so anyways Pinocchio was transformed
into a victim and he's offered this he's
offered this identity and he takes it
now it's partly because he deceived and
manipulated but it's also partly because
the Fox offers him the abandonment of
responsibility as payment for as payment
for adopting the victim identity so this
is where his own lack of morality let's
say because this is all about Pinocchio
development as a character plays a role
in his demise so if I'm a victim then
everyone else owes me something and I
don't have to take any responsibility
and so one of the things I've wondered
here's something to think about it might
be that the sense of meaning that life
can provide to you is proportionate to
the amount of responsibility you decide
to take on not that be very strange if
it was the case you know because
responsibility of course is a kind of
weight obviously and it's difficult to
take on responsibility but if any
positive emotion that you feel and your
control of anxiety and the control over
pain is dependent on the activation of
these systems that watch you move
towards a desired goal then more
complete and weighty the goal is the
more kick there's going to be in the
observation that you're moving towards
it and you know you kind of already know
this because you'll you'll have observed
in your own life that when you're
engaged in something that you believe in
that the time passes properly you know
you can see this even if you're maybe
you're reading a paper and it's actually
related in some intelligible manner to
something that you want to learn so even
though it's difficult you get engaged in
it you can remember it better you could
process it better and you don't you're
not so likely to fall asleep and you're
not so likely to want to find
distractions all of that you can get
into it and it would be very interesting
if that was proportionate to the degree
of responsibility that you're willing to
shoulder and I think you can make a
strong case for that I've also often
wondered imagine you could offer people
a choice here's the choice you could say
well
your life isn't meaningful the nihilists
have got it right there's no meaning in
your life and because of that there's no
reason for you to accept any
responsibility so you can live a
responsibility free life and maybe one
of impulsive pleasure-seeking but a
responsibility free life but the price
you pay is that it doesn't get to be
meaningful or you could say to someone
no we're going to do the opposite we're
going to say you can live a meaningful
life but it's only going to be as
meaningful as the amount of
responsibility that you're willing to
bear and then you might say well what
would people choose because everybody
also always makes noises about wanting
to have a meaningful life but if the
price you pay for that is the adoption
of responsibility that it's not so
obvious that people would choose meaning
over you know over pointless pursuits if
they had to if the benefit they got for
choosing the pointless pursuits was that
they really didn't have to care about
anything they ever did like snow
responsibility and that's really what
Pinocchio is offered and that's what the
coachmen offers them and that's
interesting because you know so far it's
been the Fox and the cat and they're
kind of two-bit hoods and so the
pathological pathway that they offer
Pinocchio is not the worst of the
pathological pathways but here at least
as far as the imagination the collective
imagination that created this movie is
concerned is this is where you get to
the most pathological form of let's call
it temptation and that's the temptation
to engage in to abandon responsibility
and to engage in impulsive pleasure
seeking short-term pleasure seeking so
here's the Fox pretending to be a doctor
investigating Pinocchio's illness and he
makes some notes which is all just
meaningless scribble right like white
noise and it doesn't matter that the
arguments that he's making is are
completely incoherent and it doesn't
matter that he actually doesn't know
anything he what he's selling is easy to
buy and so Pinocchio buys it and by the
end of the conversation with the Fox
he's pretty convinced
he's useless and it needs a vacation no
this is an eatable inedible situation as
well which I touched on the other
lecture I mean let's imagine that you
have a child that little on the neurotic
side so high negative emotion and maybe
one that's also a little bit on the
sickly side so has a variety of let's
say relatively minor ailments but the
ailments nonetheless so what that means
as a parent will say mother for this
example because I want to use the
eatable example you have to make a
decision all the time about exactly how
you're going to treat that child one
decision is well I'm not going to you
don't have to go to school today because
you're not feeling well it's like
they're not that do you make the same
decision the next day and you make the
same decision the next day and let's
imagine that you enable the child to
avoid responsibility as a consequence of
capitalizing on their illness well then
that's not going to be very good for the
child the rule with a sickly child has
to be something like I'm going to push
you right to your limit because
otherwise how is the person going to
figure out what they can do and if they
can't figure out what they can do then
they're not going to be able to make
their way in the world at all and then
that gets muddied very badly if you're
not exactly sure that you want them to
make their way in the world you know
maybe you're just as happy because you'd
be sitting at home alone if your child
was there with you and maybe you'd be
just as happy at some level it's they
never grew up at all because then they
won't leave and so and maybe that's
because you have a terrible marriage and
you're lonesome you know maybe it's an
abusive marriage and your husband has
chased away all your friends so you
don't have anything at all and maybe
that's because he didn't stand up for
yourself very well
apart from the fact that he was you know
tyrannical in his sensual nature and so
then all those little warps and bends in
your psyche are going to manifest
themselves right right in the background
of every single one of those decisions
my daughter had a lot of illnesses when
she was adolescent
they were very serious and it was very
difficult to figure out what to do about
that because you couldn't exactly apply
normative rules right and we always had
to figure out if she was communicating
her symptoms to us how seriously to take
those and the answer was the least
amount of serious possible it's
something like that because we needed to
do and she needed to know what she could
do in spite of the fact that she had
problems and one of the things I really
tried to instill in her and I think it
worked is that you don't ever want to
use it your illness as an excuse for not
doing anything not consciously you know
sometimes you might not know I'm not
feeling well how what can I do well you
don't know right because sometimes when
you're not feeling well you can do more
than you think and sometimes you can do
less than you think it's not like it's
obvious but sometimes it's obvious you
know this little temptation flips
through your mind and you think well I
don't really want to do what I'm doing
today and I'm not feeling very well so I
don't have to do it you do that a
hundred times then you don't know how
sick you are anymore and then you're
then you're in real trouble because not
only are you sick but you actually have
you've muddied the waters and so you
have both problems that is you're
actually ill and you've betrayed
yourself by using that as an excuse not
to pursue your responsibilities and that
I think if you do both of it those both
of those things happen to you at the
same time you're in real trouble that's
really hard not to have that happen so
anyways
Pinocchio gets enticed into believing
that he's a victim the fact that he's
insufficient is used as an excuse by the
Fox and them and the cat to offer him a
trip to Pleasure Island and this is I
think where the movie gets particularly
dark and so off they goes singing away
they have to carry him so you could say
in some sense he's carried by societal
pathology in his own trouble he's
carried like a puppet
off to Pleasure Island