DoctorOz: Jordan Peterson on the Profound Meaning of Pinocchio

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