https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=X6pbJTqv2hw
So we’ll continue with our Jungian analysis of the Lion King today. We ended at the point where, remember, Mufasa had taken Simba up to the top of Pride Rock and described to him the fact that his kingdom essentially constituted everything that the light touched. You can think about that as the domain of the, roughly speaking, of the Great Father, with the domain of the Great Mother on the outside of that, that being symbolically equivalent to the underworld or to death or to nature. All of those things seem to be approximately equally true. And he forbade Simba from going to investigate what was beyond the confines of the light. And in some sense, that’s exactly what a tradition does for you, because the tradition is precisely what defines the domain of the light. And to be moral from the perspective of the tradition, it’s akin to playing a Piagetian game, but only adhering to the rules. You know how Piaget described the fact that when kids first master a game, they learn how to act it out, and then they learn what the rules are, and then they regard the rules in some sense as sacred. You can’t go outside the rules. And then later in moral development, if they get to that stage, then they start to recognize themselves also as formulators of the rule or formulators of the game. And culture tells you don’t go beyond the rules. That’s the definition of morality within the box of culture. You don’t go outside of that. And so that’s why Mufasa plays that particular role. And it’s wise, because if you go outside the domain of what you already understand, then it’s dangerous out there. Clearly, it’s dangerous out there. But the downside of that particular message, and this is perhaps the mythological reason why Mufasa isn’t as aware as he could be of Scar, you know, his knowledge is bounded. And he’s not aware enough of what lies outside of that, in this realm, let’s say, of death and destruction. And so Scar is able to overcome his brother. You see this sort of thing happening to people very frequently, for example, who develop post-traumatic stress disorder. And one of the things that’s not as well known about post-traumatic stress disorder as might be known is, A, it happens to you if you encounter an experience that sort of blows out the axioms of your knowledge system. That’s one way of looking at it. It’s so unexpected that you can’t account for it within the confines of the system that you’re using to interpret the world. And that often happens to people when they encounter something that’s truly malevolent. And that can be within them, or it can be in the form of someone else who is genuinely out to hurt them. They’re often, people who develop PTSD are often, but not always, somewhat naive, and they’re not aware of the full catastrophe of the world. So that might be one way of looking at it. And then they encounter someone who’s truly out to hurt them. And they can detect that even in the way the person’s face looks, or they encounter a part of them that’s much more malevolent than they had ever imagined it could possibly be. And then they do something terrible, and then they don’t know what to do about it. So, Delaire, the Canadian general, wrote a book called Shake Hands with the Devil, and it was about what happened to him in Rwanda when he was stationed there as a UN warrior, or a UN soldier. And, I mean, Delaire was not naive, but what he encountered was truly malevolent. And it just blew him into pieces, and that’s what happens. And so, there’s real utility in staying within the bounded domain. But the problem is, is that there may be information that’s outside of that domain that you absolutely need to know. And so part of the problem with being alive is that you have to continually determine how much you’re going to maintain your stability, and how much you’re going to explore. And you have to explore because the stable part of you gets outdated. But if you explore too much, or too unwisely, then you can encounter things that flip you upside down. It’s actually one of the problems with being high in trade openness, especially if you’re also high in neuroticism. Because if you’re open, you’re creative, you’re always looking for ideas that are outside of your current systematic way of thinking. But if you’re high in neuroticism, so you experience a lot of anxiety and emotional pain and that sort of thing, you can continually upset your own apple cart. Now, the other thing that you might want to think about, this is really useful as far as I’m concerned, is you might want to think about this politically. And we’ve been doing a lot of work, I’m going to have one of my graduate students actually come and talk to you about the work we’ve been doing on personality and political belief. So what happens with political belief is that if you’re high in openness and low in conscientiousness, you tend to be a liberal. The openness being the particularly important part of that. And if you’re low in openness and high in conscientiousness, especially orderliness, you tend to be a conservative. Now it’s kind of strange because openness and conscientiousness aren’t very highly correlated. So it’s not obvious why those two traits would combine to determine political belief. And the relationship is actually quite strong between temperament and political belief, if you measure political belief comprehensively. But it seems to me that the fundamental distinction, and this is the political game, at least along the liberal conservative axis, boils down to one thing. It boils down to how open borders should be compared to how closed they should be. And you can see that reflected, for example, in the attractiveness of Trump to a large part of the general population because he’s going to close the borders, build a wall, and fortify the borders. And conservatives like that. They like to have borders between things stay tight. And they don’t even care if it’s state borders or political borders or town borders or ethnic borders or borders between ideas or borders between sexual identities. Conservatives like to have things stay in the damn box where they belong. Partly because they’re orderly and partly because they’re low in openness. They don’t get any real… they’re not interested in what happens if you free up your conceptions. All they see in that is the probability of disorder. Whereas liberals, who are high in openness and low in conscientiousness slash orderliness, they get a real charge out of letting things out of the box so that they can creatively interplay. Now the issue is, who’s correct? And the answer is, you don’t know. Because the environment underneath the political landscape moves. And so sometimes the right answer is tighten up the borders and fortify. And sometimes the right answer is no, no, no. Loosen things up because everything’s getting too static and tight and we need more information. And the dialogue that occurs in the political landscape, this is why dialogue is so important, is fundamentally between these two opposing views of borders. And because you can’t say with certainty which one is right at any given time, an open dialogue has to maintain itself so that the entire political state can maneuver properly along that moving line. It’s absolutely crucial. It’s really, really, really useful to know that people vote their damn temperament. It gives you more of an understanding, at least in principle, of those who sit on the other side of you on the political fence. And there’s been recent newspaper articles, quite interesting. I tweeted a couple of them about this company in the UK called Cambridge Analytics. And they’re using the damn Big Five. They can extract out Big Five information from your Facebook likes. They’ve got a model of every single person in the United States Big Five personality. And they help Trump craft political messages right down to the level of apartment buildings to appeal to people based on their Big Five temperament. And that’s all recent work. And so one of the things that’s very interesting is we are teaching computers to understand us so fast you can’t believe it. And we really do risk walking into an electronic world where you will only see what you want to see. I mean, obviously the marketers are trying to do that as fast as possible, right? They only want to send you ads that you’re going to be interested in because it’s expensive and foolish to send you anything that will annoy you or that you’ll ignore. And so the marketers are trying like mad to map who you are even by watching your eyes. They’re trying to figure out who you are so they can send you the right information. But the danger is that that will happen, say, in the domain of news and broader information. Increasing this tendency for people to be siloed in their exposure to the external world. It’s a big pro… sort of like each of us is becoming a micro-celebrity surrounded by electronic sycophants who do nothing but tell us exactly what we want to hear. It’s a real problem. Carl Popper, a famous philosopher of science, said that one of the things that you should do, and this is akin to the Piagetian view, is you should always look for information that contradicts your current viewpoint. Now that’s painful, right? Because who wants their axioms contradicted? It can take you apart. But it’s the only way that you can ensure that you’re learning at the same time that you’re maintaining your stability. And that’s another reason why it’s really necessary to engage in dialogue with people that you do not agree with. Because they’re the ones who will tell you things that you don’t know. It’s crucial importance in the maintenance of your own stability. The worst thing that can happen to a person… no. Because there’s many horrible things that can happen to a person. But one of the worst things that can happen is that you find yourself in a situation where no one is offering you corrective feedback anymore. Because you rely on the corrective feedback provided by other people to keep yourself sane, to keep moving in the ever-changing environment. And if you cut yourself off from that feedback, then… well, then you end up static and shrinking. It’s really not good. You get less and less competent, you get less and less confident, and the threats outside of you loom larger and larger. So that’s all to do with the domain outside the light. So Jung would also say that out in this domain that’s sort of beyond what you understand, that’s also where you encounter the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Now that’s a really, really complicated idea. But what he means by that is that if you’re put outside the domain of your competence, you’re going to start to use fantasy to organize your world. So I can give you an example of that. So you… I presume most of you are old enough to have a conscious memory of when the Twin Towers came crashing down. So everybody in the days after that was wandering around like they were in the days. And the reason they were in the days is because… well, it wasn’t exactly clear what fell, right? The physical towers fell, but that was only a tiny bit of the problem, because those physical towers were embedded in a network of meaning, like a very, very sophisticated network of meaning, but also a political network and an economic network and a military network, and like they’re nodes inside a very complex system. And so when they come crashing down, you don’t know what’s come crashing down, right? So you’re out there in the unknown and wondering what’s going on and wandering around in the days, which is exactly what happened to people. And then what Bush did, George W., was immediately turn that into a good versus evil drama, instantly. And that’s an archetypal idea. So that’s when he came up with the idea of the axis of evil. I think that was Iran, North Korea, and… I don’t remember the other one at the moment, but he immediately turned the political landscape into a good versus evil drama. And he said to everyone in the world that they were either with him or against him, fundamentally. And that was part of the retreating into, I guess, a more protected landscape that’s one of the ways that human beings deal with the encounter with a traumatic threat. And so the reason you meet the unconscious, and even the collective unconscious, on the border of your knowledge, is because when you hit the border of your knowledge, you start to use fantasy in order to bring the newest form of order out of the unknown, so that you can start to make sense out of it. And that’s what artists always do. That’s what they do. And so, from the Jungian perspective, people who are engaged in creative art are the ones who are on the perimeter of knowledge structures. And so what they’re doing is taking the absolute unknown, which would be, in Rumsfeld’s terms, the unknown unknowns, and turning them into partially known unknowns. That’s what an artist does. And especially the more classical artists who deal with mythological and religious themes, which was the case for art right up until, really, until the late 20th century, they’re using these mythological ideas to sort of extend the domain of human knowledge out beyond its current parameters. And so artists do that, and literary people do that, and dramatists do that, and they help us extend our knowledge. Now, that’s where open people live. That’s another way of thinking about it. So think about it this way. So you’re in a city, and the city has parts of it that degenerate. And so you could think about that as order degenerating into chaos. And then the open people, who are creative, come along, and they find places in the city that have degenerated, but that still have interesting potential. And then they move in there, where it’s cheap, too, and they start producing art, they start producing galleries, and then the coffee shops move in, and then the thing starts to get civilized. And then, of course, the more liberal conservative types move in. Those would be the yuppies, roughly speaking. So they’re much more conservative than the artists, but they’re still liberal compared to the bulk of the population. And so the more daring people move in after the artists have civilized it, and then after that, you know, then the chain stores start to move in, and soon it’s completely turned into zealers, or something like that. And then the artists have to go somewhere else and find another place on the boundary where they can live. And it’s a physical boundary as much as a mental boundary. And so, because you think each of those personality traits, there’s five dimensions, each of them represent the possibility of inhabiting a kind of niche. Right? An ecological niche. So if you’re an extroverted person, your niche is the social environment. If you’re an introverted person, the niche is, I think, nature. I don’t know that for sure. Because I’ve never figured out exactly what introverts are adapted to, but it’s not exactly the social world. If you’re agreeable, then your niche is relationships. If you’re disagreeable, your niche is competition. If you’re conscientious, your niche is duty and effort. And so, those niches are partly social, because so much of our environment is social, but they’re also partly natural. Because our social being is nested inside the natural world. And so, you can think about the big five traits as different kinds of adaptations to different kinds of niches. And that’s the niche that the open exploratory types occupy. So, that seems to make a higher order super factor, extroversion and openness, called plasticity. As opposed to stability, which is conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability. And there’s a playoff between those two things, because the stable people obviously are stable. But the plastic types of people are more dynamic, and they’re more concerned with transformation. And in order to get a system optimally stable and dynamic, you have to have a continual interplay of those factors. Because static doesn’t work, because everything changes. That’s the problem with conservatism. And the problem with liberalism, fundamentally, is yes, everything changes, but you have to bring forward some structures from the past. So, it’s very, very difficult to get that balance correct. Alright, so anyways, out there in the underworld, in the place beyond your current conceptualizations, that’s the place of death and nature, and it’s beyond the light, and it’s also the place of hell. And that’s what you see here. How do you conceptualize that? Well, one of the things you’ll see, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, if you ever go read the writings of the Columbine killers, the teens, they’re very interesting. They’re very much worth reading, especially, I think it’s Dylan Klebold, who was the more literate of the two. But he tells you exactly where he went, after brooding, and brooding, and brooding on his isolation and segregation from mankind. So he’s out there beyond, he’s out there in a chaotic domain, and because he’s tortured by that, his thoughts take an unbelievably dark turn. It’s unimaginably dark. If you’re interested in that sort of thing, you could read that. There’s another book you could read called Pansram, P-A-N-Z-R-A-M, and it’s a fascinating book. It’s about this guy who, I think he raped 1,200 men, so that sort of tells you what sort of guy he was. Extraordinarily physically powerful, and brutal, and malevolent, and he was kind of a juvenile delinquent type, and they put him in a reform school, and he was not well treated in that reform school. It’s sort of like the worst of the Canadian residential schools, and when he came out, he was not a happy boy. And so he spent the rest of his life trying to be as destructive as he could possibly imagine, and purely consciously, with malevolent intent. And then, believe me, he was pretty destructive. He kept track of the dollar value of all the buildings he burned down. He tried to start a war between Britain and the United States, like he was all out for all out mayhem. His dying words, that they were going to hang him, he told the guy who was going to hang him, he said, hurry up you, who’s your bastard, I could kill 12 men in the time it takes you to hang me. And that’s exactly the sort of person he was, and he made friends with this physician in the prison, who he thought was like the first person who ever did something nice for him, gave him a dollar for cigarettes, if I remember correctly, and the physician encouraged him to write his autobiography. And so he did, and it’s available, and so if you want a view, because you know, you always think of people, you think, well people have good intentions, you know, that you especially think that if you’re naive and agreeable. So all of you who are sitting there, out there thinking people have good intentions, you’re probably high in agreeableness. But that’s not always the case. People can have very dark motivations, that are fully conscious, and very well elaborated, and Panzeram was no, he was smart, and his book is very well written, and he tells you exactly why he thought the way he thought. And so it’s a good glimpse of exactly this sort of thing, where you can get to, if you want to, by brooding on your specific misfortune. You know, and his basic credo was that human beings were so reprehensible that they should just be eliminated. And believe me, that’s what he was trying to do, and these people who do terrible things, like the Columbine shooters, that’s exactly what, for lack of a better word, they’re possessed by. It’s sheer malevolence, and the Columbine kids had a much more spectacular catastrophe planned, than the one that actually occurred. And they knew it was going to be a full-blown media circus. And lots of these people who engage in those sorts of mass murders, they know about the other mass murders, and they’re engaged in a competition, and the competition is who can do the most brutal thing the fastest, something like that. So, you can’t just be thinking about people who have good intentions, but have somehow gone wrong. If you ever meet someone who isn’t like that, and you think that, you’re just a tree with ripe fruit to be plucked. So, you don’t want to be in that situation. You have to keep your eyes open. And so, anyways, that’s basically what’s encapsulated in this part of the story. Now, the hyenas go after the little lion, obviously, but they manage to escape. It’s a very malevolent scene. And Mufasa shows up at the last minute to rescue them. So, and, you know, there’s also a mythological trope there, which is that if you go outside your domain of confidence, and you encounter something you don’t understand, the first thing that you’re going to do is look to the knowledge structures that you already possess to explain it. And that’s the, you could say, from a symbolic perspective, that that’s the manifestation of the father. Because, of course, that’s what you’re going to do. And, you know, what’s really interesting, too, is because I’ve had a lot of clients who’ve had PTSD, and without exception, every single one of them was induced by one form of malevolence or another. They have to develop a very sophisticated philosophy of good and evil to get out of it. Because they have a worldview in which those things don’t really exist. There’s no such thing as pure malevolence. Well, that’s fine, unless you encounter it. And then, as soon as you encounter it, you won’t know what to do. And then you won’t be able to get on with your life. You’ll do nothing, but think about that, and think about it, and think about it, and think about it. It’ll disrupt your sleep. It’ll put you into a permanent state of preparation for action. Because the part of your brain that’s detected that, which in my estimation, by the way, is the same part, at least in part, that detects snakes. It’s the same damn circuit. Once it’s seen something like that, it is not going to let you go until you figure it out. And that’s basically what post-traumatic stress disorder is. And, you know, to some degree, each of you will have experienced that. Maybe not all of you in here, but many of you. And you can tell that. So if you go back and you think about your past, and you have any memory that’s more than about 18 months old, and when you think about it, it produces a fair bit of negative emotion, then that’s like a place where there’s a mini post-traumatic stress problem. And what’s happened? You remember I showed you that hierarchy, moving from tiny motor actions all the way up to high order abstractions? Well, you can imagine, say, you have a good person at the top, and you kind of use that scenario to construe other people. People are basically good. Well, then you run into someone who is not good, and boom, the whole bloody system comes tumbling down, because it’s violated that highest order axiom. So that’s post-traumatic stress disorder. If something has violated an axiom that’s more differentiated, you know, closer to the actual motor output, not quite so high in the abstraction chain, then all it does is wipe out that part of the structure. It doesn’t wipe out the whole thing. And you can tell if you have holes in your perceptual value structure by checking to see if you have memories that are still alive in a negative way, that are old enough so that they should have been incorporated into your personality. And so one of the things you can do, you’re doing one of the exercises that’s on my self-authoring site, you guys do the personality analysis, but there’s another program there called the, it’s called the past authoring, where you write down an autobiography. And thinking through these things that have happened to you in your past that are negative is a good way of making them go away. And thinking them through kind of means you have to figure out what happened, right? And then you sort of have to figure out how to make it not happen again. What you’re trying to derive is some kind of causal analysis. How is it that I was put into a situation where I was made vulnerable? You know, and that could be, well, because you’re only four and you couldn’t protect yourself, and now it’s time to update that because you’re a fully functioning adult. Or there may be things that you have to think through and change in your own personality, or attitudes that you’ve been holding on to since you were tiny. I had this client once, and she came in and told me that she had been sexually assaulted by her older brother. And she told me the story, and I kind of got the impression that maybe she was like eight, and he was like seventeen or something like that. And she was about twenty-seven when she came and talked to me, and then I found out by further questioning that she was four and he was six. And I thought, she still had this story in her head of her being tormented by this older person, right? That’s how she told the story. And what I told her was, well, look, another way of looking at this is that you two were very badly supervised children. Because, I mean, he was six for God’s sake. You know, he’s a little kid. That doesn’t mean that what happened to her was any less traumatic, but he wasn’t seventeen, right? The story was different than the one she had in her head, and, you know, by the time she left, after we had that conversation, it was clear that the way that she was construing the experience had radically shifted. And it’s very interesting, because, you know, you think of the past as fixed. And it is in some sense, but the reason you remember the past isn’t to make an objectively accurate record of the past. It’s so that you can use the information in the past to prepare you for the future. And your mind won’t leave you alone unless that has happened. So if you’ve encountered something that’s negative, and you don’t know why, and you don’t know what to do about it if that happens again in the future, then that will stay with you. And I think one of the things it does too is it increases your overall physiological load. There’s actually physiologists who’ve been talking about this. I can’t remember the damn phrase, but you can imagine that your mind is doing something like this all the time. It’s got a record in some sense of your autobiographical experiences. And what it’s doing is calculating how frequently you’ve been successful versus unsuccessful. And the more frequently that you’ve been successful, the higher you are up on the dominance hierarchy. That’s one possibility. So your serotonin levels go up and you’re calmer. But also, it’s reasonable to assume that the environment is less dangerous, right? Because that’s sort of what constitutes danger. You’re somewhere and you act and something you don’t want to have happen happens. That’s danger. And so your brain is always trying to figure out how to calibrate how anxious you should be. And one of the things it does is by sort of keeping track of your past success failure ratio. And so to the degree that your past has been characterized by, we’ll call them failures, that those are situations where you do not get what you want, then your brain puts your body on constant alert. Because if everything that you’ve done has resulted in catastrophe, then you’re somewhere insanely dangerous. And you should be like a prey animal that’s ready to dart in any direction. And how much you should be a prey animal is dependent on, it’s an estimate, partly your trait neuroticism, partly your success as adjudicated by other people, right? Because they’ll pop you up the dominance hierarchy if you’ve been successful. But also partly on your record of failures and successes in the past. And so you can go back and you can find out where you have holes in your, in the structure through which you’re viewing the world. That’s one way of looking at it. And you can sew those things up. And that’s a very, that’s in some sense, that’s what you’re doing in psychotherapy. You know, partly it’s exposure to things you’re afraid of and disgusted by and are likely to avoid. That’s a huge chunk of it. But if you go back into your past and you start talking those things through, it’s really the same thing. It’s more abstracted. So Freud, of course, was always, when he was doing his free association process with his clients, he’d find that if he just let them talk, that their speech would circle until it hit a place like that, where they were confused and doubtful. And then their speech would sort of wander around that. And then they’d have an emotional expression. That was a consequence of that. He thought the emotional expression was what was curative. It was cathartic in his terms. But later, James Pennebaker, upon whom these writing exercises I described his research, is based on that, my exercises are based on his research, he found that if you brought college students into the lab and you had them write for 15 minutes, three times over three days, about the worst thing that had ever happened to them, or the worst thing they ever did, if I remember correctly, they got worse in the short term but better in the long run. For example, they went and visited the doctor less. And markers of their physical health improved. And so I think the reason for that is because, what’s that called? It’s called something load. Just about got it right from the physiologists. Doesn’t matter. They got healthier, as far as I can tell, because they basically calmed down. Once they had gone through the negative memory and sorted it out properly and told a properly articulated story and figured out how to deal with it, then their physiology calmed down. And so then they weren’t as stressed, they weren’t producing as much cortisol, and so cortisol suppresses your immune function, and so they were more likely to stay healthy. And so, well, so that’s all very much worth thinking about. That’s all in the domain outside of the light, that’s one way of thinking about it. Now, of course, Simba and his, and what’s the girl’s name? Mala. Mala, yeah. They’re, you know, pretty cowed about what has happened, because they sort of stumbled stupidly out into the unknown. They stumbled foolishly out into the unknown. And this actually highlights another Jungian archetype, and that’s the archetype of the trickster. And the trickster is like the joker in the king’s court, and the trickster is someone who will be or play the fool. And the thing about the fool is that the fool is close to the truth, because you can’t learn anything new unless you’re willing to be a fool. Right? You know what that’s like, you know exactly what that’s like. You have to master a new skill, but you’re avoiding it, because you know that you’ll be bad at it when you first do it. And if you’re perfectionistic, you’re going to say, well, I can’t allow myself to be bad at anything. I can’t allow myself to be a fool, and no wonder. But the problem is, is when you try something new, you’re always a fool. And so unless you’re willing to be a fool, you can’t learn anything new. And that’s also why Jung regarded the trickster as the precursor to the savior, archetypally speaking, is because you cannot do the right thing unless you’re willing to be a fool first. And that’s really worth knowing. Lots of times, you guys are going to make a stage transition in your life, and you’re going to feel like an imposter when you get a new job, or when you get a promotion or something like that. You’re going to feel like an imposter. And you are, because what do you know when you make that first transition, right? But it’s going to make you embarrassed, and it’s going to make you ashamed, and all of those things. But you have to understand that you are a fool when you first try something new. But you’re a worse fool if you don’t try it. That doesn’t mean you should make like you know everything as soon as you’re promoted, or you have some transition in status. That’s foolish of the wrong sort. But to know that you have to be fallible in order to progress is an unbelievably useful thing. It can free you up. I was talking to a writer the other day about his process for beginning writing. He’s written many books. He writes a very, very, very bad first draft. Right, and that’s a good way to think about things, is throughout your life you’re going to be doing that, is writing the next draft of you, and it’s pretty bad to begin with. But that’s okay, because it isn’t going to get any better unless you put yourself out into the domain of the unknown to begin with. And you know, you might, you might, it might go badly. I mean, that’s what happens here. Anyways, Mufasa has a chat with Simba, and you know, tells him that he’s, he did what he wasn’t supposed to do. Although, you know, even in that situation, Mufasa’s discipline is paradoxical, because there’s part of him, because he’s reasonably wise, that knows that breaking the rules like that is actually necessary. Even though you still have to say, play by the damn rules. You know, you have to leave that door open so that the rules can be broken an appropriate amount. So he forgives them, and peace is made between them, and then they involve themselves in sort of gazing at the night sky. And so the two of them do that together. And the night sky is an interesting place, you know, because that’s where the absolute unknown resides. One of the things Jung wrote a lot about was astrology, strangely enough, slash astronomy. And one of Jung’s contentions, this is a very interesting one, was that because the night sky was completely unknown, people could project their fantasies into it. And that’s what they did in the book, and they did it in the book. And that’s what they did with astrology. So astrology is this cumulative fantasy that’s going on in the, roughly speaking, in the deep unconscious, projected onto the sky. And so if you analyze old astrological writings, what you’re really doing is analyzing old fantasies, and because of that, you could develop some insight into the structure of the mind. And so he did the same thing with alchemy, and his later writings, which are very, very difficult to understand, but extremely worthwhile. Okay, so anyways, back to the hellish domain. Now I told you that that domain that’s outside of knowledge, you could think about that as the underworld, or you can think about it as nature, the negative element of nature in particular. And so I mentioned that one element of that is hellish. And that’s exactly what the movie explains next. It does exactly that. We go back out to this domain that scar the adversary, or the negative king. That’s another way of looking at him. This is his, the domain over which he rules. And so you can see him there, surrounded in fire. Same idea as the hyenas surrounded by fire earlier. Although this is green fire and smoke, which I think is even worse. And this is where the movie starts to draw on, essentially, Nazi symbolism. At least the symbolism of totalitarian states. And you know, you think about a totalitarian state, you think about the Nazis and their goose-stepping. What’s happening is that every single person in the military becomes an identical unit. Right? They’re all uniform. And they’re all, in some sense, imitating the dictator in an absolutely perfect way. And so the dictator wants to impose strict uniformity on the entire population. That’s order. Order. And one of the things we’ve discovered that’s really interesting is that disgust sensitivity is associated with orderliness. And that’s associated with conscientiousness. And one of the things about Hitler was that he was very disgust sensitive. And a lot of his hatred for non-Aryans. So imagine inside the Aryan box, it was all uniform. Outside, it was all parasites and predators. And so, and that was a manifestation of disgust, not of fear. It’s a whole different thing. And if you read Hitler’s Table Talk, which is a collection of his spontaneous dinner speeches from 1939 to 1942, it’s a very interesting book. You see that his metaphor for the Aryan race was a body, a pure body, unassaulted by parasites or predators, and that he was trying to erect a border around it to keep all of that away. So it’s an immunological disgust-like metaphor. And there’s some recent work that was published in Plos One about three years ago, showing that brilliant study, should have got much more attention, showing that if you went around and sampled political attitudes in different countries, or even within the same country, what you found was that the higher the prevalence of infectious diseases, the higher the probability of totalitarian political attitudes at the local level. And you can imagine, well, what happens if there’s infectious diseases is you want to put borders around everything. You don’t want free movement between ideas or people, because that’s partly how the disease spreads. You’re going to have much more strict sexual rules, for example, because that’s a great way for diseases to be transmitted. And before Hitler went on his rampage against the non-Aryans, he cleaned up all the factories. Like he went in there and fumigated them. It was part of the law. He went on a public health campaign to get rid of tuberculosis, and he got rid of the bugs in the factories as well. He used Zyklon B. That’s an insecticide, and that’s the gas that he used in the gas chambers eventually. So first it was the bugs and the rats, and then it was people who were… Then it was euthanasia. That was the next move, and forced euthanasia. And the rationale for that was compassion, by the way, just so you all know. It’s merciful to put these people who are burdensome to themselves and their families and the state who are living second-rate lives. It’s merciful to euthanize them. And that was a huge campaign in Germany. It was after that that the more racial purifications began. And so that’s the disgust thing. That’s unbelievably important. It’s… Because lots of times people think that conservatives are more anxiety-sensitive than liberals, and that’s why they’re closed in terms of their ideas. That doesn’t look right. First of all, conservatives are less neurotic than liberals, although the effect isn’t that big. So it doesn’t look… And they actually score higher in measures of well-being. The most unhappy people are liberal men, by the way. But people are often accused, if they’re conservative, of being fearful, and that’s why they suppress other people’s viewpoints. But that doesn’t look right. It’s low openness and high orderliness, and that looks like it’s associated with disgust, and that looks like it’s associated with something called the extended immune system, which is the proclivity of people to keep themselves away from potential sources of contamination. It’s really terrifying, because one of the things people often said about Germany was that it was a very civilized country, and yet it descended into barbarity. But conscientiousness is a very good predictor of long-term success. And so you could say, well, conscientious societies are more civilized, but they’re also more orderly, and that makes them more disgust sensitive. And so what it might have easily been in Germany was that it was an excess of civilization, rather than its lack that produced exactly these consequences. And that’s a far more frightening proposition, and one that’s, I believe, much more likely to be true. Hitler bathed four times a day. And he was also an admirer of willpower, so he could stand like this for eight hours in the back of a car. And the thing about conscientious people is they’re very willpower-oriented. And so if you’re unfortunate enough to be sick, chronically, in the house of someone who’s conscientious, especially if it’s a mental illness, you’re more likely to relapse, because the conscientious person is going to be judgmental, and they’re going to say to you, if you’re schizophrenic, they’re going to say, well, if you just organize yourself and get up in the morning and try a little harder, you could overcome this. Which is, of course, true, except you can’t, because you’re schizophrenic. And so the pressure put on you by the anger and the contempt is going to increase the probability that you’ll relapse. So orderly people are very judgmental. And orderliness is very highly associated with things like anorexia. And the anorexic is basically someone who’s so disgust-sensitive that they become unable to tolerate their own body. And they see it as a source of corruption and imperfection, which, of course, is exactly right. It is. And it’s a very difficult thing to maintain order around. So anyways, so what happens out here in this terrible domain, where Scar rules, is that things turn into a totalitarian state. You know, and he’s presented here as a Nazi-like leader. And see, there’s another thing that’s really interesting, that’s even deeper than this from a mythological perspective. I don’t know if I can even go into it. Well, not really. I guess what I’ll have to do is satisfy myself with this observation. There’s always been some antagonism, for example, between the Catholic Church and rationalism. And everyone knows that. It’s a very long-standing antagonism that sort of runs its way through at least the last thousand years or so of Western civilization. And the people who regarded Catholics as antithetical to science take the Catholics to task for that, describing it as prejudicial and superstitious. And fair enough. But there’s something else going on there that’s more important. And that’s the observation, and this is at a deep level again, the observation that rationality has one big problem. So it can easily become arrogant and believe in its own theories. So if you’re smart, and there are going to be some of you people who are like that too, some of you, your primary, the primary trait that distinguished you from other people over the course of your whole life was that you were more intelligent than most. And you may have staked your identity on that and overvalue intelligence and rationality. And the problem with that is that you make a theory of the world, and then you tend to assume that it’s 100% correct. That’s the tendency to fall in love with your own theories. And that’s what a totalitarian does. The totalitarian says, here’s the damn theory. And it’s exactly right. And you’re going to act it out exactly. And if you don’t, well, we’ve got some special treats in mind for you. And one of the most terrible things that I encountered while reading about totalitarianism, and this was even more true of the Soviet Union under Stalin, was that the true believers, and there were many of them, were in a terrible position because according to their own doctrine, they’re already involved in the process that was going to bring utopia to mankind. The problems had already been solved, but many of them were still suffering terribly as individuals. But if you’re a totalitarian believer in utopia, your own suffering becomes heretical. Because your suffering is an indication that the damn theory isn’t correct. And so then you’re in a terrible position because you either admit that the theory isn’t correct, and fall apart because of that, and maybe face terrible punishment as well. Or you have to separate yourself from your own suffering and lie about it fundamentally. And of course, that’s exactly what happened in places like the Soviet Union, where everyone lied about everything all of the time to themselves, to their family members, to their friends. The entire system was completely permeated by lies. And so you get this terrible place that scars the ruler over, which is totalitarian and brutal and murderous and resentful and deceitful and arrogant all at the same time. So the Columbine guys, for example, when they’re justifying their murderousness and their plans to shoot up the schools, they keep making reference to the fact that people had slighted them, for example, and insulted them, and they were alienated. They weren’t bullied exactly the way the press made it out. I don’t know if they were bullied any more than people usually are in high school. But they took their alienation personally and regarded that, their isolation from common humanity as indication of the pathology of everything. And then they went out to destroy. And that’s exactly what this sort of thing represents. That’s the uniformity. And you see, he’s got this kind of vicious grin on his face, which is malicious and pleased all at the same time. There’s no fear in that. It’s quite the opposite. And there’s another image of, you know, using what’s essentially imagery of hell, which everyone understands, strangely enough. And that associates him with the crescent moon. And the crescent moon is, well, it’s a symbol of darkness and the underworld fundamentally. All right. So anyway, so that’s, we see the underworld, we see that which lies beyond the light. And in there, we see a fragment of that that’s basically hellish. And all of that’s incorporated into the story. And everyone understands that when they see it, even without, I would say, the overt references to Nazism. Okay, so now, Scar has a plan. He’s going to kill the king. And he’s going to do that by putting what the king loves in danger. And so Scar, feigning sympathy, has enticed Simba down into this ravine. And Scar’s minions are going to cause a wildebeest stampede, right? So a mindless stampede to put Simba in danger. And so that’s what happens here. The wildebeest start to march into the ravine. And everyone is making a, Scar tells Mufasa that Simba is down in that ravine, and entices him down there. And so they’re all off running to see if they can save Simba. And then you see Mufasa running in front of the wildebeest herd, trying to find his son and trying to stay ahead of them, the mad mob that’s put his son in danger. And so he tries to escape, climbing up the butte, which is almost a sheer cliff. And when he gets to the top, his brother is waiting for him there. And he asks him to pull him up. And Scar basically, before he kills him, indicates that he’s betraying him, and puts his claws into Mufasa’s paws and throws him off the cliff. And so that’s that. And it’s a sad part of the story. It’s a hard part that’s very hard on kids, because the father has died. And you know, it’s a rare kid who won’t cry about that scene in particular, where you see Simba very upset and his father dying. Now, this is a hard part of the story to interpret. And I don’t know if it’s because of my lack of ability to interpret or because the story takes a weird twist here. But there is this confusion in the story about whether Simba is an innocent victim who’s set up for the murder of his father, or whether he actually bears some guilt for it, you know. And he’s broken some rules and that and so on. So he’s not exactly placed in the position of innocence. But of course, he’s also been set up by Scar. In any case, Scar tells him that it’s his fault, pure and pure, and that because of that, he’s going to have to leave. He’s going to have to be banished beyond the kingdom. Now, you see this motif quite frequently in hero stories, where the hero has to be raised outside of the kingdom. That happens with King Arthur, for example. And it happens with Harry Potter, right? Because Harry Potter is raised by muggles instead of being inside the magic kingdom. So it’s a very common theme. And partly what it means is that it means two things. One is that you do grow up alienated from your culture to some degree. There’s no way around that because the culture doesn’t match you perfectly. And it doesn’t work for you perfectly. And it’s old and it’s kind of corrupt. And it alienates you as it’s shaping you. And so you’re going to develop some separation from it. And you see that in intergenerational rhetoric, where the new generation has the proclivity to blame the previous generation for everything that’s wrong with the current system. And fair enough, because you do inherit everything that’s wrong. Of course, you also inherit everything that’s going well, which is a good thing to also notice. But the idea is that you can’t help but be alienated from, let’s call it the patriarchy, for lack of a better word. Because it’s got a tyrannical element and because it’s not matched well to you. But then there’s also this other issue, which is, well, maybe you’re not being successful by the terms that are, by the values that are instantiated in the current system. And you might say, well, that’s because the system is set up in an unfair manner. And fair enough. But it’s also possibly because you’re just not very good at acting out those values. Right? So part of the reason you get alienated from your culture is because the culture is corrupt. But another part of the reason is you’re just not doing as well as you could be. You’re not playing by even your own rules properly. And so you get alienated and you’re unsuccessful because of your own inadequacies. And so the movie plays both of those. It’s obviously Simba is set up, but there is an intimation that he’s not entirely blameless as well. Anyways, he’s very broken up about this. And no wonder it’s also partly a story of the emergence of adolescence. Because, you know, when you’re a child and you’re ensconced right inside the familial framework, then you sort of exist within that system of rules like you would under the Piagetian scheme. But when you become an adolescent, then there’s much more of a proclivity to break free and to start breaking rules. And so that’s also akin in some sense to the death of the father. And that’s a necessary developmental stage. Anyway, Scar comes down into the ravine. It’s all foggy now because that goes along with the sort of murkiness of death and tells Simba that it’s his fault and that he’s going to have to leave. He’s going to have to leave the kingdom of his father, which makes sense now his father’s dead. So how are you going to once your father has died, how are you going to stay around in his kingdom, so to speak. So and then Scar tries to get these hyenas to go track Simba down and kill him. So and Zazu goes back to tell all the rest of the lions that Mufasa is dead and that Simba has disappeared. And then Scar takes over Pride Rock. And so what’s happened now is the malevolent element of the king has obtained control over the state, right. And so this is the king, the wise king wasn’t paying enough attention. That’s one way of looking at it. And so the malevolent part of the state has now got control. This is a very, very old idea. I’ve traced it back at least several thousand years in its representation in stories. You can see it in Egyptian mythology, for example. So the idea is that as the social structure builds in complexity, it offers you the protection of a functioning complex system, but it also becomes increasingly likely to turn into a tyranny. And because it’s more and more powerful, the fact of its potential for tyranny becomes more and more of a danger. And so then the question is, well, what are the factors that encourages it turning into a tyranny? And one factor would be the wise part of it is not paying enough attention to the malevolent part of it. And you could say that’s true at the state level. And it’s also true at the individual level, right, you have to watch your own proclivity to upset yourself and other people and, and take that into account and pay careful attention to it, because otherwise it can gain control, especially because you’re going to avoid looking at it. And one of the characteristics of the wise king who gets overthrown by the tyrant is that he has an evil brother, and he won’t pay enough attention to him. He avoids, he doesn’t look. And so the the evil king gets the upper hand. And that’s what’s happened here. And so notice now he takes possession of Pride Rock, not in full daylight, right, but at night. So that ties his rule into the rule of unconscious processes and malevolence. All right, so Simba runs away from the kingdom out into the desert. Now, why is that? Well, you remember, maybe you remember, and maybe you don’t, maybe you don’t know it. The story of Exodus, when Moses takes the Hebrews out of Egypt, they end up in a desert. Well, why? Well, it’s because when you leave a kingdom, no matter how tyrannical, you still fall into disorder. You’re out in a place that’s desert, there’s no civilization there. You know, that’s what happened to Iraq after the Americans went in, you know, the Americans, the neo-cons were all convinced that the Iraqis would welcome them with open arms, and there would be this smooth transition to democracy. Same idea in Libya. It’s like, no, that’s not what happens. What happens is the state devolves into a desert chaos. And maybe then you can make order, but probably not. And so Simba has left the kingdom. And the first thing that happens is he damn near dies in the desert. And so, you know, if you have an old belief system, and it’s not working very well, and you abandon it, well, good for you, because you’re out of the old belief system, but now you’re nowhere. One of the things that happens to alcoholics, for example, and other drug addicts as well. So imagine that you’re trying to stop drinking. All right, fine. Maybe you have to undergo some medical treatment, so when you first stop, you don’t die of seizures, because that often happens to people who are addicted to alcohol. So, and they get Valium, something like that, from a doctor, to see them through the first bits of, what would you call it, of sobering up. And so they get through it, and then maybe two weeks later, they’re not physiologically dependent on alcohol anymore. The same thing is true of cocaine. But if you take them back, and you put them in their environment, say they go back out of the treatment center, back into the normal world, they start drinking or using right away again. And the reason for that is that, well, let’s say you’ve been an alcoholic for 20 years. Okay, first of all, that’s all you do for entertainment. You drink, and all your friends are alcoholics, right? And so, if you’re going to stop drinking, not only do you have to rid yourself of the of the physiological addiction, but you have to completely learn a new way of living. Because what do you know? You have to get rid of all your friends, because they’re all drunks, pretty much, or if they’re not, they’re at least people who are facilitating your drinking. So you have to build a whole new social network. You don’t know how to amuse yourself, because of course, the way you’ve done that is by going to the bar, sitting at home drinking. And so there’s a huge hole in your life. You abandon the previous pathological mode of adaptation, but that just leaves you with nothing. And then you have to rebuild that thing from scratch. It’s extraordinarily difficult, and that’s why so many people fail when they’re trying to overcome a major addiction. So, all right, so anyways, Simba’s out there in the desert. He’s left his family and the comforts of home, and he’s discovered by these, by Pumba and, what was the little rat’s name? Timon? Yes, he’s a meerkat, right, which are very cool things. And they discover him, and this is sort of his transition into adolescence. And he kind of finds, and this is, I would say, more typical of the male transition into adolescence, because females, of course, hit puberty so much younger. The males, who aren’t very attractive when they’re young, and just starting to undergo puberty, they’re not very attractive to females. They tend to clump together in gangs and manage the transition over what could be seven years. And that’s what happens here, is Simba joins this little gang of, you know, these guys are all right, but, you know, they’re a little on the primordial side, you might say. You know, one of them is basically just a walking gastrointestinal tract, and the other one is, he’s not so bad, but he’s like, you know, a foot high, really. What good is he? And so he’s got some second-rate companions out here past the desert, but he enters, he’s out of childhood now, and now he enters the adolescent world. And what happens here is that, very quickly in the film, he goes from being a little cub to a full, full adolescence, and there’s about a five-minute transition. And so it’s the next stage in his development. And now he’s out there in this paradise, which is kind of strange, because adolescence really is no picnic. But the idea here is that he really doesn’t have any responsibilities, right? None. And that is one thing about adolescence, and even the stage of life that you guys are at, is you have lots to do, but you’re not really responsible for anyone other than yourself. And so even though you might be quite burdened with your current responsibilities, it’s nothing compared to what it would be like when you, you know, you have responsibility for for children, for example, or for the people that are working for you, or whatever. So anyways, out here, it’s a kind of impulsive place as well. And adolescence is like that. We’ve had high school students try to do the future authoring program, you know, where they have to think three to five years down the road. It’s like, forget that. They just can’t do it. And I’ve watched them. And what happens is you, you immediately become aware of just how little high school students know when they’re like 15 or 16. Three to five years? Forget it. They don’t have the world knowledge to project themselves out that far in the future, not even close. And so we’ve built a high school version that helps them design a better future three to six months down the road. And even that’s really pushing it. But, you know, adolescents are more impulsive, and they live more for the moment. And there’s some utility in that. I mean, being impulsive and living for the moment is one of the things that gets you pregnant as a teenager. And that is certainly one way that the species has managed to propagate itself. And so positive emotion and impulsivity are very tightly linked. And so he’s out there in this adolescent delusional fantasy. That might be one way of thinking about it. But more importantly, he’s out there where he’s in a domain now where the impulses of the moment basically take precedence. And so, and I think they sing some song about Hakuna Matata, right, which basically means do whatever you want and tomorrow will take care of itself or something like that. So it’s very impulsive and lacks all responsibility. One of the things that I would recommend to you if you want to protect yourself from ideological possession, shall we say, is that when you hear people speak politically, and they don’t say anything about your responsibilities, you should probably stop listening to them. Because whenever they’re trying to offer you something, if it doesn’t come along with an equivalent cost, there’s something being hidden from you. And they’re appealing to the part of you that’s, well, I would say, at best adolescent. So, all right, so anyways, he’s out there in his little adolescent paradise and with his dopey chums and back at Pride Rock. Things are not good, right? Scar, who’s arrogant and refuses to learn and who will not establish a reasonable relationship with the females, all he does is tyrannize over them. He ends up ruling over a completely barren landscape. And that’s really what happens in totalitarian states. And we also know, quite interestingly, is that one of the best predictors of economic development in a state is the degree to which they extend rights to women. So, he’s out there in his little adolescent paradise and it’s one of the best predictors. And I would say, well, if you’re going to tyrannize your own women, you’re going to tyrannize everything. You’re going to tyrannize ideas, you’re going to tyrannize structures. Like, if you have to enslave your own women, you’ve adapted a pretty damn pathological view of the world and the probability that that narrow, constrained, restricted viewpoint is going to pay off for you economically is extraordinarily low. So anyways, Scar, it’s like what happened in the Soviet Union. Part of the reason it collapsed by 1989 is that it just could not move any farther. It was like this really complicated motor that was worn completely out that no one had ever taken care of and it just ground to a halt. It just stopped working because it didn’t work. And so, if you’re totalitarian and you won’t update your system and adjust it, then it wears out and grinds to a halt and everything becomes unproductive. Now, it’s not easy to figure out what makes a society productive because you might say, well, it’s natural resources or something like that. First of all, natural resources are very often a curse to a country because they produce corruption. They call that the Dutch disease. There’s a reason for that. You can look it up. But natural resources in and of themselves are by no means sufficient to guarantee the well-being of a country. Japan has virtually no natural resources at all. And it’s really rich. And one of the prime natural resources actually seems, maybe there’s two. One is honesty. Another is trust. And if you can set up a society where people are roughly honest, which means they do what they say they’re going to do, and where the default bargaining position on both sides is trust, then the probability that that culture will become wealthy is very, very high. So and a functional legal system is also a natural resource of tremendous, tremendous value. You know, it’s partly why people in China, for example, wealthy people in China are dumping their money into the real estate market in North America like mad, because one of the things you do know, if you buy real estate in North America is you actually own it. It’s still going to be yours 20 years in the future, 30 years in the future. There’s no doubt about that. And so that fact of ownership is embedded in the functioning legal system. And that’s what gives those sorts of properties crazy value, you know, much to the much to the problematic situation for all of you people who are at some point, most of you are going to try to buy property in Toronto. And that’s really going to be entertaining. So now look, the other thing about Scar is he’s got the little bird locked up, right? That’s the vision of the king. Well, he doesn’t want to know anything. He already knows everything. So why does he need this stupid bird flying around telling him what’s going on? The last thing he wants to know is what’s going on. Stalin, I mean, God, you gave that guy bad news or good news, he was going to have you killed. It kept the bad news to a minimum. And that’s a real problem, right? Because if you torture people who bring you bad news, then you’re never going to learn anything. Well, you don’t have to if you already know everything anyways. And so that’s the situation here. Well, his little minions, the hyenas are getting pretty unhappy because they haven’t had anything to eat. And the reason for that is they’ve just stripped the landscape bare, right? I mean, and I read at the demise of the Soviet Union that something like 10 to 15% of the entire landmass of the Soviet Union had been rendered permanently uninhabitable by industrial pollution. So, you know, that I don’t remember if that included Chernobyl, you know, where that terrible nuclear accident took place. But there were massive domains of devastation in those countries that will take hundreds of years to fix. So anyways, when scar rules, everyone starves. That’s a good way of thinking about it, or everyone dies. But that’s okay, because that’s really what he’s after anyway. So that works out quite nicely. Now back out here in paradise, I mean, look at him. How pathetic can you get? Look at the expression on that creature’s face. You know, he’s sated like someone who’s just eaten a gallon of ice cream, and he’s got this pathetic, self-satisfied, naive, clueless, unconscious grin on his face, which the animators did a very nice job of capturing. Like, that’s a complicated expression. And you just want to slap him. And that’s exactly what should happen. And that’s exactly what does happen. So anyways, he’s out there being an unconscious dingbat. Well, his society is degenerating. And that’s bloody well worth thinking about, because that’s an archetypal trope, right? It’s like things are sinking around you. The question is, what are you doing about it? You know, are you just staying in kind of a blithe unconsciousness? Because you can get your next meal? Are you going to wake up and do something about it? Well, that’s the call of the self. So now we go back to Rafiki here, and he knows what’s going on in the kingdom. He’s a symbol of the self. And he also has some inkling that Simba is still alive. So the son of the king is still alive, despite the fact that the land has become ruled by a tyrant, and the son is absent. He’s still around somehow. And so from the Jungian perspective, there isn’t much distinction between the self and the child. The self is the sum total of all possibility, and the child is possibility itself. And so let’s say you’ve become an adolescent, you’re all cynical, right? And everything’s falling apart around you, which is the typical state of human beings, right? Because adolescents are cynical, generally speaking, and everything’s falling apart around them, generally speaking. And so what do you have to do in order to to do something about that? Well, one is you have to be drawn by the call of wisdom. And the other part is that you have to rediscover that part of yourself that’s a childlike part, that’s associated with the sun, and associated with that early, you know, the early exposure of Simba to the sun. You have to find that again, and then trust that some childlike exploration and a bit of manifestation of faith might get you to the next place. And so that’s what’s happening here with the little, you know, the baboon in the tree and the drawing. So anyways, he knows that Simba’s alive now, and so he goes off to find him. And meanwhile, Simba and his dopey companions are out hunting for bugs, you know, because he’s a lion, you know, he shouldn’t be eating bugs for crying out loud, but they’re easy. And so you see this scene where Pumba goes after this bug, and then another lion shows up and chases him. So she’s going to kill him and eat him. And ha, see, that’s an interesting thing. Because one of the things that happens, I suppose you could think about this. One of the things that happens in late adolescence is that the formation of male gangs is often broken up by the proclivity of one or more members of that gang to get involved in an individual romantic relationship. And so the idea that the female lion is the carnivore, the female is the carnivore that will devour the group is exactly right. And so what a girl will do often if she’s in a relationship with, you know, somebody like a young man or an older adolescent is she’ll try to separate him from his dopey friends. And like, no wonder, you know, why wouldn’t she do that? Because he does have dopey friends, and it’d be better for him if he could get beyond them. And so anyways, they’re pretty freaked out about this. And so then Simba goes out and has a fight with this lion to protect his dopey chums. And I’m sure you don’t need any explanation about what that means. And they have this huge fight and Nella, who it turns out to be pins him. And so that goes back to the beginning of the story where when he first encountered her, she pinned him all the time. She’s an anima figure, right? And now what she does immediately is shame him. So he’s an anima figure in part, she’s an anima figure in part because she actually does shame him. Right? So she’s the gateway to higher consciousness. She makes himself conscious, and rightly so. But he’s also a she’s also a psychological figure because imagine that when a young man is establishing a relationship with a young woman, and he’s enamored of her, he’s falling in love, he projects an ideal onto her. And that ideal is going to be partially fulfilled by the relationship, the degree to which is unspecified. And sometimes it’ll collapse completely. But he projects an ideal onto her, because otherwise he wouldn’t be attracted to her. And then the ideal judges him. And so that makes him feel all self conscious and useless, which is useful because he is useless and should feel that way. And so it’s part of the impetus to growing up. So and of course, one of the you need necessity in order to mature you because to mature is to take on responsibility. And you’re not going to feel that impetus unless adopting the responsibility has some sort of payoff and women tend to mate across and up dominance hierarchy. So they tend to actually like men who are useful. And so if they encounter a man who isn’t useful at all, they’re going to that’s exactly what’s going to happen. They’re going to not be happy about that in the least. And so, and no wonder and I think the reason for that economic and a biological reason the reason is, is that women are in the position of having to take care of infants primarily. And an infant is a very heavy load. And so even a woman who’s extraordinarily competent is going to find herself substantially limited in her possibilities. If she has an infant, and so then she’s looking around for someone who will pick up part of the load. It’s perfectly reasonable. And you’re not going to pick up part of the load if you’re completely useless. And so it’s in the woman’s best interest not to have two children, roughly speaking. So anyway, she pins him. And then he’s all resentful about it immediately, because she’s calling him on his stupid friends and the fact that he’s out there gallivanting impulsively in paradise when there’s real problems to be solved. And so look at him. He’s all resentful and useless. And, and, you know, feeling put upon and picked upon. And you just you got to slap him again fundamentally. She’s just completely stunned by that. It’s like, and tells him, you know, where’s the Simba I used to know, right? He’s a little doubtful about the whole situation there. The animators do a very nice job of this part of the movie, because one of the things you see is that his eyebrows are always pointing up in the middle, whereas his father’s eyebrows were pointing down in the middle. And so that’s the difference between this, which is sort of like things are happening to me, and this which is more like I’m imposing my will on things. And that’s an immature face. And, and the animators capture that brilliantly. So here’s where she shames him again. She tells him how much she liked him when he was little and, and, you know, a potential king and how hurt she is that he’s this useless, you know, wide eyed, naive, impulsive, pleasure seeking adolescent. And she tells him that she missed him. And God only knows why because look at him again. It’s like, completely appalling, appalling creature. And this is when Pumbaa and Timon sing that song about the fact that, you know, their friends doomed because, you know, this girl’s got him and, oh, and then they switch into another archetypal scene. And so they’re falling in love here. And so that paradisal imagery is really highlighted in the movie. And so they go off and have this like romp, self reflective romp through this new paradise. And they wrestle around and, and play. And then he pins her more or less and she licks him. That’s, that’s not so good. And this is one of the most brilliant shots, I think, that the animators managed because she’s obviously pushing this a little bit farther than he knows what to do with. And so they’re wrestling and he, she licks him and then she lays down and makes this face, which is every single class I’ve ever showed this to all laugh when they see that image. And that’s a good example. So Freud said that jokes were a good route into the unconscious. So the question is, and this is an archetypal facial expression and everyone knows exactly what it means. There’s something sexually seductive about it and something very sexually seductive about it, despite the fact that it’s a lioness. And the animators do an extraordinarily good job of capturing that. And so that has a huge effect on him. Well, these guys know that the game’s up, man. It’s like they know they’re dead. Whatever attractions they can offer are paling in comparison to this. So, so anyways, things don’t really progress past that. But you know, he gets a hint of her longing for him, what’s waiting for him if he grows up and the fact that she’s completely disappointed in him because he’s so completely useless. And so now he’s lounging about, you know, like some basement dweller with cheeto dust all over his chest and, and trying to justify his absolutely useless life. And you know, saying that he doesn’t have any responsibility to the devastated kingdom. And he’s out there where Hakuna Matata, you know, I can just do whatever I want and, and follow my impulsive pleasures. And she thinks he’s pretty pathetic. And the reason for that is because he is actually pretty pathetic. And she she tells him that, you know, she’s extraordinarily disappointed, he gets all pouty about it. I mean, even here, you see when he when he’s got kind of an aggressive look on his face, there’s still nothing about it that’s commanding. It’s petulant, right? It’s like, well, now I’m irritated, but he’s got no force and and still completely appalling in this in this particular situation. So she judges him very harshly and leaves. And that makes him think, yeah, he gets all self conscious, because this female that he admires wants to have nothing to do with him. And so he’s first of all, then he thinks, well, maybe I’ll just hate all women, which is, you know, pretty pathetic conclusion, and but a very common one. And the next is, well, maybe there’s actually something wrong with him, right, which is a very painful bit of self reflection. So he, he had he knows that there’s something wrong with him. And then he calls out to his father and says, Look, you said you were always going to be here for me, and you’re not. And so what’s happening is that he’s he’s become aware of the insufficiency of his current adolescent value structure. And he wants something beyond it, which would be associated with identification with the father, but he can’t, he can’t find the father, the father’s dead. It’s like when Pinocchio goes down to the bottom of the ocean to bring Geppetto up from the depths, right? That’s the situation that that Simba finds himself in right now, the father’s gone, and has to be brought up from the depths. So this is where the movie takes the, the, the archetypal pathway of initiation, initiation ceremony. So he says he wants to change. Now, one of the things Carl Rogers, one of the clinicians that we’ll talk about pointed out was that if, if someone is going to come to psychotherapy, there’s some things that had to happen before they went into psychotherapy. And one thing that had to happen was that they had to admit that there was something wrong, and they had to want to change. You had to have that before you went into the psychotherapeutic situation. And what happens here is Simba is actually he’s dropped his arrogance. And he’s looking upward, kind of like Geppetto wishing on the star in Pinocchio. He’s looking upwards, he looking towards something higher, and he wants to transform himself. So he’s asked the question, how can I change for the better? And he doesn’t get an answer. And then Rafiki shows up. So what does that mean? It means that as soon as you know you’re wrong about something, as soon as you admit that you’re wrong about something, and you open the door to potential change, that part of you will respond. So and you know this, because think about this, you’re thinking. So you ask yourself a question, because that’s what you do when you’re thinking, and then you generate some answers. It’s like, it’s very strange. The thinking will actually work. You can actually come up with answers if you think about something. And so this issue is, okay, I thought I was real good in my little impulsive paradise, but then it turns out that I’m just a half wit. And I noticed that, and I want to do something about it. So the question is now, the question has now been posed. And what Jung would say is the deeper part of yourself, the part that still contains your undeveloped potential, will respond to that posed question, and change the way that you look at things, and change the way that you act. It’ll start changing things so that you can tap those parts of yourself that are not yet developed. And you certainly do that in psychotherapy. But you can do that. Jung said that psychotherapy could be replaced by a supreme moral effort. And by that he meant was that if you really wanted things to be better, if you wanted to get your act together, and you admitted that you were insufficient in your current state, and you meditated on the issue, and tried to figure out what you should do next to put yourself together, that you would be able to find out. That there’s something in you that guides the process of development. That’s the self. It’s the higher self in some sense. It’s the thing that remains constant across transformations. You know, because you’re somewhere, then you fall apart, then you get somewhere else. But there’s something outside of that that’s guiding that process. And that’s also the self. That’s what you could be. And you can communicate in some sense with what you could be. And that’s a very strange thing about human beings. Anyways, Rafiki shows up, and Simba is sitting by the water, self-reflecting. There’s a little pebble that drops into the pool to attract his attention, and up pops the self. And Rafiki’s a trickster. He tells him weird jokes, and he hits him with a stick a bunch of times. Thank God, because someone really needs to. And he makes some stupid jokes about bananas, and kind of entices Simba into following him. He lets him know that he has a secret, and he entices Simba into following him. So Simba’s all of a sudden become interested in something. So if you ask yourself what the next developmental stage is, and you really want to know, then all of a sudden you’re going to become interested in things that might move you to the next stage. And that’ll happen more or less unconsciously. So anyways, Rafiki entices him, and then runs away. And Simba follows him. And well, that’s where he reveals himself as a sage. And then he tells Simba to follow him, and he goes underground. And this is the initiation scene, right? Which we talked about at the beginning of the class. This is the descent into the underworld. And it’s a prerequisite to radical personality transformation. So anyways, he goes through this horrifying underground tunnel system where everything’s all tangled up. Which is, you know, if you ever fall into chaos, that everything down there in chaos is tangled up. It’s a tangled mess. And he’s quite, and there’s horrifying music going on in the background. And he goes deeper and deeper until Rafiki says he finds a pool in the middle of the chaos, a deep pool. And that’s another symbol of the self. It’s the deep unconscious. There’s something down there that’s alive, that can be drawn up to the surface. And so Rafiki shows him the pool, and Simba, who’s quite terrified at this point, looks in it. And the first thing he sees is he only sees himself. He only sees his own reflection. And Rafiki says, look deeper. Now you see what the animators do here. It’s very cool. So there’s Simba, and there’s his reflection. But you see that is already half his farther. And you look at the difference in the eyebrows and the look. So there’s a tightness of jaw and a firmness of face that’s starting to manifest itself there. And that means that he’s starting to see the man he could be beyond the adolescent. That’s a good way of thinking about it. And then all of a sudden, well there, you know, that’s a whole different face, right? That’s a seriously different face. That, everything’s going in, and that, it’s like get out of my way, because things are going to happen around me. Very judgmental as well. So it’s not naive by any stretch of the imagination. But you know, we know his father’s a good guy. And so there’s something archetypal about this. And so he sees the man he could be reflected back to him, and then that switches, that actually becomes a cosmic event. And we switch up to the sky instead. And so Mufasa manifests himself basically as a solar deity. And he tells Simba that he’s forgotten who he is, which is the son of a king, and that he should remember that and start acting like it. And that’s an archetypal idea. So if you’re just a useless adolescent, then you’ve forgotten who you are. And the consequence of that is that the state is going to fall around, fall apart around you, and you’re not going to do anything to fix it, and you’re not going to be good for anything, and no one’s going to be able to rely on you, and you’re going to be all whiny and resentful. And then after that, it even gets worse. And so that’s basically what Mufasa tells him. And so Simba is like blown away by this vision, right? Because he sees what he could be, and also what he’s not, which is pretty damn horrifying. So anyways, the storm, so to speak, clears, and Rafiki comes up, and Simba’s a lot more thoughtful, and not quite as whiny and resentful anymore, and Rafiki leaves. And so Simba now knows what he’s supposed to do. He’s supposed to stop being useless and take on the moral requirements of setting the kingdom straight. And so he runs back across the desert. There’s all sorts of impressive music happening, and then he comes back to his kingdom, and it’s not looking so good. And that’s the consequence of his abandonment of it. That’s a big part of it. So now it’s dead, but also his abandonment of it to nothing but malevolence and chaos. And so he’s pretty taken aback at what’s happened, and that he exaggerates his guilt, or it should anyways. And Nella shows up, and they decide they’re going to do something about this. So in the meantime, Simba’s mother is complaining about the fact that there’s no food in the kingdom anymore, and that they’ve gone as far as they can, and Scar doesn’t want to hear this, so he attacks her, and Simba decides to go to war. And so this is where he wakes up, and he’s willing to encounter the shadow at this point. And so he confronts Scar, and Scar’s very concerned about this, because actually Simba’s looking pretty impressive now, and he thought he was dead besides. And so he tries to use treachery and whininess and subordination to excuse himself, but he’s planning to overthrow Simba nonetheless, to resist him. So he tells Scar to leave. He’s going to banish him to the nether regions outside of the kingdom, like Scar did to him. And Scar basically refuses, and then a storm gathers, right? And lights the dead wood around the rock on fire. So we have another kind of descent into hell scene here. Very common in Disney movies, this notion of the hero fighting the evil force on the edge of something that’s burning. It’s quite a common motif. You see it in Sleeping Beauty, for example. So they have a big war, and Scar ends up putting Simba in the same position that Mufasa was in, and then he whispers to him that he killed his father. So Simba’s been thinking all along that it was only his fault, and it is sort of his fault, but he didn’t know that there was a more archetypal theme playing out in the background, which is that societies are always endangered by malevolence, always. And that’s independent to some degree of Simba’s decisions and his lack thereof. Anyway, Scar tells him, because he thinks he’s won, and that energizes Simba to have this sort of final battle. He leaps out from the pit, and they have a big fight, and he pins him, basically. And the female lioness has come to his aid, and Simba tells him that, again, that he has to leave. And so they have a big fight. That’s a particularly good bit of animation. So there’s a real demonic aspect to Scar there, sort of king of hell imagery. But he loses. And then, ha! He blames his minions. He blames the hyenas for everything terrible that’s happening, forgetting that they can hear him. And then he falls off the cliff, and the hyenas go in and finish him off. So it’s a pretty brutal ending for poor old Scar, eaten by his own minions. And then Scar’s dead, and Simba has won, and so the rains come immediately. And so what does that mean? Well, it means that when proper order is restored in a kingdom, the hyenas are able to survive in a kingdom, then everything starts to flourish again. And so the rains come, and then while it’s raining, Simba climbs up to the top of the rock, and now he’s completely mature, right? The facial, the pathetic facial expression disappears entirely, and he straightens himself up, because now he’s full of serotonin, after having defeated good old Scar, and all the lionesses are alive. And then he climbs up Pride Rock, and they roar at him, which is good, they’re tough, and he’s tough, and they show him their teeth. It’s not a society of naive and harmless creatures. It’s something that’s got some bite. And the rains come, and then the next thing you see is the restoration of the kingdom. And so basically what that means is that if the individual is willing to confront their own shadow, and then to take on the malevolent forces that continually undermine society, then harmony can be restored, and everyone can do well. And so then we have a return to the beginning, right? And so Simba and Nella are now a couple, along with Pumba and Timon, and they have a baby, and Rafiki shows up and does the same thing. You know, he’s going to present the baby to the sun and have all the animals bow again, and and that’s the end of the movie. So that’s all packed. That’s all packed into an archetypal tale. And so one of the things that Jung would point out is that you all understood this, right, while you were watching it. Because otherwise, at some level, all these things made sense. They all co-heared, and the narrative appeared to be an appropriate narrative, even when you’re a little kid. Because it strikes a chord inside you, and well, that chord, the thing that it strikes inside you, that’s the archetype. Because if there wasn’t something inside of you, so to speak, that this could communicate with, then it would fall on deaf ears. And it speaks to the part of you that’s most particularly human. And it’s a story of the development of the sovereign individual. That’s the right way to think about it. It’s a hero archetype. That’s another way of thinking about it. And people are going to get that story one way or another. And now and then, a piece of public art comes along like this, that does a good job of encapsulating it. It captures everyone’s imagination. And so that’s why you’ve all seen it, and why I presume you all enjoyed it when you were kids, and maybe still enjoy it now. Well, that was actually faster than I thought it would be today. So this is what I’m going to do. We’ve got 20 minutes. So why don’t you think for a minute or two, and I’ll take some questions, which I don’t often do. And they can be any questions about anything we’ve covered in class. So take a minute and… Yes? There’s a question about archetypes. It’s like, I have this feeling, sometimes you watch a movie, and you feel like you know the character, but it’s not exactly that character. Like, what comes to mind is, you know, Gandalf from the Wizard of the Rings. Like, it feels like you know that sort of wise old man, you know… Archetype. Yeah. Yeah, well, there’s not much difference between Gandalf and who’s the wizard in Harry Potter? Dumbledore. They could be the same guy. That’s right. Right. And so, well, that is precisely the indication of the existence of an archetype. It’s like, and a movie, one time a student asked me, well, if there are these archetypes, why don’t we just tell the archetype over and over? Why do we need fiction, for example, which is like a bridge. If there’s individuals here and the archetype is up here, you know, at a high level of abstraction, fiction sort of fills the gap between them. And so what you want is a story that’s archetypal so that you understand its basic structure, but you want enough variation and specificity so that it’s new and interesting and also applicable to you. So you have to humanize the archetype to some degree, otherwise it’s so abstract you can’t relate to it. And good stories really do that. They bridge the gap and some of them are more personal and less archetypal, but if they’re completely non-archetypal, there’s nothing about them that captures you. It doesn’t have any force. And then if it’s too archetypal, well, it gets to be too abstract and you can’t relate to it. So good fiction writers and good purveyors of dramatic entertainment, we think about it as entertainment, are really good at occupying that middle position. So yeah, and they reveal the archetype through the individual. That’s one way of thinking about it. And that keeps it fresh. And you know, one of the things that Jung pointed out too was that you’re going to be manifesting archetypal patterns of behavior in your life, whether you know it or not. Even when you do something like fall in love, because that’s going to be a very particular experience for you, but it’s also a very common experience at the same time. Right? And romance is older than people. That’s one way of looking at it. I mean, because sex is older than human beings. And so you’re in the grip of something that’s really ancient, but at the same time, it’s really personal. And so a good novelist or a writer of fiction is able to capture both the personal element of that to show the transpersonal within the personal. And so, and in some sense, your destiny, proper destiny from a Jungian perspective is to consciously express an archetype. And so it would be the archetype, there’s a bunch of them, but one of them would be the archetype of the hero. And you’re supposed to manifest that in the conditions of your own life. So that makes the archetype real in the conditions of your own life. And Jung would also say that when you’re doing that, your experience will manifest itself as meaningful. And so it’s because in some sense, you’re acting in accordance with your deepest instincts, technically speaking, right? You’re, you’re acting out what it means to be human in the world. And you’re going to find that meaningful. So yes. Okay, so the question is about the relationship between the shadow and the, okay, so the first thing you have to understand with regards to trying to come to terms with the conception of the shadow is to understand the idea of persona. And persona is the you that you present when you want people to accept and like you. Often like, let’s say that you go to a party and you’re trying to impress the people that are there and you’re trying to get them to like you. And so you maybe get jabbed out a little bit and you laugh and you know, you’re you go along with everyone so that they like you and then you go home and you’re bitterly resentful about the way that you were put down at this party. And that’s going to make all sorts of aggressive I wish I could have said it’s going to make all sorts of aggressive and vengeful thoughts sort of flash through your imagination. Well, the first part of the problem is that you were too much persona, right? You sacrificed yourself in some sense at the party so that people would like you. And in the second part, you’re refusing to admit to the existence of those elements of you that would have actually protected you from doing that. So let’s say you go home and you’re all bitter and resentful and you have fantasies of revenge. I mean, that reveals to you the shadow reveals to you the shadow part of you that’s aggressive. And the thing is you actually need that because if you would have integrated that more successfully into your personality, when you went to the party, you wouldn’t have had let you wouldn’t have had to let people put you down to get them to like you. You know, instead of having a face like this, which says, I’ll take anything that’s coming my way, you know, you have a face and a stance that’s more determined and assertive. And if you manifest that properly, people aren’t going to mess with you to begin with. But you know, you may have already adopted a morality that says, well, I have to be likable, and I shouldn’t do anything that causes any conflict. And I shouldn’t ever, you know, hurt anybody’s feelings. And so you’re just to present yourself as a punching bag. And you think that that makes you a good person, but it doesn’t. And there’s no integration of the shadow in that situation. So you see that at the end of the movie, we know when I mentioned this, when Simba climbs up the rock to take control of it, all the female lionesses bear their teeth and he roars. It’s like that aggressiveness is integrated into him. And so resentment is a really good emotion for making contact with the shadow side. Because if you’re resentful about something, it basically reveals two things. It either means that you’re immature and you should stop whining and get on with things. You know, someone’s asked, this often happens with adolescents who are asked, say, by their mother to clean up their room, they get all resentful about it. It’s like, shut up and clean up your room. You know, it’s not that much to ask. Or so that can be a gateway into the observation of your own immaturity. Or it’s possible that you’re resentful because people really have been poking at you too much and taking and taking shot cheap shots at you and oppressing you. But what that means is that you’ve got some things to say that you haven’t been willing to say or don’t know how to say. Right? You can’t stand up for yourself properly. And in order to do that, you have to grow some teeth and be willing to use them. And again, that’s something that might violate your morality, because you might say, well, I shouldn’t be able to bite people. And the thing is, yes, you should be able to bite people hard. And if you’re able to bite them, then generally you don’t have to. But they need to know that you can because otherwise, especially people who are badly socialized, they’ll just keep encroaching on you and encroaching on you and encroaching on you until you put up a wall. Like someone who’s really well put together won’t do that, you know, because they’re sophisticated. But if you run into people who only have boundaries because other people impose them on them, and you won’t do it, you’re going to be the bullied one in the office, for example, you’re not going to get a raise. People aren’t going to credit you with your own work. Other people are going to take credit for it. You know, and you’re going to go home angry because you’re doing your best and you’re trying to get along with everyone and nothing ever goes your way. Well, it’s because you’re a pushover. And you think that’s good because you confuse harmlessness with morality. It’s not right. Just because you can’t do any damage doesn’t mean you’re moral. It just means you don’t have the capability for mayhem. And that makes you a pushover. I mean, the Yulia stuff is very, very dark, you know, it’s very dark, because his notion of what constitutes a moral human being is much different from the typical view. He really thinks you get that horrible side of yourself integrated, so it’s up there where you can use it. Because otherwise, you’re dangerous. You can’t say no to people, and you’ll go along with the crowd. And then if the crowd does something particularly pathological, which it’s liable to do, you won’t be able to resist it. You won’t have the strength of character. And so then you’ll fall prey to crowd pathology. And it’ll be because you’re too agreeable with a shadow resentful side that the crowd and its murderous intent is going to act out. So the question is, the relationship between archetypes and the idea of memes. Well, oh yeah, that’s a complicated one. So Richard Dawkins was the guy who originated the idea of meme, and his notion was that you could produce an idea or a set of ideas that had the capacity to propagate across minds. For whatever reason, it was catchy, let’s say like a song that gets stuck in your head. And that those, he called those memes, which was sort of a play on the idea of genes. So there are these stable sets of ideas that can be transferred across minds. Well, I’ve often thought when I was reading Dawkins that if he would have kept thinking, he would have turned into Carl Jung, because an archetype is a meme, but it’s a really, really, really deep meme. So you can imagine that an idea has been so around for so long, and that people have acted out for so long that it’s actually become part of the landscape that does the selection. So think about it this way. Okay. So it’s more or less a truism that if you take a male dominance hierarchy, the probability that the men at the top of the hierarchy will leave offspring is much higher than the probability that the men at the bottom will leave offspring. And it’s true in many, many species. Now there’s a much higher probability of the average female leaving offspring than the average man. So now then imagine that there’s characteristics that push a man up a dominance hierarchy. Okay. And then imagine that there are characteristics that push a man up a set of dominance hierarchies. So that each dominance hierarchy has something in common with all of the others. It’s sort of like the idea of a good player of a game being a good sport across games. So then imagine that the idea of the successful male starts to become encapsulated in biology. Because the male part of the species at least is going to be adapting to the selection pressures placed on the male by the male dominance hierarchy. So what happens is you have a competition between men. The men that win the competition find partners and mate. So the male is going to start to adapt to the fact of the selection that’s implemented by the dominance hierarchy. Then you can imagine that that’s going to take place across dominance hierarchies because this is happening in many, many situations spread across time. And so then the idea of how the proper man should act starts to become incorporated in the biology and also in the expectations of the society. And then that starts to loop. So as the expectations become clearer and clearer, the notion of what constitutes success becomes clearer and clearer as well. And the two things get tangled together. Now, and I think you can see that a manifestation of that whenever you go watch a movie, because you immediately identify the hero and you identify with him. It’s like he’s the person that your mythological imagination grasps onto and you play that out using your body as a representational platform when you watch the movie. And so maybe you admire the hero. If he’s a successful hero, you do. Well, that admiration is the manifestation of the instinct that drives you towards that kind of behavior. And not only can you manifest it, in which case you’re likely to feel good about yourself, because you know that sometimes you can feel good about yourself and sometimes not. But you’re also going to be able to recognize it when you see it in the world. And that’s going to manifest itself in admiration and admiration is the proclivity to imitate. So the meme can be so so you can imagine dominance hierarchies are very, very old. They’re like 300 million years old. They’ve been around a very long time. And the idea that we have an image of what it takes to climb the dominance arc, it’s more or less self evident. Because that’s the landscape that selected us. And at the same time, you know, the archetype, the pattern that propagates you up the dominance arc is also the same pattern that makes you attractive to women. They’re the same thing. So and of course, that’s a massively powerful selection mechanism. And sexual selection is really shaped human beings, it’s turned us into what we are. And that’s an interesting thing too, because you know, this is one of the things that really bothers me about the emphasis of evolutionary scientists on randomness. It’s like the the gender mutation generation process is random or quasi random. We don’t know that for sure, because there is evidence now that you can inherit acquired characteristics. And that was nobody thought that was possible 20 years ago. So things are have taken a very weird twist in the Darwinian world. But for the sake of argument, we could say that the mutation process is random. But the selection process isn’t random. It’s not even close to random. Ever since creatures have been able to evaluate one another, the selection process hasn’t been random. And so basically, we’re selected by you could say by the manifestation of mind in the world. Unless you believe that women, for example, exercise no conscious choice in their mate selection, which seems completely absurd. First of all, men consciously choose who’s going to lead them, at least in part, you know, who’s going to succeed in a hierarchy, and women consciously choose their sexual partners. So the idea that the selection process, that the evolutionary process is random is, it’s an absurd proposition. Sexual selection makes it non random. And Darwin knew that he emphasized sexual selection a lot. But modern biologists since the time of Darwin, except for the last about 20 years, downplayed the role of sexual selection. And I think the reason for that is that it brings mind into the evolutionary process in a way that they don’t like. And no wonder it’s complicated, you know, it’s like, to some degree, we’re consciously directing our own evolution, at least through the mechanism of selection. So, Yes. Yes. Well, Dawkins just thought of memes as something that were he never thought about them as something that could last long enough to play a role in selection itself. You know, he thought about them more as parasitical cognitive entities, I would say, that just sort of floated on the surface of the mental landscape. He never, he never grappled with the idea that a meme could be something that could last for hundreds of millions of years, roughly speaking. So we got time for one more question if anybody has. Yes. Yes, from a political perspective, like if you divide people by their political affiliation, it looks like liberal men are the most unhappy. They’re higher in neuroticism. I think the openness probably contributes to it as well, but we don’t. And also possibly the low conscientiousness. When my graduate students come in, or one of them anyways, we’re going to talk about this in some detail, because she’s going to tell you. Because we’ve also looked at the personality predictors of political correctness, which is extraordinarily interesting, as well, because it doesn’t really seem to fall exactly on the liberal conservative continuum. So we’ll talk more about that when we get into the big five part of the course. Okay, good. We’ll see you on Thursday when we’re going to do a speed review of Freud.