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Jan. 1, 2019 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin
27:34
Objective Critique - A Defence of MauLer
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There's a YouTuber called Morla whose content I particularly enjoy because he does stress that he is going to try and be objective with his reviews.
Now reviews of movie and art and any kind of criticism of this kind of thing is very difficult to be objective about because of your own subjective preferences.
And it can be difficult to try and explain to people what one even means by the term objective when one is describing a piece of art.
So I thought I would address it because of this particular Reddit post.
Now I don't know where this came from and I don't know who wrote it and I don't even know whether it was widely seen or not.
But I'm happy to help this be widely seen because I think it raises important points that probably should be addressed.
So this is, I believe, a leftist talking about Morla's content and why his channel is growing so quickly.
They say this helps add to my theory that more people have subscribed to him simply because he set himself up in a particular camp against another set of people on social media.
It's entirely possible.
People are going to go towards content that they feel represents their beliefs and their worldview much more than they will to content that is opposed to that.
And that's one of the main problems with social media.
It funnels people into these particular ideological channels and makes them set against other opposing ideological beliefs without critically engaging with or examining any of it and simply dismissing it on very flimsy grounds.
You see this with a lot of leftists online.
You also see this a lot with the alt-right.
It's not very healthy.
I think it creates a kind of insular and almost cult-like belief system that emanates out of these groups.
So I try not to do that.
For example, I watch Jimmy Dore, David Packman, Kyle Kalinsky, and there was another leftist, I can't remember off the top of my head, as much as I watch people like Stephen Crowder, Ben Shapiro, etc., etc.
I don't necessarily agree with everything they say, but there is definitely value in their content from both left and right, and I, as a critical thinking being, distill what I believe to be valuable from it, and I take account of what I believe to be incorrect, and set myself against that, I suppose.
I don't bother doing response videos to these people, by and large, because generally I think they're a force for good, even if they are partisan.
They are still concerned about what they perceive to be reality, but I don't think that they would say that they're being objective.
I think they would openly admit to their biases in one direction or another.
But anyway, in reality, this is a lot less to do with Star Wars and more to do with how people want to be associated themselves with one camp versus another camp.
A lot of this is revealed in his manifesto at the beginning of his most recent video.
He promotes himself as objective without really going into what that is and why anything he actually says is objective in the first place.
Well, that's an interesting thing to say and a good point.
And to be honest with you, it's kind of unreasonable to expect someone to have a fully formed and functional definition of what being objective is because it's actually a very difficult thing to define, especially when you consider the complexities of it.
But I have spent a lot of time studying this now and thanks to postmodernism, I think I can give us something resembling an answer.
At least something that I think will do for the context of a movie review.
So let's just go with Google's dictionary definition of the word objective.
Of a person and their judgment not influenced by personal feelings or opinions and considering and representing facts.
This is what we could otherwise describe as being fair, giving both sides of any issue or multiple sides of any issue a fair hearing and taking them all into account when making our judgments.
trying to accept that we are flawed and partial creatures and trying to create an impartial judgment by accepting and understanding our own biases and prejudices and trying to set them aside when making our decisions.
Now, the first problem that anyone is going to encounter and the first one a postmodernist will leap at is, well, what do you even perceive to be important about the thing that you're talking about?
That's inherently based on your biases and ideological lens and these things change as your ideological lens changes.
For example, a communist and a capitalist will see the Canto Bite scene from whichever Star Wars movie it was, The Last Jedi, I think it was, and they will perceive different things about it.
In fact, that whole scene was in fact a dog whistle to the communist or the socialist sort of side, the anti-capitalist side, because the way that it was portrayed is deliberate and intentionally designed to show you a flawed version of capitalism, what they believe to be exploitation of presumably the proletariat by the capitalist class who are living the high life while you see the workers and serfs struggling to make ends meet to support the whole superstructure.
And we are informed that this is supported by an arms trade, I think it was, and I presume there's some kind of underlying pacifist ideology to this, and this is assumed to be inherently immoral.
Just for anyone questioning, the arms trade is not inherently immoral.
If we didn't have arms, we wouldn't be able to protect our liberal democracies.
The form of government, the only form of government, in fact, that we find to be moral, we need arms to protect this.
So we are unable to be pacifists and enjoy this kind of lifestyle.
And as George Orle pointed out, a pacifist is only a pacifist because someone else is ready to do violence on their behalf.
It's a conceit that they are afforded because of the ability of others to do violence in their stead.
Essentially, every pacifist is a hypocrite.
But the point of being objective is not that it is a hard and fast rule that one must adhere to at all times.
Being objective is in fact a goal, an ideal, if you will.
And it's one thing that is quickly thrown out of the window by those who are of the more sort of lefty postmodern bent, where they say, well, technically we're all subjective.
And that's true.
Every human being does have a subjective set of senses, and those senses are unique to themselves.
And any perception of what we consider to be wider reality is automatically filtered through these senses.
We can't really be sure that they're telling us the truth.
And often they don't.
Often they deceive us.
But not all the time, and not permanently.
These perceptions can be corrected.
And often it is permanent.
Often we can't necessarily, like if someone's colourblind, they literally cannot physically perceive a certain kind of colour.
Does that mean that colour doesn't exist?
And as soon as we start going down that road, we realize that what we're doing is saying the only things that are real are the things that we perceive to be real.
And our perception of those things is what makes them real.
And without us to perceive them, then effectively there is no reality.
I don't agree with this.
I'm actually on the objectivist side of this argument, where they believe that there is an objective reality that is independent of human perception.
It exists whether we like it or not.
I think that's true.
I don't think that it's true that the world is created through our shared delusions or something like this.
But the question is, if we are all subjective creatures, and we are, and our senses are the only way we have with interacting with the world, and they are, and all the information about the entire universe that we will ever know comes to us through unreliable means, which it does, how can we trust anything that we see or hear?
And how can we be sure that we're seeing reality as it is?
And then we come to the fact that humans are innately emotional creatures and that we cannot be really trusted to make objective judgments on our own.
All true.
But that doesn't mean that we should abandon the idea of the ideal of objectivity.
That is what I would consider a degeneration of our achievements thus far.
It is not that there is no objective reality.
I think that's incontrovertible.
There must be.
Even if, for some reason, God or nature somehow imbued us with such faulty senses that we could never really be sure of anything around us.
The question is, why do we all see the same thing?
Why is it that thousands of people will watch this video and hear the same words and see the same images and all come away with a very similar impression of who is giving the talk, the sort of subject that I'm talking about, even the colour of my hair, the colour of my skin, the background I'm sitting behind in front of, even, why will they all have the same thing?
So if something is being represented to almost everyone, and is a tiny fringe minority of people who either can't or won't perceive it in the same way as the majority of people, is it reasonable for us to conclude that it is a mass delusion and in fact the people who are refusing or unable to perceive what it is that everyone else appears to perceive are correct?
Or is it reasonable to think that there is some deficiency within this minority of people that is preventing them from experiencing reality, objective reality, as everyone else appears to experience it?
We know that we are inherently subjective in our senses.
We know that we are inherently subjective in our value judgments of the things that our senses describe.
So why on earth would we think that any of us could be objective?
Well, the answer is we can't, at least not perfectly.
But perfect objectivity, luckily for us, isn't actually necessary for us to have a reasonably objective description of reality.
It's not a black and white question.
The question is one of resolution.
The question is, how accurately are we representing objective reality?
And at this point, I think we can be fairly sure that at least from what we can perceive and the shared delusion that we are apparently all living in, and the fact that we all have, you know, computers, phones, and whatnot, and we can all see the results of acting as if there is an objective reality, as in assuming that an empirical reality can be measured, something we would otherwise call, I suppose, the scientific method.
There must be something true about this.
Because otherwise, how do we all agree that we have the things that we have?
How could reality be as it is to almost everyone unless there wasn't something objective outside of ourselves that we can still perceive and interact with?
And what sense would it make for either the God or the way that we've evolved, however you believe it, to have imbued us with senses that were so faulty that we could somehow bumble through life and become so successful for so many millennia and build up such an advanced world around us without actually being able to perceive what it is we call reality?
There must be a way of doing this.
Regardless of the fact that our senses are in and of themselves imperfect, they must be useful enough and good enough at their job for us to at least establish that there is some kind of shared reality in which we all live, in which we can interact with one another and actually build something out of what we perceive to have around us.
Put simply, I suppose, is that there is an objective reality and that our senses are giving us a measure of it.
I think we can be sure of this at this point.
Essentially, what I'm saying is I'm not a Cartesian rationalist.
I am a British empiricist.
And so now we come to the question of, well, is anything that Mauler says actually objective in the first place?
Well, it depends on how high your standards are, really, doesn't it?
If your standards are for perfect objectivity, as in the sort of thing a robot might be able to give you, possibly not.
Possibly, you couldn't say that any one thing that he has actually said is definitively objective because of the inherently subjective qualities of the person saying it.
He is, like the rest of us, just a man with fallible senses who is trying to interface with the universe at large as we all seem to perceive it broadly.
Despite the excellent quality of Mauler's work, he is not perfect, and he would not claim to be perfect.
And he wouldn't say that he is saying something that is definitively objective.
I think what he would say is that he is striving for objectivity, because of course, being a man, like everyone else, he is subject to emotional whims, personal preferences, and all this sort of thing.
He is not a machine and cannot give you a machine's interpretation of the technical dimensions of a piece of art.
But I think that is fair to suggest that he considers objectivity to be an ideal.
And he understands that his own personal preferences aren't always the most accurate way of describing the things that he is perceiving.
And it takes some deal of self-awareness to do this, because you need to be able to understand why you feel and interpret a certain thing in a certain way, a certain perception.
I believe that Morler would probably agree that the point would be to take your own subjective preferences and understand them and compartmentalize them and ask yourself, is this appropriate for the context in which that is being applied?
For example, in the Kanto Byte scene, I as a capitalist might find no problem with what's going on there.
And I don't.
I don't actually know that any particular injustice has been done to create this particular scenario.
This might have been the result of a just procedure of events that led up to this happening.
Now, I'm sure that that's not the case because of the writers of Star Wars and the director's intent.
But it could be that that's the case.
And I as a capitalist might think, well, why are these people undermining the rule of law in order to try and right a cosmic wrong that they can't even be sure of in the first place?
But it wouldn't be appropriate for me to take this bias, this preference, this lens, and apply it to the Kanto Bite scene, because I know that wasn't the intention to begin with.
So I, as someone who values objectivity, would hold that as one analysis of that scene.
And I would put that to the side.
And I would say, right, okay, what other potential analyses of this scenario are there?
Now, you can perform many, obviously.
I mean, you can apply any ideological lens that you like.
And the interesting thing about an ideological lens, think of it like the predator's mask in Predator.
You know, it changes vision modes.
That's effectively what you're doing when you adopt an ideological lens.
What it does is highlights particular things about whatever it is you're examining.
And it is from these things that you form your opinions, because obviously you can't have an opinion on something you can't perceive.
The communist looks at the Kanto Bite scene and shows them, in glaring, offensive contrast, the difference in inequality between the haves and the haves-not, have-nots.
So the communist looks at this and thinks, wow, this is a manifest injustice.
And maybe it is, to a communist.
But to say this is the be-all and end-all of the information contained within that scene is not true.
There is obviously more to unpack with this.
And one would have to abandon that ideological lens and apply another one and look at it differently.
How does it look from a feminist perspective?
Are women being fairly represented?
How does it look like from a racial justice perspective?
Are non, I guess, non-humans in the case of Star Wars, are they being fairly represented?
And so on and so on and so on, according to whatever ideological structure that creates the ideological lens that you're looking through.
This is what I would personally interpret as trying to be objective.
To try and look at a certain scene or a scenario or an object through as many different lenses as possible, to get as many different impressions from it, to highlight the various aspects of it.
And it's through that that we can try and form something that approximates to an objective stance.
Now, I appreciate that that's not going to be perfectly objective.
There are going to be lots of lenses that I could use that I didn't use.
There are going to be lots of things that I didn't think to use.
There are going to be things I don't even understand that I should be looking for that I don't see.
So I'm not saying by any stretch of the imagination that I am perfect.
But the point is, I think it's a good thing to look at any situation through multiple ideological lenses in order to try and evaluate whether I am looking at this as objectively as I am capable.
And I think that is the difference.
Because the alternative is to abandon the quest for objectivity, which will never be successful, at least perfectly anyway, and will always be flawed in many, many different ways, but will always be better than the alternative, which is to see it only through one lens.
To be deliberately subjective, to not try and account for my own personal preferences and biases, and just fall headlong in saying, if I perceive something about it that is true, and doubtless the communists are perceiving some kind of truth of the situation in that particular scene, that's the only truth.
My subjective truth becomes reality.
Might not be true for other people.
It might not even be true at all.
It might be my biases showing me the things that I want to see in it, which is really the source of what we call hot takes.
It's not that there isn't anything else to be seen, but it's that I haven't tried to look for anything else.
Because I don't see any value in the concept of being objective, because I, as a subjectivist, have undermined the concept of objective thought, objective reality, objective perception.
We know that these aren't perfect, and therefore I will abandon this quest altogether.
That way, I can see precisely what I want to see.
And it's not even that I'm going to take my subjective perspective and say that this is objective reality.
I'm not even going to care about objective reality.
I'm going to call this truth.
And that's the problem that most people have with these various ideological groups that this poster talks about later on in this post.
It's not that there is only one way of looking at it, it's that there are many ways of looking at it.
And Mauler, in his quest to be as deep with his analysis as possible, understands this and is going to try and look at this from all possible angles, at least all the angles that he personally finds relevant.
Often what Mauler's doing in his analysis is analyzing the scenario that is created, the world building, and making sure that it is logically congruent and not full of holes that are being patched over for ideological reasons, because people are seeing what they want to see and not using lenses that would otherwise make these holes far more glaring and far more obvious.
Making excuses, making up reasons, etc., etc.
This is what Mauler means, in my opinion, when he says he's going to try and be objective.
He's looking for the flaws in other people's worldviews.
What is being left out and what needs to be filled in.
This is what I think he means when he says he is trying to be objective.
Because like I said, I'm sure that he would believe and would say himself that he is not perfectly objective.
It is just an ideal that he holds to.
Unlike the sort of postmodern left who have decided that objectivity is for suckers and they can get by just fine on their own subjective perceptions and beliefs.
So coming to the second paragraph, it's basically sagging of a cat all over again.
Well, I hope at this point I've now explained what I mean by objective and the fact that I understand that it is inherently a faulty concept and a technically unattainable ideal, but it's like all things.
It's not the end goal that matters, it's the journey.
It's the act.
As who was it was summarizing Aristotle when they said excellence is not an act, it's a habit.
It's something you do over time and eventually you'll become better and better and better and your analysis will become more and more sophisticated even if it's not perfect.
But just because something is not perfect doesn't mean that it has no value.
And I think that the reason Mauler's channel is doing so well at the moment is because the value that is extracted by the viewers from his content is far superior to those who say, you know what, fuck objectivity.
I'm going to be deliberately subjective and say that one thing is bad because I don't like it.
And that doesn't actually extract the maximum amount of information and therefore maximum amount of value to the user, the content of it, from the people watching.
Carl Benjamin defined himself because he opposed an East Sarkeesian and people fell in line with him because they opposed an East Sarkeesian.
There's probably some truth for that.
There's probably truth that there are people who just don't like being attacked for being male.
And I'm sure that I was like that back when I first started.
But I hope it's self-evident that I've done an awful lot of work since that point.
And the critique of me that these people are using seems to be rather out of date.
Now Carl wants to actually promote his own ideas.
He's losing support.
Am I?
I mean, I'm still making as much on Subscribestar as I was on Patreon, and that was more than ever before.
And my viewing figures are in the millions.
My channel's nearly a million subscribers.
Where is the lack of support?
I have many, many connections.
I'm not even sure where the support has gone, if it's disappeared at all.
Still do sold-out live shows.
I mean, this seems to be all going very well, even when I promote my particular philosophy, which in my case is liberalism.
Again, it's something that I think is not as exclusionary as the alternatives that deliberately say yes.
I think, in fact, being subjective is a good thing.
That in itself, to me, seems to be inherently more divisive, because you're deliberately leaving out certain other perspectives and worldviews.
And I'm not doing that.
And I think that's a far more inclusive way of doing any of this sort of thing.
So I guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on this one.
Why?
Because people figured out that he brought nothing to the table other than the fact that he opposed someone a lot of people didn't like.
I hope this video goes as a somewhat of a refutation of that point.
This is basically what Mauler is promoting himself as.
I don't agree.
I think Mauler is promoting himself, as I've described objectivity, as a goal, as an inspirational ideal.
It's not going to be perfect.
No one is.
But everyone understands that and perseveres anyway and produces higher value content than acting as if this is not even worth attempting in the first place.
He's not like H. Bombergye, Joseph Anderson or Quinton.
I only know H. Bomberguy from that, but again, someone who's openly subjective and doesn't care about objectivity and in fact finds the concept laughable, I'm sure.
I don't actually watch that much of his content, to be honest.
Or all of these other people.
He's not like those people who precursor the bulk of their material with, in my opinion.
Mauler is not like, not like, not like, etc.
Well, that's not true.
I mean, Mauler says in his critiques, when he's giving an opinion, this is my opinion.
When he is observing reality through whichever lens he is viewing at the time, and most people don't even realise that they're changing lenses when they start looking at things in different ways, when they see other holes in the narrative and things like this.
A lot of people aren't even sure that they're changing lenses, but they are, and this is what they're observing.
But you've got people like H. Bomberguy who are intelligent enough to know that this is what they're doing and do it anyway because it's easy and it's satisfying.
And what will his downfall be when Morler actually tries to create anything, promote anything, do anything other than be the opposite of what many are already predisposed to disliking?
Well, there's some truth in that as well, to be honest.
But I don't agree that this will be a downfall.
I think this will be the natural side effect of coming from an objective position to a necessarily subjective one.
If you're going to promote something, that thing is going to have defined boundaries.
There's going to be a particular worldview that goes into creating that thing, and it is not, in and of itself, going to be something that is all-encompassing.
So you're going to have people who have different worldviews and who have other ideological lenses that reveal flaws or objections to the thing that is being created, and they won't like it.
For example, if Morler were to create a film of his own, and there was a black man and a white woman who were a couple in the film and they were the main characters and the story focused around their lives.
The alt-right may well have really enjoyed his critiques of social justice-created films because these obviously are created from their own particular lens and they're going to have various holes in them and Morler can point them out.
So he's going to attract a wider audience because he's going to be observing things that are demonstrable to multiple different ideological lenses.
But when he creates an interracial couple in a film, then yeah, of course, the alt-right are going to object to this.
They're going to say, well, I'm not going to support this.
I find this offensive.
I find this to go against my morals because this is part of the white genocide.
So I object and I'm going to withdraw my support from that.
But that doesn't mean Morler won't have any support for what he's doing.
And ultimately, maybe the story he writes will be so good that that doesn't really matter.
They'll say, well, you know, I didn't like that, but there were so many other things of value that I extracted from his work that I can overlook that.
I mean, you'd have to be a real zealot not to be able to do that, wouldn't you?
But they are making a good point here, and this is one of the reasons why movie critics rarely make good directors.
They're very good at pointing out where other people have gone wrong, but it is very difficult to create and it's very easy to criticize, or at least it's easier to criticize.
And they finish with: Welcome to the post-Gamergate social media, where popularity is defined by what you're opposed to rather than what you stand for.
No, it's just that you can amass a wider audience by being more objective and trying to serve multiple different interest groups and ideological perspectives rather than simply promoting one thing that will serve one particular ideological interest group, which is where Star Wars is going wrong.
They're deliberately trying to promote an agenda instead of trying to tell a story from an apolitical view or from a view that might be satisfactory to multiple different political spectrums.
They are in fact choosing one and saying that the rest have something wrong with them and in fact shouldn't get anything out of this.
That's where they're going wrong there.
And I think they should stop that.
They should return to a, I guess, more neutral political lens, one that is more acceptable and more normal towards most of the viewers, rather than choosing a particular one and saying, right, this is it, this is what we're sticking with.
The rest of you are racists or sexists or bigots in some other way.
That's the difference.
I hope I've addressed the major points that our critic had here and hope that I've explained what is and is not objective and why we consider what we say to be objective at least in some way, or at least aiming towards that goal.
And if you're the chap who wrote this, you know, feel free to leave a comment and tell me what you think.
And if you think I'm wrong about something, then tell me.
I mean, I might be wrong about something.
But I've done a lot of reading on this and I hope that I got this right.
I really, I think I did.
But again, I'm just as fallible as everyone else.
But that's what I would interpret as being objective, and I think is what most other people, probably not in such wordy terms, also understand by the term objective.
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