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April 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:29
201 Art Part 1: Truth and Lies

A few theories on the nature and purpose of art...

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It's 8.30 on Friday the 21st of April 2006.
And, uh, ladies and gentlemen, it's time to talk about art, art, art, art, art.
I'm going to have maybe two sessions, maybe two in a bit, about art, because I guess by the time this is posted, you will at least have had the chance to listen to the graphic and explicit...
The God of Atheists, so I thought it might be worth trying to talk a little bit about what is going on in at least my artistic ideas, or at least my artistic theories, and some of them will be a little bit more common and some of them will be a little bit more specific, but I know that there's a number of people out there who've posted on the boards or sent me emails who are interested in creative writing.
Please understand that I stand from the lofty summit of having one novel published, which has scarcely taken the world by storm, although it has not done too badly, and having been barely paid as a writer for 20 years, so I approach this topic with the full understanding that these theories, if successfully applied, and I think I've successfully applied them to my satisfaction, if successfully applied, will not.
Repeat, will not gain you a condo in Maui and dates with Eva Longoria.
So, you will not be finding any particular economic success through my writing advice.
I'm not going to take the high road and say that the world is too corrupt to appreciate my brilliant writing.
I don't know that that's the case at all.
Obviously, Ayn Rand wrote pretty radical stuff and had a massive appeal, and so there's something that, in my writing, which is to my satisfaction, I like it very much, but this does not mean that this is to everybody's satisfaction, although it will be interesting for me to...
To hear people's responses to something like Almost, which has a sort of surface chaos and disorder, but which is fairly well engineered under the surface to create the theme, right?
Sort of the general idea.
So, Art. Ah, it's the monkey on your back.
It's the second daemon that I have.
And I read once, I think it was in the New York poem, where a guy comes wandering into a sculptor's studio and he says, Hi, I'm Art.
I'm the guy you do everything for.
I think that's very funny. It is a very difficult thing to have this in your life and to feel that you have or you take joy and have a capacity to produce fiction or I guess, you know, I would sort of say fiction that is sort of lively and sort of believable and has a sort of message that if you have this capacity it can be a real monkey on your back because you don't really feel quite satisfied unless you're doing it.
And then where you never feel quite satisfied with it, but there is an enormous joy in the actual writing.
I love the phase where the writing is cooking.
I don't like so much all the research and all the getting up on stuff.
I mean, that's not that much fun.
But the actual writing itself, and I don't like the beginning where you're really trying to hack things out and you're deleting far more than you're keeping and so on.
I love it when it's cooking along in the middle.
And I hate the editing.
I don't mind the first two or three passes, but it keeps going.
And I'm sure, you know, sort of my own limitations as a writer, I'm sure that I could benefit from a strong editor.
And I'm sure that I could benefit from outside views on what it is that I'm doing.
So that's, I mean, sort of professional ones.
I'm certainly happy to hear people's responses to...
To the god of atheists.
And if you get public lives, or you get just poor, or you plump down for the tree-killing monstrosity that is the three-volume set of Almost, then I'm certainly happy to hear people's feedback.
I do try and sort of write in a way that is not obvious.
I mean, you know, Ayn Rand is obvious.
And that's not a bad thing.
I certainly enjoy, and she's a mistress, absolute past mistress of plot.
I mean, you just can't fault a woman as far as plot goes.
But I find...
This is sort of... Okay, I'll just sort of talk about a bit my philosophy of art and then you can see if it's of any use to you.
You can also see, you know, if you get one of my novels you can see how this philosophy plays itself out.
Now, the problem that I had with Ayn Rand, or I guess I have with Ayn Rand, is not particularly...
Obviously, it's not philosophical.
She and I... Well, I am a slave to her in like 90% of what she says, so...
We agree, you know, like we're just sort of sitting down at dinner and informing each other.
No, I was absolutely under her sway for many years and feel a much better man for it.
So... It's not...
The issue is not that she is not philosophically correct, because that's true of nobody, 100%.
And I was just doing great until, I think it was podcast 172.
Oh, well.
No, I'm just kidding. If I happen to have at least five errors per podcast, I'd be surprised.
But... I think that for me, what I found not satisfying about Ayn Rand's novels was that the life that she portrayed was not something that I felt I could connect to and live in a real sense.
For instance, she really doesn't deal with issues of parenting.
There's a little bit of, I guess, Peter Keating's mom, who's a clingy and narcissistic independent and so on.
And there's Hank Reardon's mom.
But this parenting is not really dealt with.
And of course, her characters spring like Zeus's daughter from his forehead.
They sort of spring into being.
They're entirely self-made and isolated fortresses unto themselves.
And there's never any...
They shrug off their past, for the most part, without any particular issues.
And that just didn't strike me as...
Believable or applicable in my life.
So, she shows how people are when they've already vaulted over into self-actualization.
But, to me, that's kind of a vault.
You know, it's like saying to people who have leprosy, okay, so, see, when you're cured of leprosy, this is what it's going to look like.
And here's some people who've got leprosy, and here's some people who don't.
And it's like, well, that's great, but maybe we could have a little bit of a transitional step.
How it is that we sort of get from here to there.
And I think that's fairly important.
So I've tried to write some of those transitional steps.
I mean, that's really what the God of Atheists is all about, that everyone starts in this chaotic and irrational world where they are not loved for who they are, where everybody's life is accidental and unchosen, and people don't have any intimacy, and families are...
It's sort of structured around the defenses of the parents and the things that they can't accept about themselves.
And there's a lot of cynicism on either side of the parental divide.
And there's a lot of detail, at least in the beginning of The God of Atheists, that I wanted to sort of say that this is where people's lives are starting.
And I originally, my very first couple of chapters were from absolute infancy all the way through, but I ended up having to cut those as being too long.
But I was trying to talk about the family circumstances and the individual personalities, the way they meshed, and the isolation that people were experiencing within their own families.
There's nothing but everything within the god of atheists at the beginning is obligation.
I mean, what the Buddhists call sort of living by fear or living under obligation, that you see parents rushing home to be with their children simply because that's their schedule, that's what they have to do, and they're far more afraid of the disapprovals from the nannies than they are the love of their children,
and everybody's a means to an end at the beginning of The God of Atheists, so Joanne wants older because she wants to have a kid, And Dave and Angela want each other for the sake of status, and Al likes his children to some degree, just as sort of ornaments, and when you actually get a first touch of intimacy, which is...
Alice and Sarah, very early on in their slumber party, when you get your first touch of intimacy, this is where life begins to change for people.
So you have to sort of get this brush of intimacy to realize what it is that you're missing.
And that's something actually I sort of wanted to mention.
I'll just have a minor tangent.
Between Airport Road and Pearson, I'll give myself a time.
I'll give myself no more than four kilometers of a tangent, but I'm going 117 kilometers per hour, so it shouldn't be more than...
Oh, I better not talk about it or I won't get a chance to do it.
So, those of you who listened to the parenting series, I know that it wasn't the most popular series, not the end of the world.
I did get... An email this morning from someone who said, no, no, no, it's interesting, keep going.
But the one thing that I would suggest, if you ever feel like it and you ever feel like it might be worth listening to them again, the one thing that I would suggest is that listen to them not in terms of you being a parent, but in terms of you being a child and what was missing for you.
I sort of have a feeling, and I'm not at all surprised, and it was something I was going to tie up at the end, but I'll sort of mention it now until I sort of come back to it, but...
You may feel that it wasn't relevant to you because you're not a parent.
You may feel it's not relevant to you because your parenting style is different.
But what I would invite you to do is to, if you feel like it or you have the time or just sort of think back it in your own mind, that the important thing to do is to listen to it, if you're not a parent yet, in memory of your own childhood and what was probably not present for you at that time.
So let's continue on with art.
Now, art as a whole, I mean, the sort of question is, what is the purpose of art in human life?
And it is to entertain, to distract, and to show a kind of life that is different, right?
I mean, there's a... There's an old saying, I can't remember who said it, that a novel is a chance to try somebody else's life on for size.
But it is a kind of intimacy in general.
It is a kind of knowledge of another person's perception and experience.
It does reproduce something that we can't really ever experience directly, which is the experience of looking out through somebody else's eyes and living in somebody else's life and mind.
And so it is something that is The closest we'll get to psychic experience is sort of reading something like Atlas Shrugged or something like Albert Camus' L'Étranger.
And it is a way of looking out through somebody else's life.
Now, I certainly, certainly, certainly do not in any way, shape or form believe that artists lie to tell the truth.
I think that if you look at something like Camus' The Stranger, I think that it's important to understand what is being talked about.
Now, again, psychologically assessing somebody from a distance in a different language is always very difficult, but basically the story of the stranger is a man who is lost, alienated, alone, depressed,
miserable. His mother dies, and basically he ends up On a beach, and he shoots an Arab, he gets tried, he goes to prison, and in prison he finds existential freedom.
And everything in the book is horrible.
Just so you understand it, his neighbor has a dog that is bald.
I mean, it's this kind of stuff.
To me, that's a little stomach-turning.
Not because bald dogs would...
I mean, I guess it'd be vaguely stomach-turning in real life.
Bald podcasters, on the other hand, always, always nothing but gorgeous!
But he has all of these kinds of things.
Like everybody has some sort of horrible ailment or some sort of sickening psychological problem.
I think he's got a neighbor who's a wife beater and so on.
And it's sort of like if you've ever seen Last Tango in Paris, I am, of course, a great admirer of Marlon Brando as an actor.
And... If you see that this one guy has to go to a prostitute because his wife is covered with reptilian scales, she has some sort of skin disease.
I mean, this is not that uncommon in France, where you see these metaphors or these allegories about people that they are rotting or diseased or whatever.
I mean, and there's terrible loneliness.
This is in Amélie as well.
Just incredible dysfunction.
And Amelie's about a woman who's pathologically shy with almost no self whatsoever who falls in love, I think, with a guy who works at a porn shop.
I mean, it's just kind of...
I mean, it's just kind of gross, in sort of my humble opinion.
There's an enormous amount of artistry and cinematography and great acting, and the writing is not bad, but the central theme or content is that people are not competent.
Now, this kind of writing...
In my view, it is not telling the truth about the world.
In fact, it is obscuring the truth about the person by recreating it in the world.
So, if you have a story about how everybody has no self and is pathetic and is pathologically shy or violent or acts out everything, then you are not talking about the world because there are people in the world who don't do that.
And you are not talking about the world as a whole.
You are talking about yourself or your family.
But in order to protect your own family or your own corruption or your own evil, you have to portray your life not as a choice but as life itself.
And this is, in my view, the vast majority of art is along these lines.
So, if I am a pathological liar, or I was raised by pathological liars, and I have an artistic bent, and ambition, and drive, and opportunity, and all that kind of stuff, then I'm going to write a novel, or a screenplay, or a play, or whatever, about how everybody lies, and it is the human condition for everybody to lie.
But what I'm doing is I'm saying that my choice is not a choice but a fact of reality and therefore I am submerging my own moral choices because I hate myself, I'm ashamed, I'm guilty, I'm enraged at my parents who lie to me constantly.
There's all this kind of stuff.
And this will come out overall in the novel.
So, if you have been severely abused, then you are like a Tarantino abused.
I don't know what the heck happened to that demon when he was a child, but I bet you it involved something pretty awful.
And then you are going to write about violence and alienation and you're going to have guys in leather suits locked up in basement chests for sexual practices.
You're going to have anal rape.
You're going to have all of these kinds of things.
Because you can't separate your own experience from a virtuous possibility.
And the reason you can't do that is that the moral horror of the rage, the fear, the terror, the horror that you experienced, you will not process.
You choose not to process that.
And I can understand why, because it's a damn hard thing to process.
But you won't process your own moral horror, and so...
You end up saying that the world is horrible.
The world is horrible.
Everyone is horrible. Human beings are horrible.
There's no possibility of non-horror.
And therefore, there's no way to deal with my feelings.
There's no need to deal with my feelings.
It would be like writing an entire play, getting angry about the fact that there's such a thing as gravity.
It would be like, well, what's the point of getting...
or aging. I mean, I guess you could...
I mean, what's the point, right?
I mean, it's going to happen. Gravity exists.
We're going to age. So why would you write an entire story railing against it?
Well, in the same way that if you've experienced a lot of horror that you have not processed, in other words, you are protecting those who abused you, and you are protecting yourself from the rage that you feel against those who abuse you, then you are going to recreate a world wherein there is nothing but abuse in the world.
And that is a pretty important thing to understand.
This is why very few of us who are libertarians like modern novels.
Because modern novels are the projection of pathological defenses onto the world as a whole.
And we are then, by reading those novels, absorbed into those defenses.
And we are infected with a worldview, in my particular humble opinion, that is very destructive and very horrifying and very negative.
And so that's one of the reasons I tend to avoid modern novels.
I see a few more modern films, but it's been a long time since I read.
I think the last modern novel I read was The Lives of the Saints.
And what a confusing mess that was.
Man, it was a struggle to read that.
My agent was somebody whose agency had represented this guy at one point, so I read it.
Oh, no, we were submitting my novel to somebody who'd published that book.
So, I read it, and as soon as I was in two pages into it, I was like, well, I guess they're not going to publish my work because that stuff was just sort of alienated and dead and confusing and baffling.
And so, I think that's a pretty important thing to understand about art, that art is not, most art is not about revealing the truth through a lie.
It is about obscuring choice through projection.
It is about protecting the evil By painting the entire world as evil.
So, if I think the whole world is evil, then my parents are not evil.
I mean, just sort of to take an obvious example.
If my parents were drunks and abused me and did this, that, and the other horrible thing, then if I write a movie script wherein everybody is a drunk or horrible or abusive, then I am excusing my own parents.
Because I'm not reaching for something higher or better.
I'm not clearly condemning them with reference to virtue.
I am simply creating a whole world of horror so that I don't have to deal with the specific emotional abuse of my parents.
So, for instance, the guy who wrote Leaving Las Vegas with Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue, I think, He was somebody who was a chronic alcoholic, obviously had gone through probably sexual abuse, but for sure, extreme verbal and physical abuse as a child.
So he wrote a movie about a guy drinking himself to death, and then I think two months after the movie's release, he drank himself to death.
So this was not a restorative or curative art form in any way, shape or form.
So the old Aristotelian theory about catharsis, which is basically around pity and terror.
So you see something like King Lear or Macbeth or Hamlet and you feel both pity and terror or one or the other.
And through seeing it on screen or on the stage or in a book, you experience that terror and you master it and you are purged of it and so on.
Sort of like a static electricity bill charge up when I was a kid in junior high school.
We were allowed into the library for an hour a week or an hour every couple of days.
And the big game, of course, was to shuffle along the carpeting which built up this horrendous static electricity because in Canada the air is so dry in the winter and it's heated, right?
So you basically would walk up to somebody with these sort of Frankenstein electrical bolts sort of quivering between your fingertips and touch them on the earlobe and so on and watch them sort of jump out of their skin.
But that's sort of the idea in the Aristotelian theory of art, that the reason we're drawn to art and the reason why art is so negative is because we wish to both experience, master and discharge these feelings of pity and terror.
He doesn't really explain why, I don't think, why those feelings build up to begin with, but my theory would be that we have...
We have terrible experiences in our lives which are very difficult to process in the absence of a clear, coherent and optimistic moral framework, or you could just say a logical moral framework.
We have these experiences which are very hard to master.
And art, especially of the sort of negative, horrible, alienated, destructive, dysfunctional modern kind, Art allows us to avoid mastering those feelings by pretending that there's nothing to master because it is a universal phenomenon and therefore you are not singled out and therefore your parents were not evil and therefore there is no cure and therefore you're not sick.
Right? So that is the way that I think modern art tends to I deal with these kinds of problems.
So it really is a lie to obscure a lie rather than a lie to reveal the truth.
That's sort of my humble opinion about this kind of art.
Now, then you have, on the other side, I mean, you have the very idealistic art of what Rand called the Romantic School, the sort of Victor Hugo and Ayn Rand and sort of some other people.
And this is sort of a projection of the way, as Rand put it, an idealization of man, the way that man ought to live, the way that man should live.
And I think that's interesting.
I think that's fine. But I think that because of a peculiar vanity in both of these people, both Rand and Hugo, I've read the biographies of both, and they were both somewhat vain and very ascetic.
Hugo used to wash...
He lived on an island, and he washed in ice-cold water every morning, and people would sort of go by in boats to watch him wash himself in this sort of macho, cold way.
And Rand had a very strong machismo to herself and to her group, her cult, I'm afraid I have to say.
And... So this machismo, I think, caused them psychologically to overleap the process of becoming human, of becoming moral, of becoming idealized in a sense.
And so they did not provide any journeys from there to here, but to some degree they projected themselves forward.
Into a world of angelic purity, of integrity, and so on, without building a bridge to there.
And so I think there was a little bit more fantasy and a little bit less imagination, if you remember this from a podcast from about three months ago.
There was a little bit more fantasy and a little bit less active and transitional imagination in their journeys.
So what I try to do in my art is to show the journey, to show the journey.
So in Revolutions we have a sociopath who is an anarchist who is really all about destroying and killing and undermining everything and he thinks that he's doing it for political causes but we find out the truth as we go forward both about his life and his own history and how he ends up being able to turn into a different kind of human being is through a process of a breakdown of his existing defenses and personality structure And as I wrote in a poem many,
many, many years ago, I do believe that in order to resurrect ourselves, we have to bury ourselves first.
You do have to go through a kind of spiritual death, at least that was my experience, and I'll talk about this at some point when I have the courage to go through the whole process.
But you do have to go through a kind of spiritual death to be reborn, simply because the defenses have become the personality.
And as I mentioned in TOGOA, sorry, the god of atheists, I'll call it TOGOA, just it's the acronym.
The defense is they overwhelm and become the personality they were originally designed to protect in the same way that governments overwhelm and become or displace the interests of the citizens that they were originally designed to protect.
These are all the same continuums, right?
I'm working on a grand field theory, I guess you could say, for all of psychological phenomenon, the human relations phenomenon.
I see a distinct parallel between defenses that originally designed to protect the personality, which then overwhelm, displace, and tyrannize over the original personality, which stays in sort of mute misery at the bottom of the psychological structure.
And this to me seems entirely the same function and process as a cis state which is put in to originally protect the citizens, which then overwhelms and dominates and subjugates the citizens and starts acting on its own, not as a service, but as an autonomous and tyrannical master.
To me, this seems like the same phenomenon.
And of course, it very much is tied to parenting.
Parenting, ideally, is supposed to be for the benefit of the children, and the parents are servants of the children's best interest.
While still retaining some authority, and that is not what, and of course, ideally, that was the goal behind government, but it never seems to happen because power corrupts, and for a variety of reasons we've talked about.
so to me what happens within the personality, what happens within the family, and what happens within the state is entirely parallel, which is why you can't be free politically until you're free personally, and neither can you, I think, effectively advocate for the freedom Of politics before you're free personally.
And you can't be free in your family until you're free in your own soul.
So to me, there's a sort of fairly strict hierarchy.
And this is what I'm trying to get across in my art.
Now, it's taken a couple hundred podcasts to get there.
And in art, you have to really compress it down.
You really have to compress it down.
And you have to make it a journey that shows the fear that is involved in self-actualization.
Shows the challenges in a way that is, I think, sympathetic and evocative.
So you have to communicate the difficulties of self-actualization in a way that is dramatic and exciting and that makes you root for the person who's trying to break free while simultaneously completely understanding the barriers that they have to break free.
So I spent a fair amount of time at the beginning of The God of Atheists talking about The family structures, talking about the selfishness of parents, talking about the emptiness of familial relationships, and my goal in the novel is to show that this is the structure or the emptiness that we're all brought up with,
the lack of instruction, and basically parents who have authority over their children in the way the government has authority over the population, and I'll talk about that a little bit later, But that they have authority because they wish to have authority, but they always use the argument for morality.
I mean, you'll see this sort of as the novel progresses, that the parents are always using, this is good, this is right, you have to do this, while they actually have no idea what goodness and rightness is.
And that shows up in their lives, and it shows up as a corruptive force within their children's lives.
And it shows the hypocrisy of knowing that morality is important, knowing that The argument for morality and never applying it.
And you see this all the time.
Whenever you see people interviewed, if you watch a Dr.
Phil or two, or any time you see anybody interviewed, they always know the exact right moral answer.
So you say to this, I don't know, some violent woman, Dr.
Phil says, do you think that children should be treated with respect and not beaten?
Oh, yes, absolutely.
Or how do you think that this should work?
Oh, he should do the right thing.
He should tell the truth. He should do this.
He should do that. Oh, I think it's very important to encourage your children and to let them do what they want to do and to sort of guide them along and help them figure out what they're good at.
Everybody knows. This stuff flows off people's tongues like a bile.
I guess bile with flowers on top or something.
Everybody knows the right thing to do, and that is what is used as sort of the sycophantic way of speaking about morals without ever having to live them.
And that creates a great deal of confusion in children about ethics because the parents say the right things and do the opposite and claim to have authority because they're moral but know nothing about morality.
And this is the central theme of the novel, when the children start to become morally aware and begin to question the behavior and actions of their parents.
But it's enormously difficult for them to do it.
They face unbelievable trials, tribulations, hostilities, rejections, because asking questions of any kind of authority is a very dangerous thing to do in any situation, particularly these days where authority has more power over individuals than at any time in history.
I mean, You had terrible authority in the Middle Ages, but they didn't have nuclear weapons capable of wiping everybody out, right?
And so, it really was, it really is, I mean, the discrepancy, the power discrepancy between the state and the citizens is wider now than at any time in human history, and it really is quite astonishing to see the effects, of course, that this has on parenting and vice versa and so on.
So, In The God of Atheists, I also talk about how morality is in the tiny decisions at the beginnings of things.
And so that is something that's a very, very important thing, for me at least, to communicate.
That's why I talk about morality.
The little details of these children's lives at the very beginning of their lives.
So the interaction between Sarah and her mother about going shopping, these are the little details at the beginning of things which give people a sense of self or not a sense of self.
And seeing how that plays out and how a sense of self can be rescued from that kind of parenting I think one of the central themes of the novel, one of it is that I'm trying to achieve to show that where things were at the very beginning of things is the things that you have to face the most, right?
First impressions count, and our first impressions of the world and of authority and of our parents are very important, which is why I talk about Alice and her nannies and her parents, her mother in particular's arbitrary decisions about So morality is the tiny decisions at the beginnings of things, the decisions that are made by the parents, the experiences that occur to the children, and also when you in life make a choice, it is who you're going to be sort of like in 10 years.
I mean, it's important to recognize that choices are not just building a bridge to your future, they're actually building where your future is, what your future is going to be.
And I think that's pretty important.
So, for instance, when I went out with this Girl for six years or so, off and on, long distance, not too long distance, in school, past school.
When we had our first or second date, we had a conflict about, I can't remember exactly what, but I think it was the third date and she raised her voice at me and so on.
And I had a decision at that point.
And I had a decision which was to say, okay, well, obviously things aren't going to get any better from here.
Obviously she's on her best behavior since we're early on in our dating.
And I have a choice at the beginning, and I can choose to say, no, I will not accept this in my life.
And say, you know, all the best, but that's not something that I can live with.
And to my credit, I did bring this up.
But, of course, then I fell down the pit of being blamed because I didn't still understand the nature of certain kinds of femininity and the propaganda that I had been subjected to.
So I certainly understand and have sympathy for myself, although I wish somebody had told me a little bit before that my feelings were valid and not that men just had no ability to have any contact with their own feelings and so on.
So I did take that stand, but I was dismantled because of my own susceptibility to propaganda and my own lack of wisdom in this area.
And so, well, obviously I ran out of power while doing this podcast in the car, so I'll just finish it off by saying that when you make little decisions at the beginning of things, like not to trust your own instincts, you end up in very difficult moral situations down the road, which take a lot more recovery and a lot more energy,
so it's important to focus on the little decisions at the beginnings of things so that your life becomes morally easier over time and you don't end up with these sort of, who do we save out of the lifeboat situations, which occur Please come by and drop me a few bucks.
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