https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Us979jCjHu8
Music Okay, so The last time we were here We got about maybe a third of the way through this story This story of Pinocchio and the transformation of a Marionette Into something hypothetically real and I’m going to backtrack a few slides and it’ll get us into it again So you remember that The blue fairy, so I would say the benevolent element of Mother Nature in the schemata that we’re going to use to investigate mythology Had more or less been allowed her entrance because Gepetto was a good guy and because he wished for the right thing And so in some sense here’s a way of thinking about that You know genetic studies, genetic slash environmental studies of children’s temperament have revealed something quite interesting Which is that The shared environment that children have within a family So that would be what’s the same about your environment and your brother’s environment to say Doesn’t have that much effect on your temperament or his temperament Because the presumption always was that within a family there was a shared environment, right? That something was common about the environment to every child within that environment But there isn’t much of a shared environmental effect on temperament So then you could say well that makes it appear as though parenting isn’t that relevant in relationship to the development of temperament But you could also suggest something else You could suggest that if parenting is occurring properly The effect of the shared environment should be very close to zero And the reason for that is that you establish an individual relationship with each child And the environment is actually a micro environment that’s composed of your observations of your child and that specific child’s interaction with you And to some degree if there’s a shared environment that means that you’re enforcing the same principles on every child And so my suspicions are, although I don’t know this because the research hasn’t been done That in bad families there’s a shared environmental effect But in good families that minimizes And so that lets the child’s biological predisposition, roughly, manifest itself with support and in some positive manner Well, I don’t want to extend the analogy too far But you could imagine that, and this is what this film proposes Is that if you aim properly in relationship to your child What you’re trying to do is to establish an individual relationship And to allow them to move towards whatever their particular expression of individuality happens to be And that’s, well that would be the same as allowing nature to take its course in some sense At least nature and its positive guise, and that’s exactly what happens here Now, the other thing that happens of course is that The cricket, for reasons that aren’t clear precisely Is knighted by the blue fairy and serves as Pinocchio’s conscience Although he isn’t very good at it, which is a very peculiar thing And quite a marked point that the film is making That that conscience actually has something to learn too And there’s actually a Freudian element to that, you know Because Freud thought of the superego as the internalization, roughly speaking, of the father And it could be very severe, the superego, so it could be like a really strict father Really tyrannical father inside your head Although I think it’s better to think about the superego as the internalized representation of society at large Mediated to some degree through your parents Because it’s not as if your father, even assuming he’s tyrannical Is the inventor of all those tyrannical rules He’s the propagator of them, but he’s actually a proxy voice Even if it’s just for the harsh side of society He’s a proxy voice for society And because we’re social creatures The utility of having an internal social voice to guide you Although, again, you seem to be able to follow it or not follow it Which I also find spectacularly interesting Because obviously if it was an unerring guide, you could just follow it And if it was an unerring guide, well, you wouldn’t need free will either Because you could just act out the dictates of this internal representation And that isn’t what you do So, anyways, the proposition here is that the conscience exists But it’s a relatively flawed entity And it needs to be modified as well by nature Which is quite interesting, because the Blue Fairy Knights him Because you also might think of the conscience as only something that’s socially constructed Right, which is the more typical viewpoint But I don’t buy that for a second Because I believe firmly And I think the Piagetian interpretation of child development more or less bears this out Is that there are parameters within which conscience has to operate And it’s sort of like this It’s like the same parameters that govern fair play, we’ll say that And so you can say there’s fair play within a game And there’s fair play across sets of games And the set of games is pretty much indistinguishable from the actual environment Right, if you think about all the things you do as nested games At some point, the spread of that is large enough so it encompasses everything you do Which includes the environment And so I believe that you’re adapted to the set of all possible games, roughly speaking All possible playable games, something like that And that you know the rules for that, which is why We talked about this a little bit, why you’re so good at identifying cheaters You have a module for that, according to the evolutionary psychologists And not only do you identify them, but you really remember them It really sticks in your mind And there’s other evidence too So one piece of evidence that I love I think it’s so, well there’s a couple One I would derive from Franz de Waal, who’s a famous primatologist And he studied the prototype morality that emerges in chimpanzees And it’s very much nested in their dominance structures Because you can think of morality in some sense as the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates And so you could say, well the biggest, ugliest, meanest chimp And the male dominance hierarchies in chimps seem to be the predominant ones Although the females also have a dominance hierarchy in it It’s not quite so clear in bonobos Which seem to be more female dominated But in any case The primary chimp dominant structure is male And you could think, well it’s like the caveman chimp Who’s biggest and toughest Who necessarily rules and who rules longest But that isn’t what de Waal found See the problem with being mean, let’s say And not negotiating your social landscape And not trading reciprocal favors Is that no matter how powerful you are as an individual Two individuals, three quarters of your power can do you in And that happens with the chimps fairly regularly If the guy on top is too tyrannical And doesn’t make social connections Then weaker chimps, males, make good social connections And when he’s not in such good shape they take him down And viciously too, de Waal has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of, let’s call it regicide Among the chimpanzee troops that he studied Mostly in the Arnhem Zoo They have a big troop there That’s been there a long time But he’s very interested in prototypical morality And here’s some other examples of prototypical morality emerging among animals There’s many of them But one is, you know, if two wolves have a dominance dispute Again, that would be more likely among the male wolves But it doesn’t really matter They basically display their size And they growl ferociously and puff up their hair so they look bigger And you know, you can see cats do that when they go into fight or flight Not only do they puff up, including their tail But they stand sideways And the reason they do that is because they look bigger Because they’re trying to put out the most intimidating possible front So anyways, if two wolves are going at it What they’re really trying to do is to size each other up And they’re trying to scare each other into backing off Fundamentally Because, see, the worst case scenario is like You’re wolf number one and I’m wolf number two And we tear each other to shreds But I win, but I’m so damaged after that That wolf number three comes in and takes me out So, like, there’s a big cost to be paid Even for victory in a dominance dispute If it degenerates into violence And animals, and human beings, but animals in particular Have evolved very, very specific mechanisms To escalate dominance disputes towards violence step by step So that they don’t Victor doesn’t risk incapacitating himself by winning So what happens with the wolves is that You know, they growl at each other in posture and display And maybe they even snap at each other But the probability that they’re going to get into a full-fledged fight is pretty low And what happens is one of the wolves backs off And flips over and shows his neck And that basically means, alright, tear it out, you know And the other wolf says, of course he doesn’t Well, you’re kind of an idiot and you’re not that strong But we might need you to take down a moose in the future And so, you know, despite your patheticness I won’t tear out your throat And then they’ve established their dominance position And then from then on, at least for some substantial period of time This subordinate wolf gives way to the dominant wolf But at least the subordinate wolf is alive And, you know, he might be dominant over other wolves And so everyone in the whole hierarchy has sorted that out Either through mock combat or through combat itself And, you know, the low ranking members aren’t in the best possible position But at least they’re not getting their heads torn off every second of their existence And so there’s even some utility in the stability of the dominance hierarchy for the low ranking members Because at least they’re not getting pounded They’re getting threatened, which is way better I mean, it’s not good, but it’s way better than actual combat And then there’s the example of rats, which I love This is Jak Panksepp’s work And he wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience Which I would highly, highly recommend I have a list of recommended readings on my website It’s a brilliant book, and he’s a brilliant psychologist, really One of the top, top psychologists as far as I’m concerned Both theoretically and experimentally A real genius, huh? He’s the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them They laugh ultrasonically, so you can’t actually hear them But if you record it and slow it down, then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an eraser Which is sort of like their mother’s tongue It’s often what lab people use as a substitute for the licking of the little rat by the mother So, and he discovered the play circuit in mammals, which is like a major deal, right? He should get a Nobel Prize for that That’s a big deal, to discover an entire motivational circuit Whose existence no one had really predicted You know, apart from the fact that obviously mammals play And even lizards, maybe, some of the more social lizards seem to play You know, so, anyhow Anyhow, what Panksepp observed, and I think this is a brilliant piece of science Is that, first of all, juvenile male rats in particular Like to rough and tumble play, they like to wrestle And they actually pin each other, just like little kids do, or like adult wrestlers do They pin their shoulders down, and that basically means you win And so, okay, so that’s pretty cool, but what’s even cooler, I think Well, there’s three things, one is The rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur And so that’s one of the scientific ways of testing an animal’s motivation, right? So imagine you have a starving rat, and it knows that it’s got food down the end of a corridor You can put a little spring on its tail, and measure how hard it pulls And that gives you an indication of its motivational force Now, imagine the starving rat that’s trying to get to some food, and you have a little spring on its tail And you waft in some cat odor So now that rat is starving, and wants to get out of there He’s going to try to pull even farther towards the food So getting away plus getting forward are separate motivational systems And if you can add them together, it’s real potent And part of the reason why, in the future authoring exercise that you guys are going to do as the class progresses You’re asked to outline the place you’d like to end up, which is your desired future And also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart is so that your anxiety chases you, and your approach systems pull you forward You’re maximally motivated then And it’s important, because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things that you want to pursue Right? And that’s very common And so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward But it makes you weak, because you’re afraid You want to get your fear behind you, pushing you And so what you want to be is more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them It’s very, very helpful And lots of times in life, and this is something really worth knowing You know, and this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult You don’t get to pick the best thing You get to pick your poison You have two bad choices, and you get to pick which one you’re willing to suffer through And every choice has a bit of that element in it And so if you know that, it’s really freeing Because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking Well, maybe there’s a good solution to this, you know, compared to the bad solution It’s like, no, no, sometimes there’s just risky solution one, and risky solution two And sometimes both of them are really bad But you at least get to pick which one you’re willing to suffer through And that actually makes quite a bit of difference Because you’re also facing it voluntarily then, instead of it chasing you And that is an entirely different psychophysiological response Challenge versus threat, it’s not the same Even if the magnitude of the problem is the same And so putting yourself in a challenging, let’s call it mind frame You can’t just do that by magic Putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much easier on you psychophysiologically Because you don’t produce, you don’t go into the generalized stress response to the same degree And you’re activating your exploratory and seeking systems Which are dopaminergically mediated, and that involve positive emotion So if you can face something voluntarily, rather than having it chase you It’s way better for you psychophysiologically So that’s partly why, well, it’s worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair Instead of waiting for it to come and eat you So, and especially when you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair You might find it when it’s a baby, instead of a full-fledged bloody monster That is definitely going to take you down And so that’s part of the reason why Well, there’s a whole bunch of things that that, that emerge out of that observation Like, don’t avoid small problems that you know are there Face them, because they’ll grow into big problems all by themselves And you can think about, imagine the tax department sends you a notification You owe them like $300 Well, it’s, you know, that’s annoying Maybe you don’t even want to open the letter Or maybe if you do, you just put it on the shelf But that damn thing doesn’t just sit there like a piece of paper on the shelf, right? You ignore that for five or six years It’s going to become attached to all sorts of horrible things And if you ignore it long enough, you get the idea It’s going to turn into something that is completely unlike the little piece of paper that it’s written on And many, many problems in life are like that You’ll see they’ll, you’ll see that they pop their ugly little head up And you know, and you might want to turn away You might not want, not want to think about it Which is the easiest way of turning away, right? You just don’t attend to it It’s not like you repress it or anything like that You just fail to attend to it And that’s a really, as a long-term strategy, it’s dismal It’s also something I think that’s more characteristic of people who are high in neuroticism and high in agreeableness Because agreeable people don’t like conflict And people who are high in neuroticism, who are high in negative emotion Are hit harder per unit of uncertainty or threat And so, you know, and that’s partly why in psychotherapy A lot of times the people you see need assertiveness training So that would be the opposite of agreeableness Or they need to help get their anxiety and emotional pain under control Those are not the only reasons There’s antisocial behavior, but you can’t fix that in therapy In all likelihood, there’s alcoholism There’s lots and lots of other reasons, but those are two major reasons So anyways, there is a, that was all to tell you that Oh yes, back to the rats So okay, the rats are pulling on the, you can measure rat motivation by how hard they pull on the spring, let’s say And they’re more motivated if they’re running away and running towards But let’s go back to play So you can take juvenile rats who haven’t been able to play for a while Maybe they’ve been isolated Or maybe they just haven’t been able to engage in physical activity Like many school children that you might be thinking about Neither allowed to play, nor allowed to engage in physical activity And there’s a reason I’m telling you that So anyways, you get one of these little rats and you can measure how hard he wants, how hard he’ll pull to go out and play Or how many buttons he’ll push, you know And that gives you an indication of his motivation So anyways, you can see that a play-deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than a non-play-deprived juvenile rat And so you can infer that the rat wants to go play And you know, you do that, you do the same measurement with everyone around you If they want to do something, you’re going to poke and prod at them to see what sort of things they’re willing to overcome In order to go and do that, you’ll object, even if you don’t really object It’s like, it’s a measurement device And if they’re willing to overcome a bunch of your objections, then you think, oh well, maybe they really want to And that’s another thing to really know If there’s something you want, you need about five arguments about why you want it Because the probability that the person who’s opposing you will have five arguments about why you shouldn’t have it is very low They just won’t have thought it through enough So the other thing that happens in the future authoring exercise is that you’re asked to articulate the reasons for all the goals that come out of your vision of the future So you’re asked, like, why would it be good for you? Why would it be good for your family? Why would it be good for broader society? So that gives you three levels of argumentation right there And if you have it articulated down into detail and it’s related to other important goals, then you’re a hell of a thing to argue with Because people just aren’t that deep, by which I mean they just don’t have that many levels of explanation or objection And it’s also really useful in relationship to your own mind Because if you want to do something that’s difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections It’s like, well, maybe that isn’t what you should be doing right now Maybe you should be doing the dishes or vacuuming or watching TV or looking at YouTube If you’re really sneaky, when you’re trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that’s not quite as hard So that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you’re supposed to because you’re doing something else useful And if you give in to that temptation, which you often will, then it wins and because it wins it gets a little dopamine kick and it grows stronger Anything you let win, the internal argument, grows And anything you let be defeated shrinks because it’s punished, it doesn’t get to have its way So that’s another thing really to remember, don’t practice what you do not want to become And because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man, they’re not going anywhere You can build another little machine to inhibit them, that’s the best you can do Once they’re in there, you can’t get them out And then the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress and the old habits will come back up So you’ve got to be careful what you say and what you do because you build yourself that way So anyways, back to the rats, okay, so the little rat gets to go out there and play Now imagine one little rat is paired with another rat, but the other little rat is 10% bigger 10% in juvenile rats is enough to attain permanent dominance So the 10% bigger rat will win the first wrestling contest, okay, and so that’s what happens And then, so the little rat gets pinned and maybe they play a bit and then they’re done with it So you separate them, then you let them play again And the next time what happens is that the subordinate rat does the invitation to play And that’s like, you know, like a dog does when it wants to play You can recognize that, it kind of splays its feet apart and it looks up and looks interested and sort of dances around You can do it with any kid that has a clue, you know, that hasn’t been destroyed by adults If you’re a little three-year-old kid or four-year-olds are better for this If you go like this, like, they know exactly what’s going to happen You know, they’re ready to dart back and forth and they’ll usually smile And kids love rough and tumble play, which is now basically illegal in all day cares It seriously, it seriously is, kids need it so desperately because it teaches them the limits of their body And your body, and it teaches them what’s painful and what isn’t And it teaches them the dance of play And without that they’re just little disembodied blobs Like, they have no finesse, that’s what you’re checking out when you dance with someone, you know You’re seeing if they have that fluency and facility for mutual reciprocal action embodied in them And if they’re kind of like this, you know, and just have no sense of rhythm and don’t pay any attention to you And all of that, you have reason to question whether they actually inhabit their body And whether they can engage in a mutual interaction, a physical interaction that’s going to be reciprocal and mutually satisfying It’s really important to check out And a lot of that rough and tumble play, even interactions between a child and its mother If you have a happy mother and a happy infant, and you videotape them and you speed up the videotape You’ll see that they’re dancing So one responds, then the other responds, then the other responds It might just be with eye gaze and movement and all of that But there’s a dynamic interplay, which you don’t see with depressed mothers and their infants So, okay, so back to play So the little rat who is the subordinate one, he has to do the invitation And then the big rat can agree to play, because he’s in the dominant position But if you pair them repeatedly, and this is really worth thinking about Because, see, morality emerges out of repeated interactions Because you might say, well, if you’re only going to interact with someone once, you might as well just take advantage of them and run off That’s what a psychopath does, by the way And there is room in the environmental niche for psychopaths, but they have to keep moving around Because otherwise people figure out who they are So they just move around, and they can take advantage of one person, you know, maybe five times or ten times or something And then the reputation spreads and they’ve got to get the hell out of there So it’s not a good long-term strategy, unless you can’t think of a better one So anyways, if you repeatedly pair these rats, unless the big rat lets the little rat win at least 30% of the time The little rat will not ask the big rat to play And that is, it’s a staggering discovery It’s a staggering discovery, because you’ve got the emergence there of an implicit morality, essentially That’s even incarnated in rats, that emerges across multiple play sessions It’s like, yes, exactly, that’s exactly what Piaget said about the emergence of morality It’s exactly the same idea at the rat level So it’s a massively, and the fact that there’s a circuit, a separate neurophysiological circuit That’s actually specialized for that sort of thing, is also a big deal Now the other thing PENKS have figured out is that If you deprive juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in rough and tumble play Their prefrontal cortexes don’t develop properly And they become impulsive and restless, and then you can fix them with methylphenidate or Ritalin And those are the drugs that are used to fix hyperactive kids, most of whom are male And that’s because, well, really, you’re going to take your six-year-old, your five-year-old You’re going to put them in a desk, you’re going to get them to sit there for six hours That’s your plan, right? That’s a stupid plan And they’re denied the opportunity to engage in play And that means that their ability to become social is being impaired It may cause neurological impairment, that’s what the rat evidence suggests And then you suppress that with amphetamines Because amphetamines actually don’t activate the play circuit They activate a different circuit, which will suppress the play circuit So it’s very, very, it’s not very wise And I’m not going to go off on that tangent, because I couldn’t tell you why the school systems were set up that way Which I probably will at some point, because it’s quite an interesting story in and of itself And it’s the reason all you guys are sitting in desks right now Somebody laughingly referred to this once as Grade 15, which I thought was pretty funny It’s pretty funny, given the look at the bloody place, you know Hidious And, okay So, now This is an interesting thing, so you’ve got the emergence of morality in, say, chimps You’ve got the emergence of morality in wolves, you’ve got the emergence of morality in rats And the morality governs sequential interactions or group interactions They have to repeat Because it’s an emergent property of social or repetitive interactions That’s why, you can’t just localize it in one instance, it’s repeated And there’s been computer simulations of this To help you figure out how you might attain victory across games, across time Maybe you need a strategy And there’s a very simple strategy Which I believe is called modified tit for tat So if you’re nice to me, I’m nice back And if you do something bad to me, I do something bad back But imagine you run that out in sequences of behavior and see who does best with what strategy across time Or an alternative strategy Here’s the best strategy I trust you, you trust me, we start interacting You screw up, I whack you And then I forgive you and we start again That’s modified tit for tat And so, and there hasn’t been, it’s a very simple algorithm No one has come up with a better algorithm in computer game In the computerized simulation of game space than that particular strategy So it’s like, trust, but don’t be a pushover If someone violates the rules, you’ve got to nail them But then you don’t hold a grudge, you open the door to further interactions So, pretty smart, pretty smart And, okay, so anyways So what this means, because rats can’t talk, and wolves can’t talk, and chimpanzees can’t talk So what that means, just as Piaget suggested, was that the morality, the development of the morality Precedes the development of the linguistic ability to describe the rules for the morality He said exactly the same thing about kids, right? Is they learn how to play games before they know how, what the rules are to the games And so you see that if you’re playing peek-a-boo with a kid, they can pick that up like at really young They get that right away And you can play with kids almost immediately after they’re born if you play simple enough games And so they’ve got that deep, and they’re unbelievably playful So they’ve got that circuitry ready to go right off the bat And it’s one of the things that makes kids so much fun, because they just like to play all the time And so if you’re, if the play circuit in you hasn’t died, which is a bad thing Then you can use that a lot with your kids, and it’s one of the things that helps you love them So that’s a good thing So, okay, so the point is that the damn morality emerges before the representation of the morality It’s a big deal to know that, and that it emerges as a consequence of repeated social interaction So it’s not a top-down thing, it’s a bottom-up thing Now, Piaget says, well, it’s not just bottom-up, because what happens with human beings is that they learn to play the games One of his experiments was, watch seven-year-olds, I think that’s the right age, play marbles And then you notice that they can play with each other, and that they can follow the rules But then if you take the individual seven-year-olds out of the game, and you say, what are the rules? They give incoherent and incomplete explanations of the rules So what that means is they don’t really represent the rules, but they can act them out And they have a partial representation of what they’re acting out Now, when they get older, the rule representation starts to fall into alignment with the actual rules of the game And you can imagine that’s why, because when they’re playing something like marbles, they’re going to have discussions like, you’re cheating Or you’re not allowed to do that, because they’re always going to be pushing the envelope a little bit And then the group is going to render a judgment on whether or not that’s appropriate And out of that, the rules are going to emerge, but they’re not rules to begin with, they’re patterns of behavior It’s not the same thing as a rule A rule describes a pattern of behavior, but a pattern of behavior is a pattern of behavior It’s something that’s acted out So there’s the individual within the group, and then the interactions of the individuals within the groups produces a hierarchical arrangement Or multiple hierarchical arrangements Those are games, roughly speaking, or stories, nested inside an overarching story, which is the fundamental culture And then that’s nested in a whole bunch of competing cultures that have some commonalities, or they would just be at war all the time Which, you know, to some degree they are So, okay, now, you see that, back to the movie, you see that happening in this movie I mean, it’s very, very quick, but the blue fairy turns the bug into the conscience And then the bug tries to explain to Pinocchio what the rules of morality are But the thing is, the bug doesn’t know, because he’s just a bug, and he’s just not omniscient So the best he can do is to come up with a propagandistic, semantic verbal representation that’s internally contradictory And when he tells Pinocchio, Pinocchio has no idea what he’s talking about And neither does the bug, that’s the thing And so, well, so what happens is this The cricket says, well, Pinoc, maybe you and I had better have a little heart-to-heart talk And the puppet says, why? And the cricket says, well, you want to be a real boy, don’t you? All right, sit down, son Now, you see the world is full of temptations Temptations? Yes, 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 Understand? No No, and neither did the cricket And that’s actually very nicely done in that piece of the movie Because you just want to slap him as soon as he starts talking like that Because, well, he gets up on his little matchbox and lectures, and he’s dull and tyrannical, both at the same time And so there’s nothing genuine about what he’s saying He’s sort of imitating, he’s imitating something that isn’t him So he’s really acting like a puppet at that point, too But it doesn’t work at all And so Pinocchio says, I’m going to try to be a good boy And the cricket says, well, that’s the spirit, son And then away they go So, all right, so then we’re at the next day Because this all happens in one night We’re at the next day, and it’s a nice day, and there’s these birds flying around That’s actually, that’s a bit of foreshadowing there So, now you have to remember when you watch something like this movie Not a single bit of it is random or accidental None of it Because, you know, they had to draw, I don’t remember how many frames per second these things are 30 maybe, maybe it’s a little less than that, but it’s high quality animation And so someone had to paint 30 pictures to get a second of this You’re not doing that accidentally, it’s really expensive And everyone has to agree on exactly what’s going to happen And you might say, well, do the people who are doing this consciously know what they’re doing And the answer to that is, well, sort of, just like you do You know, it’s yes, they know, and no, they don’t And they know because they’re really smart and gifted and all that But they don’t know because it’s not all articulated Plus they’re working in a group So they know and don’t know, just like you do when you’re watching it And so, and when you do anything else So, now, they’re also guided by what you might call They’re guided by their unconscious in the Freudian and in the cognitive way Partly because your unconscious value structures determine the direction and content of your perceptions And so it’s built right into the way you move your eyes Because you tend to look at things you value, right Or at things you’re afraid of, like you look at things with valence And part of the decision about what has value is dependent on The implicit structure of your moral system Because morality is about what’s good and what isn’t And that’s been partly a conscious construction of you But it’s partly something you’ve been, you’ve picked up by interacting with people like Matt ever since you were born You don’t know all the rules any more than the damn cricket did You just don’t, and you can’t Because you’re too complicated But you act them out And then you also have representations of how people act in your imagination Dreams are, that’s what a dream is, that’s what a fantasy is That’s what that little movie that plays inside your head when you remember what you did is And you only remember the gist, you know So even the imagistic representation of your behavior in your past Which is basically your episodic memory It’s already selecting and molding and turning it into a relatable story It can’t help but do that, it’s the only way you can represent it And so you don’t know how you do that or why you do that But part of it’s governed by this implicit morality That’s part of your procedural memory system Part of the way you act and part of the way you move your eyes and listen to things and focus on them And that’s all being instantiated inside of you because of this immense social, your biology But also this immense social project that you’re continually engaged in And so that informs what you remember, it informs what you imagine It informs what we collectively imagine It informs what we can collectively understand And partly what you’re doing while you become conscious of yourself Is to map the implicit structures that already constitute you from society Into explicit representation That’s what self-understanding means And you know, when you have that moment of insight about something you’ve done It’s like you’re watching this repetitive behavior that you’ve manifested Probably that got you in trouble You know, it’s your characteristic way of falling accidentally into chaos And you talk about your problems, you talk about them with your friends, you talk about them Maybe you have dreams about them and you’re trying to relate them And you have memories about them that you can’t get rid of because they’re negatively toned So you talk about them and then someone comes up with a little statement that links them together causally And you think, aha, that’s what I’m doing And then maybe you can stop doing it or at least maybe then you can think up some strategies for not doing it anymore But it’s not like you know, it’s like you’re acting it out You know it that way But until the representation matches that pattern, that click of insight doesn’t occur And that’s like a revelation, it’s a really good way of thinking about it Because the knowledge is there in its implicit form and all of a sudden, bang, it’s been made explicit As a fantasy maybe or also as a set of semantic statements You know, maybe you have a crush on someone and you don’t notice it And maybe you find yourself having a fantasy about them And you think, oh, that means something, that indicates something Maybe you don’t want to know that that’s what you want But the fantasy will tell you And one of the things Jung suggested, and this is sort of out of the Freudian tradition of free associations Watch yourself, watch your fantasies, because they’re always happening And they’ll tell you something And so one of the things I do when I’m interacting with my clients is we’ll have a discussion And then their eyes will drift a little bit And I’ll know that something’s flitted through their mind, you know And that means we’ve touched on something that has a multiplicity of elements And so I’ll stop and say, look, I noticed that you, maybe you teared up That’s another thing to really watch, or maybe you laughed Or you drifted at least It’s like, it’s because some other thought has entered your field of consciousness And then if you can get the person to grab those thoughts, to notice them Then you can often figure out the avenues along which that particular conversation might unfold That’s a complex, that’s a Jungian complex, or a psychoanalytic complex It’s like there’s an emotional core that produces a whole range of associated ideas And that thing’s got a life, it’s like a micro-personality And it might have resentment in it, it might have anger It’s often negative emotion tinged Because though negative emotion tinged episodes are still problems And they will emerge automatically because your threat detection systems force them onto your consciousness, essentially So you watch, and when you drift, you’ll drift And the fantasy is partly a representation of the problem space You know that happens when you wake up at 3 in the morning and you’re worried about things Because actually what happens is you wake up during threat processing And if you’re depressed, actually that gets so intense you can’t sleep So then you just lay there all night worrying, not fun And those are fantasies about the negative elements of your past, present, and future And the fantasies can also breed solutions And that’s partly why Freud regarded dreams as wish-fulfillments It’s partly, and he wasn’t, that was where he stopped It’s not correct, it’s partially correct It’s like the fantasy will provide you with a problem and a potential solution But they’re more like problem identification mechanisms, the fantasies, with the possibility of a solution built in And so a way of thinking about that is that you can generate potential futures So they’re like each segregatable environment, according to the rules of your fantasy Then you can generate little avatars of yourself that inhabit each of those little universes and you can run them as simulations And then you can watch what happens in the simulation, and if it’s a catastrophe then you don’t have to act it out And that’s exactly, not exactly That’s akin to what you’re doing when you go watch a movie, except that is much more coherent and well thought through Than just a dream, which is often quite fragmentary And that’s partly because the dream is willing to sacrifice coherence to play with category structures And that’s why in dreams things can change from one thing into another really weirdly Or scenes can change from one scene into another without a logic The logic gets loosened so that the expanse of your thinking can widen And it’s dangerous to do that, and that’s partly why you do it when you’re asleep and paralyzed You don’t run around and act out your pseudopodal fantasies, where you’re stretching yourself out into the world There’s no risk exactly, although it can be bad enough so you’ll wake up in terror But that’s better than being in a crocodile’s mouth by a large margin Anyways, back to these birds, these are used later in the movie as manifestations of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking And of course that’s a standard Christian symbol, although as I mentioned the dove often represents the Holy Spirit And we’ll talk about that later, but this movie has very strong pagan elements in it as I mentioned before As opposed to strictly Christian symbolism, but that’s a foreshadowing And what it foreshadows is that a new day has dawned, it’s the emergence of new consciousness And everything last night went well, really well, everything in the, let’s call it the unconscious, say after time stops That all went well, and so the new day is full of promise And so the birds are singing and the sun is shining, and like hooray, and so that’s exactly So that sets, this is the next scene, right, so it sets the tenor for that scene just like the introductory song does So anyways, then you see all these kids playing and enthusiastic, so they’re off to school Which is presented in a positive light, and so that’s where you get socialized So Pinocchio is ready to go beyond the boundaries of the familial home And he’s ready because his father prepared him and because his mother prepared him And so he goes off and he’s not going off alone, he’s going with his conscience Which is sort of the, you can think about it again, as the internalized representation of nature and society And so he’s not going out there alone, even though he’s not very good at it And he’s pretty excited about this, and so is Geppetto See, Geppetto is standing there paralyzed with terror And the kid isn’t phobic of the outside world And so that’s, he’s treating it as an adventure, I mean even though Well, it’s an adventure, but adventures can be dangerous What if the other, you can imagine a kid, especially one who’s like high in neuroticism Who hasn’t been encouraged sufficiently to overcome that, let’s say Their primary idea might be, well what if the other kids don’t like me? That’s a big one, what if the teachers don’t like me, what if the other kids won’t play with me? It’s like, yeah, what if? That’s rough, man And if you’re not a playful kid, it could easily be the case So, but that’s not Pinocchio, he’s like spinning out ready to go And so, good, good, he’s got, naive, but enthusiastic Okay, well that at least gets the ball rolling Now, you’ve got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat I think this one’s based on one of the Marx brothers actually, Harpo Marx Who I believe never said anything, but be that as it may, they’re these near-do-well characters The fox in particular, now fox is a standard trickster animal, right? It’s a classic animal, maybe because it’s good at hiding and it’s good at hunting I don’t know exactly why, but it’s, and coyotes are like that too They’re classic trickster animals He’s kind of like Wile E. Coyote, in fact, you know, the Warner Brothers character Who’s genius at large, and of course, whose arrogance continually gets him walloped And this character has a lot of features like that But he feigns being an English gentleman of like the 1890s and pretends to be educated And he has a kind of high-blown way of talking, and he’s a fraud through and through And he’s got this, you know, sidekick who is barely there at all And he doesn’t treat him that well, but he’s got someone to lord it over So that keeps his dominance hierarchy thing going well And the fact that he’s like a second-rate companion, well, he never really notices that Although he’ll treat him contemptuously whenever he gets a chance So anyways, they’re walking down the street and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he’s done And how he pulled the wool over someone’s eyes And he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence And one of the things that you see, this is worth knowing too Because if you’re preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life The psychopath who will be narcissistic will presume that you’re stupid And that you deserve to be taken advantage of because you’re naive and stupid So it’s actually a good thing that he’s doing it And his proof for, and I’m saying he because there are more male psychopaths The proof that you’re stupid naive is that he can take advantage of you And so, like if you were wiser, you’d know his tricks And then it wouldn’t be morally necessary for him to show you just exactly who knows what about what And so the psychopath will use his ability to fool you as proof of his own grandiose omniscience and narcissism And the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath And virtually anybody can So that Robert Hare for example, who studied psychopaths for a long time And interviewed a lot of them, like hundreds of them And videotaped many of the interviews He said when he was talking to the psychopath he always believed what they were saying And then he’d watch the video afterwards and see where the conversation went off the rails But the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong And if you’re polite you don’t object to the way that the person unfolds their strategy And psychopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate, obviously, how to manipulate people And the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low Go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on YouTube That’s bloody, that’s enlightening, man Paul Bernardo, he’s like the CEO of a meeting in that video, you know He gives the cops hell, he gives the lawyers hell, he protests his innocence He basically tells them that they’re rude and untrustworthy Because they don’t trust him because he did a few little things 17 years ago And he gets away with a few little things, right? I mean he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his girlfriend at the time And you know, he was a repeat sexual offender and murderer But he basically goes, well, you know, that’s a long time ago It’s like, we’re past that, aren’t we? I mean, I’m having a discussion with you, I’m trying to help you solve some crimes Which, by the way, I committed, but we won’t bring that up And you’re accusing me of being a liar Like, you’re not playing fair, what’s up with you? And then when they answer he looks at his fingernails Which is like, that’s a lovely little manipulative thing Because it basically means, whatever happens to be under my fingernail at the moment And the court is much higher priority than listening to your foolish story And you watch, you’ll see people do that to you And then you get a little insight into what they’re up to He’s very good at that Or he looks outside, or he just looks at his hands, or he looks out the window Immediately dismissive in his non-verbal behaviour It’s brilliant The courts were forced to release that, by the way But look it up, Paul Bernardo on YouTube, wow It’s just mind boggling, he’s so good at what he does And he’s good looking, and he’s charismatic, and you know, he can really pull it off And you can’t tell what’s happening with the cops and the lawyers Whether they’re just letting him play as a routine to get some information from him Or whether he’s actually setting them back on his heels And I suspect it’s a bit of both But it’s a masterful performance If you didn’t know who he was And you were watching it without the audio, you’d think He’s the CEO of some company given his employees hell for not being up to scratch That’s all his body language, his eye contact, everything Just speaks that, it’s amazing So anyways, you got these two-bit hoods here Who think they’re really something They also think they’re tough and dangerous And they’re not, they’re just cowardly and cornered dwellers And they confuse their unwillingness to abide by reasonable rules As indication of their heroic courage Which is something else that low rent hoods like to do, you know And it’s partly because lots of people who just attend to the law Do do that because they’re cowardly Which is a Nietzschean observation Are you good or are you just afraid? Let’s start with afraid first Before we proceed to good And that the reason that you follow the rules is because you’re afraid of getting caught Yeah, well, you know those kids who Often university kids who are in like a hockey riot And they end up breaking windows and stealing things And you know, they get nailed for it Afterwards they’re really Blown away by their own behavior It’s like, well, they’re in that camp It’s like, they think they’re good people But they’re not, they’re just never anywhere where you could be bad And as soon as you put them somewhere where they could be bad It’s like, out it comes, just like that And that’s really worth thinking about Because most of you, many of you But not all of you, I suspect Have never really been somewhere that you could be really bad And get away with it So you might think, well, you wouldn’t do it, but But people do it All the time So anyways, they’re talking about some exploits And then they see that this character named Stromboli Who’s a marionette, he has a puppet show, right? And he’s kind of a wheeler-dealer too Remember, I showed you that mask that was glaring at Pinocchio When he got his voice It’s like, Stromboli is one of his manifestations The fox here is another one of his manifestations And all the negative characters throughout the movie Are manifestations of the same thing It’s partly the adversarial individual And it’s partly the tyrannical aspect of society It’s the negative masculine, that’s one way of thinking about it So, and you know, when men go bad They often go bad by being antisocial and tyrannical So, there’s way more antisocial men than there are antisocial women Which is why there’s 20 times as many men in jail as there are women So each gender, let’s say each sex Has its own characteristic pathologies And there are some antisocial women And there are some high neuroticism guys Or some guys who are really agreeable as well But they’re rarer So anyways, he sees this poster advertising Stromboli’s puppet show So Stromboli’s a puppet master Now that’s really worth thinking about Because that’s an archetypal theme Or it’s at least attached to an archetypal theme Something’s behind the scenes pulling the strings And everybody always wonders what that is, right? What’s actually going on? What’s actually going on with Trump? Who’s actually in control? Is it Putin? I mean, that’s the fantasies of the left It’s Putin It’s like, well, the question always is The question always is, what’s going on behind the scene? And the question is, that’s the case certainly on the political landscape Business landscape, interpersonal relations What are you really up to? Everyone’s always wondering that, right? That’s why they’re watching your eyes Because your eyes point at things And they can infer what you’re interested in And what you’re up to by looking at what you look at And that’s why your eyes have whites So that we can see where you’re pointing Because gorillas don’t And so what that means, roughly speaking Is that all of your ancestors, whose eyes couldn’t be reliably tracked Were either killed or didn’t mate It’s a big deal for us to see where people’s eyes are pointed And so we’re always watching each other’s eyes constantly What are you up to? What are you looking at? What do you want? And I want to know, because if I know what you want I can predict how you’re going to behave And that also means I can cooperate with you Or I can compete with you, or I can lie to you But all the information is in the eyes Surrounded by the facial display, right? Because that’s also an indication of motivation and emotion And so we’re trapped, like, our eyes are so good at that That for you guys sitting there in the back I can tell if you’re looking at my eyes or at my chin And the deviation in your eyes is so tiny That it’s a kind of miracle that we’re capable of making that perceptual observation It’s really important to us And we have really good eyes So that’s another thing about us So anyways, what’s going on behind the scenes? Well, if you look at Stromboli You might be thinking It’s not clear he’s someone you’d want to have pulling your strings Like there’s a little bit of forced enthusiasm, let’s say, there And he’s just not a very savory-looking character So anyways, the fox knows him And they start talking about Stromboli, that old joker And then how they could possibly involve him in some sort of scam Because he’s back in town And then they see the puppet And the fox does his equivalent of thinking Which is, you know, pretty sad and nasty But that’s what he does And then they see this puppet with no strings And they think, hey, man, a puppet master would pay a lot For something that is capable of semi-autonomous movement like that It would be kind of a miracle And so they decide that they’re going to take him to Stromboli And so they grab him And he’s got an apple to take to the teacher Which I think it’s the cat, promptly eats And the fox acts out this sort of false enthusiasm About what Pinocchio is up to And pretends that he’s his friend Which is, of course, what your typical pedophile will do And so this is in the same kind of category And it truly is And one of the things that’s interesting to know about pedophiles Is that they’re predatory, right? And so they don’t go after kids that are assertive And likely to be noisy They watch And they watch to see if they can find a kid who’s defeated And that’s good enough Who’s defeated And who’s going to need a friend And who’s not going to object And so when they check out These are the ones who do the stranger abductions Which are, by the way, extraordinarily rare They look for a victim type They look for a kid who’s going to be easy to take down And so, you know, that’s one thing you don’t want So you might think, well One of the things that was really big And it’s probably even worse now When I was a parent of young children Was to teach your kids how to be afraid of strangers It’s like, no, wrong That is not what you teach them Because all you do is teach them then to be timid and fearful And the real predatory types They’re pretty much thrilled about that Because you’ll also make them sheltered and naive You know, so that is You make your kids courageous And you get their damn eyes open And that’s the best thing you can do to protect them Against people who are truly dangerous So none of that terrifying That is It’s not a good idea Anyways, the fox befriends the puppet And then they come up with this evil scheme To get them off to Stromboli The puppet master, and away they go And they sing a little song about being an actor An actor’s life for me And this took me a long time to figure out I thought They’re taking Pinocchio away to be an actor Now why in the world are actors Getting such a rough time In this movie It’s like, it’s a Hollywood movie You know It’s acting, obviously The voiceovers and all that are acting It’s, why, what is this thing about being an actor And then I thought, oh I get it I see what’s going on They sing to Pinocchio about The delights of unearned Celebrity So he doesn’t have to go and get an education He doesn’t have to take the difficult route He can take the easy way To dominance To success To dominance success He can circumvent all the hard work And go right to the top You know, and when you think about Phenomena like the Kardashian family And how popular they are Part of that is, is this desire That people have for unearned celebrity Because you can get to the top Without any sacrifices And without any work, and if you’re really cynical You know, you think that the people at the top Are just there by accident anyways And it might as well be you, and of course There’s a lot of naivety in that as well And a fair bit of You know, not A fair lack of wisdom and all of that But the actor idea here is that you can You can pretend To be something you’re not And that that’s the proper route of anyone Wise to success It’s the ultimate in cynicism And it’s a nihilistic perspective as well And that’s how they entrap them They say, look, why are you going Why are you bothering to go to school That’s going to take 18 years With all of your talents, you can just go on the stage Your name will be up in lights You’ll be at the top in no time And plus he does have some talents He is after all a semi-autonomous puppet Now he doesn’t Exactly know how special that makes him But the fox could obviously See something in him, and he’s good at playing That naivety off And then offering these false promises But see, the thing is One of the things that Carl Jung said That I thought was really interesting when he was talking About the Oedipal situation in families I never forgot this So the Oedipal situation, roughly speaking, is when I’ll lay out the classic story Is when a child is seriously overprotected Usually a male child by his mother Now the reverse can be the case And it can be a female child by the mother And all of that But I’ll just talk about the classic case to begin with Now, what Freud observed Was that there were usually not very good boundaries In families like that And so the relationship between the husband And the wife was either strained or non-existent And the wife would often turn to the child To be what she isn’t getting from the husband And so there’s a great South Park episode about this A wonderful South Park episode Where they, where I don’t remember, that horrible little guy That’s him, yeah, yeah Yeah, and his mother brings in the dog whisperer To train him And it’s a brilliant It’s a brilliant episode If you want to learn about the Freudian Oedipal situation You watch that, you’ve got it down cold Because she brings in this expert Who then she wants to have an affair with And she’s like, oh, I’m going to be a dog whisperer In this episode, we’ve got this expert Who then she wants to have an affair with So that’s a boundary issue And he basically separates her son from him And imposes the same discipline on him That he would impose on a bad dog Although he also trains The dog’s owners all the time Because maybe it’s not the dog Maybe it’s the owner There’s a horse whisperer movie too About the original horse whisperer That does a beautiful job of laying that out too Because he’s very good at fixing problem horses good at diagnosing psychopathology on the part of the owner. He’s got a gift for it. But anyways, what happens in the South Park episode is that the dog whisperer gets Cartman, yeah, straightened out. And he starts dressing properly and doing his homework. And the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisperer, but he’s professional. He keeps his distance. Like, he keeps boundaries around him. And then he leaves. And then the first thing that she does when he leaves is bribe Cartman, basically, out of doing his homework so that he can accompany her to, I don’t know, a fast food restaurant or something like that. And so the reason she does that is because she’s lonesome and doesn’t have anybody else around. And maybe she’s also deeply, deeply, deeply terrified that if she helps that boy grow up, he will leave. And she’ll have nothing. And so mothers who don’t have something say outside their infants, not merely their children, are more likely to fall into that. And it’s no wonder. You’ve got to think that through. And lots of women, most women, really fall in love with their babies. And so even if they start growing into larger children, that can be threatening. Because when the infant turns into a toddler, the infant is dead. The toddler is there now. And you can radically interfere with that process. That happens all the time, all the time. That’s the classic Freudian Oedipal nightmare. And that episode is brilliant. It’s bloody brilliant. It just nails it. And some of you have been in my personality class and watched Crumb, the documentary Crumb. And that’s another staggering exposition of exactly that kind of pathology. Anyways, one of the things Jung pointed out, so I knew this guy once who had a mother who basically was trying that trick. And she was very smart and had lots of tricks up her sleeves. And there’s just no way he was going to go for it. He rebelled at every possible moment. And he basically became, I would say, somewhat hyper-masculine in response, which is an interesting lesson with regards to the hyper-masculinity that boys often develop if they’re raised by single mothers, because they tend to go one of two ways. And he just fought her at every step of the way. And it didn’t happen. But one of the things Jung said, which I loved, and you can really see this in the Crumb documentary, is that the Oedipal mother basically entices the child. Says, look, here’s the deal. You don’t have to do anything. But you don’t get to leave. But if you don’t leave and you don’t do these difficult things, then I’ll take care of you. And the child has a choice all the way along there. I mean, obviously, he’s outclassed in some sense. But it’s not as obvious as you’d think. Little kids are tough. And they make decisions all the time. And so Jung thought about it more as a conspiracy than as something imposed on the child by the mother. And I really like it’s actually a conspiracy between mother, father, and child, actually. And I think that’s a good way of looking at it, even though it’s really rough. Well, should you hold the child responsible? Well, yes. But judiciously and not completely. Because then if you deal with someone like that as an adult and they’re trying to escape from it, you have to go all the way back and figure out how the hell it happened. And then they have to adjust. They have to figure out where they opened the door, like inviting a vampire in. Because they can’t come in unless you invite them in. So don’t invite them in. Because once they’re in, they’re really hard to get rid of. And they’ll take all your blood. So that’s a cautionary tale. So anyways, Pinocchio doesn’t know any better. And he’s got the egotism of youth. And he’s offered the easy way to success, which is exactly what the fox tells him. And off they go to see Stromboli. So this is the song. I’m not going to read it all. It’s great to be a celebrity in actor’s life for me. You sleep till after 2, you promenade a big cigar, you tour the world in a private car, you dine on chicken and caviar in actor’s life for me. So it’s all this idea of wealth and public exposure and zero attention whatsoever to anything regarding responsibility or discipline or learning. And so it’s a dual attraction, right? You get everything you want, and you don’t have to do anything. Geez, what a deal. And so that’s what the actor represents. It’s a liar fundamentally. It’s someone who’s acting out a deception. They’re a persona in the union sense. So the persona is the mask you wear in public that you might even think you are, but you’re not. It’s this mask. And that’s the persona. So the fox and the cat are inviting the puppet to only become a persona. And see, for Jung, you start as a persona. And then when you start to investigate the parts of you that don’t really fit in that persona, that would be the shadow. Then you start understanding who you really are. And that’s shocking, because the persona contains everything, roughly speaking, that you think is good and maybe even that your immediate culture thinks is good. And then the shadow contains everything that’s not part of that. And some of that’s really bad. But some of it is good disguised as bad. And you can’t break out of the persona and transcend it until you incorporate a lot of what’s in the shadow. And so for example, if you’re an extraordinarily compassionate person, let’s say, 98th percentile will say, you’re going to be sacrificing yourself to other people all the time. And there are people who will find that extraordinarily And it will be under some circumstances. But the problem is that you will sacrifice yourself. And that’s a really bad attitude to have, for example, towards adult males. It’s a great thing for infants. But for adult males, it is the wrong approach. And so you will get taken advantage of continually by people who are looking for someone like you until you grow some teeth. And you’ll think, no, no, that’s the opposite of compassion. Being able to bite hard is the opposite of compassion, which it is. And so you’ll have that pushed into the predator category. I’m not doing that. I’m not getting angry. I don’t like conflict. It’s like until you bring that out of the depths and put it on so you can use it, you’re going to be in trouble. And that’s kind of Nietzsche’s idea of the revaluation of good and evil. You have a sense of what’s good and a sense of what isn’t with your conscience. But it’s not very smart. It’s got things in the wrong boxes. And a lot of the things that even nature itself, a lot of the things that you accept as untrammeled goods, like compassion, let’s say, have a very dark side, first of all. And second, are not enough to get you through life. You need the opposite virtues too. And so you have to develop them. And so you get outside the persona to do that. But anyways, Pinocchio is invited to be a false persona to take the gains of celebrity without having to do anything to be educated. He’s just going to go right to the top from right where he is. And people are kind of fascinated by that idea. That’s why you watch America’s Got Talent or The X Factor, which are shows I actually love, by the way. You never see narcissism in its purer forms than you see it when you watch people who display an absolute lack of talent and become homicidal when someone dares point it out, right? Accusatory and homicidal instantly. It’s really something. And then now and then you do see one of these people who’s so introverted and so out of society and have this unbelievable gift, which is also something really remarkable to see. And it’s no wonder those things are so popular. They’re psychologically extraordinarily interesting. So OK, so that’s the actor, first of Pinocchio’s temptations. And of course, it’s the first one, because he’s entering the social world. And the temptation in the social world is to be exactly what other people want you to be. And the thing that’s cool about that is that is what you should be doing, right? When you go out in your peers, you should be not subjugating your individuality to your peers, because that’s not exactly right. That’s kind of based on an inhibition model. You’ve got aggression. You’ve got bad habits. They have to be inhibited. You learn that by interacting with your peers. It’s not the right model. That’s a Freudian model. Piaget was correct about that. He basically pointed out that what should happen is, let’s say, with your aggression, and hopefully you have some, is that it gets socialized. And so you learn how to play games, but you don’t drop your drive to win. You integrate that in the games. And so you try to win. You try to play hard. But if you’re defeated or you hit something negative, you don’t respond negatively. And you can keep that all bounded within being a good player, a fair player. And that means what’s happened is you’ve learned how to play a game or a set of games that also includes the darker parts of you, and they actually become part of your force of character. It’s way better if you can pull that off. And that’s what you definitely want to do as an adult. All you people are going to have to learn to negotiate on your own behalf. And that’s really hard. It means that you have to know what you want. You have to be able to communicate it. And you have to be able to say no. And to say no, you have to be built on a solid foundation. You have to have options. So you’ve got to remember that as you go through your life. If you don’t have options, you can’t negotiate with someone. And if you’re not willing to use them, they win, period. Because if you’re asking your boss for more money, say, the answer is no. Because he doesn’t have any spare money lying around that he can just give to you. And lots of other people are asking. So some of that zero sum stuff, not all of it, because often you cooperate with people and the whole pot can grow. But some of it’s zero sum. And so you better have a case made. It’s like, here’s how much money I should have. Here’s why. Here’s the benefit to you that will accrue if you do it. Here’s the consequences that you don’t. They’re actually real. They will cost you. And I will do them. It’s like, then you can negotiate. And you don’t do that rudely. But those arguments, you better have them in order. Like, so for example, if you’re going to negotiate for a raise or a status shift, you better have your resume at hand, all polished up, and know where else you’re going to look for a job. And you better be able to get one. Because otherwise, you’re weak. And you will not win the negotiation. And if you’re too agreeable, so you’re conflict avoidant, you will make less money across time. That’s already been well established. And that’s because you don’t have teeth. Not enough. And so in the little microcontest that you’re going to have every day, you’re going to incrementally lose to people who are more aggressive, who have bigger teeth. And that’s what happens. So don’t let that happen. You place yourself so you can negotiate. Because otherwise, you’re just a facade. And in a real battle, a facade is just torn down right away. So yes, well, say no more, right? Well, the cricket, he’s supposed to be helping the puppet out. But he overslept. It’s like, that’s just another indication that he’s not everything he could be yet. And that’s really, that took me a long time to puzzle out with regards to interpreting this movie. I could not figure out. All right, I told you this. If the bug is the person who opens the hero narrative and who can guide the transformations of time and who has the same initials as Jesus Christ, and is knighted by nature herself, why is he such an idiot? It’s a very difficult thing to figure out. But the idea that the conscience isn’t omniscient, even though it has that voice of, let’s say, common sense, and that fits very nicely in with the Freudian idea of the super-ego, again, because the super-ego can be flawed. It can be too harsh. It cannot be properly developed. You see that often with people who are orderly. So they’re high in conscientiousness. Conscientiousness fragments into industriousness and orderliness. Orderly people like willpower. They’re very judgmental. And they like things to be exactly where they’re supposed to be. But they’re also very self-punitive. So conservatives are much more likely to be orderly, by the way. It’s one of the best predictors of conservative. Low openness is the best predictor. But right after that is high orderliness. And it’s associated with disgust sensitivity, which is really an amazing thing. We’ll talk about that later. Anyways, this cricket, well, he falls down his first day on the job. He’s not as conscientious a conscience as he should be. So he’s feeling pretty stupid. He’s got his little millionaire clothes on there, but he’s really not living up to them. So he does catch up to the fox and the puppet, however, and tries to dissuade Pinocchio from going down this road. And of course, the cat, well, you can see what the cat’s doing there. He’s got a big hammer, big mallet. And he also shows you just exactly how much of a clue he has. He’s going to wallop the bug who’s sitting on the fox’s hat, which I think he actually does. And then the fox can’t get out of his hat and has to talk through his hat, which basically is what he’s doing the whole time anyways. So this I really like. So you see on the left here, the cricket is speaking inside this flower. And like I said, there’s nothing accidental in these representations. So these are artists who are coming up with these compositions. And their fantasy has a structure. And so the cricket is speaking out of this flower that has, well, you could think about it as it has a sexualized element. So you could think about that as a phallic part of it and that part of the feminine part of it. Well, they are flowers after all. They are the sex organs of plants. And so that’s very much the same over here as this is the Yoni and Lingam. This is from Hindu cultures. And you see there’s a snake wrapped around that. And so that’s masculine and feminine with a snake wrapped around it. And that’s a holy representation, a sacred representation. And it represents the deepest reality. That’s one way of thinking about it, like chaos and order surrounded by the snake. It’s exactly the same idea. And so the cricket speaks out of that. We already know that because the cricket is the conscience. And he’s been awakened in part by Geppetto and the good father and awakened in part by the good fairy and nature. And so he speaks with those voices. And he’s also a manifestation of the underlying chaos itself because nature and culture spring out of chaos. I already showed you that schematic representation. OK, so I’ll just end this scene. And then we’ll have like a 15 minute break, OK? So anyways, the cricket tries to make a case for why Pinocchio shouldn’t go off to be a celebrity. But it’s a hard case to make because the fox is very manipulative. And Pinocchio is naive. And it sounds like a good offer. And also the fox is actually quite forceful. He basically takes him by the hand. So the temptation is, and this is something else I like about the movie, you can’t just say, well, the puppet gets what he deserves because he’s little, naive. And what he’s facing is really malevolent, truly malevolent, and physically overpowering. And so the movie does a nice job of not minimizing the threat that’s posed by this particular temptation. And that’s part of what makes it art. OK, good. So we’ll stop there. We’ll have a break for 15 minutes. And then we’ll start with the stage. So all right. So here we are at the big event. And Pinocchio’s off to be a celebrity. And the cricket is watching. And Pinocchio basically, well, he’s got some natural talent because he’s a puppet. He doesn’t have strings. And he goes on stage with strings. And then he drops his strings. And the whole crowd is amazed. And the crowd should be amazed when that happens, right? You can imagine when a kid goes to school and shows some independence, that that’s actually going to. People are going to notice that. His peers are going to notice that. The teachers are going to notice that. Maybe it’s too much independence even. But it is a remarkable thing, too. It’s so interesting. You can see marked signs of independence in children, well, right from the time they’re born, basically, because what’s one of the things that’s really funny about infants is that when they’re crying, you always think, oh, the baby’s, well, you’re crying. It’s, the baby’s sad. It’s like, no. A lot of the time, that baby is angry. And the way that we know that is because you could do facial expression coding on infants, just like on adults. And you can tell what emotion they’re expressing. And very frequently, like when the kid starts to recognize mom explicitly, because he or she knows the smell right away, pretty much in the sound of the voice. But visually, if someone comes in and it isn’t who the baby wants, so generally it isn’t mom, the baby will start to cry. But it’s not because the baby’s sad, generally. It’s because it’s angry that mom didn’t show up. And that’s an early sign of will. It’s like, this kid wants things. And it’s perfectly willing to tell you about that. And of course, a two-year-old who’s having a temper tantrum is, in some sense, doing the same thing. It’s poorly integrated will and independence, obviously. But it certainly runs contrary to what you want. You don’t want your two-year-old having a temper tantrum in the middle of the toy store. It’s extraordinarily embarrassing for you and, well, for you. But it’s also embarrassing for the two-year-old. This is one of the reasons I think that that sort of thing should be carefully socialized rapidly. Because it’s actually humiliating for the kid, because other people don’t like that. And they’re very judgmental about it. Like, they won’t say anything, usually. But sometimes they will. But they’re not happy about the fact that that’s happening. And they will judge the child negatively. And so you don’t want your child to be behaving in a way in public that makes other people think badly of them. It’s really not good. And so part of your job as a parent is to not expose your child to that sort of experience, especially not repeatedly. It’s really hard on them. Or they get narcissistic, which is also really hard on them. It’s just, it takes a lot longer to manifest itself. So anyways, he’s off on stage. And Stromboli introduces him and talks about how wonderful this is going to be. And Pinocchio comes out on stage with his strings on and drops them. And then he falls down the steps and put his nose in a hole. Makes a fool out of himself. And that’s when Stromboli, first time Stromboli, shows his true character. Because he just really yells and screams at him. And he has his back to the audience. Stromboli, while he’s doing this. So he’s not noticing how the audience is reacting. Typical tyrannical parent, right? Who’s not noticing that society is reacting a different way than him. And he’s not happy about it. And Pinocchio, of course, is dazed and feels like a fool. And he is a fool. So that’s appropriate. But then Stromboli hears the crowd laughing. And as soon as he turns around, he’s like all smiles again. And so that’s the first time you get insight into what sort of puppet master he is. He’s there to please the crowd, and that’s all. And he’s there to look good in public. But fundamentally, he’s a tyrant. And I guess that’s the problem with false celebrity, is that the negative spirit of the crowd becomes your master. Because to be a celebrity, you have to be a crowd pleaser. And if you’re pleasing the kind of crowd who likes a celebrity like you, which is, and there’s not much reason for that, then it’s not exactly like you’re appealing to the proper side of the crowd. And you’ve become its puppet one way or another. And maybe it’s rewarding you with wealth, perhaps, and with attention. But fundamentally, it’s not something I would recommend if you want to stay reasonably psychologically healthy for any reasonable amount of time. You’re going to sell yourself out. And I don’t mean that in any casual way. All right, so anyways, Stromboli changes from the tyrant to the good father in half a second. It gives Pinocchio a pat on the head, despite the fact that he’s made a mistake, looks all kind, and the show continues. Now, the cricket is not very happy about this. He’s sitting in the stage watching. He’s very angry and, let’s say, disgusted by what’s happening, partly because Pinocchio is making a fool of himself. Now, that’s an interesting thing. Human beings blush. In fact, if I remember correctly, the name Adam, like Adam and Eve, is related to the capacity to blush. Now, that comes from something I read a long time ago, and that might be wrong. But Adam does manifest shame in the sight of God. So there is a relationship there. But anyways, people do make fools of themselves for public display. And you can tell you’ve done that in some sense, not always, if you blush. Because you’ve either said something you shouldn’t have, and you realize that, which is more like you’ve tried to be funny and gone a little bit too far. And sometimes that can be really funny. Or you said something that you know to be false, manipulative, deceitful, beneath you, any of those things, and you’ll have an automatic response to it. You’d be ashamed and blush. And one theory about that is that you can trust people who blush. And so because you know that their conscience will betray them. And so that even if they are lying, they tell you. And so it’s an interesting theory, you know? Because blush is definitely like it’s a facial display. It’s right out there where people can see it. So maybe that’s true. Maybe it isn’t. But it’s kind of an interesting idea. Anyways, the cricket is not happy with what’s going on. He’s not happy about Stromboli. And he’s not happy about the willingness of Pinocchio to make a fool of himself to support this false celebrity. And so I actually think that’s why the celebrity types like that often get narcissistic and arrogant. Because they aren’t paying attention. They’re not paying attention, really, to what’s happening inside of them. They drown it out because the glory and the money and all that is so attractive and enticing. They refuse to notice what price they’re paying for it. And they magnify up their grandiosity and their arrogance to keep that stuff all under control. And then, of course, they get surrounded by sycophants, which is a really bad thing, right? They get surrounded by people who will tell them exactly what they want to hear. And that’s really bad if what you want to hear from other people is not good for you. To surround yourself with people who won’t offer you genuine criticism or even genuine reward. It’s the same thing. Like, you want from me that I differentially reward and punish you in approximately the way that the good part of the crowd will. That’s what you want from all your friends. Because then, your interactions with them can generalize out to the broader community in a productive way. And so a good friend, I mean, your friends tend to be on the supportive side. And perhaps that’s appropriate, assuming there’s reciprocity. But a good friend will also tell you when one way or another, when your behavior is starting to tilt in a direction that’s going to make you unpopular with them and likely unpopular with other people. And of course, that’s what a parent is supposed to do. That’s the prime job of a parent, in my estimation. It’s like, don’t do that. Other people will hurt you if you do that. By exclusion, by threat, by failure to offer you an opportunity, bad things will happen to you. So you can’t do that. And then you’re a representative of the social situation, which is exactly what you should be, not a friend. So or at least not precisely a friend. That doesn’t make you an enemy. It makes you better than a friend. Well, so Pinocchio’s on stage making a fool of himself. And then he gets all tangled up in other puppets’ strings. That’s what happens to him. And then it all ends rather badly with everything being a tangled mess on stage. But it also turns out to be rather funny. It’s funny, because he’s surrounded by angry Russians. You know, you could kind of view that as a potential lesson, is that if you’re a puppet on a stage and you mess around too much, you just might get tangled up with a bunch of angry Russians. These are Cossacks. That’s exactly what happens. So anyways, of course, no. That’s not what’s happening here. But it’s still funny. So Stromboli is not happy with the tangled mess. But then the crowd reacts very positively. And then that confuses the conscience, because he thinks, well, look, this is horrible. This guy’s a tyrant. Like Pinocchio’s making a fool of himself. Everything turns into a tangled mess. But the crowd goes crazy. And well, being a fool, that can be entertaining, right? So it’s hard to tell when a crowd, especially at a spectacle, because this crowd is at a spectacle, you just don’t know exactly why it is that they’re responding positively. But you’ve definitely given them what you want. And you can see this look on Stromboli’s face. It’s like this false, again, this false kindness and generosity, public facing. And oh, well, anyways, the conscience is very confused. And I really think this is an important thing, because I’ve often thought, I spent a lot of time thinking about Hitler. And I was thinking, well, how do you get into a state like that? And you think, well, he’s a dictator. And he led his people down a bad path. It’s like, that’s not right. That is not what happened. They had a conspiracy together and went down a bad path. Now, think about it this way. If one person thinks something about you, it’s like, whatever, right? But if five people tell you that, well, what? Then to start not taking that seriously is kind of narcissistic, right? And if it isn’t five, let’s say it’s 15 people, tell you the same thing or act the same way towards you. It’s like, probably you should clue in. Well, what if you’re a politician and you’re trying out a bunch of different ideas and you’re good at interacting with the crowd? You’re charismatic. You watch the crowd. But you’re not necessarily all that articulate. You don’t have your values all straightened out. But you’re kind of angry, too. And maybe that’s because you spent a bunch of time in World War I in the trenches, which was like no joke, and all your friends got blown up. And then you were unemployed. And then you tried to be an artist, and that didn’t work out, even though you were moderately talented. And then maybe the economy fell apart completely on you. Hyperinflation. And then maybe there was a communist menace coming in from the East, and there genuinely was. And so you’re not the world’s happiest clam at that point. And you’re talking to people who aren’t that happy either, because they were also badly defeated in World War I. And then they had a terrible treaty they had decided. And they lost part of their territory. And so the crowd’s not happy, and neither are you. And there’s reason for it. And so you start talking to them. You don’t know what you’re upset about. And neither does the crowd. So you start to articulate some things about why you might be upset. And some of them fall flat, but you’re paying attention to the crowd. So you stop saying those things. And some of the things make the crowd really wake up and listen. And so you start saying more of those things. It’s an unconscious dialectic between you and the crowd. It’s mediated by consciousness. But it’s not like you’re sitting there saying, although you might be, I’m going to tell this crowd more what it wants to hear. It’s more sophisticated than that. And so you do that 1,000 times. And you do that to ever-increasing crowds. And the crowd really starts to go mad. And they basically tell you that you’re the savior of the nation. It’s like, how many bloody people have to tell you that before you start to believe it? I would say with a typical person, 100 will do it. That’ll get you going, man. If 100 people tell you specifically why you’re special, you’re going to be thinking, even if you’re kind of humble to begin with, you’re going to be thinking, jeez, there’s got to be something to this, man. But if it’s a million people, and they’re roaring their approval well, and then when it’s a whole nation, it’s like, good luck withstanding that. There’s just not a chance. How are you going to withstand that? Now, you could be like Gandhi. And you could have taken that into account beforehand, because he did. He read Tolstoy, by the way. He was a student of Tolstoy. And that’s very interesting, because Tolstoy was the person who developed the techniques of nonviolence that Gandhi used. And Tolstoy was also a deeply religious writer, apart from his novels, which are not, I wouldn’t say, really in the religious category, although they’re profound. Tolstoy stressed humility with nonviolence. He really stressed it. And that’s what Gandhi took to heart. So he lived a very, very, very, very simple, bare bones, ascetic life. And that was to kind of see if he could keep his damn ego tamped down while the groundswell was building behind him. And he dressed really simply. And he didn’t own much. And he ate very simply. And he just tried to stay away from the whole materialistic success element that would be an element of what would turn him into an actor and also inflate his ego. And he seemed to do that pretty well. He certainly, well, he led a nonviolent revolution that resulted in the independence of India. It also produced a terrible civil war in the separation of the Muslim Indians from the Hindu Indians. But I don’t think you can precisely lay that at the feet of Gandhi. But what I’m saying is that you have to be an extraordinary person. You have to be extraordinarily wise. And you have to take ridiculous precautions if you’re going to put yourself in the public sphere like that and expose yourself to that kind of adulation without becoming a puppet of the crowd. And that’s what happened to Hitler. I mean, it’s not like he wasn’t also a conscious manipulator and surrounded himself by people who were propagandists and all of that. So there was a conscious element. But you’ve got to think these things through and see how that dialectic develops. He learned how to appeal to the darkest fantasies of the crowd. He was really, really good at it. And that was a dialectic process, right? The crowd told him what they wanted to hear. And the crowd’s a mob at that point. So I don’t have to take responsibility for the fact that I’m screaming my approval when I’m surrounded by a million people. So I can scream my approval for whatever I want, for whatever dark, revengeful fantasy might be playing out in my imagination, because I’m not going to be held accountable for it. Anyways, the cricket’s confused. And it’s no wonder. It’s like the public has rendered its judgment. And the judgment is positive. So when I wrote the book on which this course is based, I was thinking, how am I going to judge its success? And then I thought, well, there’s a two-by-two matrix of success. You could say, it’s a great book. No one reads it. That happens. So what do you do about that? It’s like Nietzsche sold virtually nothing in his lifetime, right? And you know that’s happened to lots of artists. Then it’s a terrible book, and everyone loves it. That happens, too. And then it’s a great book, and everyone loves it. And then it’s a terrible book, and everyone hates it. That’s probably a better category, actually, that it’s a terrible book, and everyone loves it. I mean, you wouldn’t pick a terrible book that everyone hates if you had a choice. But at least the quality and the response match. At least it’s truthful, like great book, good response. But the problem with those four categories is you can’t really tell which category your production falls into, right? Because how do you know? I think you should assume horrible book, bad response, because that’s the most likely. Of all four of those categories, that’s the one that’s most likely to be true, but just purely on actuarial grounds, let’s say. So all right. So anyways, the cricket wanders away, because he obviously not only was he late for work that day, but he turned out to be wrong about everything. So he lets Pinocchio go off on his adventure, and Stromboli puts him in this little kind of like a traveling, a touring wagon, you know? And away they go. And the cricket thinks, well, the conscience isn’t needed anymore on this journey towards unearned celebrity. Well, meanwhile, back at the ranch, as they say, the puppet is supposed to come home after school. But he doesn’t. He doesn’t show up. And the kitten and the fish and Geppetto are all waiting there for him, ready to eat. Excuse me. But he doesn’t show up. And so Geppetto goes out into the rain to look for him, and he can’t find him. And then we see the inside of the traveling show cart, and Stromboli is having a snack and counting all the money that he’s made from tonight’s performance and hypothetically dividing it up with the puppet. So he’s got this little stack of gold, and some of it’s false. So somebody paid with a, looks like a little washer, like a mechanical washer, and it’s bent. And so he curses about that for a while, even though it’s interesting, because he’s made all this money. It’s been really successful. This one little error is enough to enrage him, which is very ungrateful and tyrannical. It’s like, look, you got 100 gold pieces. Someone slipped you a fake one. It’s like, you could have had 101. It’s still a pretty good day, all things considered. You know, you’ve got to make a bit of allowance for error, which is something a tyrant does not do. And that’s perfect, because if you don’t make allowance for error at all, then people are always guilty of something. And if you’re a tyrant, that’s exactly what you want. And people are always guilty of something. So the tyrant who’s willing to exploit that is always on solid ground. So anyways, he doesn’t share with Pinocchio, and he puts him in a bird cage, a jail. And then he also shows him this other puppet that has an ax through him that was the previous puppet, who didn’t precisely perform as he was supposed to. And so there’s a big threat there. It’s like, you stay in that jail. You do exactly what I want. Or it’s off to the woodpile for you to be burned. And so, well, that’s just worth thinking about, because that’s kind of what happens with tyrants, and literally, not just metaphorically. So the cricket is basically wondering what in the world he should do. And then the cart rolls by, and he gets an inkling, or hears, and I don’t quite remember this, that Pinocchio is in there and might be in trouble. Or he thinks that up. I’m sorry. I can’t remember that. But he ends up, anyways, he ends up inside the cart. He finds the traveling cart, and he goes inside. And then he tries to pick the lock, because he’s a bug. He can climb inside. He tries to pick the lock. He tries to get Pinocchio out of the jail that he’s sort of collaborated himself into. And it’s interesting, because if you read, for example, if you read Solzhenitsyn Skulag Archipelago, which I would highly recommend, one of the things you find is that if you were arrested by the KGB, by the secret police in the Soviet Union, and you were hauled off to a tribunal before a judge, they wanted you to admit that you were guilty. You had to. They torture you until you confess. Or you could just confess. And I always found that so mysterious. It’s like they kick down your door. They know perfectly well that they haven’t got any more on you than they’ve got on anyone else. And yet, you have to go through the damn trial, and you have to admit that they’re right. It’s like, why do they even bother with that? Why don’t they just throw your sorry ass into the camp, which is essentially what’s going to happen anyways? Why do they need your collaboration? I’ve never quite figured that out. I think it’s partly because they’re not willing to let you stand in opposition to the rules, because the mere fact that you’ll do that means that you exist as something that is allowed to exist outside the rules. And they’re not having any of that. So that’s part of it. But there’s more to it. There’s more to it than that. It’s like the drama of collaboration. So one of the things I learned about societies like the Soviet Union, and this is true of all tyrannical societies, is that the idea that that’s top down and that people are just following orders, they’re good people, but they’re just following orders, it’s like you can forget about that. That’s a stupid theory. When a society becomes tyrannical like that, the tyranny exists at every single level of the society. You tyrannize your own conscience. So let’s say you’re a true believer. You’re a true believer in Marxist utopia, let’s say, or national socialist third right that’s going to last 1,000 years and be racially pure. You really believe that. And that’s supposed to be a perfect state. And that’s already been delivered to you. And so what that means is that insofar as you’re a true believer, your own suffering becomes heretical. Because to the degree that you’re suffering, you’re living proof of the fact that the system is not delivering what it promised to deliver. And so you have to suppress that. You have to become your own tyrant. You can’t admit that anything’s gone wrong. And of course, you can’t talk about it to your family, because one out of three of them are government informers, just like one out of three of everyone. And you’re certainly not going to mention it in the workplace, because unless you’re a devout Communist Party member, you’re not going anywhere. And if any of your ancestors were like landowners or bourgeoisie, it’s like you’re done. You’re done. Class guilt, man. You’re not going anywhere. And then every single level of the bureaucracy is exactly the same as that. And on the top, there’s a tyrant. But the tyrant is everywhere, everywhere, from the peak to the soul. It’s all tyranny. And everyone participates in that by lying about everything. And that’s why you see what happens next in the movie. So Pinocchio’s in jail. And he’s there because he was naive. And he allowed himself to be enticed, because he did something that would have run contrary to his conscience. But the movie doesn’t put up straw man. The poor damn puppet got tangled into this. His conscience wasn’t even around. So you have to have some sympathy for him. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because he ends up in jail. And he can’t get out. And the fact that it, in some ways, wasn’t his fault doesn’t change the fact that he’s in jail, and he can’t get out. And then his, I was watching Louis C.K. the other night. And he was talking about children lying. He was talking about his nine-year-old daughter lying. And he said, well, it’s no wonder your children lie. And it’s no wonder it’s impossible for you to stop them. Because you’re talking to someone whose head would scrape the roof. They weigh like three times as much as you. And they’re capable of force. And they’re intimidating. And they say to you something like, did you take that last cookie after I told you not to? And you’re thinking, oh no, I took the cookie. What am I going to do? And then you get a genius idea in your head, which smarter children learn to lie earlier. Children with high IQs learn to lie younger. And C.K. says, well, it’s like you’ve just been handed a magic get out of jail free card. You can just say, no, I didn’t take that cookie. And worse than that, it works in every single situation if you get away with it. And now you’re supposed to learn not to do that. He said, well, great. That’s the thing about comedians. They’ll tell you the underlying truth, which is why people think they’re so funny, like the jester in a king’s court. He’s the only one who’s allowed to tell the king the truth, because he’s beneath contempt. That’s what comedians do. Well, so what happens is, well, Pinocchio’s not very happy about this. It’s really breaking him up. And the blue fairy appears again from the star, same way. So what this means is, and I think this is right, this is something Jung talked about. And it was also extraordinarily brilliant. He said that it’s one thing to break a rule when you don’t really know the rule. For whatever reason, you seem to get a bit of a free pass for that. But if then you know the rule, and then you break it anyways, you get hit a lot harder. And I know that’s true. And I even think I figured out why it was true at one point. But I can’t remember at the moment. But there’s something about it’s like the severity of a moral error isn’t quite as massive if you’re genuinely ignorant and unconscious about the rule. And maybe it’s because you’re not violating your own belief system as much when you engage in the misactivity. It’s something like that. So anyways, Pinocchio is in there. And he’s partly at fault, at least because he’s naive. And he’s very desperate about it. But it’s also because his conscience isn’t functioning very well. So he has his reasons. And so whatever, the blue fairy shows up again. Mother nature steps in to aid him. And that is true, I would say, because it’s not like you get walloped or killed every time you make a mistake. It’s kind of interesting. And especially that’s the case with kids. We have more leeway for them. Whether nature does, that’s a different issue. But I would say yes, because kids are really cute. And they’re appealing. And they’re naive. And they’re kind of helpless. They have those motions even that indicate helplessness. And that’s associated with the natural apprehension of cuteness. So cuteness is big eyes, small nose, symmetrical features, baby-like features, helpless movements. That elicits sympathy and compassion. And it doesn’t cross species. And so does the cry. And my roommate when I was in college had a niece who was quite young, about a year and a half old, I think. And we had a cat, a wild cat. And it was a really fighty cat, partly because of me, because I would always play with it. And I let it fight with me quite a lot. So it was a fighty cat. And that little girl would come over. And maybe she’d cry. That cat was like there right now trying to figure out what was wrong. And the cat would use its claws on me, but it would never use its claws on the little kid. And I thought, well, that’s the indication of that cross species cuteness. And you’re all attracted to that, more or less. And the more maternal you are, the more you’re attracted to such things. You see something on YouTube, and you go, ah. And that’s so cute. It’s like, yeah, it is. It appeals to exactly this concomitant of infantile features. And it brings out compassion, unless you’re psychopathic. So it’s a good thing. But it can be manipulated, that’s for sure. Women actually manipulate it with makeup, which is quite sneaky and good of them. So anyways. So the blue fairy shows up. So that’s nature. So what I’m saying is that nature will cut kids a break. If you think of nature in the guise of, well, their mother, for example, but even the biology of other people. Because we’re wired to accept behavior from children that we wouldn’t accept from other people. So nature will forgive. So she shows up, and you’re heavenly guys, and says, what’s going on? And Pinocchio, again, because he’s naive, but also because he’s not good. He’s not evil either. He’s neither, or both. It depends on how you look at it. And he also has no idea how smart he is, and how smart he isn’t, or how smart the person he’s talking to is. And instead of admitting what he’s done, he lies about it. And that’s interesting, because it does suggest that he understands at some level that he set himself up for this. Because he could have just told the truth. This horrible fox kidnapped me and sold me to this slave holder, which is true. It’s a lot more true than the story he tells. He tells a story about some monster, a fictional monster. He could have told even 3 quarters of the truth and had it work, but he doesn’t. He just obscures the story entirely. And this is the part of the movie that people remember. And I’d edited this out for years when I was talking about this movie. I forgot why it was so significant. His nose grows, right? And it grows to ridiculous length. And why is that? I think it was Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens, I think, who said, one of the advantages to telling the truth is that you don’t have to remember what you said. And that, god, that’s worth listening to. Because so there’s a bunch of things I’ve learned as a clinician. And one of them is, because you’re often in really weird situations with people if you’re a clinician, because things happen that don’t happen normally. And you don’t know what to do. And so what I’ve learned is I just say what’s happening, whatever it is, regardless of what it is. I’ll just try to describe it as accurately as I can, and not worry about, in some sense, not worry about the consequences. Like I’m not going out of my way to cause trouble. But if you’re in a really, and I’m telling you, this can save your life at times, especially if you’re dealing with someone who’s paranoid, who’s really paranoid. You do not lie to someone who’s paranoid and violent. Because as soon as you lie, you’re aligned with the forces that are persecuting them. And they’re going to be, because paranoia makes people hypervigilant, like they’re on amphetamines. In fact, you can make people paranoid by giving them enough amphetamines. And you can make paranoid people more paranoid by giving them amphetamines. So they’re hypervigilant, because they feel that everything is predatory and against them. And so they’re watching you like you would not believe, way more than you’re watching them. And if you flicker, a lie, while you’re talking to them, and they’re really on the edge, you’re done. So it’s one thing to really know if you’re ever in a really bad situation, and you don’t know what to do. You tell the truth minimally. Don’t disclose too much. That’s just another lie. You tell the truth minimally, and carefully, and hopefully. And you might get out of it. You might get out of it. But if you falsify it, look the hell out. So the truth is a real mechanism of protection in dangerous situations. So if someone’s trying to intimidate you, and you think they might get violent, and they ask you if you’re afraid, then you tell them that you’re terrified, and that you hope that things will go OK. Or you say, I’ll give you an example. One time I was in an airport, and we’re in this lineup to fly back to Canada that said international flights. And so it’s a long lineup, like 50 people. And I got about three from the front. There were still like 40 people behind me. And the guy behind the counter decided that he was just going to shut down the line, and that we could all go to this other line, which was like 300 people long. And I suggested that he not do that, because we’d been standing there for half an hour, and that he could just deal with the 20 of us that were left, and have a clue. So he called the sheriff right away. And this was down in Florida, and it wasn’t that long after 9-11. And so these guys came up, and they were armed. And they came and said, looked at me, because of course, he told them that I was causing trouble, which I wasn’t. I was just trying to not let, what would you say, an arrogant, bureaucratic scum rat take advantage of me, which is not the same as causing trouble. So anyways, as soon as the cops came up, I said, look, I’m going to do exactly what you tell me to do right now, and I’m not going to cause any trouble. But I would like you to hear what actually happened. And so that’s a good example of a situation like that. It’s like, if someone’s got you, no bravado. It’s a very bad idea. And I was going to do exactly what they told me, because they didn’t know who I was, and I didn’t know what they had been told. So anyhow, the problem with lying is that it’s a hydra. And kids find this out very early, because you tell one lie, and what happens is it has one of the consequences that you expect. Maybe you get away with it. But it has three or four others that you don’t expect. And so it’s like it grows some complexity. And then you have to tack a lie on each of those little complexity outcrops, and then they grow three more complexities. And soon, this little lie turns into a great big ball of lies, and at some point, it becomes painfully evident to everyone. And by that time, you’re in such, you see this with politicians, like that guy who was sexting. Anthony Weiner, yeah, perfect name for him, man. It’s so funny. I shouldn’t make that comment, because it’s so obvious, but it’s still funny. But that’s exactly what happened to him. It wasn’t even so much the event, because people are stupid. They make mistakes. And actually, the public is somewhat forgiving if you say, yeah, geez, I’m a real moron. And like really, seriously, how could I do that? But I did. And I’ll try not to do it again. But what happens with politicians is, and I’m not speaking specifically of politicians, is they’ll make an error, and it gets exposed, and then they make three others trying to cover it up. It happened with Nixon, for example. And then the whole thing just turns into a complete scandal. And maybe they could have got out of it at the beginning by just telling the truth. It’s like, yes, I’m an idiot. I’ll try not to do it again. Well, that isn’t what happens in this case. And Pinocchio grows this elaborate series of lies. And the fairy is willing to be a little generous to him, because he’s little and cute, and he’s still a puppet. And she tells him not to do that, and that she’s going to give him a pass this time, but that she isn’t going to be able to intervene on his behalf again. And that’s partly one of the things that’s quite interesting about people who have Rousseauian ideas about children. So children are all good, and they get corrupted by society, which is half true, because they’re also not good, and they get shaped and disciplined by society. But the Rousseauian types often are very interesting when their kids hit teenage years, or when they’re judging, say, criminal teenagers. It’s like the child is perfect until they hit like 11, then they turn into a teenager, and then they’re like thugs. So they go from good to thug in one move. And you often see that in families, too, that have treated especially their daughters like a princess. And then they hit puberty, and the parents who have princessed them to death have no idea what to do with them. And so then they become demonized. And so the overly good child turns into the overly wicked teenager. And sometimes they’ll act that out, too. One of the things I’ve seen with girls who are held in princess esteem when they’re little, and their parents have too tight a grip on them, and too much of a demand for good behavior, is they’ll find some nasty character to associate with who will tear them out of the family. Bikers are really good for that sort of thing. So, and especially if you have some vengeful thoughts towards your parents, a nice biker is your perfect solution to that problem. OK, we’ll go through this scene, and then I think we’ll call it a day. OK, so now Pinocchio’s gone free. He’s been united with his conscience. He’s learned a couple of lessons. Don’t be an actor, and don’t lie. And those things are quite similar. And especially once you’re caught in your actor trap, don’t lie to get out, because that will just make it worse. So that’s the first of his trials, his moral trials on the road to becoming real. All right, now here we’re in a different place. We’re at this, I think it’s called the Red Lobster Inn, and it’s a shadowy place, right? And it’s kind of cave-like. So it’s like the, it’s an underground entrance to somewhere that’s not good. And so, and it’s a foggy night, and you can’t really see. So everything’s murky and gloomy there. And so inside, we see the coachman, and the fox, and the cat. And the coachman, the coachman’s a bad guy. He’s that mask that we saw first of all. He’s the archetype of that mask that was judgmental about Pinocchio having a voice. And it’s like, one of the things Jung said about the shadow, and this is, I would say, one of the primary impediments to enlightenment, is that if you start looking at your motives for misbehaving, and I mean by that something very specific. I mean, I don’t mean that you’re misbehaving by someone else’s standards. I don’t mean that. I mean, when you know by your own standards that you’re doing something that’s devious or malevolent or underhanded, you know it, and you still do it. So it’s your own judgment you’re bringing to bear on yourself. If you look at why you’re doing that, the longer you look at it, the deeper a hole you dig. And so this is the motif of Dante’s Inferno fundamentally. So Dante’s Inferno is a story about, I can’t remember his name, unfortunately, might be Dante in fact, although I don’t remember. He’s led into hell by Virgil, who’s an ancient philosopher, thinker. And hell has levels. And so the outer level is, and this is a Christianized version of hell, because there’s hells of all sorts, but this is a Christianized version. And so on the outermost levels of hell, which is sort of like normal life, are the ancient philosophers. And they’re still in hell because they weren’t Christian, but it’s kind of like cheap motel hell instead of the full pit thing. And so then Dante goes deeper and deeper into hell until he gets right to the bottom of it. It’s been a while since I read it, but if I remember correctly, Satan himself is encased in ice at the bottom of hell, surrounded by people who betray others. And so Dante’s notion was that the worst of all possible violations of moral behavior was betrayal. And they’re in the deepest levels of hell. And I really like that idea. I think it’s true, because if you trust me, then you’re manifesting the necessary courage that puts someone through life. If you’re smart, you don’t trust me because you’re naive. You trust me knowing that I’m full of snakes and so are you, but maybe we could cooperate and move things along nicely. And we could reduce each other to the word, to our word, and we could cooperate. But you’re awake. And then I betray that, then I’m undermining your necessary faith in life and humanity. And you can really hurt someone that way. Sometimes it’s self-betrayal, but you can really do someone in that. We can really traumatize them so that they can’t recover. And so it’s a really terrible thing to do to someone. And maybe it’s the worst thing, and that was Dante’s idea. And it’s tied in. That makes very interesting reading, if you read it at the same time as Milton’s Paradise Lost, because those are metaphysical explorations. This is what they are. They’re metaphysical explorations of the terrible places you can end up and that people do end up, and also a metaphysical explanation of what spirit takes you there. So because you might ask, well, why do you betray someone? And that is a deep question. And so you’ll have your specific reasons, but under that, there’ll be some other reasons. And under that, there’ll be some other reasons. And under that, there’ll be some other reasons. If you go all the way to the bottom, you come up with the ultimate reasons why you betrayed someone. And when you look at that, that will not be pretty. That’s when your proclivity for evil, let’s say, unites with the general human proclivity for evil, and you discover just exactly what you’re capable of. And so Jung’s notion was that, well, that was a full encounter with the shadow, which is, I suppose, partly what this course is about. Because one of the things that I believe I told you at the beginning is that I was going to try to help you understand how it might be that you could be an Auschwitz guard. And to really understand that, that’s a horrifying thing to understand. But I’ll tell you, if you want to grow some teeth, that’s a really good thing to understand. So we were talking about your capacity to negotiate before. Like, if you aren’t a monster, you cannot negotiate. But if you’ve got that under control, then you don’t have to be a monster. It’s really paradoxical. So if you’re just naive, well, you end up in jail, and a marionette master has control over you. That’s not helpful. So that’s not good. That just means you’re useless, and you can be manipulated. You won’t go out of your way to be malevolent. But it’s mostly because you just don’t have the skills, the organizational skills, or even the depth to do that. You’re good because you’re harmless. That’s not good. That’s easily manipulated. And so you think, well, how do you get out of that? Well, partly, you watch people, because you know what they’re like, because you know what you’re like. But you also know what you could do and would do if you were pushed. And so you don’t have to show much of that when you’re negotiating with someone for them to take you really seriously. So it’s a strange thing, you know? But one of the things Jung pointed out, too, was that what you most need to know will be found where you least want to look. And that’s because you haven’t already looked there. And so it’s a little different for everyone, right? Because your particular place you don’t want to look isn’t going to be the same as your place. But you’re going to have a place you don’t want to look. And what you haven’t discovered, that’s where it is. And so that’s all partly going to be discovered by you looking at what you’re capable of, what you’re truly capable of. But people, especially on the compassionate end, say, well, no, I could never be brutal like that. And that could be true. But you can kill people with compassion, no problem. That’s the Freudian edible situation. So think about working in a nursing home. So there’s actually a rule of thumb, which I also use to guide my interactions with children and also with my clients. And I would say with people in general, do not do anything for anyone that they can do themselves. All you do is steal. You just steal it from them. So imagine you’re working with really elderly people. They have Alzheimer’s. It’s really easy to do things for them because, well, it isn’t, because it’s really a hard job. But it might be easier to do something for them than to let them struggle through it. But you just speed their demise by taking away the last vestiges of their independence. And you do the same thing with kids. It’s like, struggle through it, man. Did you ever see My Left Foot? That’s a great movie. It’s about this author whose name escapes me at the moment. It’s a brilliant movie. And the person who played the part is Daniel Day Lewis. I think he won an Academy Award for it. But it’s about this author in Ireland who was, I think he had cerebral palsy. And all he could really do was use his left foot. That was it. The rest of him was pretty spastic and not controllable. But he was there. He was very intelligent. He was with it. And his dad would not help him. He had to drag himself up the damn stairs with his left foot. He just would not help him. And what happened was he learned how to live. He actually, he could function. And the movie does the book, which is called My Left Foot. And the movie does a lovely job of laying that out. But you have to be one hard-hearted son of a bitch to let your son crawl up the stairs with his left foot over and over. Think about that. But what’s the alternative? If he would have been, and of course, he lays this out in the book, if he would have been catered to, he would have ended up just like you’d expect someone who was always catered to. So it’s a very nice lesson in the triumph of fostering independence over too casual compassion. That’s what I would say. Well, so you look at the coachman here. Kind of looks like a demented Santa Claus. He doesn’t have a beard. But it’s a nice touch on the animator’s part. He’s even got the pipe and the red suit. And so he’s listening to the fox and the cat brag about how much money they made selling Pinocchio to the puppet bastard, how evil and terrible they are. They’re bragging away. And he’s the real thing, hey? He’s the real thing. And he can see through their little petty, narcissistic, grandiose tales of quasi-criminality and has nothing but contempt for it. And you can see that in his facial expressions. He’s sitting back a bit thinking, keep talking, bucko. Pretty soon I’m going to have you right where I want you. And so the fox and the cat are drinking beer and smoking cigarettes and talking about how evil they are and bragging about how they got one over on the what? Like a four-year-old. Real impressive guys. Real impressive. And the coachman is thinking up his own nefarious schemes right now for what he might do with that puppet if he got his hands on him. And so that’s what he reveals himself. So what you see, filmmakers just do it for a second. And that’s an archetypal trip. It’s like you’ve got the fox and the cat. They’re sort of petty examples of criminality and evil. And then you’ve got the coachman, and he’s the real thing. But he’s not really showing anybody who he is. And then at one scene in the bar, he lets his guard down, and he lets them see what he’s really like. And so you see this all teeth and predatory eyes and glee all at the same time, right? That’s a bad combination. I’m going to eat you, and it’s going to make me very happy. That’s insanity. You do not want to see that look on someone’s face. And so that’s the look. And the fox is traumatized by that. He just, like, he thinks he’s a bad guy. And he’s not. He just can’t be a good guy. He hasn’t got the talent to be a bad guy. And then he’s talking to the coachman and bragging, and the coachman’s had enough of it and shows his real face. And it’s like, that’s not good. The fox gets a real glimpse into hell, and that just terrifies him. And then the coachman, the other thing the coachman does is reveal his plans. And his plans are to kidnap Pinocchio, along with a bunch of other boys, and to take them to this place called Pleasure Island. And the fox knows what’s going on there. And so it’s the foreshadowing of the next stage of the adventure. And so after the fox and the cat are terrified, the coachman, who takes you along with him, has a little chat with them, and they describe exactly what they’re going to do next. And the fox and the cat know perfectly well that they’re over their head. But at this point in their misadventures, there’s no pulling back. And I think we’ll stop there, even though it’s a little early, because that was a very short story. And I think we’ll stop there, even though it’s a little early, because that was a lot of material. And this is a really good place to stop. And so I’d be happy to take some questions, if you guys have some questions. We could take questions for like 10 minutes, and then we’ll call it a day. And you can ask me a question about anything you want. This was back at the beginning of the lecture, But how does morality go from who’s stronger and who’s weaker to what’s good and what isn’t? Well, I think it depends to some degree on what you mean by stronger. So physical strength is one element. And if you look at mythological heroes, imagine that the stories of heroes are fragmented elements of the archetype. And so one kind of archetypal hero, obviously, is someone who’s physically strong. You know, you see that there’s a great movie that you could watch about this. It’s called Hitman Heart. It’s one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. And it’s about this guy named Bret Hart. And Bret Hart was, for a while, the most famous Canadian on the planet. And he was a worldwide wrestling foundation. I think, what did they call it? WWF? Yeah. He was their lead good guy. And wrestling, I loved the documentary, because when I was a little kid, like four or five, I used to watch his father, whose name was Stu Hart, who ran this channel, this wrestling confederation in Alberta. And Stu Hart had, I think, eight boys. And he trained all of them to be pro wrestlers. And part of the movie is extraordinarily funny, because Stu Hart is in it. And he’s really old. He’s like 85. And he’s just barely, can you imagine? He was like a pro wrestler for four years. Like, every joint is broken. And he’s still big, but he’s just barely moving. And this kid and another kid come over. And Stu is telling the story about how he used to take his boys into the basement and toughen them up. And I think Bret called that the journey to pain, or something like that. His father would take all these kids down there, wrestle with them, and push them right to the edge of their pain tolerance constantly. And anyways, they grew up tough. There’s no doubt about that. And all his daughters married pro wrestlers, too. And I think he had seven daughters. So he’s quite the character. Anyways, these two kids, they’re late adolescence, early adulthood, come over. And one of them’s pretty damn cocky. And he’s listening to Stu. And he says something smart, like, well, you were pretty tough with the old days, hey? And Stu looks at them and says, well, why don’t you come down to the basement with me? And he says, well, look, I don’t want to hurt you, old man. So the filmmakers follow them into the basement, hey? And they’re kind of standing there. And the old guy grabs him in the headlock. He takes him like, he’s like a snake, hey? He’s got a headlock so fast that the kid doesn’t know what to do. And then so Stu, like, he knows how to put a headlock on someone. He’s like flexing his forearm, yeah, which is still not so bad, a forearm. And this guy’s face is just, he’s like he’s stepped in a bear trap. Plus, he’s absolutely shocked that this old guy got him. And so he’s kind of gasping. And Stu says something like, you watch, if I flex this muscle just right, you can see this vein on his forehead starting to pop out. It’s extraordinarily funny. Anyways, Bret Hart plays out the good guy archetype. And Bret’s, like, he’s a solid guy. But I would say he’s not particularly sophisticated. And I’m not being cruel about that. I mean, he had a great career. And he’s tough as a boot and so good for him. But he plays out this good guy archetype. And he gets tangled up in it. And now, I don’t remember your damn question. But I am trying to answer it. Tell me the question again. So I was wondering how, in reality, you go from who’s strongest and who’s weakest to what’s good and what isn’t. Oh, yes, yes. OK, exactly. Well, so one of the things I really liked about this movie was it showed me why people watched wrestling. And I couldn’t, because certainly, they’re not appealing. And I’m not being. There are different strata of conception of abstraction that any entertainment process has to appeal to. And most people don’t go to movies. And that’s actually because it really is because movies operate at a level of sophistication that is too high for many people, just like novels. I mean, hardly anyone reads. And if you, about 15% of the population, might be 20%, cannot read well enough to follow written instructions. And so people who are maybe it’s 15% of the population or 10% have never finished a book, never. And it is that high. But the archetype still needs to manifest itself at different levels. And so it manifests itself in wrestling. But even there, where it is physical force, it’s not just physical force. Like it’s a drama between good and evil. And you can see this so clearly in the Bret Hart documentary, because he’s the good guy. And the bad guys are really over the top bad. It’s a real drama. It’s like it’s good versus evil in the ring every time. And hopefully good wins, but good often gets maybe the bad wrestler brings two of his friends in, and they bring in chairs, and they bash the hell out of the good guy. And the whole audience is just outraged by this. And the documentary does a lovely job of showing that. So even at the level of physical combat, let’s say, you can’t reduce what’s good to what’s strong. It’s just one element of it. Better to be strong than to be weak. And so you can have a strong hero, because it’s better to be strong than to be weak. But it’s better to be strong and kind than to be strong. And it’s better to be strong and kind and wise than to be strong and kind. And that’s true not only for human beings, but it’s even true, let’s say, at the wolf or the chimpanzee level, because one of the things you see with the chimp dominance hierarchies, and I think I mentioned this before, is if the leader, the dominant male, is really good at fostering social relations and being reciprocal in acts like grooming, and also paying attention to the females and their offspring, his dynasty will be much more stable. And so strong might be good for one battle. It might be good for two battles. But for 50 battles, it’s not optimized, especially because no matter how strong you are, someone can take you out. So what happens is the idea of what’s ideal becomes increasingly complex across time, multifaceted. And so strength, wisdom, intelligence, vision, all these things are amalgamated into a single being. And we’ll talk a lot about that, because I want to show you how that happened in Mesopotamia, because that’s one of the first places where we have documentation about how that ideal emerged. We have a god called Marduk. And Marduk had 50 names. And as far as I can tell, the reason for that was that Marduk was an amalgam of the tribal deities of at least 50 tribes. And when the tribes were brought together and civilized, each of their gods who were ideals had to be amalgamated into something that was a single, a single, dramatized representation of value. Or there was no way that all those people could have lived together, right? There are different value structures that would have fragmented them, and they would have stayed in a state of war. And so the question is, it’s the question you’re asking. If it’s not strength, then what is it? Well, strength is an element. But the Egyptians figured out that it was vision. It was actually the capacity to pay attention. That was paramount. And the Mesopotamians had that figured out more or less, too, because their god Marduk had eyes all the way around his head. He could see everywhere. So seeing was a critical element of what should be on top. And the other thing for the Mesopotamians was the ability to speak. So by the time of Mesopotamia, people had already dramatized the idea that cardinal human attributes are vision and the ability to speak. And that’d be the ability to speak the truth, too, not just speak. So other questions? So I mean, I wasn’t really aware of what you just said, that most people don’t watch movies, because I’ve probably watched so many movies. I just think it’s kind of nice. So is that why we sort of consider, because we were talking about this earlier, that different levels of abstraction of celebrity are expected more, like reality TV probably lower than a cover patch, than a theater actor, than a novelist? Yes. That’s exactly why. Because you see, the less sophisticated the genre, the more the genre is like real life. And the more sophisticated it is, the more it has abstracted out across instances of real life the fundamental lessons. And that’s what makes something profound and deep. It’s abstracted from multiple sources, and it applies across multiple dimensions, because that’s what you want. And here’s why, fundamentally. It’s like you have a problem, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that there are problems. So the problem is a meta problem. There are problems. You need a solution to that. That’s not a solution to a problem. That’s a meta solution to the class of problems. And that’s what people have been trying to figure out ever since we were able to actually figure things out. It’s not how do you solve a problem. It’s how do you act so that you solve the problem of problems. And that’s basically, at least, the complexity of life and the fact that you’re mortal and vulnerable. So then a follow-up question. From your book, you have this strata from play all the way up to religion and beyond that, looking back retroactively with philosophy and rationality. Yes. Is right. It’s. Well, that’s a good one. It’s a good one. I would say that if you really want to think this through, the best way to do that is to read Nietzsche and Dostoevsky at the same time. Now, I’m sure there’s other ways of doing this. But Nietzsche was actually quite heavily influenced by Dostoevsky, more than people knew, although their thought runs very parallel. And so Dostoevsky is like the ultimate dramatist. He embodies his ideas, and he has them act out in a dramatic space. It’s literary. Whereas Nietzsche has taken that up one level of abstraction to the semantic. He says, well, here’s what’s going on in an articulated way. But he doesn’t embody it in the story. And you might say, well, that’s higher. But it’s only higher in a way. It’s more abstract in that it’s more like words. Whereas what Dostoevsky does is half words and half images. Because when you read a novel, what happens is that people say, and the postmodernists say, well, where the hell is the meaning in that novel? It’s not in the word. It’s not in the phrase. It’s not in the sentence. It’s not in the paragraph. Where do you localize the meaning? Great question. Their answer sucks, but the question’s great. But what happens partly when you’re reading a book, a novel, is that the words trigger representations in your imagination. And a lot of the information from which a lot of what you extract the information from is actually your imagistic representation of the words. And that imagistic representation is richer than the words, because it’s informed by all of your knowledge about people. And so you know this happens, because you go to a movie, like the Harry Potter movies, and you say, that’s not how I imagined it. The probability that there’d be a one-to-one correspondence between your internal representation of the book and the movie is zero. And usually the movie is less rich than the book. I mean, I love movies, and they have their own place, that’s for sure. But while mini-series, the series now, are more approaching the complexity and depth of literature, because they can extend across 20 hours. And they don’t have to compress a 12-hour reading experience into two hours of action. So yeah, and so what I was trying to do with that hierarchy was to show how the knowledge moved. First of all, it’s kind of implicit in your biology. And then it’s distributed into society. And then by imitating society, you make it part of your procedures. And then you watch your own procedures and start to build a representation of them. And then you can articulate that representation. And it’s a bootstrapping process, too, because once you’ve made the representation, that can affect the way you behave. And so they start to loop. So here’s one idea. So imagine that there’s a type of male who tends to win dominance hierarchy contests and to merge at the top. Well, that’s the case. That is the case. And that’s why you’re the way you are. And so what’s happened among human beings, this is so cool, is that human females are choosy-maters. So about twice as many men fail in their reproductive efforts as females fail. But the men who succeed are more successful. So women are, on average, more successful. And men are, on average, more failures and more successful. And I’m talking strictly about reproduction here, although it generalizes to other areas. But I’m talking about reproduction. So how does it work exactly? Well, the women have a real problem with mate selection. It’s like, who the hell are you going to have as a mate? And it’s too complex to work out. So women in their genius don’t. They let the men compete, and then they peel from the top, acting out the assumption that the man who wins is the best man. And it’s a good assumption, because if you have a bunch of men competing, especially if they’re competing across competitions, and someone pops up at the top, you can think, well, they may not be worth much, but they’re better than anyone else at whatever it is that they’re doing. And that makes men at the top of dominance hierarchies very attractive to women. And then the women accelerate that, so you can imagine they’re more likely to reproduce. And so what happens is that the proclivity to emerge at the top of the set of dominance hierarchies becomes inbuilt into the biology across time. And the women exaggerate that by differentially allowing the men to reproduce. And that’s also why they’re mother nature. They really are mother nature. It’s not just a metaphor. And so then the representation and the biology start to tangle together. And that’s like, well, that’s the difference between a meme and an archetype. A meme is this idea that propagates itself. But an archetype is an idea that has propagated itself across such a massive span of time that it’s actually shaped the course of evolution itself. And men, I can tell you already how this, it isn’t necessarily that you even have to compete with other men in order to see who wins. As soon as you admire someone, and that’ll happen unconsciously, you won’t be able to stop yourself. You’ve already elevated them in the dominance hierarchy contest. The act of admiration is your recognition that you’ve met someone who’s better at whatever it is that happens to be driving your admiration than you are. And that’s partly the manifestation of just the idea as the, what would you say, as the representation of the ideal. Kids do that all the time. They hero worship other kids. Usually, a four-year-old will latch on to some six-year-old who will just follow, or she’ll follow, everywhere and do exactly what they do. And it’s like, well, why? Well, because that person represents to that child their next ideal, their conceptualization of the place forward. So OK. Any other questions, or should we maybe call it a day? OK. When you said that the guy who was smiling at the thing was a pediatric glee, which is insanity, how do you define insanity in this context? Well, let’s call it what you don’t want to encounter alone in an alley at midnight and leave it at that. But that is what I mean in this context. That’s exactly what I mean. And then not only is the person there waiting for you, but they’re looking forward to whatever might happen. Yeah, for sure. I just mean like in a psychological context, using that word saying, that’s like its own connotations. So I was making sure I wasn’t interpreting it in a wrong way. No, well, the movie provides the frame for the interpretation in this particular situation. And so he’s the thing that hauls naive young boys off to their doom. OK, so that’s bounded. So yes. I have a question. I would like you, if you can, elaborate a bit on, you mentioned you talked about this mental process where people do the thing that’s less hard but still hard to avoid facing the shadow. Yeah, that’s actually a really productive way of procrastinating, although it comes with its own problems of rationalization. So that reinforces certain circuits. Yes. Then you talk about it in a way that says that those can’t go away, so you need to bring up the other inhibitory circuits. And I’m just wondering if you can elaborate. Well, I can. Sure. What is in the ground with possibility around their understanding of it? Well, I’ve derived that partly from my study of addiction and also from my study of recovery from post-traumatic stress disorder. But let’s talk about addiction. So there’s a series of actions that occur before you take your cocaine. Some of those are local. They are the things that happen immediately before. And some of those are distal. They’re farther back in the chain of events. And when you have a hit of cocaine, it produces a dopaminergic burst. And that feels really good. But it also makes the circuits that were immediately active before that grow. That’s what reinforcement is. And then the growth is proportionate, not linearly, but it’s proportionate to how long before that event occurred. The closer it is, the stronger they’re going to get. But even the ones that are somewhat distal get some reinforcement. Because you might say, well, what did you do before you found your latest fix? And the answer is, well, how long before? Well, the closer, the more rewarded. And so what happens then is that if you take that person out of the normal environment, you put them into a treatment center. They’re off their physical addiction, which is a weird thing in the case of cocaine. But not that long. A week will do it. Two weeks for sure. Even heroin and alcohol, for sure, if you can get them through the seizure part without dying. And so they’re done. They aren’t physiologically dependent anymore. But you let that person go, and the first thing that happens is his old friend, who he’s always out doing drugs with, shows up and bang, he’s craving like mad. And that’s because that thing in there is not dead at all. And it’s activated by the cue. And it’s a circuit. It’s not. It’s a personality. It only wants one thing. It wants cocaine. It’s going to suppress any non-related thoughts, and it’ll use lies. That’s no problem, especially if lies have been reinforced, which they certainly have. Where are you off to, son? You’ll have a lie for that, and then 10 minutes later, you have your drug. And so that little lie has just grown. Or maybe you think you’ve tried to quit, and you think to hell with it. And every time, 10 minutes before you take your drug, you think to hell with it. And you do that 1,000 times. Well, believe me, that to hell with its circuit, that sucker is strong. And so it’s alive. And it’s not like it just disappears. It can’t. It’s you. It’s grown in there. Now, you can build another circuit to shut it down, and you can help it decompose across time by not giving it what it wants. But you’re going to have to not give it what it wants in all of the multiple contexts that you’ve already associated with the drug. Some of you have probably smoked and then tried to quit smoking. And what you’ll see is you get a craving when you have a cup of coffee, or when you’re finished dinner, or when you’re done having a phone call, or when you first get up in the morning, or whenever you’ve regularly had the drug, whatever you had the drug in relationship to, even complex things like ending a conversation will produce acute craving. And so then that can extinguish over time if you punish it by either punishing it or not letting it get what it wants. But a lot, you have to build another circuit to just shut it down. And then that circuit’s kind of fragile, and stress can often disrupt it. So that can be mediated by some of the effects that people read about quitting smoking or things like ibogaine. Oh, sure. Well, ibogaine’s a whole different thing, because it seems to have a direct physiological effect. But the addiction has a cognitive component. It’s full of thoughts and desires and wants. And you may have to rebuild your whole personality in order to get that thing cornered. Religious conversion, for example, is a really effective treatment for alcoholism. That’s partly why Alcoholics Anonymous works for the people for whom it does work. But religious conversion, which is total personality conversion, is actually one of the few things that we know of that’s an effective treatment for alcoholism. We don’t know how to induce it. But although that’s not exactly true either, because the early work with LSD was quite promising as a treatment for alcohol addiction. And there’s recent work with psilocybin showing that if people have a mystical experience when you give them psilocybin, their success rate in quitting smoking is about 80%, which is way higher than any pharmacological intervention for smoking has ever been. So all right, we should probably call it a day. So we’ll see you in a week. Thank you.