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Jan. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:59
49 Artists, Capitalism and Intolerance (Part 1)

Why people think the market is cruel

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Time Text
Good morning, all you kind and gentle creatures.
It's deaf.
It is 9.14am on Monday, January the 9th, 2006.
And I am heading to a meeting with a fine gentleman at an engineering company to talk about a proposal we're doing for the city of London.
That's not the swinging city of London, England, but the rather less, decidedly less swinging city of London, Ontario.
And after that, I have to head downtown for a rather delicate meeting wherein we are selling a system to a hospital for sick children in Toronto.
And this is the sort of delicate moral issue that I have to figure out how to work through, which is that I'm not entirely convinced that we can deliver in the long term the value that we have.
I didn't make the proposal, but I Have to go and try and close the deal, and I'm not entirely positive we can provide to them the value that we have claimed, or that somebody else in the organization who's no longer with us claimed.
And, you know, the last conceivable thing that I would ever want to do is to take money from a hospital for sick children.
I mean, without providing them greater value in return.
So I have to figure out how to work on that.
And what the right course of action is there, and that's the kind of stuff I was talking about.
I think it was last week when I was talking about moral questions that we actually face in life that are a little bit different from, you know, who do we throw overboard from the lifeboat because there's not enough food for everyone.
Those things don't happen.
Things like today, you know, do, especially in the software industry, right?
Overpromising is the cancer of the software industry, and it arises from a real insecurity.
I mean, basically, to under promise and over deliver is where you want to be.
Not ever to over promise.
Even if you over promise and then just manage to squeak in your delivery, you still are not going to be satisfying the client as much as if you'd under promised and over delivered.
So what I'd like to talk about this morning is tolerance.
And this is something that I find quite a fascinating topic.
When people talk about the free market, there are all of these horrible phrases that people put together, like dog-eat-dog capitalism.
I can't remember which wag pointed this out, but he said they don't even do that in nature.
Dogs don't even eat dogs in nature, let alone in the free market.
So you hear dog-eat-dog capitalism, cutthroat competition, You know, rugged individualism is sort of one way of putting it, but, of course, rugged individualism is still pejorative because, you know, it sort of says that as long as we're all swarthy, bearded lumberjacks out there swinging our timber in the free market, we are okay.
But, you know, if you're sort of a soft, delicate kind of personality or, you know, a woman with a preference for having children, that you're not welcome in this, you know, rugged frontier of the free market.
So there's that.
There's lots of phrases that are used in the free market to talk about how horrible it is.
And I sort of have some understanding of this from perhaps a different perspective.
The way that most people get their perception of ideas is through art.
And, you know, one of the problems that exists in the current environment, and it's been the case for quite some time.
One of the problems that exists in the current environment is that artists don't like the free market, or at least a lot of artists don't like the free market.
And the reason for that is that, you know, art is one of these places in the market where the supply of participants, or the supply of willing participants, vastly outstrips the demand.
And so you have lots of people who want to be, say, a writer.
And why?
Because you get to set your own hours, you don't have a boss, you're self-employed, you get all the tax benefits, you get to sort of have... you get to create something that is reproducible, right?
So you are a manufacturer of words and, you know, other people can produce those words for you, so you're sort of self-employed and producing a product that's very easy to reproduce.
You know, it can go out in magazines, it can go out on the web.
I mean, the reproduction costs are insignificant.
And so, you know, it is a very compelling and, you know, I imagine quite pleasurable situation to be in, to be a professional writer and to have all of that sort of flexibility.
Now, of course, it's really not that case.
Writing is incredibly hard work.
I was working on a essay this weekend for Lou Rockwell on the argument for morality in relation to the welfare state.
Ugh, it's so hard!
It's called heavy lifting from a sitting position, I think I've heard, and I think that's quite true.
So, you know, artists don't like the free market because the vast majority of them are going to be rejected, right?
It's like models or actors or, you know, all of these people who want that kind of uh... life musicians you know another kind of all of the people who want that kind of life well you know as i said before like ninety five percent of the money goes to five percent of the people and you know the magic alchemy of talent is something that You know, people sort of have to recognize as the core value differentiator and it can't be transferred, right?
You can't transfer the skill.
Like, you know, I could teach you how to program a computer and, you know, you might not be Bill Gates, but you'd be pretty good, right?
But you can't teach me how to write songs and have me immediately be able to, you know, earn a living at it.
You know, you can't teach that kind of stuff, right?
There's no Lennon and McCartney school of songwriting, so artists don't like the market in general.
They don't like business because, you know, for the vast majority of people, and I certainly put myself in this category, you know, art should be a hobby.
And the only reason I put myself in that category is not because I don't believe I could make a living as a writer or as a communicator, but simply because I have traded, and you know, voluntarily and willingly, I have traded exposure for accuracy, right?
I mean, the current culture is so corrupt that You really can't get exposure if you want to go for accuracy.
Now, I've tried to sort of sweeten it with a little bit of humor and a little bit of a sort of more gentle approach, and a little bit less of an academic approach than a lot of communicators in the libertarian world, but that's been more than compensated by the fact that I am going for sort of philosophical and moral truth without compromise, right?
Which has alienated me from most of my... No media outlet would carry me.
I mean, they'd be crazy!
They'd be shut down for hate speech within 30 seconds.
So there's just no profit.
And of course, even if they weren't, the readers or listeners would go completely through the roof.
So artists have a real problem with the free market because they're not in demand at all.
Every cockroach in Los Angeles has a screenplay that he's going to try and sell you.
I produced a film that I wrote a number of years ago.
And it was a finalist at the Hollywood Film Festival, and when I went down there for the screening, I got off the plane, got into the limo, and a guy heard I was a producer, and I told him it was like a small, independent film, and it wasn't anything blockbuster-y, but he still tried to pitch me his screenplay.
And, you know, there's a cab driver.
So there's so many people aching to get into this magical world of art, and so few people who actually make it that artists have this view of the free market that is, you know, cutthroat and competitive and exclusionary and so on.
But, of course, that's simply because they're working in an area of the free market where, you know, few people can make it.
And, you know, unfortunately, and that's the last thing before I get onto tolerance, which I think I'll make this a part of somehow.
Yeah, that's the plan.
The other problem, too, is that you have the vanity of those who do make it produces significant problems for those who are still outside the magic biosphere of culture.
Because one of the problems that happens with artists is that if you are an artist who's made it, right?
So you're some director who has made it.
Now, have you worked harder than anybody else?
Well, maybe, but probably not.
Because, you know, lots of people in the art world work very hard and give up on a lot of things to get into the cultural mainstream, or any part of the culture for that matter.
You've been lucky and you've taken risks, which a lot of people do.
And you've got some skill, which a lot of people do.
But maybe you just happened to have your hands on that one hot property that was the screenplay that sort of clicked with everybody.
Or maybe you just waited that extra week.
I know a guy Who knows a guy who went to Los Angeles to sell a screenplay or two and was there for a year or two and then was, you know, within a week of heading back home to resume his former occupation when he got an offer of a million dollars to option a screenplay.
So, you know, if he'd left a week earlier... I mean, there's lots of coincidences, and don't get me wrong, the people who make it have done, you know, usually work very hard and have some skill in their areas, but there is a certain degree of fortune that is natural.
But the problem is that what they do is they ascribe their success entirely to their own characteristics.
And this isn't universal, but it's pretty common.
So you'll get speeches, and I saw one of these when I was at the Hollywood Film Festival, you'll get speeches from people where they say, you know, you've got to stick with your dreams, you've got to hang in there, you know, it's going to happen, blah, blah, blah.
You know, when the fact of the matter is, for the vast majority of people in the cultural arts, it's not going to happen.
And that's sort of important to recognize.
Knowing when to stop with a particular dream is very important.
And I sort of figured this out when I stopped wanting to be an actor, right?
When I sort of honestly assessed my own capacities as an actor and a playwright, and realized that if I were to continue down that path, I would be giving up a vast number of things.
So, I'll talk about that.
I was just trying to figure out if I was going to take that little tangent door marked, enter here, and don't exit before you end the podcast.
But I won't.
Maybe I'll do that this afternoon.
So, people's view of the free market, which is sort of presented to them through artists, right?
The free market is sort of composed of two types of people in the artist's view of the free market.
The first is, you know, the evil capitalist guy.
Now that character over the last little while has fallen out of favor just because it's such a stock character.
It's so much out of central casting, you know, this the fat mustachioed capitalist with the bald head and the, you know, the cigar and, you know, the sort of chilling lack of empathy for all things human.
That guy.
And I think the turning point was a film called Working Girl, which was with Sigourney Weaver, Melanie Griffith and Harrison Ford.
You know, wherein you had a sort of capitalist boss who was, you know, actually honest and fair and just.
And that sort of began to change that.
However, there's always still, usually, something significantly wrong with the boss figure, right?
And so the reason for that is that there's such a high degree of corruption in the art world and, you know, because the demand so much, the supply so much outstrips the demands, those who are in the position of, you know, hiring actors or writers or directors or whatever, They have such a degree of power that it's going to corrupt them.
I mean, if you have everybody coming through your office begging you for something all the time, then it's going to have a pretty significant effect on your perception of your own value and of humanity and of empathy.
I mean, you really can't afford empathy.
You know, it's the beautiful woman syndrome, right?
Like, if you're a beautiful woman with a curvy figure, you can't afford to be friendly to guys, right?
Because every other guy is going to sort of imagine that now, you know, there's a love affair imminent and, you know, they're going to be all over you and it's going to get complicated.
So you do have to exude a kind of chill and a kind of callousness when you are in high demand, you are in a high demand situation.
And that really happens with those who are able to Higher artists or those in the cultural sphere of the economic world.
So, you know, if you are a writer or an actor and so on, you have this perception of people in power that they're cold and callous and so on.
And because you mistake the world for yourself, you know, in other words, your own particular perceptions, you then project as everybody's perceptions, which is, you know, bad art.
Then you think that that's sort of the nature of authority and the nature of bosses.
So, you know, one sort of person in the art world is, you know, the evil or callous or weird boss.
And there's that great one in Office Space, if you ever get a chance to see.
Yeah!
Yeah!
That guy's just fantastic.
He's very funny.
Completely unrealistic, right?
Nobody who was that spaced out and callous would ever make an effective boss.
So if that was in the public sector, maybe I could understand it.
But of course, it's not.
So that's sort of the one stock character.
The second stock character that you see in films all the time uh... in the business world is you know the uh... the man in the gray flannel suit right like the button-down jack lemony kind of mid-level executive who uh... you know has maybe some sort of secret life on the side but basically is this drab colorless faceless yes man and that's the other uh...
character that you see in films.
And the reason that that character exists as a stock character is because that's what artists use to frighten themselves into continuing to pursue a dream that isn't really working for them.
So that's another stock character that you'll see.
So, everybody who's in the art world says, you know, this is sort of how they convince themselves that they're on the right course.
They say, oh, yeah, okay, like, I mean, maybe it's not working out for me, man, but, you know, what, do I want to just become some suit in an office or in a cubicle and have, like, type all day with nothing and, you know, all of that kind of stuff?
Like, they say that the only alternative to this sort of vital, exciting, creative, alive art world is, you know, this dead zombie-like cubicle existence, and they just scare themselves off with that particular bugaboo, which, you know, I just don't really believe.
I mean, I had those jobs, and they were not the most exciting thing in the world.
Like, I had jobs where I was just working spreadsheets, and I had jobs where I was just, you know, I worked on a union contract for the Ministry of Education when I was a temp, And, you know, I'm sort of basically responsible for organizing and producing this contract, which, you know, was mind-blowing in and of itself.
But, you know, it's a dull job, for sure.
But, you know, doing the rounds of, you know, rejection from people who may be less talented than yourself for a couple of years isn't the most thrilling and compelling, you know, career in the world either.
So, you know, all jobs have their You know, where you sort of have to survive the dull sort of whipping boy approach.
You sort of have to get through that.
The hazing of boredom, I guess, that's the phrase I was trying to think of.
You have to get through that and then you get to some more creative and interesting stuff, right?
But you have to sort of master the basics, improve your capacities in the basics before you're going to be given any chance to do that.
I mean, I'm only now, after sort of, I guess, ten years in the software industry, getting the right to go and work in closed deals on my own and sort of put together partnerships on my own.
You know, it's highly, highly risky stuff.
And if it goes wrong, you can lose like millions or tens of millions of dollars.
So you kind of have to know what you're, you have to have proof that you can do what you are sort of claimed or what you wanted to before you can be given the chance to do it.
And even then, you know, the first couple of deals that I was working on, I was in my boss's office like every 20 minutes saying, should I do this?
Should I do that?
So, I mean, you have to have gone through all of that stuff.
And, you know, it appears that people these days, it's sort of what I hear, and I think it's true, that they don't really want to go through that stuff, right?
Like there was some radio show guy who was saying, you know, nobody wants to work the midnight shift for, you know, 10 or 15 years before you get drive time.
Everybody wants to start, you know, drive time.
You know, and I think that's somewhat true.
There's one final character that I'll throw into the third one, before I sort of vainly try to put this back into the realm of tolerance.
And this is part of what I want to talk about with tolerance, but I'm not sure that I'm going to make it to that part.
But I sort of wanted to get, hopefully you to get some idea, at least some of my ideas, about why intolerance is so commonly viewed as an aspect of the free market.
And the third character is the wannabe, right?
And this is in the business world, this is like...
Melody Griffith in Working Girl.
This is the one who has some talent or some ability and just doesn't have any scope, doesn't have any opportunity.
She's just viewed as, you know, sort of, she's stuck in the pink ghetto.
She's a secretary and so on.
And so she, you know, she has the wannabe thing, but, or he has the wannabe thing, but, you know, they're having a lot of trouble getting any sort of respect within the hierarchy.
So this is also the guy in office space, you know, who has, you know, so he becomes sort of a truth teller and he wants a different kind of life, a more exciting kind of life, not sort of working on the TPS reports all the time where he can't figure out where his paperwork goes and so on.
And, you know, I also saw a film on Friday?
Saturday night.
It's an old film called The Clock Tower, I think it is.
And, you know, it's about a guy who, you know, gets accused of a crime, and it's in charge of trying to find... It was remade as a No Way Out in the 80s, I think.
But he's accused of a crime, and he's supposed to find it, but it's actually him who's accused of it, and he's supposed to find the guy, and so he has to put everyone off the scent, and it's a clever film.
And of course it has the evil boss, and it has the faceless minion, And it also has the blacklist, right?
The blacklist is another thing that you see in art about the free market.
So, for instance, right, this guy's boss, he wants to go on his honeymoon, and this guy's boss is saying, well, you have to do this job for me.
You can't go on your honeymoon.
And he's been married for a couple of years, and he's never taken his wife on a honeymoon, so he really He has to go on his honeymoon or his wife's gonna leave him and his boss says you have to do this job or I'm, you know, gonna fire you, right?
So, you know, normally in the actual free market, right?
Especially this film was made in 1948 when the free market was a lot stronger than it is now.
So normally what you do is you'd say, okay, well, you know, fire me.
I've got a great resume.
I'll just go get another job because I don't like the way that you treat me.
And so, you know, artists who are portraying the bad boss have a sort of significant problem in that they have to portray why the sort of noble wannabe hero is working for this bad boss and yet doesn't have any significant psychological problems of his own.
And so what they have to do is they have to create, you know, there are no jobs out there.
There are no other jobs, you know, and in this case, I mean there were so obviously tons of jobs in the post-war period in America that, you know, it would be completely ridiculous to say you can't get a job anywhere else.
So what they have to do is they have to make up this whole thing about blacklisting, right?
So this guy's boss says, look, if you don't do this, A job for me that I'm going to fire you and I'm gonna blacklist you and make sure that you never get to work in this industry again, right?
You'll never have lunch in this town again.
And that is, of course, completely ridiculous, right?
The more valuable this guy is, Then, you know, the more people are going to just say, what, blacklist?
Forget it!
Why on earth would I allow a competitor to not have me interview somebody who's very good at their job, right?
Like, I mean, if Bill Gates starts looking around and Steve Ballmer says, I'm going to blacklist you or whatever, he starts looking for a job, I mean, who's going to say, oh no, Steve Ballmer's blacklisted you, I'm not going to interview Mr. Gates because I don't want Steve Ballmer to get mad at me!
So, I mean, that's just so not true, right?
So they have to In order to make these heroes sympathetic, and in order to make the boss...
mean, they have to make the guy who's working for the mean boss unable to get another job, right?
Because otherwise he's insecure or pathological or he's a masochist or whatever and he's locked into this unhealthy psychologically entwined and dysfunctional relationship with his boss, right?
Like you get this from women sometimes and I only say this because I've heard more women complain about their jobs than men although I'm sure it's not the case in general but you know women who will have some relationship with their boss where their boss is mean and they'll keep telling you over and over about how mean their boss is and then you say well why don't you do this and oh I can't do that why don't you get another job oh I can't do that
So, you know, obviously that's a sort of dysfunctional death grip relationship that is the woman's getting some sort of sort of sort of unconscious payoff from that relationship, right?
She gets to feel like a victim, she gets to feel morally superior, she gets to feel, she gets to limit her, her self-esteem, the growth of her self-esteem in a way that makes her feel comfortable and doesn't threaten her other relationships, you know, maybe with her husband or boyfriend or family or children.
So, you know, there's lots of ways in which bad bosses are beneficial to sort of dysfunctional people, but that can't be the case, because then the bad boss is not a bad boss, but... I mean, okay, he's a bad boss, but it's not abusive, it's not exploitive, right?
And so to raise the drama, you have to have a good person working for a bad boss, which means that you have to have the bad boss having some sort of death grip over that person's career, and for that person then to have no other options.
So that them working for a bad boss is not an indication of a pathological state psychologically.
So you have to pretend that there are no other jobs or that there is no other.
Now, the interesting thing is that the way that you would do this normally, of course, is you would put that person into a union, right?
So this would be, you know, on the waterfront scenario, which is an old film by Ilya Kazan starring Marlon Brando, you would put it into that scenario.
So, you know, what would be realistic would be to say, well, the union controls all the jobs, and if you cross the union, the union is going to blacklist you.
And, you know, of course that would be a significant problem for someone, as it is for Marlon Brando in that film, because, you know, you're in this mafia world where if you don't please the Union, then you don't get a job.
And you can't get other jobs because the Union controls them all, and also you're pretty unskilled, right?
Like you're a hoister and lifter and a toter of bales, I guess you could say.
So that is another sort of aspect of where the free market, it does not exist, right?
I mean, Ilya Kazan himself, who started out as a communist and then, you know, after his experience with the House Un-American Committee, the HUAC, I can't remember what the acronym, but the Un-American Activities is one part of it, where he was asked to testify Not by McCarthy, but by the Congress, I think it was, but it wasn't Joseph McCarthy.
He wasn't interested in artists.
He was only interested in the spies who were working for the State Department.
He could care less about artists, but, you know, I think Ayn Rand testified, and he testified, and he was blacklisted, of course, because of his testimony.
But another reason that he was unpopular was that he had exposed a bad union, right?
I mean, this is a very powerful film that was artistically very strong.
I mean, I think more with the acting than with the writing, but artistically it was very strong, and he was exposing a bad union, which is not Something that you generally do, right?
Unions are these wonderful friendly things that help save you from the bad bosses when you have no options.
And so that's sort of another Stark character and another Stark situation that you have to put the person in.
The other thing too is that the person has to be good at their job, but the boss cannot reward that person for being good at their job.
So, this is another sort of stock situation that you see in movies and in books.
Now, if the person's just bad at their job, then you could understand why they wouldn't be able to get another job, or they wouldn't get a lot of sympathy from their boss.
Right?
I mean, if they just showed up to work late, and their tie was on crooked, and they weren't shaven, and they were just sort of careless, and so on.
Then, you know, you would expect that they would, you know, sort of not have a great career, or not be dealt with well by their boss, but, you know, it would be their fault, right?
So, for instance, in the movie North Country with Charlize Theron, you know, you have this woman who, you know, wants a job at the mine and, you know, she's going to make a lot of money and so on.
And I can't remember if she's a waitress or something, but it's a pretty low-rent job that she has before.
So she wants to work at the mine and, you know, she's divorced.
She had an abusive husband.
She has...
Kids and so you know and she's living at a parent's place and so there's no real she has no real skills and she has no real opportunities but of course that's not her fault right I mean that that's another thing that's pretty common in the art world right which is that you know people who are in films who are sort of downtrodden and so on You know, they're always victims, right?
They're always, like, long-suffering Ellen Brockovich types who have, you know, spark and fire and verve, and yet, sadly, they end up with these, you know, abusive men or abusive situations or no skills and lots of kids.
And that, of course, is just unrealistic and not true.
I mean, somebody who is in an abusive relationship Let's say with a man is is absolutely dysfunctional themselves right so any woman who's in a relationship where she gets sort of beaten up is you know without a doubt in a who is without that person is without a doubt a dysfunctional person and is 99.99% likely to be abusive to her own children.
Simply because, you know, if you accept abuse in another person, you accept abusive behavior in yourself.
Right?
So these sort of sad-eyed victims is, you know, it's just not the case.
Right?
I mean, my father was pretty mean to my mother and my mother was pretty mean to us.
And I'm not trying to sort of mistake the world for myself and say that that's the case with all women.
But I mean, it is certainly the case psychologically that whatever we accept as behavior, we reproduce in others and that we reproduce in our relationship with others.
And that is sort of a significant fact of psychology that is never dealt with by these kinds of films, right?
So you have this sort of helpless victim who has no responsibility for her own problems, you know, which is also, you know, it creates sympathy, and it's unrealistic, but it does create sympathy.
And it also is part of the sort of projection or the fear of those who are in the artistic world.
Because if you are an actor, it's not like you're creating a whole bunch of great skill sets for, you know, other areas in your life, or if you're a screenwriter.
So you work for, you know, years and years to master this challenging craft of writing screenplays, and your odds of success in terms of making a living wage are pretty low.
And so you're sort of frightened that you're going to end up in this situation where you have skills that are useless towards other people, and you haven't worked at developing other skills.
So, you know, what you do is you You project all of those fears into these sort of noble characters who can't get a leg up and who, you know, there's no fault of theirs that they don't have good skills.
There's no fault of theirs that they, you know, ended up in these bad relationships, right?
So, I mean, this is artists themselves, right?
Artists are these noble struggling creatures who, you know, it's not their fault that nobody wants what it is that they have to sell, or it's not their fault that They have all of these problems and it's, you know, it's not going to be the end of the world if they end up having to leave the art world and try and peddle their skills elsewhere, which, you know, which they won't be able to do.
So this is, I think, one of the things that's very interesting around the art world and its perception of the market.
There's a number of reasons why I mean, the art world is like this.
I mean, the demands for services are so small relative to the supply.
But it does give artists a very skewed view of the free market.
And so I wanted to talk about that in a little bit, but I'm just at my interview itself, or not my interview, my meeting with the engineering company, so I will pick this up shortly.
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