Join Dr. Oz as he discusses with Jordan Peterson how Pinocchio is such a powerful psychological story, explaining how the story of forgiveness, as well as other themes in literature and the arts, reflect our reality. Jordan Peterson also talks about how humans have a hand in their own destiny.
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00:00 I adore that you're a fan of Pinocchio, which for everyone listening, you may not realize this, but 1881,
00:07 Italian short story,
00:10 to the best of my knowledge, is the most printed and read story outside of the Bible and the Quran.
00:17 I didn't know that. So it speaks to the power of
00:20 a fairy tale. But it seems to be much more than that.
00:25 Yeah, well, fairy tales are much more than they seem. Yes, because they're true.
00:30 It's just a fairy tale. It's like, really? No, it's a meta-truth. It's so true that you can hardly believe it.
00:37 Well, you can't, in fact.
00:40 Explain the transformation that Pinocchio represents. Why is it so powerful psychologically, that story?
00:47 Well, partly in the Disney version, it's unbelievably well done. I mean, they had genius level animators working on it.
00:53 So like a crew of
00:55 imaginative geniuses crafted this story together. And you can imagine them thinking, "Well, this would be cool, and this would work."
01:01 They don't know why, because they're guided by, they're engrossed in the activity. They don't know why this works, but that's cool.
01:08 We'll do that, you know.
01:09 1940. Yeah.
01:11 Yes, and it stood up quite well.
01:13 There's a bit of explicit moralizing in it when the story deteriorates,
01:16 but mostly it does a great job of staying in the narrative frame and acting its
01:23 propositions out instead of, you know, hammering them home. It happens.
01:26 But at a more subtle level, I mean, Pinocchio, I think, is us, right? Because he's in the natural world.
01:30 He's made of natural things. Wooden-headed puppet, and someone is pulling his strings. Yeah, that's us for sure. And what are we tempted by? Well, lying.
01:38 Neuroticism, right? Because he's tempted to become a victim. He's tempted to become an actor. Well, what's an actor? Persona. It's an act.
01:46 I want something from you, so I'm going to act in a way that will ensure you deliver it to me.
01:51 You know, so, I mean, I think part of the reason that people
01:54 like my
01:57 lectures, say, is I'm not trying to do that. I'm not trying to get something from you.
02:01 I don't know what it is that, I don't even know what it is I would ask for if I wanted something from you.
02:07 It's like, I want to have a discussion where we
02:10 exchange truth about things we're concerned about. Why would I possibly want anything more than that?
02:19 So, you know, we're tempted by deceit and to become an actor. Well, you meet actors all the time.
02:25 They're false.
02:26 Politicians are often accused of this because they craft a persona to manipulate the public, and they have coaches to do that.
02:31 It's like, you know, think about your image and
02:34 what it is, what message you want to craft. It's like, no, just say what you think.
02:41 Try that.
02:43 Instead. Well, that won't work.
02:46 Maybe not. But if you continue practicing being this actor that you think is necessary,
02:51 then you will definitely become what you practice, and then you'll be an actor. An actor of what? I mean, the coachman in Pinocchio.
02:58 So there's these negative
03:01 patriarchal figures in Pinocchio, and now and then they turn right into Satan himself.
03:05 You see the coachman in one scene turn bright red and like, essentially, horns grow on him.
03:10 And he's so malevolent that the two thieves that he's allied with, the fox and the cat, are,
03:16 despite their, you know, sly malevolence and their
03:19 intellectual hubris, they're above all of that and above the common person.
03:26 They're terrified when they see what they're actually serving for that brief
03:29 instant when the curtains go back and the spirit of
03:35 patriarchal malevolence itself reveals itself. And it just opens and closes very quickly in the story.
03:40 But you see, he's the coachman that takes Pinocchio and the delinquents to the Pleasure Island where they busy themselves with, you know,
03:48 impulsive pleasure while being turned into
03:50 voiceless slaves. It's very sophisticated.
03:54 Pinocchio is given an opportunity, right? He's brought to life.
04:00 He makes these mistakes partially by a benevolent father, but he has his own work to do.
04:05 So let's do that for this. We'll talk about Giuseppe, but then I want to get into why Pinocchio,
04:09 how he gets forgiven. Because he's a bad little boy,
04:13 but even as a bad little boy, he does things that are redeeming, which again, I think all of us have that in us.
04:20 Yeah, well, you know, reality is constituted such that we're fortunate enough to make mistakes now and then and still survive
04:28 sometimes. And so there's a forgiving aspect to what it is
04:32 we're interacting with. That can be other people and the spirit that embodies them.
04:36 But in some ways it can be the material world too. You know, you can touch something
04:40 you shouldn't touch and it doesn't kill you. It just warns you. And so there's some room for error and for learning.
04:47 And, you know, that's often been interpreted as divine mercy versus divine justice. And God rules with both of those.
04:55 Justice is you get what you deserve and mercy is not all the time. And you can't survive if only one of those dominate.
05:03 So why did Giuseppe make Pinocchio? What does he represent in the story?
05:09 Geppetto. Geppetto, no problem. He's God. He's the benevolent creator.
05:15 He's the benevolent element of the patriarchal structure.
05:19 But he doesn't prevent... He's playful and he makes toys and he loves children. He has a warm and inviting place.
05:23 So why does God allow us or Pinocchio to go to Pleasure Island? To hang out with people, you know, they shouldn't have been...
05:32 I don't know. I don't understand that. We have a hand in our own destiny. Maybe that's better good than, you know,
05:40 programmed robots walking down the road. There's something that's so good about our own choice that
05:48 it even, what would you say, it justifies the catastrophe of our errors.
05:55 It's something like that. And maybe that's a reflection of our import in the structure of things.
06:03 It's like it really matters what we do. It matters so much that we have some choice.
06:07 And that's because we need to learn to handle that choice. Because that's how important it is.
06:15 How important what we do is that we have that latitude. It's something like that. And you say,
06:20 "Well, I don't believe that." It's like, "Yeah, but your conscience calls you on it if you don't do that."
06:24 So, you know, belief.
06:27 Is it good for us to be disobedient sometimes?
06:30 Definitely. Often it's right. Like, man, like, as far as I was concerned, for example, when I was in school,
06:38 in junior high and high school, the delinquent types, most of my friends dropped out in grade 10,
06:43 they were more ethically admirable than the good boys.
06:46 Why?
06:46 Because the good boys were just obedient. That's all they were. It was just fear. They weren't good.
06:53 Whereas my friends, they could really be bad. And they weren't afraid to be.
07:01 But so then when they were good, that was really something. It was a real achievement.
07:05 And it wasn't pasting cowardice. And I always thought the school system had failed so badly
07:10 because those were the sorts of boys, the tougher ones, that were likely to drop out.
07:14 It's like, at grade 10, they thought, "I'm not putting my hand up to go to the bathroom anymore.
07:19 You know, up yours. I'm out of here." It's like, "Yeah, well, fair enough.
07:24 You know, you're 16, you're 6'2", you weigh 200 pounds, you're like tough as a bloody boot.
07:30 You could go out in oil rigs and work, because you could, 40 below weather.
07:34 You're not putting your hand up anymore to go to the bathroom.
07:37 Is that disobedience? Or is that like the primal spirit of masculinity manifesting itself
07:43 in its disruptive form? So, you know, one of the things that I've become reasonably well-known
07:49 for saying is that you have to be dangerous to be good. And the more dangerous you are,
07:54 the better you can be, because you have all that capacity for evil, mayhem, destruction.
08:02 And yet you turn it to a higher purpose. Maybe that's part of the issue of the adversary,
08:08 all things considered. Better to master evil than not to have it at all.
08:12 You speak about "meek". The meek shall inherit the earth.
08:18 Yeah, well, I don't know if that's an accurate interpretation, and I can never find where I
08:23 found the interpretation of what "meek" meant. But it was something like,
08:26 "Those who can use swords, but sheath them."
08:32 Right. They'll inherit the earth. Something like that.
08:35 Forgiveness is a big part of the Pinocchio story. And there's a feminine element to it, right?
08:42 The blue fairy. Yeah, yeah. That's nature. That's Mary. That's the mother of God. All of that
08:48 in its fairy tale form. It's the same universe of imagery. I mean, she's a star, you know.
08:54 She radiates cosmic light, and she's magic. And she entices Pinocchio, too. She's the part of
09:01 life that entices. And that's the mother. A mother entices a baby into existence. Even true of rats.
09:06 Rats who are deprived of maternal licking die. You can feed them all you want. Their gastrointestinal
09:13 system shut down, and they die. And it's the same with human infants. That was seen in the…
09:18 Remember the orphans in Romania? Yes, that's right.
09:21 After Ceausescu? Yeah.
09:22 Right. And so they had no physical attention. There's a whole literature on that.
09:28 Jak Panksepp, who's a great effective neuroscientist, did a lot of investigation
09:32 into the necessity of maternal touch for the development of the infant. It's not optional,
09:38 that love. It's not optional. That entices the infant into existence. And that's that love.
09:44 It's like, "This is worth it. You're worth it. Come along. Come along. Live, grow, expand.
09:50 Be good. Be good." So why does Pinocchio… Why is he allowed to become a real boy?
09:57 Because it's better than being a puppet. And because maybe everything aims for the better.
10:02 Maybe. Is that ethic embedded in the structure of being itself? Well, we're manifestations of that
10:09 being. Who knows what that means? We have some relationship to the infinite. This is independent
10:14 of your belief in God, you know. We have some relationship to the infinite. Well, how is that
10:20 related to value? Good, beautiful, true, all that. Is that part of the substructure of being itself?
10:27 Is that merely a human overlay? And what does "merely" mean?
10:31 "Merely human." An overlay. All those things. So it's better, maybe, to be a good person than to
10:41 be a puppet of unseen forces behind the scenes. You've brought up several times. Let me ask this
10:48 last question. Do you believe that we are… I mean, it's being called a consciousness that we
10:57 all have that connects us. And there's no way of actually proving this. I'm just curious about your
11:03 personal view. It connects us through our speech. And we are unbelievably good at shared intention,
11:08 right? I mean, you and I can… And children do this when they play. We can mutually specify a
11:13 goal and inhabit the same conscious space. So in some real sense, it's connected. And in some real
11:19 sense, it's the same thing. Your consciousness is not qualitatively different than mine in its essence.
11:25 How could that be? We have the same biological structure. That's such a complex thing that
11:31 the variation is bound to be limited. If you had to just
11:34 predict what we might be able to figure out a hundred years from now, or maybe never,
11:40 is there a collective unconscious that's allowing the localized teamwork?
11:45 I don't think you have to hypothesize that in some sort of mystical sense. You know,
11:51 that if you go deep into the unconscious, you find a place where we're united in some
11:55 non-local place. I think it's more like the zeitgeist idea is that there is a spirit that
12:01 inhabits all of us that is a product of our capacity to imitate. And that has its own
12:09 essence. And we communicate in all sorts of ways that we don't understand. And that produces all
12:13 sorts of manifestations that unite us. You know, you see that for example, think about it this way.
12:18 Every decade has its own look. Right? Why? Well, because we're all imitating each other. Right?
12:24 And so there's a movement that's happening that we're all engaged in. And it's a consequence of
12:29 our communication that none of us really guides. Zeitgeist, spirit of the times. And at the deepest
12:35 level, that's the collective unconscious in some real sense. Now, it's more complicated than that
12:40 because the collective unconscious would also be part of your unconscious and mind. That's the
12:47 same that allows us to understand, say, fairy tales like Pinocchio. Right? We don't understand
12:52 how we understand them at all. My son watched the whale scene in Pinocchio where the whale turns
12:59 into a dragon, essentially a fire-breathing dragon, and causes Pinocchio's death. He watched that over
13:04 and over and over, like 400 times when he was four. It's like, why? Well, there's a lot in that.
13:10 Who knows what he was learning? So that's a manifestation of the collective unconscious
13:15 as well. But you don't have to assume some sort of mystical union underneath everything,
13:21 even though that might be a possibility. I tend not to, you know, multiply explanatory
13:25 hypothesis beyond necessity. There's simpler ways of accounting for a lot of that. And
13:30 that's better. It just seems like there's something so archetypal in these stories.
13:36 It's hard to imagine we're not hardwired to do certain things. And perhaps it's as simple as a
13:43 biologic driver that you respect your parents, or you appreciate there's things out there you
13:48 don't understand. It's the proclivity to imitate. It's so deep in us. What do we imitate? Well,
13:54 just think about a child playing house. He's the father. Well, does he mechanically represent
14:00 every action he just saw his father take? No. He looks at the father in multiple manifestations
14:06 across multiple times, and is also informed by the media he's been consuming. And he acts out
14:14 the embodiment of the spirit of the father. That's what he does. And a child does that. It's like,
14:20 is there a spirit of the father? Yes, it's the commonality of all manifestations of behavior
14:25 and perception across all instances of what we call paternal behavior. That is the spirit of
14:30 the father. Is there a benevolent element to that? Yes. Is there a tyrannical element? Yes.
14:36 Is it archetypal? Yes. Because we're so smart that we imitate the pattern, not the-- we imitate the
14:45 underlying commonality and not the particular manifestations. Because we can abstract. It's
14:52 a remarkable thing, and it's so deep, that impetus to imitate. And it grips us. It grips us way
14:58 underneath rationality. In fact, it directs rationality itself, because we pay attention
15:03 to what those who we are compelled to imitate believe to be important.
15:07 Jordan Peterson, thank you very much. Thank you very much.
15:10 God bless you.