2017 Maps of Meaning 03: Marionettes and Individuals (Part 2)

OK, so the last time we were here we got maybe a third of the way through this story—the story of Pinocchio and the transformation of a marionette into something hypothetically real. I'm gonna backtrack a few slides and it'll get us into it again.

So you remember the blue fairy? So I would say that the benevolent element of Mother Nature, in the schemata that we are going to use to investigate mythology, was more or less allowed her entrance because Geppetto was a good guy and he wished for the right thing. In some sense, here's a way of thinking about that: you know, genetic/environmental studies on children's temperament have revealed something quite interesting, which is that the shared environment that children have within a family—so that would be what's the same about your environment and your brother's environment—the same doesn't have that much effect on your temperament or his temperament. 'Cause the presumption always was that within a family there is a shared environment, right? And something was common about the environment to every child within that environment. But there isn't much of a shared environmental effect on temperament.

So then you can say, well, that makes it appear as though isn't that relevant in relationship to the development of temperament. But you could also suggest something else. You could suggest that if parenting is occurring properly, the effect of the shared environment should be very close to zero and the reason for that is that you establish an individual relationship with each child, and the environment is actually a microenvironment that's composed of your observations of this child and that specific child's interaction with you. Like, to some degree, if there is a shared environment, that means that you're forcing the same principles on every child. So my suspicions are, although I don't know this and the research hasn't been done, that in bad families there's a shared environmental effect, but in good families that minimizes, so that lets the child's biological predisposition, roughly, manifest itself with support and in some positive manner.

Well, I don't want to extend the analogy too far, but you can imagine that—and this is what this film proposes—if you aim properly in relationship to your child, what you're trying to do is to establish an individual relationship and to allow them to move towards whatever their particular expression of individuality happens to be. And that's... that would be the same as allowing nature to take its course, in some sense, at least nature in its positive guise. And that's exactly what happens here.

The other thing that happens, of course, is that the cricket, for reasons that aren't clear, precisely is knighted by the blue fairy and serves as Pinocchio's conscience, although he isn't very good at it, which is a very peculiar thing. And quite a marked point that the film is making is that that conscience actually has something to learn, too. And there's actually a Freudian element to that, you know, because Freud thought of the superego as the internalization, roughly speaking, of the father. And it could be very severe, the superego, so like a really strict, really tyrannical father inside your head; although I think it's better to think about the superego as the internalized representation of society at large mediated to some degree through your parents.

'Cause it's not as if your father, even assuming he's tyrannical, is the inventor of all those tyrannical rules; he's the propagator of them, but he's actually a proxy voice. Even if it's just for the harsh side of society, he's the proxy voice for society. Because we're social creatures, the utility of having an internal social voice to guide you—although, again, you seem to be able to follow it or not follow it—which I also find spectacularly interesting because, obviously, if it was an unerring guide, you could just follow it, and if it was an unerring guide, you wouldn't need free will either, because you could just act out the dictates of this internal representation. That isn't what you do.

So anyways, the proposition here is that the conscience exists, but it's a relatively flawed entity—it needs to be modified as well by nature—which is quite interesting. 'Cause the blue fairy knights him, 'cause you also might think of the conscience as only something that's socially constructed, right? Which is the more typical viewpoint, but I don't buy that for a second. Because I believe firmly, and I believe the Piagetian interpretation of child development more or less bears this out, that there are parameters within which conscience has to operate.

And it's sort of like this: it's the same parameters that govern fair play, we'll say that. You can say there's fair play within a game, and there's fair play across sets of games, and the set of games is pretty much indistinguishable from the actual environment. If you think all the things you do as nested games, at some point the spread of that is large enough so that it encompasses everything you do, which includes the environment. And so I believe that you're adapted to the set of all possible games, roughly speaking, all possible playable games, something like that, and that you know the rules for that, which is why—we talked about this a little bit—you're so good at identifying cheaters. We have a module for that, according to the evolutionary psychologists. And not only do you identify them, but you remember them. It really sticks in your mind.

And there's other evidence, too. One piece of evidence that I love—well, there's a couple—one I would derive from Frans de Waal, who's a famous primatologist, and he studied the prototype morality that emerges in chimpanzees, and it's very much nested in their dominance structures. You know, because you could think of morality in some sense as the understanding of the rules by which the dominance hierarchy operates, right? And so you could say, well, the biggest, ugliest, meanest chimp... and the male dominance hierarchies in chimps seem to be the predominant ones, although the females also have a dominance hierarchy, it's not quite so clear in bonobos, which seem to be more female-dominated. But in any case, the primary chimp dominance structure is male, and you could think, well, it's like the caveman chimp who's biggest and toughest who necessarily rules, and who rules longest.

But that isn't what de Waal found. See, the problem with being... mean, let's say, and not negotiating your social landscape, and not trading reciprocal favors is that no matter how powerful you are as an individual, two individuals, three-quarters your power could do you in. And that happens with the chimps fairly regularly. If the guy on top is too tyrannical and doesn't make social connections, then weaker chimps, males, make good social connections, and when he's not in such good shape, they take him down—and viciously, too. De Waal has documented some unbelievably horrendous acts of, let's call it, regicide among the chimpanzee troupes that he studied, mostly in the Arnhem zoo, the big troupe there that's been there a long time.

But he's very interested in prototypical morality, and here's some other examples of prototypical morality emerging among animals. There's many of them, but one is, you know, if two wolves have a dominance dispute—again that would be more likely among the male wolves, but it doesn't really matter—they basically display their size, and they growl ferociously and they puff up their hair so they look bigger. And you can see cats do that when they go into fight or flight. Not only do they puff up, including their tail, but they stand sideways, and the reason they do that is because they look bigger, right? 'Cause they're trying to put up the most intimidating possible front.

So anyways, if two wolves are going at it, what they're really trying to do is to size each other up, and they're trying to scare each other into backing off. Fundamentally because, see, the worst-case scenario is like, you're wolf number one, and I'm wolf number two, and we tear each other to shreds. But I win, but I'm so damaged after that, wolf number three comes in and takes me out. So, like, there's a big cost to be paid even for victory in a dominance dispute if it degenerates into violence. Animals—and human beings, but animals in particular—have evolved very, very specific mechanisms to escalate dominance disputes towards violence step by step so that they don't... so that the victor doesn't risk incapacitating himself by winning.

So what happens with the wolves is that, you know, they growl at each other and posture display, and maybe they even snap at each other, but the probability that they're gonna get into a full-fledged fight is pretty low. What happens is one of the wolves backs off and flips over and shows his neck, and that basically means: "Alright, tear it out." And the other wolf says—though of course he doesn't—"Well, you're kind of an idiot, and you're not that strong, but we might need you to take down a moose in the future, and you know, despite your patheticness, I won't tear out your throat." And then they've established their dominance position, and then, from then on, at least for some substantial period of time, the subordinate wolf gives way to the dominant wolf. But at least the subordinate wolf is alive, and, you know, he might be dominant over other wolves.

And so, everyone in the whole hierarchy has sorted that out either through mock combat or through combat itself and, you know, the low-ranking members aren't in the best possible position, but at least they're not getting their heads torn off every second of their existence. So there's even some utility in the stability of the dominance hierarchy for the low-ranking members, 'cause at least they're not getting pounded, getting threatened, which is way better. I mean it's not good, but it's way better than actual combat.

And then there's the example of rats, which I love; this is Jaak Panksepp's work, and he wrote a book called Affective Neuroscience, which I highly, highly recommend. I have a list of readings, recommended readings on my website. It's a brilliant book, and he's a brilliant psychologist; really one of the top psychologists as far as I'm concerned, both theoretically and experimentally— a real genius. He's the guy who discovered that rats laugh when you tickle them. They laugh ultrasonically, so you can't actually hear them, but if you record it and slow it down, then you can hear them giggling away when you tickle them with an erase, which is sort of like their mother's tongue; it's often what lab people use as a substitute for the licking of the little rat by the mother.

So, he discovered the play circuit in mammals, which is like a major deal, right? He should get a Nobel prize for that, that's a big deal to discover an entire motivational circuit whose existence no one had really predicted. You know, apart from the fact that obviously mammals play, and even lizards—maybe some of them are social lizards—seem to play.

So anyhow, what Panksepp observed, and I think this is a brilliant piece of science, is that, first of all, juvenile male rats in particular like to rough-and-tumble play, like to wrestle, and they actually pin each other like little kids do, or like adult wrestlers do. They pin their shoulders down, and that basically means you win. And so, OK, so that's pretty cool. But what's even cooler, I think—well, there are three things—one is: the rats will work for an opportunity to get into an arena where they know that play might occur. And so that's one of the scientific ways of testing an animal's motivation, right?

So imagine you have a starving rat and it knows that it's got food down in the end of a corridor. You can put a little spring on its tail and measure how hard it pulls, and that gives you an indication of its motivational force. Now, imagine the starving rat that's trying to get to some food, and you have a little spring on its tail, and you waft in some cat odor. So now that rat is starving and wants to get out of there, he's going to pull even farther towards the food. So getting away plus getting forward are separate motivational systems, and if you can add them together it's real potent.

And part of the reason why, in the future authoring exercise that you guys are gonna do as the class progresses, you're asked to outline the place you'd like to end up—which is your desired future—and also the place that you could end up if you let everything fall apart, so that your anxiety chases you and your approach systems pull you forward—you’re maximally motivated then.

And it's important, because otherwise you can be afraid of pursuing the things you wanna pursue, right? And that's very common. And so then the fear inhibits you as the promise pulls you forward, but it makes you weak, because you’re afraid. You wanna get your fear behind you, pushing you. And so what you wanna be is more afraid of not pursuing your goals than you are of pursuing them—it's very, very helpful. And lots of times in life, and this is something really worth knowing, you know, this is one of the advantages to being an autonomous adult: you don't get to pick the best thing; you get to pick your poison.

You have two bad choices, and you get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through, and every choice has a bit of that element in it. So if you know that, it's really freeing because otherwise you torture yourself by thinking, "well, maybe there’s a good solution to this, compared to the bad solution." It’s like, "No, no, sometimes there's just risky solution 1, and risky solution 2," and sometimes both of them are really bad. But you at least get to pick which one you're willing to suffer through, and that makes quite a bit of difference, because you're also facing it voluntarily then instead of it chasing you, and that is an entirely different psychophysiological response—challenge versus threat; it’s not the same, even if the magnitude of the problem is the same.

And so putting yourself in a challenging, let's call it, mind frame—you can't just do that by magic. Putting yourself in a challenging mind frame is much easier on you psychophysiologically, 'cause you don't produce... you don't go into the generalized stress response to the same degree, and you're activating your exploratory and seeking systems, which are dopaminergically mediated, and that involve positive emotion. So if you can face something voluntarily rather than having it chase you, it's way better for you psychophysiologically.

So that's partly why, well, it's worthwhile to go find the dragon in its lair instead of waiting for it to come and eat you. And especially if you also add the idea that if you go find the dragon in its lair you might find it when it's a baby instead of a full-fledged bloody monster that is definitely gonna take you down. And so that's part of the reason why—well, there's a whole bunch of things that emerge out of that observation, like: don't avoid small problems that you know are there. Face them, because they'll grow into big problems all by themselves.

And you can think about—imagine the tax department sends you a notification, you owe them like 300 dollars. Well, that's annoying, maybe you don't even wanna open the letter, or maybe if you do, you just put it on the shelf. But that damn thing doesn't just sit there like a piece of paper on the shelf, right? You ignore that for 5 or 6 years, it's gonna become attached to all sorts of horrible things. And if you ignore it long enough, you get the idea, it's gonna turn into something that's completely unlike the little piece of paper that it's written on.

And many, many problems in life are like that. You'll see that they pop their ugly little head up, and you know, you might wanna turn away; you might not want to think about it—which is the easiest way of turning away, right? You just don't attend to it. It's not like you repress it or anything like that; you just fail to attend to it. And that's a... really, as a long-term strategy, it's dismal. It's also something, I think, that's more characteristic of people who are high in neuroticism and high in agreeableness. 'Cause agreeable people don't like conflict, and people who are high in neuroticism, or high in negative emotion, are hit harder per unit of uncertainty or threat.

And so, you know, and that's partly why in psychotherapy a lot of times the people you see need assertiveness training, so that would be the opposite of agreeableness. Or they need help to get their anxiety and emotional pain under control. Those are not the only reasons, there’s antisocial behavior—but you can't fix that in therapy in all likelihood. There’s alcoholism, there’s lotsa, lotsa other reasons, but those are two major reasons.

So anyways, that was all to tell you that... oh yes, back to the rats. So, okay, the rats are pulling on... you can measure rat motivation by how hard they pull on the spring, let's say. And they're more motivated if they're running away and they're running towards, but let's go back to play.

So you can take juvenile rats who haven't been able to play for a while, maybe they've been isolated, or maybe they just haven't been able to engage in physical activity, like many schoolchildren that you might be thinking about—neither allowed to play nor engage in physical activity. And there's a reason I'm telling you that. So anyways, you get one of these little rats, and you can measure how hard he'll pull to go out and play or how many buttons he'll push, you know, and that gives you an indication of his motivation.

So anyways, you can see that the play-deprived juvenile rat will fight harder to play than a non-play deprived juvenile rat. And so you can infer that the rat wants to go play, and you know, you do that... you do the same measurement with everyone around you. If they wanna do something, you’re gonna poke and prod at them to see what sort of things they're willing to overcome in order to go and do that. You’ll object, even if you don’t really object; it's like... it's a measurement device, and if they're willing to overcome a bunch of your objections, then you think: "oh, well, maybe they really want to."

And that's another thing to really know: if there's something you want, you need about five arguments about why you want it because the probability that the person who's opposing you will have five arguments about why you shouldn't have it is very low. They just won't have thought it through enough. So the other thing that happens in the future authoring exercise is that you're asked to articulate the reasons for all the goals that come out of your vision of the future. So you're asked like: "Why would it be good for you? Why would it be good for your family? Why would it be good for broader society?"

So that gives you three levels of argumentation right there. And if you have it articulated down into detail, and it's related to other important goals, then you're a hell of a thing to argue with, because people just aren't that deep; by which I mean that they just don't have that many levels of explanation or objection. And it's also really useful in relation to your own mind, because if you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are gonna throw up objections. It's like, "Well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now; maybe you should be doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube." If you're really sneaky, when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to 'cause you're doing something else useful.

And if you give in to that temptation, which you often will, then it wins. And because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick, and it grows stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows, and anything you let be defeated shrinks, 'cause it's punished; it doesn't get to have its way. So that's another thing really to remember: don't practice what you do not wanna become. And because those are... they're neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man, and they're not going anywhere. You can build another little machine to inhibit them; that's the best you can do. Once they're in there, you can't get them out. So... and then the ones you built to inhibit can be taken out by stress, and the old habits will come back up, so you gotta be careful what you say and what you do, because you build yourself that way.

So anyway, back to the rats. OK, so the little rat gets to go out there and play. Now imagine one little rat is paired with another rat, but the other little rat is 10% bigger. 10% in juvenile rats is enough to attain permanent dominance, so the 10% bigger rat will win the first wrestling. And so that's what happens, and then... so the little rat gets pinned and maybe they play a bit, and then they're done with it. And so you separate them, then you let them play again, and the next time what happens is that the subordinate rat does the invitation to play. And that's like, you know, like a dog does when he wants to play.

You can recognize that, it kind of splays its feet apart, and looks up, and looks interested, and then it sort of dances around. You can do it with any kid that has a clue, you know; that hasn't been destroyed by adults. If you're little 3-year-olds or 4-year-olds are better for this. If you go like this, like, they know exactly what's gonna happen; you know, they're ready to dart back and forth and they'll usually smile. And kids love rough-and-tumble play, which is now basically illegal in all daycare. Seriously, it seriously is. Kids need it so desperately because it teaches them the limits of their body and your body, and it teaches them what's painful and what isn't. And it teaches them the dance of play, and without that, they're just little disembodied blobs; like, they have no finesse. That's what you're checking out when you dance with someone; you know you're seeing if they have that fluency and facility for mutual reciprocal action embodied in them.

And if they're kinda like this, you know, and don't have any sense of rhythm and don't pay any attention to you and all of that, you have reason to question whether they actually inhabit their body and whether they can engage in a mutual interaction, physical interaction that's going to be reciprocal and mutually satisfying. It's really important to check out. And a lot of that rough-and-tumble play, even interactions between a child and its mother, if you have a happy mother and a happy infant, and you videotape them, and you speed up the videotape, you'll see that they're dancing. One responds, then the other responds, then the other responds. It might be just with eye gaze, and movement, and all of that, but there's a dynamic interplay, which you don't see with depressed mothers and their infants.

So, OK, so back to play. So the little rat, who is the subordinate one, he has to do the invitation, and then the big rat can agree to play, 'cause he's in the dominant position. But if you pair them repeatedly, and this is really worth thinking about because, you see, morality emerges out of repeated interactions. Because, you might say, if you only interact with someone once, you might as well just take advantage of them and run off. That's what a psychopath does, by the way. And there is room in the environmental niche for psychopaths, but they have to keep moving around, 'cause otherwise people figure out who they are. So they just move around, and they can take advantage of one person, you know, maybe five times, or ten times, or something, and then the reputation spreads, and they gotta get the hell out of there.

But... so it's not a good long-term strategy unless you can't think of a better one. So anyways, if you repeatedly pair these rats, unless the big rat lets the little rat win at least 30% of the time, the little rat will not ask the big rat to play. And that is... it's a staggering discovery. It's a staggering discovery because you've got the emergence there of an implicit morality, essentially—that's even incarnated in rats—that emerges across multiple play sessions. It's like, "Yes, exactly, that’s exactly what Piaget said about the emergence of morality." It’s exactly the same idea at the rat level.

So it’s a massively—and the fact that there's a circuit, a separate neurophysiological circuit that's actually specialized for that sort of thing is also a big deal. Now, the other thing Panksepp figured out is that if you deprive juvenile rats of the opportunity to engage in rough-and-tumble play, their prefrontal cortexes don't develop properly and they become impulsive and restless. And then you can fix them with methylphenidate or Ritalin, and those are the drugs that are used to fix hyperactive kids, most of whom are male. And that's because, well, really, you're gonna take your six-year-old or your five-year-old and you're gonna put them in a desk? You're gonna get them to sit there for six hours? That's your plan, right? That's a stupid plan.

And they're denied the opportunity to engage in play, and that means that their ability to become social is being impaired. It may cause neurological impairment—that's what the rat evidence suggests. And then you suppress that with amphetamines, 'cause amphetamines actually activate the play circuit. They activate a different circuit, which will suppress the play circuit, so it's very, very... it's not very wise. And I'm not gonna go off on that tangent because I could tell you why the school systems were set up that way, which I probably will at some point because it's quite an interesting story in and of itself. And it's the reason all you guys are sitting in desks right now.

Somebody laughingly referred to this once as grade 15; that was pretty funny, given the look of the bloody place. You know? Hideous. OK, so now, this is an interesting thing. So you got the emergence of morality in, say, chimps. You got the emergence of morality in wolves. You got the emergence of morality in rats, and the morality governs sequential interactions or group interactions. They have to repeat because it’s an emerging property of social or repetitive interactions. That's why you can't just localize it in one instance; it's repeated.

And there's been computer simulations of this—they help you figure out how you might attain victory across games across time. Maybe you need a strategy, and there's a very simple strategy, which I believe is called “modified tit for tat.” So if you're nice to me, I'm nice back, and if you do something bad to me, I do something bad back. But imagine you run that out in sequences of behavior and see who does with what strategy across time. Or an alternative strategy... [?] Here's the best strategy: I trust you, you trust me; we start interacting; you screw up, I whack you, and then I forgive you and we start again. That's modified tit for tat.

And so it's a very simple algorithm; no one has come up with a better algorithm in a computerized simulation of game space than that particular strategy. So it's like: trust, but don't be a pushover. If someone violates the rules, you gotta nail them. But then you don't hold a grudge; you open the door to further interactions. So, pretty smart; pretty smart. And, OK, so anyways... so what this means—'cause rats can't talk, and wolves can't talk, and chimpanzees can't talk—and what that means, just as Piaget suggested, was that the morality, the development of the morality precedes the development of the linguistic ability to describe the rules for the morality. He said exactly the same thing about kids, right, is that they learn to play games before they know what the rules are to the games.

And so you see that when you're playing peek-a-boo with a kid, they can pick that up really young. They get that right away, and you can play with kids almost immediately after they're born if you play simple enough games. So they've got that deep, and they're unbelievably playful; so they've got that circuitry ready to go right off the bat. And it’s one of the things that makes kids so much fun because they just like to play all the time. And so if you... if the play circuit in you hasn't died—which is a bad thing—then you can use that a lot with your kids, and it's one of the things that helps you love them, so that's a good thing.

So, OK, so the point is that the damn morality emerges before the representation of the morality. It’s a big deal to know that and that it emerges as a consequence of repeated social interaction. So it's not a top-down thing; it's a bottom-up thing. Now, Piaget says, well, it's not just bottom-up, because what happens with human beings is that they learn to play the games—one of his experiments was: watch seven-year-olds, I think that's the right age, play marbles. And then he noticed that they can play with each other, and that they can follow the rules. But that if you take the individual seven-year-old out of the game and you say: “What are the rules?” they give incoherent and incomplete explanations of the rules.

So what that means is they don't really represent the rules, but they can act them out and have a partial representation of what they're acting out. Now, when they get older, the rule representation starts to fall into alignment with the actual rules of the game. And you can imagine that's why... [?], because when they're playing something like marbles, they're gonna have discussions like: “You’re cheating!” or: “You’re not allowed to do that,” 'cause they're always gonna be pushing the envelope a little bit, and then the group is gonna render a judgment on whether or not that's appropriate. And out of that, the rules are gonna emerge, but they're not rules to begin with; they're patterns of behavior. It's not the same thing as a rule. A rule describes a pattern of behavior, but a pattern of behavior is a pattern of behavior, it's something that's acted out.

So, there's the individual within the group, and then the interactions of the individuals within the group produce a hierarchical arrangement, or multiple hierarchical arrangements; those are games, roughly speaking, or stories nested inside an overarching story, which is the fundamental culture, right? And that's nested within a whole bunch of competing cultures that have some commonalities or they would just be at war all the time, which, you know, to some degree they are.

So, OK, now, you see that—back to the movie—you see that happening in the movie. I mean, it's very, very quick, but the blue fairy turns the bug into the conscience and then the bug tries to explain to Pinocchio what the rules of morality are. But the thing is, the bug doesn't know because he's just a bug, and you know, he's just not omniscient. So the best he can do is to come up with like a propagandistic semantic, verbal representation that's internally contradictory. And when he tells Pinocchio, Pinocchio has no idea what he's talking about, and neither does the bug, that's the thing.

And so... so what happens is this: the cricket says, “Well Pin, maybe you and I had better have a little heart-to-heart talk.” And the puppet says, “Why?” And the cricket says, “Well, you wanna be a real boy, don't you? Alright, sit down son! Now you see the world as full of temptations.” “Temptations?” “Yes, temptations, they're the wrong things that seem right at the time. But even though the right things may seem wrong sometimes, sometimes the wrong things may be right at the wrong time, or vice versa. Understand?” “No! No!” And neither did the cricket, and that's actually very nicely done in that piece of the movie.

Because you just wanna slap him as soon as he starts talking like that. Because he gets up on his little matchbox and lectures, and he's dull and tyrannical both at the same time, and so there's nothing genuine about what he's saying. He’s imitating something that isn't him, so he's really acting like a puppet at that point, too, and it doesn’t work at all. And so, Pinocchio says, “I'm going to try to be a good boy.” And the cricket says, “Well, that's the spirit, son.” And then away they go.

So... alright, so then we're at the next day, ‘cause this all happens in one night. We're at the next day, and you know, it's a nice day, and there's these birds flying around. That's actually the... that's a bit of foreshadowing there, you know? So, um, you have to remember, when you watch something like this movie, not a single bit of it is random or accidental, none of it. Because, you know, they had to draw—I don't remember how many frames per second these things are, thirty maybe, if it's high-quality animation.

So someone had to paint thirty pictures to get a second of this. You're not doing that accidentally, it's really expensive, and everyone has to agree on exactly what's going to happen. And you might say: “Well, do the people who are doing this consciously know what they're doing?” And the answer to that is: well, sort of, just like you do. It's yes, they know, and no, they don't. And they know because they're really smart and gifted and all that, but they don't know, because it’s not all articulated. Plus they're working in a group, so they know and don’t know, just like you do when you're watching it.

And so... and when you do anything else... now, they're also guided by what you might call... they're guided by their unconscious in the Freudian, and in the cognitive way; partly because your unconscious value structures determine the direction and content of your perceptions. So it's built right into the way you move your eyes, 'cause you tend to look at things you value, right? Or at things you're afraid of, like you look at things with valence. And part of the decision about what has value is dependent on the implicit structure of your moral system, because morality is about what's good and what isn't.

And that's been partly a conscious construction of you, but it's partly something you've been... you've picked up by interacting with people like mad since you were born. You don't know all the rules any more than the damn cricked did; you just don't, and you can't, 'cause you’re too complicated. But you act them out, and then you also have representations of how people act in your imagination. That's what a dream is, that's what a fantasy is. That's what that little movie that plays inside your head when you remember what you did is. And you only remember the gist, you know?

So even the imagistic representation of your behavior in your past, which is basically your episodic memory, it's already selecting and molding and turning it into a relatable story. It can't help but do that; it's the only way you can represent it. And so you don't know how you do that or why you do that, but part of it's governed by this implicit morality. It's part of your procedural memory, part of the way you act, part of the way you move your eyes, and listen to things, and focus on them. That's all been instantiated inside of you because of your biology, but also this immense social project that you're continually engaged in.

And so that informs what you remember; it informs what you imagine; it informs what we collectively imagine; it informs what we can collectively understand. And partly what you're doing while you become conscious of yourself is to map the implicit structures that already constitute you from society into explicit representation—that's what self-understanding means. And you know, when you have that moment of insight about something you've done—it's like you're watching this repetitive behavior that you've manifested, probably that got you in trouble. You know, it's your characteristic way of falling accidentally into chaos, and you talk about it, your problems; you talk about them with your friends, you talk about them and maybe you have dreams about them, and you're trying to relate them. And you have memories about them that you can't get rid of 'cause they're negatively toned.

So you talk about them, and then someone comes up with a little statement that links them together causally and you think: "Aha! That's what I'm doing!" And then maybe you can stop doing it or at least maybe then you can think of some strategies for not doing it anymore. But it's not like you know; it’s like you're acting it out- you know it that way, but until the representation matches that pattern, that click of insight doesn't occur and that's like a revelation.

It's a really good way of thinking about it because the knowledge is there in its implicit form, and all of a sudden, bang! It's been made explicit as a fantasy maybe, or also as a set of semantic statements. You know, maybe you have a crush on someone and you don't notice it and maybe you find yourself having a fantasy about them, you think: "Oh! That means something!" Maybe you don't want to know that that's what you want, but the fantasy will tell you.

And one of the things Jung suggested—and this is sort of out of the Freudian tradition of free association—is to watch yourself, watch your fantasies, because they're always happening, and they'll tell you something. So one of the things I do when I'm interacting with my clients is we'll have a discussion, and then their eyes will drift a little bit and I'll know that something's flitted through their mind, you know? And that means we've touched on something that has a multiplicity of elements, and so I'll stop and say: "Look, I noticed that you... maybe you teared up, that's another thing to really watch, or maybe you laughed, or you drifted at least; it's like... it’s because some other thought has entered your field of consciousness, and if you can get the person to grab those thoughts, to notice them, then you can often figure out the avenues along which that particular conversation might unfold.

That's a complex; that's a Jungian complex or a psychoanalytic complex; it's like there's an emotional core that produces a whole range of associated ideas. And that thing's got a life, it’s like a micro-personality, and it might have resentment in it; it might have anger. It's often negative emotion-tinged because negative emotion-tinged episodes are still problems, and they will emerge automatically, 'cause you're threat detection systems force them onto your consciousness, essentially. So you watch, and when you drift... you'll drift, and the fantasy is partly a representation of the problem space you know, that happens when you wake up at three in the morning and you're worried about things, right?

'Cause actually what happens is you wake up during threat processing, and if you're depressed, actually that gets so intense, you can't sleep, so then you just lay there all night, worrying. Not fun. And those are fantasies about the negative elements of your past, present, and future. And the fantasies can also breed solutions, and that's partly why Freud regarded dreams as wish-fulfillments. It's partly... and he wasn't—that was where he stopped; it's not correct; it's partially correct; it's like the fantasy will provide you with a problem and a potential solution, but they're more like problem-identification mechanisms, the fantasies, with the possibility of a solution built in.

And so a way of thinking about that is that you can generate potential futures. So they're like each segregateable environments according to the rules of your fantasy. Then you can generate little avatars of yourself that inhabit each of those little universes, and you can run them as simulations. And then you can watch what happens in the simulation, and if it's a catastrophe, then you don't have to act it out. And that's exactly—not exactly; that's akin to what you're doing when you go watch a movie, except that is much more coherent and well thought-through than just a dream, which is often quite fragmentary.

That's partly 'cause the dream is willing to sacrifice coherence to play with category structures, you know? And that's why in dreams things can change one thing into another really weirdly, or scenes can change from one scene into another without a logic; the logic gets loosened so that the expanse of your thinking can widen. And it's dangerous to do that, and that's partly why you do it while you're asleep and paralyzed. You know, you don't run around and act out your pseudopodal fantasies where you're stretching yourself out into the world; there's no risk, exactly, although it can be bad enough so you'll wake up in terror, but that's better than being in a crocodile's mouth by a large margin.

Anyways, back to these birds, these are used later in the movie as manifestations of the Holy Spirit, roughly speaking. And of course, that's a standard Christian symbol, although, as I mentioned, the dove often represents the Holy Spirit, and we'll talk about that later. But this movie has very strong pagan elements in it, as I mentioned before, as opposed to strictly Christian symbolism. But that's foreshadowing, and what it foreshadows is that, well, a new day has dawned. It's the emergence of new consciousness, and everything last night went well, really well.

Everything in the... let's call it the unconscious, say, after time stops, that all went well. And so the new day is full of promise and so, the birds are singing, and the sun is shining, and, like, hurray, this is the next scene, right? So it sets the tenor for that scene just like the introductory song does. So anyways, then you see all these kids playing and enthusiastic, so they're off to school, which is presented in a positive light, and so that's where you get socialized.

So Pinocchio's ready to go beyond the boundaries of the familial home, and he's ready because his father prepared him and his mother prepared him. And so he goes off, and he's not going off alone; he's going with his conscience. You can think about it again as the internalized representation of nature and society. And so he's not going out there alone, even though he’s not very good at it. He's pretty excited about it, and so is Geppetto. See, Geppetto isn’t standing there paralyzed with terror, and the kid isn’t phobic of the outside world, and so he’s treating it as an adventure!

Even though, well, it's an adventure, but adventures can be dangerous. You can imagine a kid, especially one who's like high in neuroticism, who hasn't been encouraged sufficiently to overcome that. Let's say their primary idea might be: well, what if the other kids don't like me? That's a big one! What if the teachers don't like me? What if the other kids won't play with me? It's like, yeah, what if? That's rough, man. And if you're not a playful kid, it could easily be the case. So... but that's not Pinocchio. He's like, spinning out, ready to go and so... good, good.

He's got... naive, but enthusiastic—OK, well at least that gets the ball rolling. Now you've got these two evil creatures here, the fox and the cat. I think this one's based on one of the Marx brothers, actually, Harpo Marx, who I believe never said anything. But, be that as it may, they're these ne'er-do-well characters. The fox in particular now is a standard trickster animal, right? It's a... classic animal, maybe because it’s good at hiding, and it’s good at hunting. I don't know exactly why, but coyotes are like that, too. They're classic trickster animals.

He's kinda like Wile E. Coyote, in fact—you know, the Warner Brothers character who's genius at large and whose arrogance continually gets him walloped. This character has a lot of features like that, but he feigns being an English gentleman of the 1890s and pretends to be educated and has a kinda high-blown way of talking, and he's a fraud through and through. And he's got this sidekick who's barely there at all, and he doesn't treat him that well but he's got someone to lord it over, so that keeps his dominance hierarchy thing going. Well, the fact that he's like a second-rate companion—well, he never really notices that; although he'll treat him contemptuously whenever he gets a chance.

So anyways, they're walking down the street and the fox is bragging away about some crooked thing that he's done. How he pulled the wool over someone's eyes, and he confuses that with wisdom and intelligence. And one of the things that you see, this is worth knowing too, because if you're preyed upon by a psychopath, which you will be to some degree at some point in your life, the psychopath, who will be narcissistic, will presume that you're stupid and that you deserve to be taken advantage of because you're naive and stupid. So it's actually a good thing that he's doing it and his proof—and I'm saying "he," because there are more male psychopaths— the proof that you're stupid and naive is that he can take advantage of you. And so, like, if you were wiser, you'd be, you know, you'd know his tricks, then it wouldn't be morally necessary for him to show you just exactly who knows what about what.

And so, the psychopath will use his ability to fool you as proof of his own grandiose omnipotence, omniscience, and narcissism. And the problem with that is that you can be fooled by a psychopath, and virtually anybody can. So that Robert Hare, for example, who's studied psychopaths for a long time and interviewed a lot of them, like hundreds of them, and videotaped many of the interviews, he said when he was talking to the psychopath he always believed what they were saying and then he'd watch the video afterwards and see where the conversation went off the rails.

But, you know, the proclivity to be polite in a conversation is very strong, and if you're polite you don't object to the way that the person unfolds their strategy; you know? And psychopaths are pretty good at figuring out how to manipulate—obviously how to manipulate people—and the probability that you will be immune to that is extraordinarily low. Go watch Paul Bernardo being interviewed by policemen on Youtube. That's bloody useful; that's enlightening, man. Paul Bernardo, he's like the CEO of a meeting in that video. He gives the cops hell, he gives the lawyers hell, he protests his innocence, he basically tells them that they're rude and untrustworthy because they don't trust him.

Because he did a few little things seventeen years ago and he gets away with the few little things, right? I mean, he killed a bunch of people, including the sister of his girlfriend at the time. And you know, he was a repeat sexual offender and murderer. But he basically goes: “you know, that's a long time ago; it's like, we're past that, aren't we? I mean, I'm having a discussion with you; I’m trying to help you solve some crimes—which, by the way, I committed—but we won't bring that up, you know. And you're accusing me of being a liar; you're not playing fair; what's up with you?” And then when they answer, he looks at his fingernails, which is like, that’s a lovely little manipulative thing 'cause it basically means: “whatever happens to be under my fingernail at the moment is much higher priority than your foolish story.”

And you watch and you’ll see people do that to you, and then you get a little insight into what they’re up to. He’s very good at that. Or he looks outside, or he just looks at his hands, or he looks out the window—immediately dismissive in his nonverbal behavior, it's brilliant. The courts were forced to release that, by the way—look it up; Paul Bernardo on Youtube; wow, it’s just mind-boggling, he’s so good at what he does. And he’s good-looking, and he’s charismatic, and you know, he can really pull it off. And you can't tell what's happening with the cops and the lawyers, whether they're just letting him play his routine to get some information from him or whether he's actually setting them back on his heels, and I suspect it's a bit of both.

But it's a masterful performance. If you didn't know who he was, and you were watching it without the audio, you'd think he's the CEO of some company giving his employees hell for not being up to scratch. That's all his body language, his eye contact, everything just speaks that, it's amazing. So anyways, you got these two-bit hoods here, who think they're really something and they also think they're tough and dangerous and they're not. They're just, you know cowardly corner dwellers and they confuse their unwillingness to abide by reasonable rules with an indication of their heroic courage, which is something else that low-rent hoods like to do.

You know? And it's partly because lots of people who just attend to the law do do that because they're cowardly—which is a Nietzschean observation. Are you good, or are you just afraid? Let's start with afraid first, before we proceed to good. And that the reason you follow the rules is that you're afraid of getting caught. Yeah, well, you know, those kids who... often university kids who are in a hockey riot and breaking windows, and stealing things, you know, they get nailed for it, and afterwards they're really blown away by their own behavior. It’s like, well, they’re in that camp; they think they are good people, but they're not; they're just never anywhere where you could be bad.

And as soon as you put them somewhere where they could be bad, it's like: out it comes, just like that. And that's really worth thinking about 'cause most of you, many of you—but not all of you, I suspect—have never really been somewhere that you could be really bad and get away with it. And so you might think, well, you wouldn't do it, but people do it all the time. So anyways, they're talking about some exploits, and then they see that this character named Stromboli, he has a puppet show, right? And he's kind of a wheeler-dealer too.

Remember, I showed you that mask that was glaring at Pinocchio when he got his voice? It's like, Stromboli is one of his manifestations; the fox here is another one of his manifestations. All the negative characters throughout the movie are manifestations of the same thing; it's partly the adversarial individual, and it's partly the tyrannical aspect of society. It's the negative masculine, that’s one way of thinking about it. So, and you know, when men go bad, they often go bad by being antisocial and tyrannical. There are way more antisocial men than there are antisocial women, which is why there's twenty times as many men in jail as there are women.

So each gender, let's say, each sex has its own characteristic pathologies. And there are some antisocial women, you know, and there are some high-neuroticism guys or some guys who are really agreeable as well, but they're rare. So anyways, he sees this poster advertising Stromboli's puppet show, so Stromboli's a puppet master. Now that's really worth thinking about because that's an archetypal theme, or it's at least attached to an archetypal theme: something's behind the scenes, pulling the strings. And everyone always wonders what that is; what's actually going on? What's actually going on with Trump? Who's actually in control? Is it Putin? I mean, that's the fantasies of the left; it's Putin. It's like, well, the question always is: what's going on behind the scene, right?

And the question is— that's the case certainly on the political landscape and business landscape and interpersonal relations—what are you really up to? Everyone's always wondering that, right? It's why they're watching your eyes 'cause your eyes point at things and they can infer what you're interested in and what you're up to by looking at what you look at; and that's why your eyes have whites. It's so that we can see where you're pointing them 'cause gorillas don't. And so what that means, roughly speaking, is that all of your ancestors whose eyes couldn't be reliably tracked were either killed or didn't mate. It's a big deal for us to see where people's eyes are pointed.

And so we're always watching each other's eyes, constantly. “What are you up to? What are you up to? What are you looking at? What do you want? I wanna know, because if I know what you want, I can predict how you're gonna behave.” And that also means I can cooperate with you, or I can compete with you, or I can lie to you; but all the information is in the eyes, surrounded by the facial display, right? 'Cause that's also an indication of motivation and emotion. Our eyes are so good at that that for you guys sitting there in the back, I can tell if you're looking at my eyes or at my chin, and the deviation in your eyes is so tiny that it's a kind of miracle that we're capable of making that perceptual observation; it's really important to us, so.

And we have really good eyes. So that's another thing about us. So anyways, what's going on behind the scenes? Well, if you look at Stromboli, you might be thinking: “It's not clear he's someone you’d want to have pulling your strings.” There's a little bit of forced enthusiasm, let's say, there, and he's just not a very savory looking character. So anyways, the fox knows him, and they start talking about Stromboli, that old joker, how they could possibly involve him in some sort of scam because he's back in town. And then they see the puppet, and the fox does his equivalent of thinking, which is, you know, pretty sad and nasty, but that's what he does.

And then they see this puppet with no strings, and they think: “Hey man, a puppet master would pay a lot for something that is capable of semi-autonomous movement like that; it would be kind of a miracle.” And so they decide that they would take him to Stromboli. And so they grab him; he’s got an apple to take to the teacher, which, I think it's the cat, promptly eats. And the fox acts out this false enthusiasm about what Pinocchio is up to and pretends that he's his friend, which is of course what your typical pedophile will do.

And so this is in the same kind of category, and it truly is. One of the things that's interesting to know about pedophiles is that they're predatory, right? And so they don't go after kids that are assertive and likely to be noisy. They watch, and they watch to see if they can find a kid who's defeated and... that's good enough—who's defeated and who's gonna need a friend and who's not going to object. And so when they check out... these are the ones who do the stranger abductions, which are, by the way, extraordinarily rare. They look for a victim type; they look for a kid who's gonna be easy to take down.

And so, you know, that's one thing you don't want... so you might think, well, one of the things that was really big—it's probably even worse now—when I was a parent of young children was to teach your kids how to be afraid of strangers. It's like, uh, no, wrong; that is not what you teach them, because all you do is teach them then to be timid and fearful. And the real predatory types, they're pretty much thrilled about that because you'll also make them sheltered and naive. You make your kids courageous, and you get their damn eyes open, and that's the best thing you can do against people who are truly dangerous.

So, none of that terrifying... it’s not a good idea. Anyway, the fox befriends the puppet, and then they come up with this evil scheme to get him off to Stromboli, the puppet master. And away they go, and they sing a little song about being an actor: “An actor's life for me!”

This took me a long time to figure out. I thought: they’re taking Pinocchio away to be an actor. Now why in the world are actors getting such a rough time in this movie? It's like, it's a Hollywood movie; you know? It's acting, obviously— the voiceovers and all of that are acting. It's... why is this thing about being an actor? And then I thought: oh, I get it. I see what's going on.

They sing to Pinocchio about the delights of unearned celebrity. So he doesn’t have to go and get an education; he doesn't have to take the difficult route; he can take the easy way to dominance—to success, to dominance success. He can circumvent all the hard work and go right to the top, you know? And when you think about phenomena like the Kardashian family and how popular they are, part of that is this desire that people have for unearned celebrity because you can get to the top without any sacrifices and without any work.

And if you're really cynical, you know, you think that the people at the top are just there by accident anyways and it might as well be you. Of course, there’s a lot of naivety in that as well and a fair bit of, you know, a fair lack of wisdom and all of that. But the actor idea here is that you can pretend to be something you're not, and that that’s the proper route of anyone wise to success. It's the ultimate in cynicism and it's a nihilistic perspective as well. And that's how they entrap him. They say: “Look, why are you bothering to go to school? That's gonna take 18 years. With all of your talents, you could just go on the stage. Your name will be up in lights, you'll be at the top in no time.”

And what does the puppet know? Plus he does have some talents. He is, after all, a semi-autonomous puppet now. He doesn’t exactly know how special that makes him, but the fox can obviously see something in him, and he’s good at playing that naivety off, and then offering these false promises. But, see, the thing is... one of the things that Carl Jung said, that I thought was really interesting when he was talking about the Oedipal situation in families—I never forgot this—so the Oedipal situation, roughly speaking, is when—I'll lay out the classic story—is when a child is seriously overprotected, usually a male child, by his mother.

Now the reverse can be the case, and it can be a female child by the mother and all of that, but I’ll just talk about the classic case to begin with. Now what Freud observed was that there were usually not very good boundaries in families like that, and so the relationship between the husband and the wife was either strained or nonexistent. And the wife would often turn to the child to be what she isn’t getting from the husband.

And so there's a great South Park episode about this, a wonderful South Park episode. Where... I don't remember that horrible little guy [student: Cartman] yeah, that’s him. His mother brings in the dog whisperer to train him. It’s a brilliant episode. If you want to learn about the Freudian Oedipal situation, you watch that; you've got it down cold.

Because she brings in this expert, who then she wants to have an affair with, so that’s a boundary issue. And he basically separates her son from him [sic] and imposes the same discipline on him that he would impose on a bad dog. Although he also trains the dog's owners all the time because maybe it's not the dog; maybe it's the owner. There's a horse whisperer movie, too, about the original horse whisperer that does a beautiful job of laying that out too. 'Cause he's very good at fixing problem horses and unbelievably good at diagnosing psychopathology on the part of the owner. He's got a gift for it.

But anyways, what happens in the South Park episode is that the dog whisperer gets Cartman straightened out, and he starts, like dressing properly and doing his homework. And the mother is pursuing an affair with the dog whisperer, but he's professional; he keeps his distance, he keeps boundaries around him, and then he leaves. And then the first thing that she does when he leaves is bribe Cartman, basically, out of doing his homework so that he can accompany her to, I don't know, a fast food restaurant or something like that.

And so the reason she does that is 'cause she’s lonesome and doesn't have anybody else around, and, you know, maybe she’s also deeply, deeply, deeply terrified that if she helps that boy grow up, he will leave and she'll have nothing. You know? And so mothers who don't have something, say, outside their infants—not merely their children—are more likely to fall into that. And it's no wonder. You know? You gotta think that through.

And lots of women, most women, really fall in love with their babies. And so even if they start growing into larger children, that can be threatening because when the child... when the infant turns into a toddler, the infant is dead, the toddler is there now. And you can radically interfere with that process; that happens all the time. That's the classic Freudian Oedipal nightmare, and that episode is brilliant—it's bloody brilliant; it just nails it.

Some of you've been in my personality class and watched "Crumb," the documentary "Crumb," and that's another staggering exposition of exactly that kind of pathology. Anyways, one of the things Jung pointed out—so I knew this guy once, who had a mother who basically was trying that trick, and she was very smart and had lots of tricks up her sleeves, and there was just no way he was gonna go for it. He rebelled at every possible moment, and he basically became, I would say, somewhat hyper-masculine in response.

Which is an interesting lesson with regards to the hyper-masculinity that boys often develop when they're raised by single mothers 'cause they tend to go one of two ways. And he just fought her at every step of the way, and it didn't happen. But one of the things Jung said, which I loved, and you can really see this in the "Crumb" documentary is that the Oedipal mother basically entices the child. She says: “Look, here's the deal. You don't have to do anything, but you don't get to leave. And if you don’t leave, and you don't do these difficult things, then I'll take care of you.”

And the child has a choice all the way along there, I mean obviously he's outclassed in some sense, but it's not as obvious as you'd think. Little kids are tough, and they make decisions all the time. And so Jung thought about it more as a conspiracy than as something imposed on the child by the mother. And I really like that; it's actually a conspiracy between mother, father, and child, actually, and I think that's a good way of looking at it, even though it's really rough.

'Cause well, should you hold the child responsible? Well, yes, but judiciously and not completely. 'Cause then if you deal with someone like that as an adult and they're trying to escape from it, you have to go all the way back and figure out how the hell it happened; they have to figure out where they opened the door—like inviting a vampire in—'cause they can't come in unless you invite them in. So don't invite them in, 'cause once they're in, they're really hard to get rid of, and they'll take all your blood. So that's a cautionary tale.

So anyways, Pinocchio doesn't know any better, and he's got the egotism of youth. He's offered the easy way to success, which is exactly what the fox tells him, and off they go to see Stromboli. So this is this song; I'm not gonna read it all—it's great to be a celebrity, an actor's life for me. You sleep till after two, you promenade a big cigar, you tour the world in a private car, you dine on chicken and caviar, an actor's life for me!

It's all this idea of wealth and public exposure and zero attention whatsoever to anything regarding responsibility or discipline or learning. And so, it's a dual attraction, right? You get everything you want, and you don't have to do anything! Geez, what a deal. So that's what the actor represents; it's a liar fundamentally. It's someone who's acting out a deception; they're a persona in the Jungian sense.

So the persona is the mask you wear in public that you might even think you are—but you're not. It's this mask, and that's the actor; that's the persona. So the fox and the cat are inviting the puppet to only become a persona. See, for Jung, you start as a persona and then when you start to investigate the parts of you that don't really fit in that persona—and that would be the shadow—then you start understanding who you really are.

And that's shocking because the persona contains everything, roughly speaking, that you think is good and maybe even that your immediate culture thinks is good, and then the shadow contains everything that's not part of that. And some of that's really bad, but some of it is good disguised as bad. And you can't break out of the persona and transcend it until you incorporate a lot of what's in the shadow.

And so, for example, if you're an extraordinarily compassionate person, let’s say 98th percentile, you're going to be sacrificing yourself to other people all the time. And there are people who will find that extraordinarily endearing, and it will be under some circumstances, but the problem is that you will sacrifice yourself, and that's a really bad attitude to have for example, towards adult males.

It's a great thing for infants, but for adult males, it is the wrong approach. You will get taken advantage of continually by people who are looking for someone like you until you grow some teeth. And you'll think: “No, no, that's the opposite of compassion.” Being able to bite hard is the opposite of compassion, which it is. And so you'll have that pushed into the predator category. "I'm not doing that, I'm not getting angry, I don't like conflict," until you bring that out of the depths and put it on. So you can use it; you're gonna be in trouble.

And that's kinda Nietzsche's idea of the revaluation of good and evil. You have a sense of what's good and a sense of what isn't with your conscience, but it's not very smart. It's got things in the wrong boxes, even nature itself. A lot of the things that you accept as untrammeled goods, like compassion, let's say, have a very dark side, first of all, and second, are not enough to get you through life. You need the opposite virtues, too, and so you have to develop them.

You get outside the persona to do that. But anyways, Pinocchio's invited to be a false persona, to take the gains of celebrity without having to do anything to be educated; he's just gonna go right to the top from right where he is. And you know, people are kinda fascinated by that idea. That's why you watch America's Got Talent or The X Factor, which shows I actually love, by the way. You never see narcissism in its purer forms than you see it when you watch people who display an absolute lack of talent and become homicidal when someone dares point it out. Accusatory and homicidal, instantly—it's really something!

And then, now and then, you do see one of these people who's so introverted and so out of society and have this unbelievable gift, which is also something really remarkable to see. And it's no wonder these things are so popular; they're psychologically extraordinarily interesting. So that's the actor; first of Pinocchio's temptations, and of course it's the first one because he's entering the social world.

And the temptation in the social world is to be exactly what other people want you to be. And the thing that's cool about that is that is what you should be doing when you go out among your peers. You should be not subjugating your individuality to your peers, 'cause that's not exactly right. That's kinda based on an inhibition model; you've got aggression, you've got bad habits; they have to be inhibited. You learn that by interacting with your peers.

It's not the right model, that's a Freudian model. Piaget was correct about that. He basically pointed out that what should happen is, let's say with your aggression—and hopefully you have some—is that it gets socialized. You learn how to play games, but you don't drop your drive to win; you integrate that in the games. You try to win; you try to play hard. But if you're defeated or you hit something negative, you don't respond negatively, and you can keep that all bounded within being a good player—a fair player.

And that means what’s happened is you learned how to play a game or a set of games that also includes the darker parts of you, and they actually become part of your force of character. It's way better if you can pull that off, and that's what you definitely wanna do as an adult. All you people are gonna have to learn to negotiate on your own behalf, and that's really hard. It means that you have to know what you want, you have to be able to communicate it, and you have to be able to say "no."

And to say "no," you have to be built on a solid foundation. You have to have options. So you gotta remember that as you go through your life: if you don't have options, you can't negotiate with someone, and if you're not willing to use them, they win, period. Because if you're asking your boss for more money, say, the answer is "no" because he doesn't have any spare money lying around that he can just give to you, and lots of other people are asking.

So some of that zero-sum stuff—not all of it, because often you cooperate with people and the whole pot can grow, but some of it’s zero-sum, and so you better have a case made: “here's how much money I should have, here's why, here's the benefit to you if you do it, here's the consequences if you don't—they're actually real, they will cost you, and I will do them.” Then you can negotiate, and you don't do that rudely, but those arguments you better have them in order.

For example, if you're gonna negotiate for a raise or a status shift, you better have your resume at hand, all polished up, and know where else you're gonna look for a job, and you better be able to get one because otherwise you're weak and you will not win the negotiation. And if you're too agreeable, so you're conflict-avoidant, you will make less money across time. That's already been well established, and that's because you don't have teeth—not enough.

And so, in the little micro-contest that you're gonna have every day, you're going to incrementally lose to people who are more aggressive, who have bigger teeth, and that's what happens. So don't let that happen. You place yourselves so you can negotiate, ‘cause otherwise you're just a facade, and in a real battle a facade is just torn down right away.

Well, the cricket, he's supposed to be helping the puppet out, but he overslept. That's just another indication that he's not everything he could be yet. And that's really... that took me a long time to puzzle out with regards to interpreting this movie. I could not figure out—I told you this—if the bug is the person who opens the hero narrative and who can guide the transformations of time and who has the same initials as Jesus Christ and is knighted by nature herself, why is he such an idiot?

It's a very difficult thing to figure out. But the idea that the conscience isn't omniscient, even though it has that voice of, let's say, common sense, and that fits very nicely in with the Freudian idea of the superego, again because the superego can be flawed. It can be too harsh; it can not be properly developed. You see that often with people who are orderly, so they're high in conscientiousness. Conscientiousness fragments into industriousness and orderliness. Orderly people like willpower; they're very judgmental, and they like things to be exactly where they're supposed to be.

But they're also very self-punitive. Conservatives are much more likely to be orderly, by the way. It's one of the best predictors of conservatism. Low openness is the best predictor, but right after that is high orderliness, and it's associated with disgust sensitivity, which is really an amazing thing. We'll talk about that later.

Anyways, the cricket, he falls down his first day on the job. He's not as conscientious a conscience as he should be, so he's feeling pretty stupid. He's got his little millionaire clothes on, but he's really not living up to them. He does catch up to the fox and the puppet, however, and tries to dissuade Pinocchio from going down this road. And of course, the cat—well, you can see what the cat's doing there. He's got a big hammer—a big mallet, and he's... it also shows you just exactly how much of a clue he has. He's gonna wallop the bug who's sitting on the fox's hat, which I think he actually does.

Then the fox can't get out of his hat, and has to talk through his hat— which basically he's doing all the time anyways. So, this I really like; you see on the left here that the cricket is speaking inside this flower. And like I said, there's nothing accidental in these representations —these are artists who were coming up with these compositions. And their fantasy has a structure.

So the cricket is speaking out of this flower that has —well, you could think about it as... it has a sexualized element, so you could think about that as a phallic part, and that part of the feminine part of it. They are flowers, after all. They are the sex organs of plants, and that's very much the same over here. This is the yoni and lingam—this is from Hindu culture, and you see there's a snake wrapped around that. So that's masculine and feminine with a snake wrapped around it, and that's a holy representation—a sacred representation—and it represents the deepest reality, that's one way of thinking about it—like chaos and order, surrounded by the snake; it’s exactly the same idea.

So the cricket speaks out of that. Well, we already know that 'cause it is the conscience, and he's been awakened in part by Geppetto and the good father and awakened in part by the good fairy and nature. So he speaks with those voices, and he's also a manifestation of the underlying chaos itself because nature and culture spring out of chaos. I already showed you that schematic representation.

I'll just end this scene, and then we'll have a 15-minute break, okay? Anyways, the cricket tries to make a case for why Pinocchio shouldn't go off to be a celebrity, but, you know, it's a hard case to make because the fox is very manipulative and Pinocchio is naive, and it sounds like a good offer. And also, the fox is actually quite forceful; he basically takes him by the hand. So the temptation is—and this is something else I like about the movie—you can't just say, “Well, the puppet gets what he deserves.” 'Cause he's little and naive, and what he's facing is really malevolent, truly malevolent and physically overpowering.

And so the movie does a nice job of not minimizing the threat that's posed by this particular temptation, and that's part of what makes it art. So we'll stop there. We'll have a break for 15 minutes, and then we'll start with the stage.

Alright, so here we are at the big event, and Pinocchio is off to be a celebrity, and the cricket is watching. And Pinocchio basically—well, he's got some natural talent because he's a puppet, but he doesn't have strings. He goes on stage with strings, and then he drops his strings, and the whole crowd is amazed. And the crowd should be amazed when that happens; you can imagine when a kid goes to school and shows some independence, that that's actually gonna—people are gonna notice that—the teachers are gonna notice that.

Maybe it’s too much independence even, but it's still a... it is a remarkable thing, too. It’s so interesting, you can see marked signs of independence in children right from the time they’re born, basically. Because one of the things that's really funny about the infants is when they're crying, you always think: "oh, the baby's sad.” It's like, no, a lot of the time that baby is angry. And the way that we know that is because you can do facial expression coding on infants just like on adults, and you can tell what emotion they're expressing, and very frequently... like when a kid starts to recognize his mom explicitly—'cause he or she knows the smell right away pretty much, and the sound of the voice—but visually if someone comes in and it isn't who the baby wants; so generally it isn’t mom, the baby will