The Next Lion

HARVEY: 

It's The Law of The Jungle now, mate, innit? 

LEN: 

Hmm. There are these two blokes, right? 

In a tent, in the jungle. 

HARVEY: 

You got another one for me, ain't you? Go on, then, go on. 

LEN: 

It's really dark, and they hear this terrible noise outside the tent. 

This terrible roaring noise. 

And one bloke turns to the other bloke and he says, 

' Do you hear that? '

HARVEY: 

What? 

LEN: 

I said, 'Did you hear that? '

HARVEY: 

Oh, right, yeah. 

LEN: 

' That was a lion. '

(The Doctor starts to pay attention to the anecdote.) 

LEN: 

And the other bloke, he doesn't say anything.

He just starts putting on his running shoes. 

And the other bloke turns to him and says, 

' What are you doing? 

You can't outrun a lion!! '

The bloke turns to him and says, 

' I don't have to outrun the lion. '

HARVEY: (feeble laugh) 

Don't get it. 

Time's Champion : 

He doesn't have to outrun the lion, only his friend. 

Then the lion catches up with his friend and eats him. 

The Strong survive, The Weak are killed. 

The Law of the Jungle. 

HARVEY: 

Oh yeah. Very clever. 

Time's Champion : 

Yes, very clever — if you don't mind losing your friend. 

But what happens when The Next Lion turns up...? 

(The cat is watching The Doctor.) 

LEN: 

What next lion? 

(The black cat burst out from behind the shelf of cat food and runs out of the shop.) 

Time's Champion : 

I think you'd better get your running shoes on, gentlemen.

Peterson: 

So I got a story to tell you that you might like because I’ve thought a lot about that Use of Language. 

Because language can be used as camouflage, 

and so here’s the story :

I think I got this from Robert Sapolsky. 

So he was talking about zebras, 

and zebras of course have stripes. 

And hypothetically that’s associated with camouflage. 

But it’s not a straightforward association because 

zebras are black and white, 

and  they’re on the veldt 

along with The Lions. 

The Lions are camouflaged because they’re grass colored, but the bloody zebras are black and white. 

You can see them like 15 miles away.

So biologists go out to study zebras, 

and they’re making notes on a zebra. 

And they watch it, then they look down 

at their notes, and then they look up. 

But they think, ‘Uh oh, I don’t know 

which zebra I was looking at.’ 

The camouflage is actually against the herd because 

a zebra is a herd animal, not an individual. 

So the black and white stripes break up 

the animal against the herd, 

so you can’t identify it.

So this was a quandary for the biologists, 

so they did one of two things. 

One was drive  a jeep up to the zebra herd, 

and use a dab of red paint 

and dab the haunch of the zebra, 

or tag it with an ear tag 

like you use for cattle. 

The Lions would kill it. 

So as soon as it became identifiable 

the predators could organize their hunt 

around that identifiable animal.

That’s why there’s the old idea that lions and predators take down the weak animals, but they don’t. 

They take down the identifiable animals. 

So that’s the thing: if you stick your damn head up, you get picked off by the predators. 

One of the things that academics seem to do is congregate together in herd-like entities, and then they share a language. And the language unites them.

As long as they share the same set of linguistic tools among themselves, they know that there isn’t anybody in the coterie that’s going to attack them or destabilize the entire herd. 

And that seems to me to account for that impenetrable use of language.

It’s group protection strategy. It has absolutely nothing to do with the search for. . . It’s the search for security within a system and not the desire to expand The System.

Paglia: So true. To me it’s blatantly careerist because it was about advancement, and it was also about the claim that somehow they have like special expertise. 

This is a special technical language. 

"No one else can understand it. Only we can."