but the other one is the rot of previous structures, and that’s Osiris and Seth, right? Because you could think of Osiris as only protective. Your culture’s functioning, it’s protecting you from the terrible element of Mother Nature, and it’s working perfectly. But the problem is, it doesn’t work perfectly for two reasons. One is, it decays with time, because yesterday’s solutions are not necessarily appropriate to today’s circumstance, and it’s sped along by people’s unwillingness to attend to errors and correct them. Refusal to do that, and that’s refusal to make the proper sacrifices. So that’s what gets Cain in trouble, for example. He will not make the right sacrifices. Somebody kindly sent me another translation of God’s conversation with Cain, when Cain goes to complain about the nature of being. And God basically tells him straight out that if things aren’t going well for him, it’s his fault. And so it lays explicit stress on the idea that part of the reason that things are going wrong for Cain is that he’s not doing the right thing. It’s not only the arbitrary decision of God. So the thing that stands above, in some sense, is the thing that corrects errors. Or you could say that in a slightly different manner, because one of the things that I’ve been trying to figure out, in some sense, what might constitute the highest virtue. And I don’t think it’s an answerable question, actually, because there’s an interdependence of virtues. I think the primary decision that people make is whether or not you want to make being better or worse. That’s the pinnacle of any particularized hierarchy. So you’re always making that decision, better or worse, better or worse, better or worse. If you want to make it better, then the optimal tool you have is truth. And then if you’re in that hierarchy, the thing that stands above it, the I, let’s say, or the transcendent feature, is the thing that attends to error and repairs. And if you squelch that, which is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union, then the whole bloody system starts to shake. The psyche, because people have to falsify their experience constantly, never updating it, never repairing it. And then the whole bloody system starts to oscillate too, because you can’t voice your detection of error. Part of the utility of free speech, and this is precisely the utility of free speech, is that people get to voice their error detection. Now they might be wrong, you know, everybody has to figure that out. But if you stop people from objecting, then the system can’t correct itself, and it will become corrupt because it does that, but it will just careen off the path. So what Gepetto is doing, what he’s trying to do in generating a genuine individual is to produce an entity that’s related to the divine, hence the star, but whose function is to be socialized by the hierarchy, but then to repair it. Now that’s manifested most particularly in this movie on a couple of levels. First of all, Pinocchio has to make minor course corrections. He makes mistakes, and gets off the path, and has to return. So that alters his character. And sometimes in a way that’s a mixed blessing, to say the least, because he’s damaged by deviation from the path. So that’s one part of transformation, but this movie takes the transformation all the way to its logical conclusion, because in order for Pinocchio to completely catalyze his transformation into an autonomous individual, he has to go to the very depths, right in the bottom of the underworld, to the most monstrous thing, and it’s from that he rescues his father. It’s the same story as the story of Osiris and Horus. And there’s an idea there. Here’s the idea. You will not understand the value of your culture until you face the thing you’re most afraid of. And that’s what this story means. And it’s partly because you can’t tell what the utility of the ideas are until you experience a situation where the most profound ideas become necessary. And that won’t happen unless you face something terrible. So okay. Now you know what the movie’s doing is constantly hinting at what that transcendent figure is. And I would say what human beings have been doing ever since we became self-conscious was attempting to define the parameters of ideal being. And a religious story, Buddhism and Christianity, are very intent on specifying the nature of ideal being. And the reason they’re doing that is because they match ideal being against mortality. And they say, look, we face this terrible problem. It’s the one outlined in the fall. It’s the one outlined in the story of the Buddhist inability to go home again. It’s the same idea. There’s a mode of being that allows people to live properly and for society to be maintained in the face of that. The question is, what’s that ideal mode of being? And the answer is, we’ve been trying to figure that out individually and collectively ever since history began. And what we have as a record of that is the trail of profound religious ideas that we’re leaving behind us as we move through time. But you can’t understand why those are useful until they become necessary. So you don’t go deep enough. You don’t go deep enough into the underworld. So for example, your conception of good is pretty unsophisticated and naive until you know what its opposite is. And I’ve encountered a fair bit of that, I would say, in my psychotherapeutic practice, because a lot of the problems that I’ve attempted to solve that are rooted in an individual and then also in the family, because there’s almost no barrier between those two things. You know, it’s like Dante’s Inferno. You start at one level of hell, but it’s really not too bad. It’s sort of like vacation hell. And that’s like the outside circle in Dante’s Inferno where the ancient philosophers were. They weren’t Christians, so as far as the Catholics were concerned, they weren’t going to be in paradise, but they were sort of at the cheap Club Med version of hell. And then Dante takes you down, layer by layer, to the ultimate hell that’s at the bottom. In that hell, in Dante’s poem, that’s where the betrayers are, and that’s also where Satan, if I remember correctly, sometimes I get this confused with Paradise Lost, that’s where Satan, who’s the archetypal figure of evil, is lodged and immobilized right at the centre. And so the journey is down to the lowest level into the underworld to encounter the archetype of evil. And it’s at that point that religious stories start to become, the values that are put forth in religious stories start to become crucially necessary, because they’re the only thing you have that can fortify you against that level of catastrophe. And you know, partly what this developmental process is supposed to be accomplishing is the production of a personality that’s capable of doing that. So partly I figured this out in part because I did a lot of meditation on the things that I read about the concentration camps in Germany and in the Soviet Union, but things that were worse than that, because there are things that have happened in the world that are far worse than that, I think the worst things I ever found were the actions of unit, I don’t remember, 172, it was a Japanese unit that went into China. And it’s just like, it’s so terrible it’s traumatizing to read. You know, and partly what I was doing when I was going through that material was trying to imagine myself as the person who did that. And that’s no game, you know, like if you’re really imagining it, because you have to put yourself in the place where you could do that. And that’s a terrible thing, to realize that you could do that, to realize that that’s part of your character. And until you realize that, you don’t have enough motivation to mess with any ideas that are actually profound. It’s just too difficult, and unnecessary. So we’ll continue with this. Okay, so one of the things that appears to be the case, you know you have two hemispheres, okay, the reason for that appears to be that you need two neural networks in order to negotiate the world. You need one to produce stable models of reality, and you need another to identify deviations and then feed the process deviation information slowly into the system that imposes a stable view. Because, you know, I’m sorry I don’t have the details of this quite right, but if you train a neural network, for example, to identify birds, and so it learns how to do that, and to identify fish, and it learns how to do that, and you feed it a penguin, then all birds become fish. What happens is the anomaly blows the category structure, and so the category structure now ranges from fish to bird. And so in order to prevent that, you need a separate system that deals with exceptions. Now that’s what we have in our right and left hemispheres, roughly speaking. And what the right hemisphere does is identify anomalies and start to formulate a theory around them. That’s a fantasy, essentially. And then when you’re asleep at night, while you’re dreaming, the right hemisphere is communicating with the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere’s categorical structures loosen up, and you can experience that in the dream because things become somewhat irrational, right? And then the brain plays with how it might recategorize information in the least damaging fashion in order to incorporate this new information. And a lot of that’s a dream. So that’s what’s happening at night. Your brain is basically updating itself. And it’s a very important process. people of dream sleep, they become psychotic, and quite quickly. So it’s a non-trivial necessity. So now, this is complicated. So we’ve got this bug now, and he’s the only thing that’s awake, and he’s being driven mad by time. That’s what’s happening here. You’ll see his eyes start to move independently. And that’s a very common cartoon representation of insanity. And it’s quite interesting because one of the things that you see in schizophrenia is eye movements that are unconscious. And so it’s as if you’ve got voluntary eye direction fields at the front of your brain and involuntary ones at the base of your brain. And when you’re dreaming, the involuntary ones are the ones that are in control. And when you track a moving object, that’s also the involuntary one. So you can experience this. So if you put your finger up here and track that, it’s no problem. Smooth vision. Okay, now try to do that. Try to move your eyes that smoothly without having that thing to track. Try it. So you do this first. Don’t move your head, but just track it. You’ll see and feel your eyes moving smoothly. Okay, now put your finger down. Now try to move your eyes that smoothly. And you can’t do it. You go ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch. And it’s partly because the old eye movement system is more sophisticated than the new eye movement system. One of the things you see in schizophrenia is that the person is using voluntary eye movements, but there’s emergent grip of control over the eye movements by these archaic parts of the brain. And you can think about that as the emergence of the dream up into waking consciousness. And that’s associated with the schizophrenic symptomatology. So anyways, back to this bug. Okay, so what does the bug do? Well we know he’s associated with a star. We know he’s a tramp. And we’ve already covered the possibility that he stands for those things that bug you. Now one of the things that I would suggest is that, and this is a Jungian idea, is that those things that bug you are the portals both to the unconscious world or to the underworld, and also the portal to further development. And it’s part of an error detection system. So let’s say you walk into your house and you think, Jesus, that really bugs me. Why does it bug you? Well it’s because your anomaly detection system is saying, look, there’s something out of kilter here. This territory is not properly mapped or not properly groomed. You can make your map accurate by changing the map or changing the territory. Either way. And sometimes the thing to do is change the territory. You don’t remap your bedroom when it’s messy. You clean it up so that it matches the map. And so lots of times you walk into your house and something bugs you and it’s like, that’s an anomaly detector. And you might say, it really bugs me. Or you’ll say, it really bugs me when my mother does that. It’s like, yeah, go investigate that and see where you get. That’ll take you right down to the depths to find out exactly why that’s happening. And it might be depths in her, and it might be depths in you, or it might be depths in both of you. And sometimes it’s just a bloody nightmare to get to the bottom of that. Because first of all, people will block you at every level. The first thing they’ll do is say, I don’t want to talk about it. And then the next thing they’ll do is leave. And then if you chase them, they’ll tell you that you’re something associated with the scum of the earth. Because you won’t leave them alone. Then they’ll get angry. And then they’ll burst into tears. And then if you can still pursue it, then you can have a conversation. But hardly anyone ever gets to that point. Because you just have to be brutal to peck your way through those defenses. The only way you’re going to do it is if you’re more afraid of that stupid thing continuing than you are of the terrible conflict you’re going to have to have to fix it. And I don’t think you can be that scared unless you know what’s at the bottom. You think, that is not good. And if you know what not good means, then you think, hey, we can have a fight for a couple of days, man. That’s nothing compared to where this is leading, or to where it’s from. But people will rarely do that. You’ll see when you have your, you establish your intimate relationships, you know, this is a critical element of forging a long-term union. Because there will be things about you and your partner that bug each other. And those are places where your maps do not coincide. And sometimes that’s for cultural and familial differences, but sometimes it’s because one or both of you is deviating seriously from the proper script. And those are hellacious fights. You know, and those are the sorts of things that happen when someone gets really upset about nothing. You think, that’s not about nothing. It’s just, it’s like the nothing is one hair on a camel or something like that, you know. You don’t have the damn camel without the hair, and even if it’s one hair, you know there’s a camel around. So okay, so anyways, what bugs you? Well that’s that anomaly detector saying something isn’t right. Now, you think about the things that could be not right. Could be the external world, it could be someone else and their value structure and their behaviour, it could be your value structure and behaviour, and when the thing that comes up that bugs you hits, you don’t know which of those it is. And one of your tendencies is going to be to say, it’s the outside world or that other person. Because the last place you want to look is inside. And that’s part of the reason that I find, increasingly find university campuses intolerable. Because the default theory, when something isn’t right, is that it’s someone else’s fault. And I think that is pathological beyond belief. Because the step from someone else’s fault to they should be punished for that is trivial, it’s insignificant. So, you know, the default position might be, it’s your god damn fault. Find where you went wrong and fix it. And you might say, well how can I be at fault? Think about it for an hour, you’ll figure it out. Here’s a very useful technique if you’re fighting with someone that you love. You hit an impasse, man, you can’t get anywhere. You’re misunderstanding each other. And your tempers are flaring, and maybe it lasts for a week, it’s not entertaining. You go sit on your bed and you think, alright, I probably did something stupid in the last three years that set me up for this somehow. And if you just allow yourself to imagine, your memory will take you to some bloody idiotic thing that you did that might seem to be only tenuously related to the current circumstance, but maybe it’s the best you can offer. Maybe you’re only 5% at fault. Well then you go tell the person, well I was thinking about this and it seems to me that I set this up like this. And then they’re all shorted out because, you know, you’ve admitted fault and then that maybe allows them to admit fault. They don’t have to drive the spike home and then you can often have a dialogue. But you don’t get the dialogue until you’re willing to see yourself as a contributor. You know, and the alternative, and this is a terrible alternative, is that you win the argument with your partner. Well good luck with that because all that will do is make the person who’s better at formulating the arguments the tyrant and the person who’s worse the slave. And then you’ve got to decide, well is the slave what you want as a partner? And maybe the answer is yes. You know, it could easily be because Geppetto could have just as easily picked the puppet over the boy. So, there’s this, so this, the thing that bugs you, you could think about that as a moral responsibility and so maybe you go to work and something bugs you and you think, well I can just ignore that. It’s like, don’t be so sure. Your whole damn brain is telling you there’s a hole there. There’s a hole in the fabric of being and something terrible is going to come out of it unless you do something about it. And you can say, well I’ll ignore that, but all that happens is the hole grows and the monsters inside of it get bigger and you get weaker. And so eventually what happens is the hole gets really big, you get really small, and something comes out and eats you. So you get fired or you get royally screwed over at work or something like that. Or maybe someone sets up a conspiracy where you’re implicated in something you didn’t even do and then you get fired and you know, it doesn’t have to end there. And it’s all because you didn’t pay attention to that thing that was bugging you. You know, maybe it was, you were supposed to say to some extraordinarily annoying co-worker to leave you the hell alone. You know, when it was still possible to say that, maybe even quasi-politely. So once you understand that your brain is an early warning system and the things that bug you are markers for holes in being, then it’s a hell of a lot easier to attend to them. Now, one more thing. When I first watched this film, or the first dozen times I watched it, I was struck by the concordance between Jiminy Cricket and the figure of Christ. And it’s weird because obviously Pinocchio to some degree is the infant saviour, right? But then you have the Cricket, his initials are J.C., he serves as the conscience, you know, he’s a moral guide. So they’re kind of intertwined in a very weird way. And when I was thinking about the Cricket as the voice of value, you know, I kind of thought about it as an omniscient voice, as a divine voice. But that’s not how the film portrays it. What happens is, it’s so cool, what happens is that Pinocchio develops, his conscience develops. It’s like there’s a dialogue between them. So the conscience starts by just spouting rules. And you know, your conscience does this to you all the time. If you watch what’s going on in your head, you’ll see that it continually assaults you with doubts and questions about the validity of your being. But if you notice, and I’ve dealt with this with people a lot, a lot of the criticisms are sort of generic. You know, it’s like a chattering critic. And you can ignore a lot of it once you learn how because, you know, like the criticism, you’re no good. That’s useless. It’s so low resolution, you just can’t do anything with it. What the film indicates, and this is a very sophisticated idea, is that as you start making moral judgments, the first judgments you make are going to be low resolution and generic. They’re going to be cliched. But as you attempt to hone yourself, and maybe you start fixing the errors in your mode of being, then your ability to detect errors gets better and better and finer and finer. And so at some point, you get to the point where you’re ship-shape enough so that you’re going to detect little deviations and jump on those suckers right away. You won’t even, no one will even notice that you just fixed a problem. And you know, if you read any Taoist writings like the Tao Te Ching, once you know what I just told you, read the Tao Te Ching, it’ll make perfect sense. Because the Tao, which is the pathway between chaos and order, the Tao is what you’re supposed to follow, and the Tao is exactly what allows you to avoid conflict without anybody even noticing it. You know, you just, you see the thing pop out when there’s nothing to it. You can just smooth it over, maybe even gently, and no one even notices that you did anything. So well, that’s something to aim for. That’s definitely something to aim for. And I’ve seen in my own life, the best path to that is truth. That’s the best path. And so part of what you might be thinking is that as you’re willing to face the things that bug you, sometimes when you intervene, you’re going to make a mistake. You know, you’re not going to handle it well. Maybe you’ll even make the situation worse. But one of the consequences of that is that you will learn something. And so the more you learn, the more you’re informed, and the more you turn on your capacity to creatively confront, the sharper you get and the better you get at it. So you know, it’s going to be like this. You know, at the beginning, you’re going to be a pretty wobbly system, because what the hell do you know about fixing things? But if you practice it a thousand times, or ten thousand times, or a hundred thousand times, you’ll get very good at it. And that’s exactly what this film portrays, is there’s this dialogue between the generic conscience. And you could maybe think about that as the superego, or something akin to the Ten Commandments, or something like that. General principles of value. There’s a dialogue between the individual and these general principles of value, so that the value principles are updated and the individual gets sharper and sharper. And I can tell you a mythological example of that. So there’s this scene in the New Testament. One of the things that happens quite frequently in the New Testament, and this is eventually why Christ gets crucified, is that he does moral things that are forbidden. So for example, there’s a couple of episodes where it’s the Sabbath day when you’re not supposed to do anything, and someone comes into the synagogue or the temple and their hand is all withered up and he fixes their hand. And then everybody, well he’s pretty freaked out about that whole fixing thing, but they also accuse him of breaking a divine rule. And his answer to that is, is the Sabbath made for man or man for the Sabbath? And that’s a very, you’ve got to understand that that’s an unbelievably revolutionary answer because the prevailing morality, and it’s always the prevailing morality, was follow the damn rules. And his action and response was, not when they don’t serve the purpose for which they were intended. And so there’s another explicit statement of that in the New Testament. It’s very, very interesting. So by the time this story emerges in the developmental story, the Pharisees and the scribes, so you could roughly think about that as the priests and the lawyers, a powerful clique, are already they already want to get rid of this guy. And they’re trying to trap him into saying something that’s outright heretical so they can lock him up or kill him. And so the lawyers are always coming around pestering him with complex ethical ideas in the hope that he’ll trip up and make a mistake. And so one of the things they ask him is, which of the Ten Commandments is the most important? And that’s a, you know, that’s a hierarchy of principle question. Well no matter what he says, he’s done. Because if you say one’s the most important, you say the others are less important. And so you can get hung out to dry on your argument. But that isn’t what happens. He says, if I remember correctly, love thy neighbor as thyself. And then says all of the commandments are emanations of that single principle. Just bypasses the question completely. Brilliantly. It’s brilliant. It’s a paradigm shifting move. And of course that makes the people who are pursuing him even more angry because he made them into fools and showed them how advanced his ability to debate was over theirs. And then there’s one other scene that comes to mind where, again, I think it’s in this situation where he’s being accused of undermining tradition. And he’s asked what his relationship is to the tradition. And he says, I didn’t come here to break the traditional rules. I came here as their fulfillment. And so it’s those sorts of things. You see those in these mythological stories and you think, I do not buy for a second that that was invented in any normative sense of the word. Those statements are so sophisticated that it’s unbelievable. They’re so sophisticated. Now I see them emerging as a consequence of a very lengthy development of mythological imagination and knowledge. But I just don’t understand. I cannot understand for a moment how that could have possibly been thought up. So at least not by a single individual. So the idea there too is that passing through the narrow straits of a rule system is one of the ways to emerging on the other side of the rule system. So that’s all with regards to proper relationships with the Great Father. You know the other thing too is that if you allow yourself to be passed through that disciplinary process, you also have first-hand experience of its errors. Like if you want to fix a system, unless you subject yourself to the system, how in the world are you ever going to know what it did wrong? You can’t just stand from the outside as an observer without having been passed through it at every level and say, well this is how it needs to be fixed. Like what the hell do you know about it? There’s no direct personal experience. So you don’t necessarily even have a right to comment. So one of the things Jung suggested, which I think is a mind-boggling idea, he thought you were always dreaming. Awake or asleep. That the dreams just went on continually. Like maybe not 100% of the time, but you were passing through dreams continually. And that what was happening when you were awake was that the sensory pressure of the real world was such that it just obliterated your knowledge of the dream. And then when you went to sleep, what happened was you shut off all your sensory input, roughly speaking, and then the sensitivity of your, what would you say, the signal to noise ratio changes so that the background activity of your underlying neural structures can start to manifest itself and you can detect it. Well that might be the dream. And I think there’s a reference to that here, where as night progresses, one of the things that happens to this cricket is that it gets so sensitive to anything. You know, it’s getting more and more sensitive as a detection device. And so at some point it stops time. So that’s pretty interesting because now all of a sudden this bug is the master of time. He can bring time itself to a halt. Okay, now we’re in a completely different dimension. We’re in the real world, so to speak, although it was obviously also a dream, like what’s that movie where you go through levels of dreaming? Inception. Inception, yeah. So the Pinocchio story is obviously a dream and then we go down a level to a dream within a dream and that’s what we’re in right now. Okay, so like what the hell? You know, really, a star, the star, comes down and turns into a fairy. It’s like, okay, no one has any problem with that. I mean, the cricket’s a little freaked out, but everybody else seems to think that’s a perfectly reasonable occurrence, which really begs the question, how in the world can you understand that you understand that? Because it’s not understandable. It makes no sense, like from a conscious or rational perspective. Okay, so here’s what’s happening. We notice that there’s a real absence of femininity so far in the story. It’s sort of implicit in the comfort of the home, but there’s nothing explicit about it. Now, you can think of Geppetto as the beneficial element of culture. And so, here’s a way of conceptualizing it. If the beneficial aspect of culture is put into place, the beneficial element of nature is called forth. And so, you know, I can give you an example, like if you have a neurologically damaged infant and that infant grows up in a chaotic environment, the probability that that neurological damage will result in severe behavioural and social impairments is quite high. But if you take an individual like that and you raise them in a stable environment, then they can often stabilize their nervous systems. And so you can see that there’s a dance between nature and culture as a child develops, and that if you set the culture up properly, then the child’s nature has the capacity to manifest itself in the most beneficial manner possible. That would be partly the facilitation of individual development, you know, because the child is a variant of a human being. And you want to apply a cultural structure to it, to the child, so that it becomes socialized and disciplined and able to do things, but at the same time you want it to manifest its particularity. So you’ve got to get the balance right. Well, Geppetto made the wish. It’s the right wish. So nature comes to the rescue, and in its most benevolent form. And it’s attractive and seductive. This is almost like, you know, Buddha’s father setting up all the dancing girls in the forest, because this figure is part of what entices people into life, but certainly entices babies into life. You know, the love that a mother provides is a seduction into life. And no wonder, because you need to be seduced into living. It’s too hard otherwise. You know, and if babies don’t have that primary relationship with their mother, they just fold up and die. Fed, warm, bathed, irrelevant. They have to have that relationship. So right away, you know, there’s a hint of the sexual element there. And so this particular fairy was modeled on a screen queen of the time, you know, a woman who was famous for her beauty. And you know, there’s a nod here to something, which is that there are multiple elements of being that have nothing to do with rationality, that are necessary components of the nature that entices you into life. And one of those primary sources of energy, obviously, and delight and motivation and all of those things is sexuality. And as Freud pointed out, it permeates all levels of human endeavour. And you know, we have some trouble with that. Because you know, sexuality is such a powerful force that wherever you introduce, it’s like a divine force. It produces rifts in the cultural structure, you know, hence all the continual debate about sexual harassment and so forth in the workplace, you know. And so there’s the normative day-to-day cultural things that are supposed to be occurring, narrow and goal-directed, and the consistent, you know, eruption of sexuality into that. Well, and you could say, well, that should just be stopped. It’s like, be careful what you say. Do you really want to stop it? Well, you think, yeah, it gets out of hand really fast. It’s like, yeah, it does. But so do attempts to suppress it. So you know, you’re stuck with it. It’s an unalterable element of life’s complexity. And it’s also something that pulls you forward into life. So you can’t imagine the level of tyranny that would be necessary to eradicate all sexual interactions from the workplace. Everyone would wear a uniform. Everyone would have their hair exactly the same. No one would ever wear makeup. You know, you’d have to be rendered as neutral as possible. And even that wouldn’t do it. But that would be the start of doing it. To have your wish come true. Little puppet made of pine. Wait. The gift of life is done. Phew. But they can’t do these things. See, Young would regard that little blue fairy as an anima figure. An anima means soul. And so there’s an idea here that the masculine great father sort of constructed the structure. That’s Pinocchio. And he’s the nuts and bolts of the individual as a cultural construct. And then this sort of divine and enticing feminine spirit breathes life into it. And so, you know, there are situations where that causal sequence could be reversed depending on what was being exemplified or amplified. But that’s what’s happening here. So he wakes up and he becomes self-conscious pretty much immediately. Move. I can talk. I can walk. Yes, Pinocchio. I’ve given you life. Why? Because tonight, Geppetto wished for a real boy. Am I a real boy? No, Pinocchio. To make Geppetto’s wish come true will be entirely up to you. Up to me? Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish, and someday you will be a real boy. A real boy? There’s a variety of extraordinarily complex things going on here. You know, one of the things you’ll hear constantly bandied about in a quasi-scientific community is the role of nature and nurture. So we could say, archetypically, for our purposes at the moment, in this film, nurture is being represented by Geppetto because he’s constructing things, and nature by the fairy. So you could say, well, nature, nurture, the role of biology versus culture. Well, it’s an interesting ideology, we’ll say, because it makes a proposition, and the proposition is that’s the only two causal elements that are operating. Right? Nature, culture, mother, father, let’s say, roughly speaking. Then you ask yourself, well, where the hell’s the individual in this equation? And the answer is nowhere at all. Because there’s no causal role for the individual in a scientific psychology. It’s either nature or nurture. Now the film, weirdly enough, has a theory that’s, I would say, is more sophisticated than that. It says nature’s necessary, culture’s necessary, and it would be best if they were optimized so you get a head start, for example, if your father actually loves you and so does your mother. Fair enough. But that isn’t sufficient in and of itself to produce an individual who inhabits the transcendent zone. There’s actually choices that have to be made. Now I would say our entire culture is predicated on the idea that people actually make choices. Our culture is predicated on the idea of individual responsibility and choice. So we recognize that in our legal system, and we recognize it in our individual interactions, you always treat people around you as if they could have chosen something different. You know, unless they can make a really strong case that they couldn’t. And then you say, oh well, you know, then you’re not responsible for it. You know, I was in a court case at one point, and the person who was on trial had been forced to help kill someone with a rock after she’d been stripped naked and threatened with death and rape. And it was a credible threat because she’d already watched the people that were threatening her beat someone 95% to death. And so she dropped a rock on the guy. And there’s a rule in law that no matter what duress you’re subject to, you don’t get to do that. But she got there accidentally. She just blundered into the situation. She was a single mother and also very worried that if she got killed, who the hell was going to take care of her kid, and well and so forth. But you know, the court eventually found in her favour, and the reason for that was that the court, that was the first time in English common law history that that had ever happened. But the court decided that under those circumstances, she wasn’t acting as in, she had no will. Like the circumstance was so compelling that she did what you would expect someone to do. Because the law is also, by the way, optimised for the average individual, not for the hero. The law does not demand of you that you act like a hero, and thank God for that. So if someone says, look, I couldn’t help it, and then you believe that, you don’t judge them. But if they can’t make that case, your automatic presupposition is you could have done something differently. And you might ask yourself, to the degree that you’re an admirer of nature versus nurture, culture versus nature, or biology versus culture, why in the world do you believe that people have any avenue of choice? But you do, you act that out in your beliefs all the time. I guess this is where I would like to push back. I think, aren’t all human actions the result of nature versus nature? I feel like there’s no really evidence to suggest that. Well, you know, the problem with that viewpoint is it’s fundamentally deterministic. Yeah. Yeah, but reality isn’t deterministic. It’s probabilistic. And so you can’t, like, one of the things that quantum mechanics makes quite evident is that you cannot draw unerring cause and effect chains. But that’s only like in the micro scale. Yeah, I know, I know it is. I know it is. But we also exist at the micro scale, and I’m also not saying that what the movie is putting forth is true. I’m just telling you what it’s putting forth. Well, this seems non-random to me. Okay, well, yeah. We know what I mean. But that’s more like, if I hadn’t started this conversation, you wouldn’t have done that. So again, it’s the result of like… I’m not making a case for the ultimate validity of this viewpoint. Or at least if I am, I’m not expecting you to believe it. What I’m saying is that there’s a tension between this viewpoint, which is an archetypal and mythological viewpoint, and the scientific viewpoint. And you know, the way that a person would object to this viewpoint is by saying, hold on a minute. There’s deterministic causality at work. I would say in favour of this perspective is, we don’t act that way, and maybe we’re wrong, but we do not act that way. Why not? But then I would object, if it wouldn’t work, that actually indicates that it’s wrong. And that goes back to the sort of debate between Darwin and Newton. Yes, it’s wrong not objectively, but wrong in the sense that it’s not a good way to live. Sure, you could say it’s wrong pragmatically. You could say that, and that could be the case. You could make a case that we act as if we have free will because that’s the simplest solution to the problem. And you know, it’s a perfectly reasonable argument to say that. I don’t believe it, but as a coherent argument, it’s fine. It’s partly why there is such tension between scientific and mythological views of the world. This is a huge part of the tension. You know, part of it is evolution versus creationism. It’s like, who cares about that? That’s a stupid argument. But this one is much more difficult. You know, that’s determinism versus choice, that’s part of it. And there’s much to be said on both sides, and of course our deterministic models of the world are extraordinarily powerful. And we use them all the time. So we also act out our belief in those models. So back to Pinocchio. So now he’s got his own voice. So that means, you know, partly what that means is that by the time you launch your child into the world, they should have their own voice. You actually see that developing in kids. You see that really developing when they’re about two, because that’s when they learn to say no. And like 50% of what a two-year-old will say to you is no. I used to fool my son because he would say no to everything. He’d say no to things, like ten things in a row, and then I’d ask him if he wanted some chocolate ice cream. And the first thing he would say is no! And then he’d startle a bit and think, wait, I actually do want some chocolate ice cream. But we know people call the terrible twos the terrible twos because that is when the child discovers its voice. It learns how to push back. And so it’s dependent, then it’s oppositional, then it starts to become cooperative. You know, and you want the child to be a nice balance between oppositional and cooperative roughly by the time they hit three, and for sure by the time they hit four, because if they don’t do it by the time they hit four, it’s like the crucial developmental period in many ways has passed. Or you’re too stupid to learn how to interact with your kid, and it basically boils down to the same thing. So now he has his voice and he has some limited autonomy. And the first thing the blue fairy tells him is that he has a moral adventure in front of him, and that it’s going to involve following some rules. And they’re pretty prosaic and stereotypical rules, you know, they’re like a lecture from your maybe not so favourite aunt or something like that. So he’s kind of a loudmouth at this point, and he hauls himself up a little podium to speechify from. And one of the things you’ll see is his voice is quite patronising and phony, and it’s also very hard to listen to him. Like the next five things he says, they have no life in them, they’re boring. And that’s because they’re basically dead rules. They’re necessary, but they’ve got no spirit in them. And he’s also got this pointing thing going on, you know, so he’s like a hectoring superego type of creature. And he’s too dumb to stay out of the situation, right? He leaps into it, you know, without even thinking really. And so it’s a good commentary on your conscience, because that damn thing can drive you crazy. And the thing is, even though it’s necessary and partly right, it’s also destructive and not completely right. So you know, that makes it very difficult to know how to relate to it. I doubt you Pinocchio’s conscience. Lord High Keeper of the knowledge of right and wrong. Counselor in moments of temptation and guide along the straight and narrow path. Arise, Sir Jiminy Cricket. Where? Oh, I know. Say, that’s pretty swell. Gee, thanks. But don’t we get a badge or something? No, we’ll see. Maybe a will. I shouldn’t wonder. Make it a go. Maybe. None of them. Okay, so again, a variety of very complex things happens there. First of all, the conscience undergoes a transformation at the same time as the boy does. And so I think the way of thinking about that is that it’s something like, you know, obviously human beings are predisposed to learn language, whatever that means. One of the things that infants do when they’re in their crib, you’ll hear them babbling. And they’re playing with sounds. And I don’t know if you know this, but an infant babbles every human phoneme. So there’s different phonemes, speech elements, in different languages. One interesting difference, say, is between many Asian languages and English, there’s no distinction between the R sound, er, and the L sound in many Asian languages. And so often Asian people can’t even hear that difference, and they certainly can’t say it. And there’s lots of sounds that English speakers have a hard time with. Many sounds in Asian languages, lots of sounds in German. You know, there’s throat sounds that are kind of guttural, and then there’s click languages. And you know, there’s all sorts of things that not only can you not say by the time you’re an adult and trained in one language, but you can’t even hear them. Now the child is sitting there babbling in every single phoneme, which is amazing. It’s as if it knows the units of every possible language. And then what happens is it loses the ability to emit phonemes that aren’t of that language. It’s so… it’s not what you’d expect, man. You’d expect that it doesn’t know a damn thing, and that it learns the particular phonemes, not that it knows every phoneme and then loses the ability. That’s very peculiar. Okay, so you could say in some sense that the child has a low resolution, broad adaptation to possible languages. Then I would say, well the same thing comes with regards to conscience. The child has the inbuilt mechanism for conscience. You know, and it could be developed in a very large number of specific ways. You know, they fit within a universe of potential, what would you call, playable moral games. So it’s not unbounded, it’s not infinite, but it’s large. And then, so the child comes equipped with that, and then what happens is that as it’s enculturated, the conscience starts to pick up the specific rules that underlie that culture’s mode of social interaction. And that’s sort of the generic conscience, and so that’s what it is at this point. You know, it’s been well developed, that’s why it’s got this sort of rich nature. It’s not fully developed, it knows that itself, that’s why it still wants the damn gold badge. It’s a lot better than it was when it was just a tramp that had been everywhere, right, because now it’s specifically allied with an individual. And so that’s interesting too, because the movie posits that the conscience requires the individual to develop just as the individual requires the conscience to develop. It’s a very cool, very sophisticated idea. And so now they’re both set out fundamentally to learn. Now the conscience is a little wiser because in some sense it’s been everywhere, right? Well that was partly why it was a tramp to begin with. But also the interesting thing too is that it doesn’t have full control over the individual. You know, and that’s a strange thing too, because it’s also not what you’d expect from a purely deterministic system. You know, a deterministic system you’d think would be bound by the rules. Well maybe we are in a very complex way, but certainly not in any simple way that’s ruled to behaviour. You know the rules, but you don’t have to follow them. Well… Ruknokul, be a good boy, and always let your conscience be your guide. Goodbye, my lady. Goodbye. Bad, says I. Oh yeah, almost forgot about you. Well, hello. Maybe you and I had better have a little heart-to-heart talk. Why? Well, you want to be a real boy, don’t you? Uh-huh. All right. Sit down, son. Now you see the world is full of temptations. Temptations? Yeah, temptations. They’re the wrong things that seem right at the time. But even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time, or vice versa. Uh-huh. Hmm. I understand. Ah. But I’m going to write. I’m a boy, you know, and I’m going to help you. So there’s a nice little philosophical conundrum there. It’s quite sophisticated. Even the conscience can’t state explicitly the rules of the game. So much of it is implicit. Now he’s kind of narcissistic at this point, and thinks he knows a lot more than he does know. When he tries to articulate the rules, he finds that he doesn’t know them, and even if he did, the thing to which they’re being articulated cannot follow them at an articulated level. And what that really means is people do this with their two-year-olds all the time. They explain the rules to them. It’s like it’s virtually pointless. Because a two-year-old, they don’t. They aren’t governed by rules. Adults aren’t governed by rules. Why in the world would you ever expect a two-year-old to be guided by rules? And they certainly can’t articulate them. You know, now if you’re careful, there’s certain things that you can articulate for a two-year-old, but explaining complex moral concepts to them is, that’s just not how they learn how to behave. They learn how to behave by bugging you, roughly speaking, and seeing what happens. But not only that, they come for comfort and they laugh. Like they’re charting the interactions constantly and extracting out the rules. They’re learning it through experience, and that’s basically what happens here. The conclusion for the conscience and the puppet is, well, we have to learn through experience. It’s something that has to be acted out, not explained in an articulated way. We’ll skip the little song. Okay, so now it’s the next morning. So, you know, you can see by his behaviour that he’s been raised well because he’s very enthusiastic, hence the hopping around, you know, and he’s not powering. You could also say, well, he’s got the temperament for it, fine. He’s not cowering, you know, afraid of the world. And Geppetto isn’t going to walk him to school. You know, Geppetto is courageous enough, we could say, but also confident enough in Pinocchio’s capacity at this point to say, okay, you know, you’re going to manage it. And it’s not like he’s naive and figures that there’s no danger. That’s not it at all. It’s that he feels that the child has developed enough so that the next logical step is to allow him some freedom of choice in the actual world. So that’s what he proceeds to do. Another sign that he’s a good father. He’s not… Pinocchio isn’t caught in an eatable family that won’t let him go. It’s encouraging him to move out into the world. Be a boy’s kid. But hurry now. Oh, we’re going to be brave with you. Here’s an apple for a teacher. Now turn around and let me look you over. What? Oh, yeah, yeah. Here. Right in the mouth now. And he doesn’t forget to give you my book. Come back here, big girl. School is not for you. Bye, father. Goodbye, son. Bye, Mike. Ah, can you hear this? The very last of your little innocent children bending their way to school. Those still little mice rushing to the fountain of knowledge. School. A noble institution. What would this stupid world be without… Well, well, well. Stromboli. So that old rascal. So this fox is, well, cynical and shallow at the same time. And all he ever does is lie. So every single word is a lie. And you can tell that in the falsity of his voice. So… Who’s back in town, eh? Remember, Giddy, the time I tied slings on you and passed you off as a puppet? We nearly put one over on that old gypsy that time. A little wooden boy. Now for a wooden boy. Look, Giddy, look. It’s amazing. A live puppet without strings. A thing right now ought to be with a fortune or someone. Now let me see. That’s it! Okay, so because of long practice, these two are more adept at lying than Pinocchio is at detecting falsehood. Okay, so he’s still naive. And that’s not the same as good. He’s not good. He’s not evil. He’s neither. He’s just naive. And people often mistake naivety for good. I couldn’t imagine doing that. That doesn’t make you good. That just makes you naive. And so it’s definitely one of the direct threats of the world. When the puppet goes out, he actually doesn’t encounter like an avatar of Tyomat. It’s not a natural force. It’s not a crocodile. It’s not danger lurking somewhere that’s, you know, of the natural world. It’s the corrupt social world. So you could think about this as his encounter with Seth. Although these guys are like low-rent versions of Seth. You know, they’re petty evil. Shh. How’s that? No, no, stupid. Don’t be cruel. Let me handle this. Here he comes. Ah, yes, kiddie. As I was saying to the douches only yesterday. Oh, oh, how clumsy of me. Oh, fine, fine, fine, fine. Oh, I dare you to be sorry. Oh, my do. So he’s off to school. He’s got his book. So, you know, he’s heading straight towards the conventional path to knowledge and inculturation, say. And something trips him up. Well, we know how that works. And so what trips you up is chaos. And then, you know, chaos can manifest itself as many forms. And what it manifests itself here as is like low-level malevolence. So they’ve got plans for him that he knows nothing about, and all the plans are is exploitive. And so you could think about that as one of the canonical existential problems that people face in the world. And what happens is Pinocchio faces a number of canonical existential challenges. And they’re not trivial. Obviously, he’s no match for these characters, even though they’re like, you know, they’re pretty wretched as far as thugs go. You look injured. I’m all right. Oh, so you’re not? Well, then. Right discolour, I see. Look, Giddy, a man of letters. Here’s your book. I’m going to school. School? Ah, well, Giddy, it’s a thing you haven’t heard of, the easy road to success. Uh-oh. No? I’m speaking, my boy, of a theater. Here’s a wrapper. Bright lights. Fusing. Applause. Fame. Fame? Yes. With that personality, that profile. Now, you know, I actually think this part of the film is more relevant now than it was when it was first produced. I mean, you know, people were obsessed with fame at this point, but it’s nothing like it is today, where we have people who are famous merely for being famous. And part of the reason that they’re famous is because they’re like anti-stars in a sense. What they indicate to people, and this is partly why they’re popular, is that you can get to the top of the hierarchy of power and influence without having anything that distinguishes you whatsoever except maybe some random attractive feature. You know, and that’s precisely what’s being talked about here. And so it took me a long time to figure out why in the world was this film so critical of actors? I thought it was produced by Hollywood. It’s like they’re engaged in this dramatic game. So what’s wrong with actor? But it’s not actor in the actor’s sense. It’s persona in the psychological sense. Do you want to be the real thing? Or you want to be something who appears to be the real thing? It’s a lot easier. And that way you can attain all the advantages of status and power without having to have done anything that actually contributes to the system in which that kind of status and power is actually possible. So basically what you’re doing is you’re a simulacrum of competence. And you know, the Fox here is like that already. He’s cynical about school, but when he holds a book he holds it upside down. He has no idea what he’s being cynical about. And so you might think of this as the first… it’s not necessarily the first temptation, but it’s a first temptation. It’s the temptation of persona. Are you going to be really who you are, or are you going to be an actor? Well, Pinocchio obviously picks actor, and no wonder. It’s a convincing possibility. And that would be associated with Jung’s idea of development of the persona. But the persona is also a necessary thing to develop. So you can also think about this as a developmental phase. You need to learn how to act in public. And so if you learn too well how to act in public, well then there’s nothing left of you and it’s a catastrophe. But if you don’t learn at all, well that’s equally a catastrophe. So okay, so anyways, he’s suckered in by these guys. I’m David B. Dean, an actor’s life for me. A high-self-catered celebrity, a watching bowl with a diamond chip. I’m David B. Dane, an actor’s life is game. It’s great to be a celebrity, an actor’s life for me. To love, to be, to know, to be a good, good, good, good, good, good. Come on, move, you horrible thing. Okay, so the conscience basically tells him, it’s very interesting. You see this little, look where he is. Now, that thing in the background there. Well, I don’t know if I can even explain it. I’ll try to explain it. One of the holiest Hindu symbols is the Yoni-Lingam combination, masculine and feminine. It’s like a container and a felic cylinder. And it’s often in gold and it’s often the thing that’s at the center of a temple. And it’s a symbol for the original juxtaposition of masculine and feminine, the creative juxtaposition of masculine and feminine. Okay, so it’s also a symbol. It’s like a Taoist symbol. It’s also very similar to the Jewish star, which is a female triangle and a male triangle put together. And so it’s a symbol of the unity out of which valuable things spring, hence it being gold. Well, the cricket is speaking from that. And so you could also say that the conscience in some sense is the voice of the combination of masculine and feminine from a mythological perspective. And it’s trying to speak natural wisdom, or maybe it’s trying to speak wisdom that’s the optimal combination of natural and cultural wisdom, and trying to convince Pinocchio that this isn’t a good idea, but he doesn’t listen. So then he meets this Italian scam artist fundamentally who enslaves him while pretending that he’s doing a good thing. And you can see the cricket is not very happy about this. Where is that? Right there. He’s very unhappy about Pinocchio’s detour into cheap attention-getting. Okay. Yeah, so you see there the emergence of the tyrannical father, like in that explosion of rage. Pinocchio’s not acting his puppet part, and so there’s instant rage on the part of the tyrant. Now when he finds out that the crowd is happy about his now slave making a fool of himself, that that’s all so funny and that that can garner attention, that it’s all put away. And it’s certainly possible for children to be quasi-celebrities by acting badly. Like if you’ve been around badly behaved children, especially if they’re kind of professional at it, that’s exactly what they do. They absorb all the attention in the room and they do that by acting in a suboptimal way. It’s a terrible thing to see happen, and that’s exactly what’s being played out here. Their parents think they’re giving them freedom, but they’re not. They’re quite the contrary. Okay, so anyway, Pinocchio does his little act and shows that he’s capable of autonomous action. He makes a fool of himself again at the end. And then this scene, Geppetto goes out to look for Pinocchio because he hasn’t come home. And so now we’re back after the performance. Well, you obviously know what’s going to happen next. So he’s now become a prisoner of this thing that’s exploiting him, and it threatens him. And then of course, he’s kidnapped. So the cricket goes off to look for him. Oh, he’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. He’s back. Okay, so neither the conscience nor Pinocchio can make it out of here. And so they’re both trapped, because this is actually a very sneaky, difficult position to be in. All right. But… Oh well, it’s not raining anyway. Hey, that’s the Oregon. The lady. What? The fairy. What was she saying? What was she saying? Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. Hey, that’s the Oregon. What? What? Who am I telling? Are you about to tell her the truth? You know, there’s an idea about creative people that they have a muse. And the muse is often a feminine figure. And there’s a variety of reasons for that, but some of them were played out in this movie. But the idea to some degree is that if you’re out in no-man’s land in chaos, maybe you’ve broken a social rule, that there’s the possibility that you can garner something positive from it if your attitude is proper. And that’s part of what’s happening here, is that he encounters the positive element of deviating from the path. But there’s also something a little more subtle, which is the idea that your nature is robust enough to tolerate a certain amount of deviation from the proper course. You can tolerate oscillations back and forth into too much order or too much chaos without it completely undermining you. But then the movie also makes a point, is that that works best if you’re not falsifying your own experience. And of course this is the part of the movie that everybody who watches Pinocchio always remembers, is that when he tells a lie his nose grows, making the lie obvious to others fundamentally. And you know, the simple moral from the story is don’t lie. And of course that’s a primary part of the developmental sequence in the movie. Part of the problem with the lie is that it prevents you from repairing your own structure, because you deny the existence of the error. And what you do then is accumulate errors as you move through time, and if you do that long enough then all you are is error. And then you’re really in trouble because part of your conscience is speaking from the error-ridden domain. And so the more you pathologize your own internal structure, or say your relationship with the broader community, the less it is possible for you to rely on that inbuilt voice of conscience, because it gets pathologized too. And so you can imagine that as the development of a positive feedback loop. The more you tell yourself lies, the more bent your perceptions become, and the more the self-guiding mechanism, so to speak, inside of you becomes. So that’s the corruption of the self, and then the corruption of the state. You know one of the things Jung hypothesized was that people are almost always bugged by things that are also partly, that are connected in some important way to the social community. One of the things he suggested was that if you really fixed your own problems, you know the problems that announce themselves to you within your own personal space, if you took them on as your problems to fix, you would also be simultaneously retooling the social structure insofar as you were able to do that. Because there’s no only fixing you, you know, you change the social structure around you just by fixing yourself. And so what that also means is that to the degree that you fail to respond to your own knowledge of error, and this is what makes it so cool, this process isn’t someone else telling you that you’re wrong. It’s you telling yourself that you’re wrong. And so it isn’t failure to abide by the rules. Because the rules, while the conscience is the arbiter of the rules, they’re unstable, necessary but unstable. But the moral battle that you’re obliged to pass through is a product of your own construction. And so it’s as if you’re playing a game where you make up the rules and then cheating. Not useful. So now he’s given up. Back to nature. The other thing that’s happening here obviously is that he lies. He becomes less human and more wood-like. So hence the nose growing. So anyways, he learns that that’s a bad idea and the fairy gives him a hand and he escapes out of that, hypothetically having learned something. Now I want you to follow this. So you remember at the beginning of the movie when Pinocchio got his smile, you saw that negative male figure glaring at him. And then we saw the same negative male figure in the kidnapping gypsy, another harsh tyrannical male. And then of course there’s the fox and the cat. You’re seeing different incarnations or avatars of the negative great father, with I would say some contamination by the adversary. But we’ll just stick with the negative great father right now. What happens here is the actual archetype reveals itself. So you could think of this as a Dante’s Inferno model. Pinocchio is coming into contact with things that are more and more serious. And what you see here is the petty evil guys bragging about how remarkable they are to the coachman. Coachman’s a typical archetypal representation of Satan. So the coachman is someone who takes you where you don’t want to go. You know, it’s something that’s your placement within the confines of an autonomous force. So what you see here is they encounter the coachman. And the coachman doesn’t reveal who he is except in one place. And what’s interesting, so it’s all of a sudden he transforms from a mere character in the movie, so to speak, to the archetype itself. It reveals itself and then the gates slam back shut. And one of the things that’s very interesting is that that revelation is sufficient even to terrify the thugs. Because in some sense they have no idea what they’re messing with. You know, and they’re very narcissistic and egotistical and they think that they’re going to get away with what they’re doing forever and that they’re really not so bad anyways and that the people they’re preying on deserve it because they’re stupid and they’re full of rationalizations. But they get a glimpse of what it is that’s animating them and it terrifies them. And the dummy fell for it. Hook, lion and singer. And he still thinks we’re his friends. And it’s Tom Olipay. That shows you how low on his job is stupid. Hey, kitty? Oh, coachman? What’s your proposition? Will. How would you blokes like to make some real money? Well, and who do we have to, uh… No, no. Nothing like that. You see? I’m connecting, stupid little boys. Stupid little boys? You know, that this beauty wants one play of Game of Thrones. And she… And I fix him to Pleasure Island. Oh, Pleasure Island. Pleasure Island? What the law? Suppose they… No, no. There is no place. They never call men as boys. Now, I’ve got a coach to lead at midnight. We need the Crossroads. I know the Crossroads. No, sir. You always meet the devil at the Crossroads, right? As every blues singer knows. Why? Because the Crossroads is a binary choice, right? And there’s the right road and the wrong road. The devil always beats you at the Crossroads. So, and that’s where the coachman meets the boys. It’s a decision point. So, okay. So, something up isn’t… something is up that isn’t good. So, Pinocchio’s going back to school, and then he gets stopped again. That’s it. You are a nervous wreck. Go back to the… He still thinks we’re his friends. Too far. Bring him to me. Yes, chief. I’ll bring you well. I’ve got plenty of gold. Yes. No, sir. Nothing can stop me now. I’ll make good this time. You’d better. I will. I’m going to school. That’s a stuff, Pinocchio. I’d better be smart than be an actor. Now you’re talking. Come on, slowpoke. I’ll race you home. Well, well, Pinocchio, what’s your rush? I’ve got to beat you in your home. Oh, hello. Well, how is the great actor? I don’t want to be an actor. The strong boy was Carol. He was? Yeah. He got me in a bird cage. He did? Uh-huh. Not a violation. I’m more… Oh, you poor, poor boy. You must be a nervous wreck. That’s it. You are a nervous wreck. Victim. That’s the next temptation. And the victim motif is a deep one. Basically, what the fox tells the boy now is that there’s a bunch of things wrong with him. Well, obviously, right, because there’s a bunch of things wrong with everyone. And so he can make a perfectly reasonable claim of that, and then he convinces the boy that the fact that there’s something wrong with him justifies his deviation from what he’s supposed to do. And that’s a classical Oedipal trick, by the way. If you want to keep your kids at home and make sure that they never leave and render them completely useless, what you want to do is watch them toy with their own vulnerability and then encourage that. So if the kid ever uses being ill as an excuse, which every kid will absolutely do, especially if they have to go do something they don’t want to do, like go to school, you just give in every time they do that. Or if you really want to do a good job, what you do is you reward them every time they do that, and you punish them every time they do the opposite. And if you do that 150,000 times, then you’ll have someone who will be absolutely incapable of standing on their own two feet. And that’s very helpful for you if that’s the sort of person you want to have around. You’re usually inclined to do that if you don’t have a life of your own, and you can’t even tolerate the possibility of ever being alone. So you cripple your child so they can’t leave. So that’s essentially what’s being offered to Pinocchio now. And then the fox says, look, you’re way too stressed, everything’s too terrible, what you need is a vacation. So what we’re going to do is replace the duty, so to speak, the movement forward towards the proper goal, with nothing but fun and games. So you could say it’s future discounting in the extreme. Forget about the future. Life is hard. Concentrate on the present. Do easy, fun things. And you deserve it anyways because you’re in such rough shape. You can see that that’s a very compelling temptation. I mean, I had a child who was quite ill for a long time, and one of the things we really struggled with was, if you’re with someone who’s really ill, how the hell do you know when to excuse them from their obligations? You know, like, I could never… we had to negotiate this all the time. So my one child was very, very tired in the morning, terribly tired. It was a secondary consequence of this particular illness. But you know, we were trying to negotiate that. It’s like, you have to go what you have to do unless you absolutely can’t. Okay, when can’t you? Well God, can you do it if you can crawl out the door? I don’t know, did you ever see My Left Foot? It’s an amazing movie. It’s based on a true story. It’s about this kid who, I think he had cerebral palsy, but he couldn’t really do anything with his body except with his left foot. He could drag himself around with his left foot. And he learned to write, and he learned to draw, and he learned how to communicate, and he went to school. But his father just wouldn’t help him. He dragged himself up and down the stairs, like he had to do everything with his left foot. And you know, he managed. He managed to live that way. But you know, I just, I can’t… I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone in the modern world who would be tough enough to do what his father did. Because you know, you’d say, well, have some compassion. It’s like, yeah, well, compassion is a double-edged sword. You know, and the basic rule, I can tell you what the rule is, and this is a rule that’s often used in nursing homes, never do anything for anyone they can do themselves. And you think, well that’s harsh man, partly because you have to find out what they can do. But it’s also respect for their autonomy and encouragement to continue developing. So well, so that isn’t what happens here. You know, one of the things I told my child was never use your illness as an excuse. Not even once. Because as soon as you do that, even once, you won’t be able to tell the difference between being sick and wanting to be sick. And when you’re sick like that, and you know, fifty things is wrong with you, it’s already hard enough to figure out what you can do and what you can’t do, man. You drop a little bit of poison into that brew and it’s just a toxic mess everywhere. So basically what happens here is that by over attending to Pinocchio’s, let’s say, neurotic doubts, the parent figure produces hypochondriasis. You know, because partly what parents, kids are doing is saying, I feel like this, what does that mean? My throat hurts a bit. Does that mean I don’t have to go to school? Well, for sure you don’t have to go to school and there’s probably eight other things wrong with you, you know. And then let’s spend a bunch of time looking for them and maybe we can have a hug and a cuddle while we’re doing that and I don’t have to watch my stupid soap operas and you can stay home from school and keep me company. It’s a little conspiracy, you know, so the child learns to do that and to bloody well exploit that like mad. And the parent can justify doing that with the feeling that they’re being compassionate. So it’s a nasty, nasty little game and that’s partly why it’s laid out here. So anyways, he convinces Pinocchio that he’s sick, making him sick in the process, and then telling him he needs a vacation. So off they go. Vacation time. Okay, so this nasty little character we’re going to meet now, his name is Lampwake, and I think that’s a reference to Lucifer. That’s the same category of word. He’s a prematurely cynical delinquent type of kid and he’s got a very superior and arrogant attitude because he knows everything because nothing’s worth knowing. And he’s the adversary. He’s Pinocchio’s shadow. That’s one way of thinking about it. So Pinocchio meets his shadow, which of course every teenager meets when they’re a teenager because that’s who you meet when you’re a teenager, right? It’s that part of the developing ego that’s challenging the structure of the community and often doing that by breaking rules. So that’s what people always talk about as peer pressure. Are you going to try this bad thing? Are you going to try that bad thing? Kids have to experiment with that. And so it’s part of the developmental progression. And the question is, well why not behave badly and break all the rules and be undisciplined and take every advantage that’s at your fingertips? That’s a perfectly reasonable question. Well, here we go again. Your name’s Rampley. What’s yours? Pinocchio. Ever been to the place, Adam? Uh-uh. But Mr. Honest Time Gimmie. Me neither. They say it’s a swell job. No school, no cops. You can tear the joint apart and nobody says a word. Honest Time Gimmie. Both around, plenty to eat, plenty to drink, and it’s all free. Honest Time Gimmie. Boy, that’s the place. I can hardly wait. The other thing that’s interesting about Lampwick is he’s completely narcissistic. Pinocchio doesn’t even exist for him. And so basically he’s got tremendously well-developed psychopathic traits. And he’s also delusional because he thinks this is all going to be free. So they go off the root of the main culture and out to an isolated place. So it’s like I would say that where they’re going, I told you that hell was a suburb of the underworld. Well, that’s where they’re headed. So. And they’re also in a mall. Not an easy place to escape from. One of the things that’s quite striking about horror movies is that they often feature clowns and they’re often set in amusement parks. And you might say, well what the hell is the connection between the amusement park and horror? Well, I don’t know if you’ve ever been to an amusement park, but if you have, you can see the connection pretty much right away. You know, it’s mindless entertainment, roughly speaking. And now it’s not like there’s anything particularly intrinsically terrible about mindless entertainment, but there’s a dark side to amusement parks and carny life and the gambling that goes on there. Like it’s low level, it’s a low level place. It’s a low class place, roughly speaking. And it’s because it’s associated with this idea of fun in the moment with no care for the future. And that’s its dark side. That’s the part of it that is tinged with horror. And that’s what happens here. These kids have abandoned culture. They don’t care about it at all. They’re cynical about it and no doubt they have the reasons. And they move, not only are they cynical about it, but they even hate it. Maybe it’s being too tyrannical for them. Or maybe they just don’t want to bear the responsibility of having to live up to its demands. In any case, they move from, you know, ceasing to identify with it to wanting to pull it down completely. And they do that partly by engaging in mindless entertainment, but there’s more to it than that. And this is where the Nazi mob thing starts to happen. Oh, you’re straight. Come on, let’s go and talk somebody you don’t know. Why? Just for the fun of it. Okay, man. Come back to Rome, come back to Rome. Disgracefully nasty conventions from the back. Come in and smoke your heads off. That’s not funny, you’re just passing through. Hello, yo. Hello, yo. There’s something. Holy moly, all this. I’m going to go. So you can’t find your conscience in a mob. Now you see that center symbol? That’s a mandala. It’s very commonly portrayed in cathedrals. And the mandala is the symbol of the self from a Jungian perspective. Why that is is ridiculously complicated, but the best way that I could describe it is, Like there’s this Buddhist idea that a lotus flower grows up from the depths through the water, and then lays itself open on top, and then the Buddha emerges in the middle. That’s what a mandala is. It’s that flower process. It’s like emerging being manifesting something perfect. And that’s what that thing represents. So Then you start to see what’s going on. As I mentioned at some point, remember what was happening in Europe at the time that this movie was being made. The dark forces of fascism were really starting to gather. And the movie is an unconscious drama of sorts, and one of the things that it’s suggesting is that there’s a tight connection between the abandonment of individual moral responsibility, the turning to deceit, and the degeneration of society into something that’s pleasure, short-term pleasure on the one hand, and absolute slavery and brutality on the other. And so you have these faceless figures moving in the background, locking the doors to begin with. And it’s all a conspiracy in some sense. It’s a conspiracy by the coachman in order to entrap the unwary. So, you know, Pinocchio has become separated from his conscience. I would say that happens to lots of people in their teenage years. They experiment with all sorts of things they know they shouldn’t be doing. It’s not a particularly pleasant life, and they lose the thread that guides them. Now, there’s some necessity in that because in some sense they’re wandering through places that they need to explore. But it’s also very dangerous because it can leave you permanently damaged. You know, you can fall out and never get back on. Okay, so Pinocchio’s in there, and he’s like playing pool and smoking and drinking and acting like a narcissist, and this guy knows some cool tricks. Pinocchio takes a little swig of his cigar, and it makes him sick. Right, so there, that’s deceit right there. He’s willing to falsify the nature of his actual experience, even at a deep physiological level, in order to impress this character who is the last person in the world that anyone sensible would try to impress. And now he can’t aim right. That’s also very interesting. You see this sideways eight ball, and that’s a symbol of infinity, and it’s starting to wander, and you know, partly what the images are suggesting is first of all Pinocchio’s aim is very unsteady because he’s pathologized himself, and he’s also, it’s like he’s facing an infinite number of problems and can’t aim straight to fix them. Yes, I also think that’s pretty funny from the perspective of teenage experience because it’s often the case that just when some idiot teenager is out to impress someone he or she shouldn’t impress, that their conscience will pipe up and they’ll do something absolutely moronic that makes them into a fool in front of the people they’re trying to impress, and that’s exactly what’s happening here. You know, and it’s partly because the person is torn apart inside and can’t act with any strength. Okay, so anyways, the Cricket and this Lampwick character have it out, and Pinocchio decides that he’s going to go with Lampwick, and so Pinocchio storms, or the Cricket storms out, and then he’s going home. I want out! I want out of the home! Come on, you dogs, keep on moving! Finally there now! We haven’t slept all night! Where’d all the doggies come from? Come on, come on, let’s have another! And what’s your name? Aw! Okay, you do! Idiot! You force a paganized price! Okay, so basically what you see is that the pathway that’s been laid out so far, including this neurotic, induced, anti-social trip to Pleasure Island, basically culminates in a form of slavery. But there’s more to it than that, because it’s voiceless slavery, right? These kids, they’re now jackasses, they’re not fit to be slaves until they can’t speak properly anymore. All they can do is bray. So they’ve severed their connection with their capacity for genuine speech to such a degree that everything that is associated with logos, let’s say, with the ability to think things through and communicate, that’s all gone. They’re empty and braying. And at that point, they’re fit for slaves. Yeah? It’s not only that he can’t speak, he’s fit when he can no longer say his own name. Right, right, right. Absolutely. That’s right. So that means that all of his individual identity is gone as well. There’s nothing individual left at all. There’s just brute animal existence. And that’s fit for slavery. Okay, so that’s not so good. Why does he get that stuff? How do you ever expect to be a real boy? What do you think I look like? A jackass? You sure don’t! Hey, you laugh like a donkey! You left them out of me! Oh. Huh? What the fuck? What’s going on? Help! I’m in double cross! Help! Help! Somebody help! I’m afraid! Help! Please! You gotta help! Be a man! Call on the people! Call on anybody! Help! Help! Mama! Help! Help! Help! Help! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! Mama! So the mirror, of course, that’s the destruction of painful self-consciousness. Oh, watch out! Okay, so the cricket knows what’s going on and it goes to rescue Pinocchio. And then the only way out from this place is to dive into chaos. So that’s what happens. They jump off the cliff, very dangerous, to get from somewhere terrible to somewhere absolutely unknown. And so they do that and they go home. They wash up at home. And so that’s where we are now. Well, you can’t go home again. Okay, so Dad’s not home. It’s too late. And so now they have no idea what to do. Okay, so now you see a weird intermingling of, I would say, pagan and Christian symbolism. So the star now sends a dove, and the dove is a symbol of the Holy Ghost, right? Hypothetically, the Holy Ghost, there’s three members of the Christian Trinity. The Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. And that’s what the hell is a Holy Ghost, you know? That’s quite the weird idea. But what it is is it’s a representation of the idea that you have an image of the divine within you, and that it’s something that can… it’s something capable of communicating. And so it’s a natural force in part, which is also why it’s associated with the blue fairy and this star. It’s… well, that’s the best I can do at the moment with that. So anyways, it gives the cricket a message from beyond, so to speak. Hey! It’s a message! What’s it saying? It’s about your father! Where is he? Why, uh, it says here he went looking for you, and he was swallowed by a whale. Swallowed by a whale? Yeah! Uh-huh. A whale! Okay, so you notice that, you know, Pinocchio without Geppetto is lost, but Geppetto without Pinocchio degenerates into chaos and is swallowed by a whale. So the two are necessary for one another. Anyways, people swallow this part of the plot without any problem, and so the cricket now tells the puppet that in order to become real he has to go to the bottom of the ocean and rescue his father from a whale. And so, another part that makes absolutely no sense, so anyways, that’s what they proceed to do. Back into the… the cricket warns him about how dangerous this is, but decides to go along anyways. So, down they plunge into the ocean, they have some kind of cute adventures, and they get the fish to tell them where they’re going, but the fish are so scared that they just run away when they hear Monstro’s name. And so, notice that, you know, he’s in the depths already, and he has to go to the darkest place in the depths in order to find where his father is. Okay, now, Geppetto’s in there, and he’s starving to death in the belly of a whale. There’s not enough food, there’s not enough nourishment for him to survive, and he can’t see any way that on his own he can get out. In fact, he’s actually given up. Okay, and he’s fishing because he thinks, well, you know, we might as well have something to eat. The whale wakes up, and it catches a bunch of fish. But it also catches what you might describe as king of the fish. Now, see, that’s Pinocchio. So, let’s… So, this is where the movie gets very… I really have a very difficult time understanding how this symbolism got in there. But, this whole part of the movie is packed with fish symbolism. And although you may know it or you may not, but the fish was a symbol for early Christianity, and Christ is assimilated to the fish. There’s all sorts of fish symbolism in the New Testament. And there’s all sorts of reasons for that, a number of which are truly incomprehensible. Some of the rast are logical because… I won’t even go into that. So, imagine this way. You’re somewhere starving. And you’ve got two choices. You can either figure out how to live so that you’re not going to be starving anymore, or you can catch some fish. Okay, so you can feed yourself momentarily, or you can feed yourself for the long run. And so, people are making that choice all the time. And so, you might say, well, if you’re a good fisherman, you catch a fish. But if you’re a really good fisherman, you catch something from the depths that feeds you all the time. Okay, so that’s what’s happening here. Yep? Oh, I was just going to ask if you thought there was any relationship with the fisher gang. Because, you know, that’s from another figure that… Yes, definitely. Yes, absolutely. Yes, definitely. So, okay, so now, Geppetto’s fishing like mad, and he’s happy because he’s catching fish. Now, it’s very cool what happens here because Geppetto catches a bunch of fish. Hypothetically, he’s looking for Pinocchio. But he’s damn busy catching fish that when he catches Pinocchio, he doesn’t even notice. And then, he kind of wakes up to the fact that he’s caught Pinocchio, which is really what he’s trying to catch. And when he turns around to hug him, he grabs a fish, and he kisses the fish, and then notices that it’s not Pinocchio. So the filmmakers are very careful to insist upon the fact that Geppetto becomes… He’s blinded by short-term considerations, and cannot see when he’s caught the thing that’s the most valuable. And we see why Pinocchio is the most valuable. So this is actually the redemption of Geppetto to some degree. He needs Pinocchio’s youth and vision to rescue himself from a sterile and static existence. And that would be associated, say, with the construction of a sterile totalitarian state like North Korea, where I think I told you last week, the wise leader has told all the Koreans that they better get used to sucking roots like they did 20 years ago, because there ain’t going to be any food, and not only that, they get to donate two pounds of rice a month each to the state warehouses, which in principle are supposed to be the places that distribute the food. So the idea that a static enough state can become sterile and barren is exactly right. So, alright. There’s a mythological motif there in many hero stories. When the hero’s out to find the worst thing, but when he finally finds it, it’s like, he’s out of there. But by that time, it’s generally too late. You know, so what it means to some degree is that no matter how awful the thing that you’re looking for, no matter how awful you think the thing that you’re looking for is, it’s more awful than you think. Even prepared. So Pinocchio, he’s out of there now. Conscience too. They’re both gone. Here’s another one. Enough for me. Here’s the big one. Get the big guy out of here. Hey, Hawkeye, open up. I got a good idea. It’s like the last of them. Here’s the good one. What do you think of that? I think we’re finished. Here’s another one. Hey, father. Father. Good father, Pinocchio. Pinocchio. Father. Pinocchio. Hey, father. Here I am. Oh, oh yes. Pinocchio. Oh, my. I’m so happy to see you. Okay, so Geppetto basically tells Pinocchio that there’s no damn way they’re getting out of this whale. And so Pinocchio has a bit of a brainstorm. Oh, yeah. Geppetto also finds out that he’s half turned into a donkey, which isn’t all that pleasant. He gets forgiven. Geppetto says he’s built a raft that they can get out with, but everything comes in and nothing goes out. And Pinocchio decides that he could make the whale sneeze. And he does that, so we’ll start here. He’s got this brainstorm of an idea. Master of fire idea. Okay, so that’s a paradigm shift. For Geppetto, the fire is there to cook the fish. For Pinocchio, it’s there to escape from the damn whale. Now, the other thing that happens here is Pinocchio sacrifices a bunch of things that Geppetto thinks are useful. Geppetto thinks he’s going to be in the whale. Pinocchio doesn’t. So now Pinocchio breaks up all the furniture and builds a fire out of it. And part of that is an explicit reminder that part of the reason that the way people got out of the whale, the terrible chaotic force of nature, was to master fire. It’s a technological solution. We don’t need it! We’re getting out! Getting out of the tower! We’re making a scene! Let them sneeze! Oh, that’s the way to do it! So there’s an idea there, too, that the human use of technology is likely to make the environment react terribly. We’re all guilty about that all the time. It’s part of what underlies our environmental guilt. We’re using technology against nature, and we always feel that there’s going to be a kickback. We’ve done something wrong. There’s going to be a kickback. It’s not like it’s completely unfounded. Okay, so now the whale does something very surprising, which is that it transforms into a fire-breathing dragon. The Zupai! They’re not safe! No, but I can’t pass! Okay, so then there’s a great battle. And the whale just won’t quit. He breaks their boat all to pieces. Pinocchio rescues his father there. And then the boat is all smashed to pieces. Geppetto says, save yourself. Right now, he’s out of the damn whale. Why bother with the old man? That’s a good question, you know, because part of that question is, well, what’s the relationship between the individual and the culture? What responsibility do you have to the culture? It’s drowning. It’s not much use. It’s old. It produced you. It’s worn out. It’s dangerous to rescue it. Why bother? Well, Pinocchio decides to rescue his father. So, Pinocchio is out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. He’s out of the damn whale. So, Pinocchio is basically here destroyed by the clash between hellish chaos and insufficient culture. And so, as far as we know, Geppetto’s alive. Pinocchio, save yourself. God bless you, son. Save yourself, Pinocchio. Pinocchio! Oh, Pinocchio! Pinocchio! So, you know, he sacrificed himself to save his culture. But you have to remember what he sacrificed. He’s a jackass puppet. And maybe that is what’s supposed to be sacrificed if you’re going to save your culture. You know, you get rid of the jackass puppet. Is really that the part of you we want to have live anyways? People identify with that. They think, oh, that’s me. That’s what I think. That’s who I am. It’s like, well, if you find yourself braying, you might presuppose that that’s not exactly the case. My boy. My brave little boy. Prove yourself brave, truthful, and unselfish. And someday you will be a real boy. Awake, Pinocchio. Awake. Father! What you crying for? Cousin. You’re dead, Pinocchio. No! No, I’m not! Yes, yes, you are. But father, I’m alive! And I’m… A real… I’m a real boy! You’re alive! And you are a real boy! Hey, woopie! A real life boy! This cards for a celebration! And now time starts. Professor, we got some news! And now in harmony is restored. You know, and you can see that father and son can now dance together. Well, that’s practically where I came in. And the conscience is like finally transformed at this point. Thank you, my lady. You deserve it. It sure was nice and beautiful. Huh? What? Well, I’ll be… And that’s like a gold flower, it’s a gold mandala, it’s the sun, it’s all of those things. And you see, it can communicate with this star. Well, in your heart, I’m a real boy. When your heart is in your grave, No request is to ask me. When you reach upon the stars, Your dreams are real. When your heart is in your grave. So all of that wrapped up in a little kid’s movie. You know, you can think about it as the work of the collective imagination. And I mean that literally in some sense, because a huge number of people who were creative worked on this. And so it’s constant compromises as to plot and as to the images that are going to be used. There’s a tremendous amount of attention, an insane amount of attention, focused on every single cell. These things were hand-painted. So the amount of work that goes into each frame, it’s hours and hours and hours of work into each frame, 60 frames a second, because Disney did it at 60 frames a second. And it’s completely, it’s hard to remember when you watch something like this that every single bit of it was created. And by people who had to agree, by genius level people who had to agree on what they were doing. And so they’d feel their way. What seems right? And the group would agree, look, that’s the right thing. Or someone would insist upon having it done this particular way. And the narrative would emerge from that. Someone had an intuition, probably Disney, that the Pinocchio story had enough, it’s quite a bit transposed from the Colodi story, the original story, but that it had enough depth to hang a story on it and to be worthy of that much attention. And I think the developmental path that it traces, it’s as accurately summarized in that movie as I’ve ever seen it summarized. I mean the movie is not without its flaws, I would say. It kind of slips into moralizing from time to time. Although, you know, I don’t know if it’s being done better. So you don’t want to complain about it too much. So, well, one of the questions that we posed at the beginning of the course was, you know, why do people do terrible things? Why do societies degenerate? And the answer to that, as far as I can tell, is because people don’t, people decide to not attend to their knowledge of their own errors. Or errors in the situation they find themselves. I think maybe it’s they don’t attend to their knowledge of holes in being. That might be a more reasonable way of putting it. And because they refuse to attend, they allow the structure to get rotten and they allow themselves to get weak. And the more rotten the structure and the weaker the people that compose it, the more rapidly it degenerates into further rottenness and the quicker everything descends into something that’s absolutely horrifying. Hell, for all intents and purposes. And so the alternative to that, as far as I can tell, isn’t so much specifically political as it is psychological, although I think at this level of analysis those two things merge. You know, you work on correcting the errors that are accessible to you in your own life, that you can correct and that you know how to correct. And simultaneously you have the best chance of revivifying your culture and keeping the horrors of tyranny and unbridled nature at bay. And I would also say that’s the fundamental human story. We’ve been working on that story for our entire evolutionary history. And so maybe it’s wrong, but that’s the one we’ve based our survival on. And you know, there’s always the possibility that it’s not wrong. That’s it, guys. Nice talking to you.