so we'll continue with our union
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 and
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 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 it 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 learned 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 and
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 this is the mythological
reason why Mufasa isn't as aware as he could be of scar
you know his knowledge is bounded and he's no I'm not aware enough of what
lies outside of that in this realm let's say of death and destruction and so scar
is he is able to overcome his his brother one you see this sort of thing
happening to people very frequently for example who developed 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 this of the
system that you're using to interpret the world 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 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 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 delay or the 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 Dallaire was not naive but what he encountered was truly malevolent
and it just blew him into pieces and and that that's what happens and so there's
real utility and 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 too unwisely
then you can encounter things that flip you upside down it's actually one of the
problems with being high and trade openness especially if you're also high
in neuroticism because if you're open you're creative you're always looking
for for ideas that are outside of your current systematic way of thinking but
if you're high in eroticism so you parents 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 gonna have one of my graduate students
actually come and talk to you about the work we've been doing on personality and
Paul 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 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 this boils down to one thing it boils down to how
open borders should be compared to how close they should be and you know 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 lone 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 and 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 loosen things up because everything's
good to static and tight and we need more
information and the dialogue that occurs in the political landscape with 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 gets you it gives you more of an understanding at least in
principle of your 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 and 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 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 Karl Popper a famous philosopher science
said that one of the things that you should do and this is akin to the PIA
jetty and view is you should always look for information that contradicts your
cur 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 crew
it's crucial importance in the maintenance of your own stability the
worst thing that can happen to a person know 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 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 you know the domain outside
the light see young would also say that out in this domain that 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 you I presume most of you are old enough to have a
conscious memory of when the Twin Towers came crashing down and 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 there was 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 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 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 turned 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 but he yeah 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
the that was part of the retreating into a 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 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
Union 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 terms they're unknown unknowns
and turning them into partially known unknowns that's what an artist does and
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 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 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 so think about it this
way so you're in a city you know what 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
right and then they move in there where it's cheap to 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
all conservative types move in those would be the yuppies roughly speaking so
they're 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 Zellers 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 fizzy elizacass much
as a mental boundary and so you 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 niches 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 niches relationships
if you're disagreeable your niches competition if you're conscientious your
niche is duty and effort and so and and that 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 people the open
exploratory types occupy so that seems to make a higher-order super factor
extraversion and openness called plasticity as opposed to stability which
is conscientiousness agreeableness and emotional stability and there's a play
off between those two things because the stable people obviously are stable but
the plastic types of people are more dynamic and they're 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 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 it's very very difficult to get that balance correct so
all right 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 and
what do you 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 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 like 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 panzram PA and Zed ra m and it's
a fascinating book it's about this guy who I think he raped 1200 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 and and 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 they're gonna 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 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 it's available and so if you
want a view because you know you 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 panzram was know 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 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 black of a better word they're possessed by its
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've you
know 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
managed to escape it's very malevolent scene and Mufasa
shows up at the last minute to rescue them so and you know that 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 right and that's the you could say from a symbolic
perspective that that's the manifestation of the father as of course
that's what you're going to do and you you know what's really interesting
- is because I've had a lot of clients who've had PTSD and 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 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'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
gonna let you go till 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 eighteen months old and when you think about it it produces a fair
bit of negative emotion then that's like a minute 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 good person at the
top and and you you kind of use that 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 myself authoring site you guys do the
personality analysis but there's another program there called the that'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 have 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
17 or something like that and she was about 27 when she came and talked to me
and then I found out by further questioning that she was 4 and he was 6
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 6 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 but he wasn't 17 right if 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 was very interesting because you know you think of the past
as fixed but 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
have again in the future then that will stay
with you and I think one of the things that does too is it increases your
overall physiological load is actually physiologists who've been talking about
this I can't remember the damn phrase but you could imagine that your mind is
doing something like this all the time it's it's it's 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 in and you act and 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 that 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 will call them failures
that those are situations where you do not get what you want then your your
body 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 like a you know
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 your success as adjudicated by other people right because they'll
pop you up the doorman its 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 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 it is based on that my read my
exercises are based on his research he found that if you brought college
students into the to 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 visited the doctor
less and markers of their physical health improved and so I think the
reason for that is because what does that called is called something load
just about it got it right from the physiologist it 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 we're 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 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 union 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 fool right you know what that's like you
you know exactly what that's like your chart 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 gonna 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
you can regarded the trickster as the precursor to the Savior architect Lee
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 gonna
make a stage transition in your life and you're gonna feel like an imposter when
you get a new job or when you get a promotion or something like that you're
gonna feel like an imposter and you are because what do you know when you make
that first transition right but it's gonna make you embarrassed and it's
gonna 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 now that doesn't mean you should you know make like you know
everything as soon as you're promoted or you have some transition in status
that's that's foolish of the wrong sort but to know that to know that you have
to be fallible in order to progress is an unbelievably useful thing it can free
you up you know what 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 gonna 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 gonna 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 with fauces 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 him and and and peace is made between them and then they're there
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 and one of the things
young wrote a lot about was astrology strangely enough slash astronomy and one
of young 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 without with astrology so astrology is this
cumulative fantasy that's going on in the in that roughly speaking in the deep
unconscious projected on to 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 ok so anyways back to the 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 his the
domain over which he rules and so you can see him there surrounded in fire
same ideas the you know 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 you think about a
totalitarian state you think about the Nazis and they're goose-stepping
what's happening is that every single person in the military becomes an
identical unit right a unit they're all uniform and they're all in some sense
imitating The Dictator in 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 discussed 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 1940 - it's a very interesting book you see that his
metaphor for the Aryan race was a body a pure body
unof salted 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 looked 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'd
cleaned up all the factories and 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 cyclone
B that's an insecticide and that's the gas that he used in the gas chambers
eventually so first it was the bugs in the rats and then it was people who were
then it was euthanasia that was the neck move and forced you euthanasia and the
the rationale for that was compassion by the way just so you all know it's it's
it's merciful to put these people who are burdensome to themselves and their
families and the state who are living second-rate lives its 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 it's 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 are there they score
higher in measures of well-being the most unhappy people are liberal men by
the way so but you know people are often accused if they're conservative of being
fearful and that's why they you know 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 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 you know 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 discussed sensitive and so what it might have easily 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 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 you know
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 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 as a Nazi like leader and see there's
another thing that's really interesting this 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 kaathal catholics as antithetical to
science take the Catholics to task for that and
describing it as prejudicial and super 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's it can easily become arrogant and
believe in its own theories so if you're smart and there's gonna be some of you
people who are like that to some of you your primary the primary trait that
distinguishes you from other people over the course of your whole life was that
you are more intelligent than most and you may have staked your identity on
that and an over value and rationality and the problem with
that is that you 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 gonna 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 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 and there were many of them we're 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 right 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 and
that's brought about so mmm-hmm the columbine guys for example when they're
justifying their murderous nests and their plans to shoot up the schools they
keep making reference to the fact that people had slighted them for example you
know and insulted them and that they were alienated they weren't bullied
exactly the way the press made it out I don't know if they were bullied anymore
than people usually are in high school but they took their alienation
personally and we guarded 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 and pleased all at the same time there's no fear in that
it'sit's quite 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 and the underworld fundamentally so all
right so anyway so that's we see the the underworld we see that which bullet 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 scars minions are going to cause a
wildebeest stampede right so a mindless stampede to to to put to put Simba in
danger and so that's what happens here the Whale debate 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 try 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 it gets to the top mmm his brother is waiting for
him there and he asks him to pull him up and scar basically before he
indicates that he's betraying him and puts his claws into Moo fusses 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 her because the story takes a weird twist here but there-there is this
confusion in the story about whether Simba is an innocent victim who 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 and that and 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 gonna have to be banished beyond the
kingdom now you see this motif quite quite frequently in heroes 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 you know we're the new generation has
the proclivity to blame the previous generation for everything that's wrong
with the current system and fair enough you know 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 for lack of a better
word because it's got a tyrannical element and because it's not matched
well to you so 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 the 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 gonna 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 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 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 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 gonna 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 and malevolence alright 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 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 Kingdom no matter how ironical 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 the
Americans the neo-cons were all convinced that the Iraqis would Oh
welcome with open arms and there would be this
smooth transition to democracy same idea and 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 and draw a draw other drug addicts as well so imagine that you're trying to
stop drinking alright 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 then they get valium or something
like that from a doctor to see them through the first bits of what do you
call it well of sobering-up and so they get through it and then 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 gonna 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
there 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 a patient but that just leaves you with
nothing and then you have to rebuild that thing from from from from scratch
it's extraordinarily difficult and that's why so many people fail when
they're trying to overcome a major addiction so alright so anyways
Simba's out there in the desert he's left his family and the comforts of home
and he's he's discovered by these by Pumbaa and who's a little rats named Tim
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 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 like and
just starting to undergo puberty they're not very attractive to females they tend
to clump together in in gangs and and and manage the transition over what
could be seven years so and that's what happens here is Simba joins this little
gang of you know these guys are alright 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 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 no picnic but the idea here is that he
really doesn't have any responsibilities right none and that is one thing about
adolescences and even the stage of life that you guys are out 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 will be like when you you know you have
responsibilities for four children for example or for the people that are
working for you or or whatever so anyways out here it's a kind of
of 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 fifteen or sixteen
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 important
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 yeah
Hakuna Matata right which basically means do whatever you do whatever you
want and tomorrow will take care of itself or something like that so it's
very impulsive and lacks all responsibilities 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 alright so anyways he's out there in his little adolescent
paradise and with his dopey chums and back at at Pride Rock things are not
good right Skaar 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 it's one of the best
predictors and I would say well if you're going to terrorize your own women
you're gonna Tarin eyes everything you're gonna Terran eyes ideas you're
gonna Terran eyes structures like if you have to enslave your own women you're
you've del 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 Skaar it's like what
happened in the Soviet Union no 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's just
ground to a halt it just stopped working because it
because it didn't work and so if your totalitarian and you won't update your
system and adjust it then it wears out and grinds to a halt and everything
becomes unproductive no it's 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 gonna 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 gonna try to buy
property in Toronto and that's really going to be entertaining so now look the
the other thing about scars 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 yeah Stalin I mean God he 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 percent of the entire land mass 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 but there were massive domains of
devastation and in those countries that you know 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
creatures face you know he's he selfs 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 be 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 gonna wake up and do
something about it well that's the call of the self so now we go back to two
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 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
in a union from the Union perspective there isn't much distinction between the
self and the and the and the child the self is the sum total of all possibility
and the child is possibility itself and so 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 around 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 son and associated with that early
you know the early exposure of Simba to the son 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
a little you know the baboon and the tree and the and the drawing so anyways
he knows that Simba is 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 should meet bugs for crying out loud but
they're easy and so you see this scene where Pumbaa goes after this bug and
then another lion shows up and chases him so she's gonna 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 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 neljä 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 animal figure right and now what she does immediately is
shame him so she he's an atom a figure in part she's an animal figure in part
because she actually does shame him right so she's the gateway to higher
consciousness she makes him self-conscious and rightly so but he's
also a she's also a psychological figure because he imagined that when a young
man is establishing a relationship with a young woman and he's he's enamored of
her he's falling in love he projects an idea 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 on
to 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 and useful
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 an 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 gonna that's exactly what's going to happen they're
gonna not be happy about that in the least and so and no wonder and I think
the reason for that it's an 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'll pick up part
of the load it's perfectly reasonable and you're not gonna 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 and she's just completely stunned by that
it's like and tells them you know where's the sim buy used to know right
well 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 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 palling 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 and then they switch into another archetypal
scene and so they're falling in love here and so the 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 manage 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 them 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 while these guys know that hey 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 out 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 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 make 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 notes 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 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 archetypal pathway
of an initiation ceremony so he says he wants to change now one of the things
Carl Rogers one of the clinicians that will talk about pointed out was that if
if someone was 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
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 square 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 so the question is now the
question is has now been posed and what young 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 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 young 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 make 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 that's a
higher its 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 that's also the self that's what you
would 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 Rafik he'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 he makes some stupid jokes about bananas
and kind of entices Simba into following him right he lets him know that he has a
secret and he entices Simba into following him so simha's all of a sudden
become interested in something so if you ask yourself what the next developmental
stages and you really want to know that 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 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
it's the deep unconscious to 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 is farther and you look at the difference in the eyebrows and the
so there's a 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 they're 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 it's not naive by any stretch of the imagination
but you know we know as far there'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's which is 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 gonna be able to rely on you and you're gonna 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
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 his abandonment of it
that's a big part of it so now it's dead but also his
abandonment of it - nothing but malevolence and chaos and so he's pretty
taken aback and what's happened and that he exaggerates his guilt or it should
anyways and neljä shows up and and they decide they're gonna 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 Skaar doesn't want to hear this so he 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 scars very
concerned about this because actually Simba is looking pretty impressive now
and he thought he was dead besides and so he tries to use treachery and whiny
Nessun 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 Deadwood
around the rock on fire so we have another kind of descent into hell seen
here very common in Disney movies this this 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 has 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 and his lack thereof
anyways 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
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 real
demonic aspect to scar they're sort of King of Hell imagery and but he loses
and then ha he blames his minions he blames the hyenas for everything
terrible this 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 pretty brutal ending for poor old scar eaten by his own minions and
then scars dead and Simba has one and so the rains come immediately and so what
does that mean well it means that when proper order is restored 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 that the facial the pathetic facial expression disappears
entirely knee straightens himself up because now he's full of serotonin after
having defeated good old scar and all the lionesses are roaring and he climbs
up Pride Rock and they roar at him which is good they're tough and he's tough and
they showing their teeth it's it's not it's not a society of naive and harmless
creatures it's 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 that 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 Pumbaa and Timon and they have a baby and Rafiki shows up and
does the same thing you know he's gonna 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 and so one of the things that young 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 cohered and the narrative appeared
to be an appropriate narrative even when you're a little kid it 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 and 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 that's the right way
to think about 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 and 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 so well that was actually faster than I thought it would
be today so this is what I'm gonna 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
but and they can be any questions about anything we've covered in class so take
a minute and yes - movie
you feel like you know the character but it's not exactly that character like
become so - you know can like it feels like you know for a wise
old man 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 it's right right and so well that that
is precisely the indication of the existence of an archetype it's like an a
movie one time a student asked me well if 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 you can't relate to it and 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 two archetypal well it gets to
be too abstract and you can't relate to it so good fiction writers and 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 and
that keeps it fresh and you know one of the things that you pointed out to was
that you're 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 and romance is older than people that's one way of looking
about 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 show the transpersonal within the
personal and so and in some sense your destiny property
study from a union perspective is to consciously express an archetype and so
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 gonna find that
meaningful so yes like like I just like because it's mine process from life
like happy but is like appreciating to help so like you know like love and subsidies 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 gonna make all sorts of aggressive and
vengeful thoughts sort of flashed 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 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 lit 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 gonna mess with
you to begin with but you know you may have already
adopted a morality that says well I have to be likeable 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 I mentioned this when Simba climbs up the rock to take control of it
all the female lionesses bare 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
ass this often happens with adolescents who are asked say by their mother to
clean up the 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 and
taking 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 and encroaching on you until you 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 gonna be the
bullied one in the office for example you're not gonna get a raise people
aren't gonna credit you with your own work other people are gonna take credit
for it you know and you're gonna 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 with with reality it's it's about it's not right
just because you can't do any damage doesn't mean your morale just means your
you don't have the capability for mayhem and that makes you a pushover I mean the
yogya 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 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 to crowd pathology and it'll be because you're too agreeable
with a you know with a shadow resentful side that the crowd and its murderous
intent is gonna act out so yes yes so the question is the relationship between
archetype 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 like a song that gets stuck in
your head you know it 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 sold 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 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 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 in in biology because this species is going to
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 in mate so the 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 case 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 it 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 them it's like he's the person that your mythological
imagination grasps on to 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 soul 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 dominant targets
it's more or less self-evident because that's the landscape that selected us
and at the same time you know the the archetype the pattern that propagates
you up the dominant 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 has 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 general 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 made 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 twenty
years down played 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 is something that weren't he never thought about them is something that
could last long enough to play a role in selection itself you know he thought
about the Moroz 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 the many ways
we're gonna 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