Transcription
I used to ask my students for example, why they were writing an essay. "Why are you bothering with this? Right? What, what's your motivation?" Well, the, the thoroughly indoctrinated and thoughtless students would say, "Well, to get a grade." And I had students who literally could not think beyond that. They, they had no idea that there might be some utility in either thinking or writing outside of the practical consequences of getting the grade.
And I'm not saying that to denigrate the students. I'm saying that to indict the education system because these were students, and these, this was mostly at the University of Toronto where this happened. These were, these were very high caliber students. So they were the beneficiaries, let's say, of 15, beneficiaries of 15 years of education, and many of them had no idea that thinking was useful, right? Well, and it is a bit of a mystery. It's like, why think? Well, if you think before you act, you decrease the probability that you'll do something cataclysmically stupid. So that's, that's the issue. That's why you want your thought criticized because if you have a stupid idea and you act it out, then terrible things will happen to you. And maybe if you discuss your stupid idea with someone who loves you, they'll point out critically why it's stupid, which will hurt your feelings, but you won't die, right? And so parents do that for teenagers all the time, right? And mostly they don't die as a consequence.
So, so what are you doing when you're, you're writing? Well, you're, you're writing. Why are you writing the essay? Well, let's say on the philosophical side, to improve your thinking. Okay, I'm going to leave that aside for a moment. We'll return to that idea. I, I'll just walk through this a little more practically. Well, I have to complete the essay to get marked, and then I have to... Why do you care if you get a mark? Well, I can't pass the course unless I get a mark. Is why do you care if you pass the course? Well, if I don't pass the course, I can't finish my year. Well, why do you care about that? Well, if I don't finish the year, then I can't get my degree. And so, well, who, why do you care about your degree? But there's an infinite regress in questioning here. "Why do you care about your degree?" Students start to get uncomfortable if you push them to that point because they often have been on a kind of automatic track, right? It's that if, especially if they're conscientious students, they went to university because, well, that's the thing you do if you're smart once you graduate from high school, or it used to be the thing you do if you're smart. Now, I don't know what you do if you're smart. Maybe you go to Peterson Academy. So, well, $300,000 to become an idiot nihilistic Marxist seems like a very bad deal to me. So, I think it'd just be more fun to become a nihilist at the bar, you know, so be cheaper, too. Probably better for you neurologically in the final analysis.
Anyways, so you want to get your degree. Okay. Well, why, why bother? Well, because you want to get a job. Okay. Well, why, why do you want to get a job? Well, you need a job to keep body and soul together. But there's more to it than that, right? You maybe you want a job that piques your interest and compels you. So, it's focused on something, what? Something important to you, something that has some meaning to you. And then maybe if the person is wise, they're also thinking, "Well, you know, I need to take my place as a responsible social agent," and if, if I have a job, well, maybe I can attract a husband or wife, and you know, maybe I can provide for my children. So maybe the career is nested in something like, what, what service to community, service to family, hopefully. Now, you know, that there could also be, well, I'd like to make a boatload of money and pursue my hedonistic whims in consequence, which is a delusional dream, but, you know, young people can certainly, and older people can certainly have that.
And then you might say, "Well, why, why do you want to grow up?" Let's say, if we assume that establishing some responsibility and taking care of people is part of maturation, and that's a tricky question. Why bother maturing? And so that's the question addressed in the story of Peter Pan, right? So Peter Pan is, he's Pan. Pan is the god of everything, god of the wilderness, god of wild instinct. And Peter Pan is an eternal child, right? And he's got this Pan-like nature because to be a child is to be under the sway of primordial instinct. And there is something attractive about that. It's very spontaneous. Like, there's something very attractive about little kids, right? I mean, they're terrible little barbarians, and they cannot govern themselves. Like, there are no societies of successful 2-year-olds, right? So, well, this is a really important thing to understand because, you know, people are enamored of the purity and brilliance of their toddlers, and I can understand that because they are remarkable, but they're also, they're not adults, and so they, they're not self-governing, they're not autonomous, they can't take care of themselves, and so all that wonder is fine, but it doesn't work, right? It, it has to be replaced by maturity.
Okay. But is the sacrifice of the spontaneity of childhood worth the burden of maturity? This is the problem that Peter Pan wrestles with. Now, he has Tinkerbell, who I like to think of as the porn fairy, and so, cuz she doesn't really exist. She's kind of an attractive little sprite, but, and enticing. And she flits around, but she's imaginary. And so, she doesn't really require any real commitment. And so, porn fairy works out quite nicely in that regard. And it's certainly the case that being enticed by the porn fairy is a way of continuing a kind of pathological immaturity and foregoing a certain kind of responsibility because it means the possibility of sexual gratification with no relationship and with no adult status. And you might say, "Well, who the hell cares? Like, if it gratifies my immediate whim, then why not do it?" Um, and you'd especially believe that if your identity was that you were nothing but your immediate desire. And so, and you know, pornography is like 30% of internet traffic. It's, this is not some trivial little social detail. This is a major problem, you know, and we're so, what would you say? We're so accustomed to the pathology of pornography that we don't even notice what a cataclysmic problem it actually represents. We've just given up even being concerned about it, except, you know, on the periphery. So that's not good, because it's an immense enticement to this sort of hedonistic immaturity that is one of the consequences of the collapse of our identity. And so, but that isn't the only issue that Peter Pan wrestles with.
Now, you remember, and you may remember in the story, that he makes friends with this girl Wendy, and Wendy's an actual girl, and Wendy decides she's going to grow up and age, right? And she gets married and she has children, and Peter Pan remains in Neverland, which is where everyone immature lives in a land that doesn't exist. And he's king of the lost boys, which is a kind of king. But if all your subjects are lost boys and you're the king, that kind of means you're the most hopeless of the worst of the lost boys. Not, not. It's like being the tyrant of a totalitarian state. It's like, well, are you the most successful or the least successful? And I would say, if you rule over hell, you're the least successful devil in hell, not the most successful devil. And so that's a good thing to know about tyrants. And so Peter Pan maintains childhood. He refuses to move to maturity. He satisfies himself with the imaginary feminine, foregoing any relationship with a real woman, a sacrificial relationship with a real woman. Well, why sacrificial? Death of childhood, death of immaturity. The necessity to forego all other sexual opportunities. All that's sacrificial. Sacrificial in relationship to what? Maturity and responsibility.
Well, why bother with that? Well, that's the dilemma that Captain Hook confronts Peter Pan with. Because Captain Hook is a brutal, barbaric, power-mad, dominating tyrant. And when Peter Pan looks to adulthood and sees the face of Captain Hook, he thinks, "I don't want any part of that." And Captain Hook is worse than a mere tyrant because he's, he's a coward as well. And what's he afraid of? Well, he's afraid of death and time. And how do you know that? Well, what chases him? Well, it's a crocodile. And the crocodile is a predator. And time is the ultimate predator. And the crocodile's already got a taste of him, just like it has a taste of all of us, which is why he's missing a hand. And it has a clock in its stomach that's ticking. And so Hook is a tyrant because he's terrified of predatory time. He's terrified of his own mortality. That makes him power-mad. And then Peter Pan looks at Captain Hook and he thinks, "Yeah, no, that's not for me." But he thinks that's a moral decision. But really, what he's doing is maintaining his own immaturity so he can stay magic and not take any responsibility. This is not a good pathway to identity, right?
And so you can see in that, too, that there's something, if you think that through, the way we thought it through, let's say, you can see that there's something that isn't morally relative about the idea of mature responsibility, right? It's actually a catastrophe that Peter Pan stays hedonistic and immature. It's not someone's opinion that that's not a good thing. It's, it's not a sustainable mode of being in any way. It leads to his own pathological degeneration across time. There's implications in the Peter Pan text continually that his most likely outcome is suicide, and his refusal to mature is a form of suicide anyways, because he's killing his best future self. That's what you do when you remain immature, right? Is you kill your best future self. And if you do that, then the temptation for actual suicide is eventually going to loom large because your life will be so miserable as a consequence of your isolated and unproductive loneliness that the weight of existence will become unbearable to you. And so there's nothing in that that's okay, right? It's not just an alternative pathway, that hedonistic immaturity. It's a complete bloody catastrophe. And it's not only a catastrophe subjectively, although that's not good. It's a catastrophe socially because, well, Wendy loves Peter Pan, but she doesn't get to marry him because he decides to stay in Neverland, and so that's not good for her. And so the, he, the immature hedonist, terrified of the patriarchal tyrant, let's say, not only dooms himself to a motive behavior that's, that's, that culminates in something like suicidally distressed nihilism, but also violates the, the order of the relationship between men and women because he refuses to grow up to become the sort of person that a woman could establish a relationship with. And of course, that demolishes any possibility of future family. And so, in so far as part of what gives your life meaning across time, as my wife pointed out when she started to talk, is the fact that you have children that you might love. So, that's a good deal for you, and them, and then grandchildren as well. Is you cut all that off, and then what the hell are you going to do when you're 40 or 50 or 60 and isolated and alone and still terminally immature?
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