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April 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:58
171 Movie Review: V for Vendetta (AKA The State-rix)
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Beware spoilers!
Beware spoilers!
Auger!
It's 8 o'clock on Saturday night.
This is April the 1st and I have abandoned my plans for an April the 1st Fool's Podcast which was going to be a spirited and subtle defense of the need to reject property rights on inheritance.
But I'm not going to do it.
I'm going to be a nice fellow.
And not end up getting flamed by everybody, although I think that would be kind of fun, and would certainly indicate that people were getting the hang of these kinds of ideas, at least those who are new to them.
to notice that I had come up with rather contradictory flaws in my argument.
So, I'm not going to do that.
Instead, we're just going to kick back, relax, and have a little bit of chat about V for Vendetta, which was a movie I saw last weekend.
And don't listen to the podcast if you haven't seen the movie.
I warn you ahead of time, I'm going to give it away in the ending, which is that, of course, the guy in V for Vendetta is dead all along, and his... Oh, wait, no, that's a different film.
The Titanic goes down?
No?
Oh, that's right, the guys in the spaceship get saved, so don't worry about that.
They do get back from their orbit okay.
So what I'd like to talk about is some of the pluses and minuses that I saw in the film.
I think it was a very interesting film.
I think that it suffered a little bit from the cartoony origins, which is really an emphasis on action over ideas.
But that is, of course, the curse of Hollywood, where if you don't have something blowing up every 20 minutes in what is supposedly an action film, Then, you really have some significant problems.
And I also wasn't that keen on the whole, if you torture people until they're willing to give up on their lives, then they somehow become heroic people.
This idea that trauma breeds strength is really not very true.
It's probably true for things like steel.
Heat breeds strength.
But for human beings, trauma most often results in neuroses, right?
A weakness or whatever.
Not always, but often.
But let me get to the things that I liked about it.
I liked that it was obviously cynical about the government.
But I'm going to do the pluses first, then I get to the negatives.
It was cynical about the government.
It talked about the natural role of the state in provoking crises in order to seize power, and that was good.
And I liked that this V fellow seemed to have a kind of moral certainty.
I wasn't so sure that I enjoyed the fact that he was a, I guess, a physical wreck, right?
He'd been burned, and I guess he didn't have any sex organs left.
It was tough to tell with that lighting, but certainly he didn't take a shot at Natalie Portman, which would seem to me eunuch or homosexuality of some kind, because she's a rather cute little ass even when she has a hairstyle that approximates mine.
But I liked the fact that he seemed to have certainty and resolution, and he had a certain grace to him, and I thought that was... I mean, he had a little bit of the tortured thing.
One day he bursts into tears because I guess he can't do whatever he wants to with Natalie Portman's character.
So there was some good stuff around that and I can't claim to not feel or not have felt a certain emotional stirring when I saw the British Houses of Parliament going up in flames.
I thought that was interesting the way he said that this country needs a symbol more than it needs some buildings.
The symbol of what we can talk about a little later, but it was interesting that he understood the symbolism of such a thing.
And I remember even as a kid, even as a very little kid, being very interested in the story of Guy Fawkes and feeling a certain amount of sadness, even when I was like six years old or whenever I was first told about the story, feeling a certain amount of sadness that, you know, he just hadn't quite gotten away with it, which I think would have been interesting in some ways.
So those are the things that I liked about it.
Things that I didn't like about it so much I don't think that it created a very believable world as a whole.
And this is a pretty esoteric criticism, so please excuse me if it just seems kind of silly, but the one thing that's true about a film like Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Nineteen Eighty-Four as a film, I think, is one of the most perfect adaptations of a literary work, with the minor exception of the rhythmics music, which was not exactly, I think, what they were looking for.
But it was a wonderful wonderful adaptation of a literary work and what it did was it created a complete world from top to bottom back to front In the same way that Lord of the Rings and, to some degree, The Matrix did.
It creates a completely believable world.
Now, one of the problems that I had with V for Vendetta was that you have this dictatorship that is going on, which has real hallmarks of 1984.
You've got John Hurt.
You can see his spittle and bad teeth on a video screen the size of a jumbotron.
And you have the small council and so on.
So obviously this is a place that has significant amounts of economic controls and economic transfers from the general population to the political elite.
But at the same time it seemed to be sort of like a flourishing economy.
And the one thing that 1984 got beautifully, to use the word beautifully in an odd way, was that the amount of poverty and wretchedness that was going on under this gruesome heel of the state was pretty well portrayed.
That everyone was short of everything and You know, when you see Natalie Portman going to work in the film, she seems to be working in a pretty upscale studio.
And the one thing that was true about or is true about dictatorships, everything is shabby.
Everything is old.
Everything is worn down.
Even the best stuff that you can get in the inner party in these kinds of environments tends to be pretty mediocre compared to what even the average or even the poor person can get.
In the West.
So I thought that there was a little bit of inconsistency there that it would have been funnier or I think more accurate in a way if it had been sort of like the movie Brazil where just nothing works and everything's kind of weird and I think that a level and amount of violence that is occurring within society does produce real catastrophes in the free market and I think that it would be more consistent to have that sort of in more places.
Now, I know that it was supposed to be taking place in the fairly near future, and so it wouldn't have been that the whole economy would have collapsed, but you would be rather amazed at how quickly capital flight occurs when dictatorships take over.
People just take their money right out of the country by hook or by crook, and there is a real sort of falling down of the main economic drivers, the capital markets and stock exchanges and so on.
And if that had not occurred yet, it was because the government was still protecting property rights.
It wasn't a dictatorship to that degree that it was portrayed.
But given that it was a dictatorship, it seemed that way, that the government could sort of arrest and torture and kill people at will, capital flight would have occurred.
And given that this was a single country that we were talking about, England, I guess, and that we heard nothing about any of the other countries, then that's even less believable, that the capital would have stayed in England despite the development of a dictatorship.
The capital and the major investments would have all gone overseas.
Of course, what made 1984 so much more believable was that it was all the same.
And the same thing is true of Atlas Shrugged, that all of the countries were going down the tubes.
And in fact, America in the Atlas Shrugged paradigm was the last to go, or the people states of Europe were already gone and so on.
So I just found that, you know, these sort of pockets of flourishing, cool, kind of, everything's hip, and so on, seem to be sort of inconsistent with the general sense of decay, and, you know, that totalitarian societies have all the ambience and charm of a well-used public washroom.
So I didn't find that to be too believable, like I felt I was kinda jumping in and out of almost like a modern world, almost like a sitcom, and then this disastrous world of dictatorship and snatching people off the streets and killing them at will.
And I found that to be somewhat problematic.
And I did sort of find the Natalie Portman character... I thought she acted well when she was taken out of the dungeon.
And it was revealed to her what was revealed to her.
Not to spoil everything, in case you didn't listen to my warning and you're still listening to this.
I thought she acted that well.
I didn't think she had that much to work with as a character.
I didn't get any sense of her friendships or her boyfriends or non-boyfriends or whatever.
And her sense of the future and so on.
She seemed to be sort of like a lower class person based on the accent, but at the same time she didn't have the sort of lower class vices, which I mean, rightly or wrongly, I associate stuff like, you know, drunkenness and so on with the lower classes, particularly in a dictatorship.
So, I mean, that might be my prejudices, but I don't think she had that much to work from as a cohesive character, and I wasn't really sure what the purpose of her was in the film.
I mean, quite often there does seem to be the need in these kinds of films where you have another kind of world or a big emotional journey for there to be a transitional character.
So there's the bad guy, there's the good guy who's wholly good and good at the beginning and good at the end, there's the bad guy who's wholly bad at the beginning and bad at the end, and then there's the transitional character who goes from a state of ignorance or corruption to goodness, and this is supposed to be the one that the audience identifies with and follows on their journey and understands each step of the way.
So you're drawing the audience along with the transitional character's journey, which I guess you could say is something like Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged.
But one of the things that you're going to have a problem with is that the person who is the transitional character needs to have something really likable and charming or endearing or vulnerable or intellectually rigorous or magnificent about her is In order for you to want to join her on the journey, and I found that the Natalie Portman character was just sort of a little bit empty.
I didn't really get a sense of strong history or strong integrity.
I know she, I thought she acted that part well in the transition scene, but afterwards it didn't seem like there was that much of a transition.
You know, she could have had even little things like she bit her nails or something like that early on or she had a penchant for bad jokes or Whatever it was that was going to show her intellectual disarray or emotional disarray at the beginning, then give her something more of a sort of shining beacon of integrity later on in the movie.
I thought that would have been good, but I felt that she was just kind of similar all the way through.
And I don't think that she's that unskilled an actress.
I mean, I've never seen her do anything fantastic.
But I think with the right script and the right director, she could have done it.
But I don't think that the right script was there for sure, and the director didn't seem to notice that we needed to be able to hook into Natalie Portman's character as someone we could identify with, and someone we could like, and someone we could recognize.
So, you know, they could have thrown some stuff in early on where she's echoing the kind of patriotic nonsense that you hear coming out of people's mouths these days, but in a nice and passionate and sweet way.
And that way we like her for that, for her sort of idealism.
And then, as the movie progresses, we see that her idealism is actually just a form of propagandistic corruption.
And she's completely unaware of it.
She starts to learn about it.
She goes through a breakdown and she emerges much more strong at the end.
I thought that would have been something more relevant to today.
And, you know, in a sense, for me, that's the major issue that I had with the film.
That obviously you could see these critiques of what was going on, right?
And you could see critiques of the current world and the current policies of governments and practices of governments.
But I think the thing that, and I don't know, the comic book might have been different, the thing that they made that it was a mistake, I mean, if I had been sort of magically placed in charge of this film, the one thing that I would have done is if you're still going to have some forms of the free market working, then naked force is rarely deployed.
This is one thing that's very true of the modern world, sort of the modern West, that the government does not like to use naked force because there are still elements of freedom, there's a free press, there's some sort of cover of jurisprudence and so on.
You get your Miranda rights read, and the government doesn't snatch people off the streets and make them vanish unless They are members of a sort of voiceless minority, right?
I mean you can do that if people are traveling in your country, you can do that if they're illegal aliens, you can do that if they are part of a ethnic group that nobody listens to or whatever, but this seemed to be happening mostly against white British people.
I didn't find that to be too realistic because, of course, if the government had advanced to the point where it did not need the show of civility or good humor anymore, then the economy would have completely collapsed and the whole look and feel of the world would be decayed and much more different.
And then it would have been much harder to believe that out of these sort of decayed and broken remnants of humanity come this sort of massive resurgence of desire for freedom and so on.
That is there, but it's usually there only in the second or third generation, as I've talked about before.
And so it seemed that there was a kind of brutality of the government that was sort of inconsistent with what we're facing right now, What we're facing right now in the West is not a dictatorship of guns.
I mean, it's definitely there, but it's very much hidden.
We're facing a dictatorship of joviality, almost.
That kind of,
You know, that little laugh that George Bush has, that kind of half-cocked, half-crazy grin that he has, and, you know, his wife is out at press junkets making jokes about, oh, my husband goes to bed at 9.30 at night, and so I'm the desperate housewife, and, you know, ha-ha, the president's wife isn't getting any, and she's at that age, where, you know, they make these kinds of jokes, you know, they show up at black-tie dinners, they talk openly, they make jokes, they speak passionately about this, that, and the other.
The kind of naked, evil, screaming, Nazi-like spittle in your face that you saw coming off the John Hurt character just was inconsistent with what we're facing right now.
And by the time it does get to that, I mean, society is completely doomed.
As long as the presidents are still making jokes, right?
Society has a hope.
Because it means that they need to hide their violence, right?
They need to hide.
This is the whole point of the argument for morality is to keep pointing out there's a gun in the room, there's a gun in the room.
The reason we need to do that is because nobody sees the gun that's in the room, although it's pretty obvious when you think about it for two seconds, and partly what they're distracted by is all of these CNN reporters making nice to the generals and all of the generals making jokes and talking about commitment and, you know, the president's wife making jokes and the president making jokes and all that kind of stuff.
There's a reason that those jokes are still being made, and that's because there's still enough freedom that an honest conversation can do them some real damage.
And so I felt that having this secret chamber of people who are lit only from above and you can't even see anything around them and there's this huge video screen and so on, on, I just thought that was kind of over the top, kind of cheesy.
And by the time you get to that kind of screaming dictatorship, you're toast, I mean, completely as a society.
And the obvious Nazi symbols, I thought, were also over the top, you know, the red and the black.
And there was, Pink Floyd's The Wall with the marching hammers.
They had this guy screaming and he had that like Hitler cowlick and all that kind of stuff.
And I just thought that that was just far over the top.
I mean, it's not how it's going to happen.
I mean, that is a clear enough sign of, you know, crazy evil dictator that we in the West, having seen films of Hitler and having seen, you know, this kind of approach to politics, we kick anybody out who even remotely seems to be passionate and foaming at the mouth.
They just get no traction, like David Duke a couple of years ago, a number of years ago in the States.
So there's just no possibility that people are going to fall for that kind of black-shirted, boot-stomping, spittle-jetting-out from speeches and cowlicks and gestures and jumping up and down.
That's not how it's going to happen, right?
It's going to happen as a sort of, you know, it's a slow suffocation in the West in terms of freedom.
It's not a sort of mad screaming strangulation.
And at least for the general population, for certain minorities, right?
If you're a poor black kid and you get drugs planted on you, then yes, you are absolutely taken out and bad things happen to you.
But there was not really, I think, a very strong sense of that cohesiveness in the movie.
And I think the movie would have been a lot more cohesive if they had resolved that problem to begin with.
And I think it would have been a much more interesting and enjoyable and relevant and powerful film If the dictatorship had been one of benevolence and smiles and jokes, that would have been something that would have been sort of illuminating about our current situation.
That there is lots of smiles and lots of jokes and lots of ha-ha's and lots of earnestness and lots of, we want to be there to help you, but there's always the gun in the room, right?
And I think that would have been a much more obvious thing to bring across in terms of our current situation, I think it would have also helped make Natalie Portman's character more sympathetic.
Because the fact that she didn't see the dictatorship, really, when she's got, you know, people being gunned down in television studios, people being snatched off the streets, her own parents are murdered, and she still doesn't quite get that it's a dictatorship, but she also doesn't swallow all of the propaganda, right?
I mean, you can have a transitional character who's very passionately wed to a system, who then, through a variety of mechanisms, becomes more aware of that system.
But she didn't seem to have any particular opinions, and that didn't make her look very bright.
I mean, it didn't make her look like she had any real energy or intellect or charisma or understanding.
Because she was in the middle of a screaming dictatorship, and her parents had been killed, people snatched off the streets, and she doesn't seem to see that there's this big dictatorship.
And it's not until she goes through her big emotional thing where she sees it.
And emotional trauma is usually not the best educator in terms of political theory.
In fact, I think that George Orwell got it a lot better in 1984, where he puts a particular trauma as being the final destruction of a personality that was originally yearning for freedom, rather than An empty and not too bright girl who doesn't even notice as the jackboots stride past her house that there might be some kind of dictatorship slowly waking up to it and then when she feels that she's going to die and she's in the middle of a prison situation and then she finally gives up on wanting to live that suddenly she becomes free.
I don't really think that's such a good political education.
I can't imagine a political science course even run by radical libertarians that would involve chaining you up for weeks or months at a time and threatening you with death.
I thought that they succumbed to the great problem of films, which is melodrama.
Wouldn't it be cool if you put her in prison and then there's a switch and then this and she's dragged out and she's shaved and oh how dramatic and so on.
And, I mean, that's fine if you're talking about, you know, the Mosque of Zorro or the Prisoner of Zenda or something, but when you're talking about a film that is supposed to be about a political education of some sort, even based on a comic book, although I understand the comic book is more intelligent than the film, then you still have the problem of melodrama that you're trying to get ideas across while going through these incredibly psychologically pumped-up melodramatic scenes without any particular explanation of the
political ideas being espoused by V, right?
I didn't think that that was particularly, you know, he was like, yeah, let's blow up the government, it's a dictatorship, we want freedom, blah, blah, blah.
Well, you know, the words are cheap, right?
The problem is that every coup in history, even if it takes you from a democracy to a dictatorship, it's all about there's a dictatorship, we want freedom, smash the government, I mean, that's what everybody says.
And so the fact that he did it, I think in no way was going to guarantee that there was going to be any more sort of freedom.
And there's lots of different ways that He could have communicated this.
I mean, there's sort of simple ways, right?
Like in the morning, he could sort of say, do you want eggs or toast?
Right?
And she could say, I want a toast.
Right?
And then he says, would you mind if I do the cooking if you do the dishes?
And she's like, no, that's fine.
And he says, this is exactly the society that I want to create.
And she's like, well, what are you talking about?
And he's like, well, you have a choice.
You can have eggs or toast.
And that's sort of the one thing that I want you to have is the freedom to make your own decisions.
And the other thing that I want is for us to be able to trade voluntarily back and forth goods and services, right?
So I make you this and then you do the dishes.
And nobody's forcing us to do either of these things.
We're perfectly free.
You can leave.
You can stay.
You can choose neither the eggs or the toast or come up with something else.
You can say, no, I don't want to do the dishes.
I'd rather do something else.
What you just did there, those two things, that's exactly the society that I want to build.
And how long would that take?
That would be like a 90-second or two-minute scene.
And I think if you acted it well and put enough passion into the guy, into V, I think that you could really make that something that would strike home with people.
And you could also put another scene in there, you know, where people want to do something, right?
And there's three of them and they want to do something and, you know, one of them wants to run away, the other one wants to attack the police.
They, you know, two of them say, let's attack the police, and the other one says, no, I'm going to run away, and they say, sorry, this is a little democracy here, and so on.
And I can't remember if they did that at the beginning or not, when she's attacked by the hoodlums, whether they say, let's have a vote on whether you get raped.
But something like that would have been pretty powerful, I think.
That would have been very, very powerful indeed.
Or for V to say something like, when he takes down these guys, it's like, well, obviously they decide that force is the best way to do it.
The only thing they're unhappy about is that I'm better at it than they are.
Like, there's lots of different ways that you could play that that would be a way of getting the message across in a way that would strike people emotionally now, right?
The great thing about allegory in stories is that it gets through people's defenses and gets them right to what's happening now and wakes them up to reality in the moment by talking about something in an artistic sentence.
It's like a very powerful dream that gives you some clarity about your life and that can be the great thing that occurs in art.
And unfortunately I didn't really get any strong sense of V's political philosophy other than the government is bad, we need to smash it, blow up the buildings and bring freedom.
Which is what every is Sheiko Avera said the same thing.
Lenin said the same thing.
Paul Potts said the same thing.
So I just felt that that was not particularly compelling from a libertarian standpoint.
I didn't get the feeling that he was anti-state.
I got the feeling that he was anti-this government.
The two are very, very different things.
Libertarians, mostly, are not anti-state.
They're anti this kind of government and they want a smaller or different kind of government.
And, you know, that's like, as I mentioned before, it's like trying to reform slavery by saying that the slaves should be nicer and give their slaves weekends off rather than, what the hell is there such a thing as slavery to begin with?
So, you know, the movie was just a little bit weak to me on that standpoint.
I think another thing that happens in a movie like V for Vendetta is that, and this was mentioned on the boards, but I think it's important to pick up that It looks like if you want to fight for freedom that you have to be incredibly acrobatic.
You have to be able to throw knives in slow rotating moment with after images of the knives as they spin.
You have to have, like, no fear, you have to be a cat burglar, and you have to have no problem with killing people, and you know, this kind of stuff.
And again, this is the trap of melodrama, and I'm not saying that I would have any particular way to solve this.
The only way that you'd solve it in this kind of movie would be to have the acrobatic guy be revealed as kind of like a dumb guy who had an earpiece and there was a smart guy in the back room Telling him what to do like his sidekick who drove the car was always telling him what to say and what to do because He didn't have the other guy.
Maybe he's in a wheelchair He doesn't have the physical ability, but the mental ability the other guy just acts which is sort of how you More intelligent people tell the less intelligent people what to do in society in a positive way like that We're always saying there's a gun in the room There's a gun in the room because we can see it but other people can't because they haven't spent the time or energy or maybe they don't have the intellectual capacity and Like, I could never invent the theory of relativity, but I kind of understand how it works now that someone's explained it to me, and that's sort of a pretty useful thing.
In society, you could have done it kind of like that, but I mean, I don't know if that would work or not.
That's just sort of one vague idea.
But, you know, he goes and steals all of these things from the government and hides them in his place and so on, stuff like that.
I just think that that's giving him too many qualities that are too staggeringly great.
It's one of the minor problems with John Galt, right?
That, you know, this guy is such a god on earth who's in no fear and, yeah, I'll help you torture me because you can't figure out how to repair the generator and stuff.
That it seems a little bit alienating like the normal life of stumbling towards freedom and speaking out even though you're afraid and dealing with conflict in a way that is hopefully positive but alienating a lot of people and trying to maybe win them back a little and you know that kind of stumbling towards freedom that most people who talk about freedom end up in.
I certainly find that to be my case.
I'm getting better at it now, but you know it was a long time coming I guess you could say.
And so I felt that creating this, you know, semi-godlike man who could do anything he wanted and take, you know, 50 bullets to the chest, although he's got a little metal plate on, and still, you know, survive and, you know, walk downstairs and that kind of stuff, it, to me, Creating those kinds of superheroes alienates people from what it is that they have to do.
What it is that they have to do.
And it reminds me of something that Noam Chomsky said, which is that when he's in the West, everybody's always saying, Oh, what should we do?
What should we do?
How can we, whatever.
I mean, whether they're, they've got some, again, they're against the government policies in some way.
Oh, what should we do?
What should we do?
And he says, you know, the amazing thing is I go to the third world and I never hear that.
I never hear that.
They don't ask me what to do.
They tell me what they're doing.
Because what to do is the simplest and most difficult thing in the world.
It's to keep saying there's a gun in the room.
It's to try and educate people.
It's to disassociate with them if they openly advocate your death.
It is to continue to get the ideas out there day after day.
It's persistent.
It takes decades.
It might take generations.
It's incremental.
It is difficult.
And we may never see the end of this road, right?
We may pass this baton on to our children and their children's children.
I don't think it's going to take that long, but it certainly is possible.
And so this idea that there's one big, orgiastic explosion that's going to set people free is also part of the fantasy, right?
That people feel like, ooh, we went to a march, ooh, I wrote a letter to the editor two weeks ago, and so on.
And that that, I mean, it's not like the letter to the editor is a bad thing, but it's the little things that you do every day that advance the cause of freedom.
Not, you know, being a cat burglar and knifing policemen and Blowing up buildings and so on, I mean, that is not going to achieve freedom.
In fact, one of the very interesting things that you could see as the after-effects to V for Vendetta is that, boy, can you imagine what would happen if somebody blew up the White House?
What would happen to freedom in America?
Oh, my heavens!
Especially if a bunch of politicians got killed.
My God, they're never supposed to get killed, right?
And so, I just think that the government
which had already manufactured crises in order to expand its power, when the entire Houses of Parliament were blown up, then we already have a society wherein people have given up their rights in return for state protection from danger, and now that somebody has blown up the entire Houses of Parliament, it would seem to me that the next logical step would be a full, you know, boot-in-the-head, jack-boot dictatorship of the worst possible kind.
So I'm not entirely sure that the fact that V wanted to turn these buildings into a symbol, I'm not sure, really, that the symbol would be, oh, the government is weak and we should be free and blah blah blah blah blah.
I think the symbol would be, there are dangerous terrorists loose in our midst blowing up the very seats of law and order and government and we have to take away a few remaining rights in order to protect you blah blah blah blah blah.
Because the population had already given up their rights in return for security.
And so, the more danger that you bring to bear on these governmental agencies, the more they're going to take away people's rights.
So, you know, that could be the end of any potential for freedom, because there was still some freedom of association and so on in the movie.
But what he did, blowing up, that would be probably, to me, the very end of the possibilities for freedom, because it would just be more than the state would need in order to justify its stripping of the last vestiges of human rights from the population as a whole.
And so I guess, I mean, I sort of take it maybe a little bit personally come to think about it that the work that I'm doing in my small way to advance the ideas of freedom doesn't look quite nearly as macho as, you know, walking across the ceiling spitting knives out of my pockets or something.
And yet I think that What I'm doing is probably a little bit more useful than plunging knives into people and blowing up buildings, because there's no way to grab power without becoming infected by it.
There's no way to use violence without becoming infected by it.
There's no way to precipitate a crisis in the ruling class and have that ever benefit the people.
At least I can't think of a historical example.
What you do need to do is you need to educate people about the fact that political and economic and military crises are invented by people in order to gain power over other people.
They were invented by the ruling class to keep everybody else down.
And I thought the film was good in that it pointed that out, but it was bad in so far as it said that, you know, when there's danger people cling to the government, so what we need to do is blow up government buildings and kill lots of cops and kill the, like, murder the ruling, the ruler in order to you know, convince people that the government is bad as if, as if when Lenin died, Stalin was a whole lot better, right?
I mean, I don't know, maybe Stalin killed Lenin.
Sorry, maybe Lenin was killed by Stalin.
Who knows, right?
But it's not as if the death of one ruler creates a more beneficial situation.
It's just a wheel that goes round and round, right?
You get some new ruler who's going to be just as much of a jerk as the last ruler and choke off your freedoms more and more because the ruler is irrelevant to some degree.
The state has a logic all of its own that it continues like a cancer until it destroys society, or at least the existing society.
And, I mean, that's the same thing you see in Lord of the Rings, not to sort of switch movies around too much, but it's like, well, Sauron, you see, was a bad lord, and that would be no good, and there's this Theoden is a bad king, and, you know, he's self-destructive, but boy, that Aragorn, that chisel-faced, you know, guy with the piercing eyes, he'll be a great king.
I mean, that's always the fantasy, right?
I mean, just get the right guy in power, it's all gonna be wonderful!
And, of course, it never is.
The right guy never gets in power.
Or if he does, even if he did magically get in power, like if someone made me king of the world tomorrow, it would be something I would immediately want to walk away from, because if I knew if I'd stayed that the amount of corruption that would enter my soul, it's almost impossible to resist if you stay in that situation.
Unless you just lock the door and don't answer the phone, right?
Everybody's begging.
Everybody's pleading.
Everybody's bribing.
Everybody wants something.
They're all hanging off you like a bunch of stalkers.
It's really tough to maintain your equilibrium in that kind of situation.
So this idea that the next ruler will be good, I think, is not such a great idea.
That's something that you see in V for Vendetta, like he kills the John Hurt guy, he kills the other guy, and then he blows up the buildings.
But the people still believe that the government provides security, right?
So they're going to just all cling to some new guy who's going to step into that vacuum, right?
Until you educate people that the government is not there to protect you, the government does not provide security, that violence is never the answer.
If you can teach people that, then there's no need for other people to step into a power vacuum.
There will be no power vacuum.
There will actually be an abhorrence of power instead, which is another topic we've been discussing on the boards.
So you educate people about the realities of the brutalities of power, and they won't then, you sort of decap the state in terms of getting rid of it, and they won't create another state.
Once people understand how evil slavery is, when you get rid of slavery, it's not like people need slavery, right?
There's a slavery vacuum which people must fill.
No, I mean, those kinds of people, they go out and buy pets.
Who knows?
But once you educate the people, that's what it's all about, right?
It's a very difficult thing to educate the people because it is very, very, very traumatic for people to understand the truth about the society.
And the more brutal their society, the more difficult it is for them to understand that truth.
So that is, unfortunately, the water wears away stone, the chipping, the continuation, the so on, that we all have to keep doing.
I mean, look at Noam Chomsky, right?
The guy was nearly arrested in the 60s.
And if it hadn't been for the Tet Offensive, he would probably be in jail for five or ten years from the 60s onwards, because they were jailing those kinds of dissidents back then.
And he's kept plugging away at it, and he's kept plugging away at it, in my view, not entirely in the right way, although his critiques of American foreign policy are beautiful.
But, you know, he did all of that, and now there's another war, and you just keep chipping away at it, and it's thankless work sometimes, and it is work that gets you into a lot of trouble socially, and it's a work that makes you ridiculed, and it's the work that makes people look down on you, and it's the work that makes people think that you're crazy, and that you're obsessive, and blah blah blah, and all this kind of stuff.
And the only consolation is that it's the finest and most noble work in the world, and now, at least that we have the Internet, we're not exactly laboring in vain, or in future generations we'll be able to listen to this stuff and we'll be able to read stuff that we've written and say, well, yes, it was a black night sky of ignorance, but there were at least a few stars.
And so I hope that that helps you at least understand my perspective on the film.
So I know there was a bet going on.
Somebody on the board said that there was a bet, which I tried to get in on, but they wouldn't let me, about whether I'd be pro or against the film.
So I'll let you draw your own conclusions.
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