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April 21, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:13
202 Art Part 2: Serving the Unholy Trinity
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Good afternoon, everybody.
I hope you're doing well.
It's time for me to go home to my baby.
I'm still working on my Freedom Aid radio musical.
How do you like it? Well, it is ten past five on the afternoon on Friday the 21st of April 2006.
And I'm heading home for a weekend with Christina.
Always a joyful and blissful and wonderful thing to look forward to.
And I hope that you are having a great evening.
I hope that you had a great week.
And what the hell. I hope your weekend's great too.
So, what are we going to talk about?
Art Part 2. Because you just can't get enough art when you have a semi-novelist at the helm of your podcast.
Now, I'm going to talk a little bit about art in terms of its history.
And, of course, I've taken a fair amount of art history both in my college or university education.
And also, I spent two years at the National Theatre School, which is the top O primo theatre school in Canada, as an actor and a playwright.
And liked both aspects of it.
A little bit more playwriting.
But I certainly did enjoy the acting.
It was a lot of fun. And it was one of the things that really was kind of an eye-opening experience to be at theatre school.
Very creative. A little crazy, of course.
But what it really did was got me kind of out of my head when British people grew up with sort of inner heads, right?
We're not that much into yoga unless we happen to be Sting.
But we tend not to be sort of rooted in our own instincts and our own physicality.
All of the dance and movement and sword fighting classes and so on really did help that sort of thing, the gymnastics and all that sort of stuff that we learned, which was macho enough to make up for all of the makeup that I learned how to apply.
So I've read a lot of historical plays and learned a lot about art history during that process.
In fact, it was that kind of historical reading that we did for all of the plays that we were in that kind of got me to continue on in history rather than English.
I did two years of an English degree at York University.
In Toronto, and then I did two years at the National Theatre School in Montreal.
And actually, only about 1% of people who apply get in, so it was quite a challenge.
I actually got in as an actor and then switched to playwriting.
And it was quite interesting, actually, the audition.
We did three auditions.
The first round was the first round.
The second round was the second round.
And for the third round, we were asked to take our favorite play and take it down to three minutes.
And my original idea...
Yes, I was a rather crazed youth.
My original idea was that in a play called Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, there is a set which has a tree on it.
And the stage directions are pretty clear that the tree has a leaf in the first act and no leaf in the second act.
And that's the only thing that changes in the set design.
So my original idea was to stand there in the manner of a tree with a hand open for a minute and a half and then close it while staring at the people doing the audition and then say, I was the tree in Waiting for Godot.
And that was my three-minute distillation of the play, which was entirely clever because that's actually a whole lot more that's generally occurring than what's occurring in the play, which is, I've never understood Beckett to save my life.
It seems like an enormous con job, yet like Ulysses, but I'm certainly willing to...
Be open to the possibility I've missed something, but it just seems to be one of these con jobs that everyone's...
It's like the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone says it's brilliant and it's funny when it just seems awful and depressing.
I will give James Joyce props for A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, which I would recommend reading if you get a chance, but his later stuff, No Luck and the Dubliners, oh my god, it's like a coma creeping over your skeletal system relatively quickly.
So... I'd like to talk a little bit about art in terms of history, because my humble opinion is that art is, for the most part, in history, art is a form of transmitted psychoses.
And I come up with that rather non-standard definition simply based on the fact that the vast majority of art in history falls into one of three categories, generally.
One is the glorification of the church or God or spiritual things or Zeus or whatever.
The second is the glorification of the rulers.
And the third is the glorification of war.
So, since the recreation of a supernatural and psychotic fantasy like religious texts, The bringing those to life as if they were true would be a form of mental illness,
right? Like if somebody said, I'm actually walking with Jesus, he's standing beside me, and you just ask me what you want to tell him, and I'll tell you, we would call that person either a priest or somebody who is mentally ill, or perhaps the two terms are not needed.
Anyway, so this sort of recreation of the acts of the gods and so on, The creation of the medieval mystery plays or morality plays and so on is the attempt to bring a psychotic fantasy to life as if it were true and to communicate it as a substitute for other people's direct experience of reality.
So, for instance, if you're in the Middle Ages, of course, you don't see God any more than we see Him now.
And yet, every time you crack a book, assuming you're the 1% of people who can read, every time you crack a book or go and see a play or hear a story, it's all about these things which have never occurred as if they're true, right?
I mean, the Bible is, for me, a work of propagandistic art.
And what it does is it recreates a psychotic fantasy around gods and devils and angels and...
Heavens and hells and walking on water and curing the lame and all this kind of stuff.
It's all a sort of psychotic, grandiose kind of fantasy.
And it recreates that as if it were real in direct contradiction to your sensual evidence, to the sensual evidence that you have.
And so, to me, any form of entertainment or communication that attempts to recreate a reality that is impossible or insane and uses that as a sort of club to demolish the evidence of the senses, such as religious texts and so on, is really a form of psychotic propagandizing and also a way in which psychoses, like a virus, is transferred from brain to brain within society.
Now, this is not just the case with religious text, religious art.
You also have all of this glorifying of the state art, which you see pretty constantly.
The most egregious and horrifying, in my humble opinion, practitioner of this art is Shakespeare, who, although a writer talented beyond words can describe, except perhaps his own, A man who simply applied all of his talents to the veneration of brutal dictatorship and the complete eradication of the value of the common man or the non-brutal dictator.
So, as I've mentioned before, you see in Macbeth that Macbeth can go and physically hew down like he's chopping down a bloody set of trees He can hew down dozens upon dozens of unarmed peasants or meagerly armed peasants or fairly unarmed lowly warriors and be called a hero and be given praise by the king.
But the moment he stabs the king in his sleep, he becomes somebody who is so cursed by God that, you know, words can't even give it sanction.
And so I do find Shakespeare to be revolting from a moral standpoint.
I understand that he's funny.
He is funny. I mean, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream are funny.
Although Puck is always annoying.
Always, always, always annoying.
It's always some gymnastic youth or kid jumping up and down, speaking in these exaggerated tones and taking big steps.
I'd much rather see a young Bill Murray as Puck than anything else, but that's just me.
So, this veneration of religious psychoses and reportraying of it, this veneration of power, which is pretty constant all the way through art, with the minor exception of a few modern artists, and this veneration of war.
Oh, you listen to the St.
Crispin speech from Henry V, or as we used to call it in theater school, Hank Sank, And, oh my heavens, it is just astounding how evil this is, you know, that good men of bed will wish that they were here on this St.
Crispin's day, you know, like he's just going to go and do this most wonderful thing when all he's going to go do is go and butcher a bunch of French peasants.
And this is the kind of soaring rhetoric, as I've mentioned before, in which Noam Chomsky also talks about this soaring rhetoric that you see always, always, always present at the most bloody and vile and vicious and cowardly executions in history.
So, I do find that the vast majority of what is called art, and of course including the religious texts, is really sick and evil stuff throughout history, and it attempts to substitute psychotic and almost always evil fantasies for people's direct sensual experience.
And I think that's a real shame.
Now, That's sort of on the one side of the fence, and that's to some degree sort of, you could say romantic in that it's a real exaggeration of people's sensual experience and a direct contradiction to it.
So, that's sort of on the one side.
And then on the other side, I'm obviously not doing much justice to the intricacies of the history, but in the rise of enlightenment and after that, you start to get the rise of realism again.
Realism in sculpture, realism in paintings, realism to some degree in art, you get the rise of the novel, right?
I mean, Daniel Defoe, I was thinking William Defoe, who's lived for a long time and turned to acting.
Daniel Defoe, who we all know from Roberts and Crusoe and Man Friday and all that kind of stuff, Oh,
gosh, what was it called?
The one where the maid is being chased by the prince, Pamela.
Yes, you get Pamela, which the guy who wrote Tom Jones, Henry Fielding, he started his career with a pretty funny parody of Pamela called Shamela, which is pretty funny and worth reading.
You have to plow your way through Pamela to get the jokes, but it's not bad.
It's not bad at all. But you start to get the rise of secularism and you start to get the rise of the printing press.
You start to get the middle class.
You need consumers in order to have novels.
You can't have them read in a village square and have any profit.
You have people with enough money to buy it who want to read about their own lives.
So you start to get the rise of this idea that art is the mirror of life, and this is something that Shakespeare talks about, and I guess in some weird way he was providing the mirror to life in that the peasants were expendable and the lords always considered themselves to be fantastic.
I mean, Macbeth was written for King James the whatever, who had an interest in witches and the macabre and the supernatural, so that's who he wrote it for, which of course doesn't mean that it's not a fantastically written This Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow speech is absolutely fantastic.
It's one of the absolutely horrible expressions of nihilism in Western literature, which until the rise of Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, of course, I don't think we had an equal, perhaps Iago in Othello, but...
You start to get the rise of the novel and so on, and you start to get this idea that art is supposed to be a mirror to nature.
In other words, you're supposed to see naturalistic displays of dialogue, so you lose this iambic pentameter, which was generally, of course, put in place to help people learn lines.
Iambic pentameter was partly in there for artistic reasons, but it was also in there because actors, prior to cheap printing presses, of which Shakespeare certainly didn't have access to until later in his career, As an actor, you would simply get your speech and your cue line, and that's what you had to learn. And they had to have their heads stuffed with lots of plays, and all they knew was their cue line, which of course made them very good actors in that they were very active listeners.
You had to listen because you had to know what your cue line was.
And it also meant that if you had them as iambic with rhyming couplets, that it was easier to memorize them.
They were sort of cues. So there were some practical reasons for it as well.
But with the rise of naturalism and the rise of sort of holding a mirror up to nature, you start to get what I sort of consider to be...
A fairly bland set of novels, which is sort of the 18th century and early 19th century novels, most of which are forgotten now and for good reason, in that a lot of them are sort of, they're like movies of the week, they're like predictable woman in peril.
She has a maid and the evil master is out to bed her and she must retain her virtue.
This sort of Tess of Durberville's thing, if you ever get a chance to read Thomas Hardy, I'd certainly recommend The Mayor of Casterbridge, which is a, I actually adapted that to the stage once, and that is a wonderful novel.
Quite powerful.
It's one of the first, I think, first post-Shakespearean writers to actually get a character of Shakespearean grandeur, which is the actual mayor of Casterbridge.
A bit of a disappointing ending, but the first half is fantastic.
So you start to get the rise of this sort of hold-the-mirror-up-to-nature stuff, and then you sort of get as a reaction to that romanticism, which is the Count of Monte Cristo, the Alexandre Dumas, you get novels like...
The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, of course, where you start to get this sort of grand heroism that is not exactly founded on religion.
It is to some degree for many of the heroes, but it's a pretty personal kind of religion.
It's not the sort of sappy Christian saint that you see in the Brothers Karamazov, the Alyoshas, or some of the sappy Christian stuff that is going on throughout the medieval morality plays.
You start to see some real kind of heroes.
And people who have staunch moral fiber and who are brave and who are courageous and who are magnificently strong.
And, you know, I guess the ethical Fabios of the 19th century was quite a movement.
It did deviate into what was called muscular Christianity, which was, you know, strong-limbed and deep-chested Christian heroes of the later 19th century.
But you did start to get this...
Somewhat, and I say this with some reservation because it's not entirely accurate, but to me at least, the somewhat cardboard cutout, somewhat comic book-y kinds of heroes which culminate in the novels of Ayn Rand.
And don't get me wrong, the ideas are great, but you can't claim that it's an over-exercise of naturalism in their portrayal or in their dialogue, which is a little stiff and a little self-conscious and so on.
And I'm sure Ayn Rand would be the first to agree with me with that, should she be listening to my podcast, in which case I'm sure I would be excommunicated from all circles, rational or with integrity, simply for about all of the podcasts.
But you start to get this and then simultaneous to, and this is very much after the First World War, you start to get the rise of what's called kitchen sink drama or ultra-naturalism, wherein the idea is that art should be a complete mirror to nature. wherein the idea is that art should be a complete And this is something that is very popular in England.
And if you look at Coronation Street, which is sort of the lives of somewhat dull and grubby people, it's the idea that these kitchen sink dramas, that there is as much drama in the life of a lowly person as there is in the life of a heroic person.
And it all comes out of Marxism and the proletariat, and it's all very lefty.
None of these people rise out of poverty to become successful business people or great artists.
They all just sort of drink and fight.
They're crushed down by the system and they have no choices and no chances.
This is something that actually...
The Death of a Salesman author, Arthur Miller, who also wrote The Crucible.
The Death of a Salesman, he took this idea very much to heart.
And Death of a Salesman is a very interesting play, if you get a chance to read it or to see it.
The version with Dustin Hoffman is great.
I actually saw Judd Hirsch do it, the guy from Taxi, and he was very good at it.
But he had this idea that he took from this kitchen sink naturalism, which was that the trials and tribulations of a small man can be as dramatic and powerful as the trials and tribulations of a hero.
So he wrote...
Death of a Salesman with this in mind, where you have a guy, Willie Lohman, right?
Lohman on the totem pole, Willie Lohman, who's obviously going through a mental illness, and of course he can't escape his lefty and Judaic background, this Arthur Miller guy.
He actually was, just by the by, in case you don't know, he was married to Marilyn Monroe, interestingly enough.
And, which means that she either had more substance than looked like it or he had less and I would maybe tend towards the latter, but who knows.
So he wrote this with this idea and it could be that it would be considered to be the trials of a man who's obviously disintegrating mentally.
But it is the trials of a salesman who is bad and pitiful and desperate at his job.
And you can see this kind of stuff in Glengarry Glen Ross as well, if you get a chance to see that.
It's worth seeing just for the acting powerhouse that it is, that every famous actor in the world is in that movie.
But Death of a Salesman, where he's hallucinating and he's lost in the past and his children are failures, it very much is around a parent who is hanging on to self-aggrandizing illusions at the expense of everybody else's ability to survive, right?
Mentally. I mean, he just kills the will and spirit of his children by constantly boosting them and praising them.
And I certainly remember all of that from my own childhood, so...
I certainly understand that the vanity of the parent is extraordinarily claustrophobic to the ambitions and hopes of the child and there's no better way to make a child cynical and possibly self-destructive but certainly having a strong nihilistic streak in them than to have the parent to be utterly convinced of the genius,
virtue and beauty of the child And to portray that and publicize that is no better way to make a child cynical and prone to underachievement than to wildly praise them to the skies in a vainglorious manner as a parent.
and you see that very much going through in Death of a Salesman.
It's very lefty, right?
But Arthur Miller, to his own credit, did say that it's not particularly lefty.
Okay, he's a salesman, but he is mentally ill, and also the guy who is the most commonsensical in the story, the guy who actually tries to help him, is a capitalist.
Willie Loman's problem, for those who haven't heard it, is basically that he thinks that he should be entitled to success and so on as a salesman because He is good friends with his boss's boss, and he helped name his kid.
And the guy's like, well, that's nice, but that doesn't really matter as far as your job performance goes.
That's what's sort of more important.
And this guy's a real failure, and he's ethically significantly compromised, as you see in the play.
And it is sort of magnificent despair.
I think the fact that his wife steps up at the end and praises him to the skies is really too much, in my view.
And it is also, as I mentioned in a podcast, I think last November, about artists in the free market.
You can really see that Arthur Miller, as an artist, doesn't understand anything about sales, where he says something like, a salesman is out there with shoeshine and a smile.
And that's all he's got.
It's like, that's all nonsense.
That's all just complete nonsense.
And a complete disrespect to the craft and the sophisticated business intelligence it takes to be a good salesman.
I mean, would you say that a surgeon is out there with a shoeshine and a smile and that's all he's got?
It's like, no, he's got significant skills which are beneficial to people.
And learning how to connect value to people, values of products and services to people to help save them money, is a very challenging and interesting skill.
And of course there are bad and lying salespeople out there, but the vast majority of them are honorable, decent and good.
But this kind of working the low aspect of life, well, quote, low, right, where you are focusing your energies and attentions on the lower classes or the excluded classes, this is the root of, and it's very, very much socialist in nature and very much anti-idealism, anti-romanticism.
You see this in all of the endless modern novels about, you know, the drunken ex-boxers and the prostitutes and the dregs and the lowlifes and the...
You know, this movie that Clint Eastwood was in recently, Million Dollar Baby or whatever, about the excluded and those who never got their shot and the Marlon Brando in the cab saying, I could have been a contender.
And all of the people who are excluded and lost and lonely and sad and hopeless.
This very much comes out of the Marxist paradigm.
And of course, it justifies...
It justifies the state.
I mean, every time that you have a piece of art that portrays people as helpless in one form or another, then you are serving centralized authority of some manner.
Usually state these days, but I mean, it can be religious as well.
So, of course, in the medieval mystery plays, the morality plays, you had the poor sinner who was helpless to achieve salvation without the help of the church, and you had the magnificent priest who came in and saved him, and so on.
And this, of course, is all justifications for state power.
In Shakespeare you have that any kind of regicide or the murder of those in authority is the worst conceivable crime and must be punished and for them to kill off peasants is perfectly noble and wonderful but for them to kill off each other is horrifying and a crime against nature.
And one of the famous scenes in Hamlet, where Hamlet is about to kill Claudius, I'm not giving anything away here, but it's well worth having a look at the play.
I would say that the Mel Gibson version is good, if you don't mind the slight anachronistic feel.
The Laurence Olivier version is very good.
And I would not spend too much time with the Kenneth Branagh version, which is four hours of complete self-aggrandizement, in my humble opinion, but have a go at the Mel Gibson version, which, I mean, he's good, but the supporting actors are just fantastic.
So, in Hamlet, there's a scene where Hamlet is about to kill Claudius.
Claudius is supposed to have killed his father, But he doesn't know for sure for reasons that you'll see if you see the movie or read the play or see the play.
But Claudius is praying.
And Hamlet says something like, well, this sucks.
This sucketh. Because if I kill Claudius while he's praying, his soul goes straight to heaven.
And I take on a sin and I go to hell and this and that, right?
And this, of course, is part of the whole idea that to serve power, right?
That you can't kill the king.
And interestingly enough, well, if you get a chance to see it, there's more that we can talk about another time with Hamlet.
Of course, it's considered to be the greatest play in the world, and it certainly has a lot of fascinating elements to it, and you could do a couple of podcasts on Hamlet.
But it is very interesting to see the resolution of it.
And I find that the play itself has never moved me.
I find Hamlet as a character has never moved me.
And of course there's a million interpretations as to why Hamlet is paralyzed.
Why does Hamlet not act?
And this is, of course, Olivier's version pretty much says explicitly that his father gets killed by his uncle, his uncle marries his mother, and the reason that he can't act is because of eatable conflicts with his own mother, that he wants to have sex with his own mother, and so he can't kill his...
Uncle, because his uncle killed his father and is having sex with his mother, which is exactly what Hamlet wants to do based on his own eatable complex, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So there's always lots of eatables.
I think that's complete nonsense.
Basically, in my humble opinion, Hamlet is told by a ghost, by a spirit, by a goblin or a daemon of the night, which takes the shape of his own father, that his own father's ghost tells him That Claudius killed him.
Not him, Hamlet, but him, his own father.
Now, I gotta tell you, I am a rationalist, but even if I weren't, if I had a vision of a ghost telling me to kill someone, I am not sure that I would leap into action either.
And the fact that Hamlet is...
Obviously mentally unstable because he is seeing visions of ghosts telling him to kill people.
Now, of course, other people see the ghost, which is always what happens in art.
It's one of the reasons that art is so destructive to mental health.
I mean, almost all art throughout history completely undermines and destroys mental health because it has other people validate insane and psychotic visions that you're having, which is not really a good thing.
You know, at the end of A Beautiful Mind, which is following the whole postmodern infection that we now have in art, wherein nothing turns out to be real.
It's like The Sixth Sense and A Beautiful Mind and Fight Club and all these other movies where, oh, it all turns out to be a fantasy.
I mean, this is mental illness here, right?
But it's a fantasy that everyone else is giving indications of having beliefs, and you find that at the end, blah, blah, blah.
I think Fight Club was a good movie.
We'll talk about that another time.
I do think that Hamlet can't act because he's worried that he's insane.
Now, I think that's a good thing.
I mean, I think there's a reason why Hamlet is considered to be one foot in the medieval world and one foot in the Enlightenment.
Because in the medieval world, the spirit would have convinced Hamlet to kill someone just by showing up and saying, I'm sent from God, I... You should go kill this guy, and then the guy would go kill him.
That would sort of be the medieval play's solution to it, but because Shakespeare was obviously intelligent enough to know which way the wind was blowing culturally, you had the influx, and this play was written in the early 16th century, you're having the influx of the rationalistic methods already...
The ancient philosophers have been rediscovered, and you have the rise of Roman law, the growth of cities, you have the beginnings of the middle class, all the stuff's going on in England, and you have some additional limitations on the power of the monarchy, which come out of the Black Death of the 14th and 15th centuries, where labor is decimated, and so those who still remain alive can bargain for more rights from their lords.
There's all this kind of stuff going on.
And so you are starting to get the rise of rationalism.
And it's not 100 years, I think, until you get, after Hamlet, that you get the rise of the scientific method from Francis Bacon.
So this stuff was kind of in the air.
And so you have a transitional character called Hamlet.
Who is obviously having sick medieval visions of ghosts and regicide and patricide and go kill people, but is rationalistic enough to ask two questions.
These two questions that Hamlet asks are pretty important.
The first question that he asks is, is it real?
Is it real?
Because other people see the ghost, but nobody else sees the ghost that...
Tells him, and hears the ghost tell Hamlet to kill Claudius, his uncle.
And so Hamlet has the first question, which is the first awakening of the Enlightenment mind, or the Renaissance mind, in the face of the psychotic worldview that is the Middle Ages.
I mean, the completely psychotic, the world is entirely populated with gods and devils, and let's kill people for their beliefs.
Entirely psychotic belief system that is the medieval thought.
The Renaissance is beginning and the Enlightenment is not 100, 150 years away.
And so Shakespeare has this character who says, okay, so I'm getting this ghost that's telling me to kill people, but maybe it's not real.
That's the first question that you need to ask about.
I mean, we think we're having trouble fighting our way free of the state and religion.
I mean, just imagine the people who had to struggle a thousand times harder than we do to get people out of this completely psychotic view of the Middle Ages.
Where not only did gods exist and walk the earth, but their absolute representatives were the totalitarian dictatorships of the monarchies that were all over the world.
There was no capitalism at all and no examples of democracy and they didn't have the enlightenment to look back on.
I mean, these people had some heavy lifting to do compared to what we're doing.
We're just juggling soap bubbles relative to what they had to haul out of the swamp.
So, you have this character who asks two questions about a ghost that tells him to kill people.
One, is the ghost real?
Well, you know, that's sort of an unusual question to ask.
You don't see a lot of that.
You see a little bit of it in Macbeth, but not a huge amount, because Macbeth hears the witches tell him that he will be a king, but also the guy who's with him Also hears that his children will be kings and so on.
So there's not really that much doubt about the supernatural manifestations in Macbeth or in other areas.
But in Hamlet, you have this question, is this ghost real?
Or is it a figment of my imagination?
Which is the first time you start to get any kind of actual identity, consciousness, rational self, the observing ego, right?
The third eye that looks at yourself and says, am I doing the right thing or the wrong thing?
There's a part of me that said, ooh, I haven't podcasted in a day.
I wonder what the issue is. Rather than just blurp, right?
Blurp is like no third eye.
So you start to get a guy who actually asks a question.
It's quite a bit different, right?
So he has a voice telling him to kill someone.
He's like, gee, I don't even know if it's real.
Whereas, Abraham just says, right, let's go kill Isaac, my son, because God tells me to.
So, I mean, this is a big difference, right?
Now, the second thing, which is a little less noble that Hamlet does, is he says, huh, okay, well, even if it is real, does it come from God, or does it come from the devil?
In other words, well, you know what it means, God or devil.
Is this ghost telling me to do something good because it's coming from God, or is it telling me to do something bad because it's coming from the devil?
That's pretty important. That's saying that you can't simply assume that everyone who talks to you is virtuous.
So even if you are hearing voices and accept that they're supernatural in origin, you have a moral responsibility to determine the moral nature of what it is that these voices are telling you to do.
I think that's kind of important.
So in Hamlet, you get this heavily transitional character.
And also, of course, you see, and this is, I think, some sort of unconscious representation of the concept of Roman law in Shakespeare's mind, right?
You have these terrible trials in the Middle Ages, as I mentioned before, this sort of trial by fire, where if you're accused of a crime, you have to reach into a fire, and if you get infected, then you are a bad guy, and you're guilty, and so on.
And that's sort of how they resolve disputes.
So you just go to the Lord. The Lord would sort of basically flip a coin and say who was right, and that was about it.
But with the resurrection of Roman law, you start to get things like courts and evidence and this and that.
And so Hamlet is somebody who is attempting to figure out murder in the absence of a court system.
And it is this paralysis, of course, once you start to have an observing ego and a third eye, And you start to see that you can't just go with your total guts and you can't just listen to crazy voices.
You actually need some evidence, which is what he tries to get with the play within a play.
The play is the thing wherein we'll catch the conscience of the king.
He starts to try and figure out, objectively, if he can find out whether or not Claudius actually killed his father or not.
And this is kind of unusual, right?
If you're looking for evidence for your beliefs, that's kind of not the medieval mindset.
And that's something that is really new that Hamlet brings to the consciousness of mankind, right?
That you actually need some proof when voices tell you that something occurred.
And so Hamlet is somebody who is trying to establish the guilt or innocence of his uncle in the absence of a legal court system.
Which is obviously pretty painful, and that's why he's paralyzed, because he doesn't know if he's crazy.
Even if he accepts that it's an external supernatural voice telling him to kill Claudius, he doesn't know if it is from God or from the devil.
And he also needs proof, because if it's from the devil, it could be trying to trick him, so he actually has to appeal.
Now, he appeals a little bit more to psychological things, rather than to...
Physical things, but it's a step forward nonetheless.
Now, he still kills Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and there's no conscience and no problem with that, and he kills other people, and he runs a thaw through Polonius, and he doesn't feel guilt for that, and so on.
But he still is hesitant about killing the king, so there's still all of this medieval nonsense.
But there is, in Hamlet, and I think that's why it's such a gripping play for so many people, there is in Hamlet this transition from We're good to go.
Mental illness versus the world is absolutely insane.
So if you're hearing voices that they're coming from within you, that it's psychological in nature, that you need to look within, and that you don't simply act out as if God or demons and so on are telling you to do stuff.
So I think that is a very interesting character, but the majority of what Shakespeare does is still pure propaganda for the ruling classes, right?
Which is sort of annoying, because, I mean, the man had an unbelievable talent.
But, so, the majority, so just to sort of sum up, the majority of art that I see and experience and have read about in the past is propaganda for the ruling classes, the aristocrats and so on, propaganda for the ruling classes on the spiritual side of God and religion and so on.
Or it's a glorification of war, which is designed to make people serve the ruling classes.
And so I find that most of art is really a psychosis that is attempting to replicate itself and substitute itself for the sensual experience.
And so you get this pomp and ceremony, which is a kind of art to me as well.
The crown around a king's head is a kind of art.
The costumes are a kind of art.
All designed to obscure the simple fact that he's a man just like everybody else that he rules.
And most of art is simply around serving that power structure, which we can talk about more.
Do email me if you're interested in this.
I have much more to say in the realm of art.
But just let me know if this is a topic of interest to you, because I still want to make sure that I'm serving the listener as always.
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