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May 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:23
224 Movie Review: The Godfather
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Hey everybody, it's Def.
Hope you're doing well.
It's time for a fun review.
I am in a good mood.
I just finished closing a deal, I guess one of the largest single deals that I've ever closed in my life.
Confirmation, verbal confirmation, no P.O. yet, but we'll count it as cause for celebration.
$340,000, which is good.
One of the bigger deals I've closed in my life.
Actually, that's the biggest.
I think that may in fact be the biggest.
So I'm pleased with that.
And after taxes, that's going to net me at least...
$12.50, but I just can't tell you how happy I am to be funding the public health care system and sending our troops to Afghanistan.
So I hope you're doing well, and we are going to have a fun review today.
It's been a long time since I've seen this movie, so forgive me if I get the details wrong, Paisano, but I thought that it might be fun to take a tour around The caricaturistic, stereotypical, yet oddly powerful film, The Godfather, which I'm sure you could recognize from my massive slaughterhouse of the opening theme.
But I think as memory serves me right, it was an interesting film on a number of levels.
So we're just going to chit-chat about it, and we are going to see if we can't tease out some of what it says, for FUNZY's sake, about the nature of power and violence and corruption and so on.
So, what I think is interesting about the film is a number of things.
First of all, the time frame, right?
It starts in 1945. I think the Japanese have just surrendered, and so there's a big celebration going on, right?
And this, of course, to me, mirrors the euphoria in the West and so on, and right after the Second World War, ah, violence is conquered, let's celebrate, and so on.
And in the back rooms, the most brutal violence is being perpetrated, And communicated.
So as it opens, there's this, I think he's an undertaker, and he's sort of saying, oh, I have this daughter and she is the light of my life and the glory of my existence and so on and so on.
And sadly, she has dated a non-Italian man, because Italian men, so respectful.
I can't remember the phrase now, but I believe that there's a phrase that Italian women use for Italian men these days, something like, a guy with mirrored sunglasses and hairy chest hanging off his mother's titty.
Something like that. I'm not entirely positive, but I remember reading an article about this that was quite funny.
But he's saying she went out with a non-Italian guy who, with a friend of his, took her for a drive, they made her drink whiskey, and then they attacked her, and she did not dishonor her family, and she fought back, but she will never be beautiful again, blah, blah, blah. And so then he wants the...
The godfather, Marlon Brando's raspy-voiced guy, to kill them.
And he wants to pay him money and so on.
And this I cannot do.
He refuses to do it, saying it's not justice, it's not an eye for an eye because your daughter is still alive, and so on.
And he also said, why didn't you come to me to begin with, right?
You know, I'm your friend, I would have helped you.
And he said, no, I went to the police because I thought I would get justice there.
And he's like, yeah, okay, so you come to America, you're into the American dream, you want to take your case to the cops, and you took the case to the cops, three years, suspended sentence, blah, blah, blah.
Because maybe you're a filthy Guinea immigrant or something like that and the WASPs, non-Italian boys, the WASPs control the court system and so you can't get justice with the state and so you have to then, this is why I as the godfather exist and can help you because you can't get justice from the state.
I mean, the basic thesis, for me, at least from the Godfather, the basic thesis, which is, of course, never really talked about because everybody blames the innocent, right?
Blames general population, blames the innocent.
The Godfather, the whole mafia world that Brando's clan is part of and is simply the shadow cast by the state and, to a smaller degree, the church.
So, in this opening scene, they set this up right away.
You went to the state for justice, but the state gave you no justice because the state is run by wasps, and these were wasp kids, and your daughter is considered to be a nobody, and you can't...
So, the state is just another gang.
So, you went to this original gang, you put your faith in the system, and I think he uses the word faith, if I remember rightly.
You put your faith in the cops. And the cops turned out to be, or the system turned out to be sort of skewed in favor of the ruling classes, of which you are not one.
So you went to the cops, and the cops arrested these guys, and it was proven, right?
So they were proven to have committed this sexual assault and beating.
And... Yet, they got no jail time because it's a political thing, right?
So, the state cannot dispense justice, and now you want me to go and kill these young men.
And that is a very interesting thing, right?
So, the mafia is the shadow cast by the fact that the state is unjust.
And now, of course, in a dispute resolution organization society, also known as DROs, for those who are new, and I got an email about this today to say, please spell it out so it's not too cryptic for people.
In an anarcho-capitalist society, you are not going to have a state.
You are going to have these dispute resolution organizations that are going to be privately funded and are going to have to please their customers and be as effective and efficient and have as many layers of self-checking as possible.
So you will get justice from this situation in the way that you just can't from the state, because the state is subject to all these political pressures and so on.
So at the very beginning, you see that...
There is a secondary layer of justice that exists because the state is unjust.
So if the state had put these kids away for 10 years or whatever who beat up this guy's daughter, then he wouldn't come to Don Corleone, he wouldn't come to the Mafia, he wouldn't be dragged into this secondary and completely corrupt because it can't operate openly, DRO called the Mafia.
And so, that to me is very interesting.
Right away, you have justification for the mafia based on the corruption of the state.
Fabulous, you know? I'm with them so far.
Of course, everyone thinks they're talking about capitalism, but they're not.
They're talking about socialism and statism and so on.
Now, there are a couple of other ways in which the state, as the cause of the Mafia, shows up in a number of ways.
The organized crime is the shadow cast by state power.
What also occurs is that the central conflict in The Godfather is between what I think Don Corleone calls legitimate vices.
I.e. the sort of natural three that you would expect, which is gambling, prostitution, And...
Oh, there was another one.
I can't remember which vice.
I wasn't drinking, because this is post-prohibition.
But prostitution, gambling, and some other...
I can't remember. But maybe it's only two.
So, these are considered to be legitimate vices.
And as Don Corleone says, at one point, they're denied to men by the church.
And so we supply them, and...
In the political arena, the fact that we are not involved in drugs, right, the central question is that the rise of heroin is occurring, and this is one of the arguments that the conciliary gives to the producer who won't give Johnny Fontaine the movie role that he wants.
Izzy says, well, one of your major stars has just turned to heroin and we can make that problem go away or make it solvable very easily and, of course, the unions are involved and we've got union troubles and we own the unions and so on.
But the fact that there is this seeming split in the underworld, and I don't think it was ever at all a split, but they just put this in for a sort of dramatic effect, and also to gain some sort of sympathy for the Don Corleone character, right?
Originally, there was a law which the government passed, which said that all criminals had to get their just desserts, right?
And that law was then repealed.
I can't remember exactly when, obviously before The Godfather, but The Godfather was one of the first films that showed gangsters like not getting their just desserts to some degree, and dying peacefully as Marlon Brando does in his garden with his grandchild and a oddly placed piece of orange peel.
And so this fork in the road, supposedly in the underworld, is, well, the release legitimate vices, the gambling and the, I guess, the drinking and the...
No, not drinking, sorry, post-prohibition.
The gambling and the prostitution, which are sort of legitimate vices, and politicians don't really have any particular problems with them, by which I think we can infer that politicians also partake in them, as we know.
But then there's this other world called drugs, which is a corrupt, evil, immoral world, and as Don Corleone says at one point in the film...
Yes, it's true that I have powerful friends and they're nice to me and they're all friendly and they're politicians, but it's unlikely, it seems to me, that they would continue to be friendly if I got involved in drugs, because drugs are corrupting and evil and bad and so on.
Which, of course, is particularly naive.
Of course, politicians have no problems muscling in on these kinds of profits whatsoever.
I mean, it would be funny. And the police, of course, don't either, right?
It'd be funny if they did. It would be silly if they did.
It would be completely illogical if they had any problems with this.
So, the fact that the mafia exists, A, because the state is not dispensing justice, the state is in fact corrupting justice and protecting the ruling class, which then means that the non-ruling class have to create their own sort of mini-state, which operates in the grey market or the black market, which is the mafia, which then dispenses justice.
On its own terms, that is sort of one example of organized crime being created by failures or problems within the state.
The second is this example that Don Corleone gives, where the vices, the legitimate vices that he calls them, the gambling and the prostitution, that these are denied to people by the state and by the church.
The sanctions against...
Especially in 1945, of course, a sanction against sexuality by the Catholic Church means that good girls don't, and men can't have any affairs, and so they end up having to go to prostitutes and so on.
Or things which are denied to them by the state, i.e.
gambling and so on. That we supply these wants which are considered to be legitimate vices and the state bans them and then we supply them and that's how we make our money.
Again, it's another perfectly valid approach to understanding how the state creates and sustains and nurtures organized crime.
Now, there is another sort of situation, if memory serves me right, that goes on between Michael, I think his name is, the...
The youngest brother, I think he is, who's come back from the war, where he was in the Navy and was decorated.
So this guy is already a murderer, right?
I mean, the fact that this guy comes back and he's going to have a different life, he's going to be different from his family, he's going to be an honest, upright citizen, and so on.
The fact that he comes back from being a professional state murderer, I mean, to me at least, does not bode well for his capacity to evade or avoid or get out of the mafia, because he's already been a paid professional killer for the state, so it's sort of hard to understand how he's going to get away from the mafia.
I mean, he's already been decorated by the big mafia.
What's the harm or the problem in joining the small mafia?
By the way, if you can hear any background noises, apparently I'm in Truck Alley.
This is like diving through the Death Star Trench in Star Wars.
Stay on target!
So, things don't bode well for Michael in this particular situation.
So, at one point he's talking to his wife Kay, who's non-Italian, heaven forbid, and...
He says about his father, Don Colioni, the Brando character, he says, my father is no different from any other man of power, like a politician or a senator.
And his wife says, oh, Michael, you're being so naive.
And he says, really?
How so? And she says, oh, come on, politicians and senators don't have people killed?
And he's like, oh, now who's being naive?
Now that is a very interesting exchange, in my view, because there is one thing that you can get from the Godfather, which I think is very accurately portrayed.
Which is that those who are corrupt have a clearer view of those who are corrupt than those who are not corrupt.
Because if you're not corrupt, it's hard to envision or to understand how evil and how corrupt people are.
But if you are already corrupt, you absolutely understand it.
And I think it's in the first Godfather, where they're sort of cooking, and they're talking about Hitler, and one of the guys, one of the sort of...
Slightly chunky, but still a surprisingly, well, slightly chunky mafia guy says, oh, they should never have let that guy Hitler get away with stuff.
It was an obvious shakedown from the beginning.
They should have stopped him in Czechoslovakia or whatever, right?
And that, to me, has always been kind of fascinating, right?
That people who are corrupt and evil are absolutely and completely able to see and identify the motives and behaviors of other people who are corrupt and evil.
And this is something, of course, that Ayn Rand talks about at some length, as she often does, in Atlas Shrugged.
Which is that we who are good find it very hard to credit those who are evil with their actual evil intentions.
We really find it hard to imagine that such people could exist, that there's not some sort of nice guy in there trying to get out there and they're just misunderstood and had bad childhoods or whatever, but they've sort of become actively evil and murderous and deceptive and so on.
So it's hard for good people to really get that.
It's a sort of failure of imagination, or as I talked about about three months ago, it's a failure of empathy towards the evil people.
Because, of course, it's a very important thing, in my view, if you want to be a good guy or a good person who's not like a weak good person, who's like, oh, I try to be nice and I try whatever, right?
But who's going to be a tough good person, like a sheriff, if that's what I mean.
Pardon the state metaphor, but somebody who's going to let bad guys have it.
Then you actually need to say, if I were an evil guy, what would I do in this person's position?
So it doesn't make you a bad person to imagine what an evil person would do, and it's actually not that hard to figure it out, right?
So I always found it fascinating that in The Godfather you have the mafia guys dissecting Hitler very, very easily.
In a way that lots of people had trouble with in the 1930s.
And so, as somebody I knew once said to me when I was doing a lot of research on Churchill and saying, like, Churchill really understood Hitler and said, well, Churchill must have had a bit of a violent streak himself to understand Hitler.
And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, Churchill shot guys in the Boer War because his government told him to.
So, Churchill also, a paid state murderer.
Although I guess he rose to conciliary and then eventually to Don Churchill.
So I found that to be quite interesting as well, that there is this equation between a man of power who is powerful based on his ability to commit violence, which is Don Corleone, And it is also a man of power who is a senator.
And it is naive. And this exchange between the two of them, I think, is very well expressed.
So she believes that it is naive of her husband, the Michael character.
Kay believes that it is naive for her husband to think that his father, the mafia guy, is the same as a politician and a senator.
And the actual fact of the matter is that she is naive for not understanding this.
And that he can see it so clearly that he doesn't even need to try and convince her.
He says, oh, now who's being naive?
And I think they go on to some other topic or something like that.
And that is something that is very, very interesting to me.
This equation between those who commit violence at a sort of personal level Versus those who commit violence at an institutional level is something that's quite...
And it just struck me right now.
It just struck me right now why Michael has this ability to understand how politicians order people to get killed because he just got back from the war.
Of course. I mean, that makes sense.
It makes complete sense. And it's that kind of...
I guess cohesiveness that makes for a great piece of art.
I mean, you don't have to have this stuff expressed consciously.
It may not even have been conscious on the part of the writers.
But as far as an analysis of power goes, the man who has just been sent by the politicians, and he being, I guess, a U.S. citizen, was drafted, so was ripped from his home, sent overseas, and paid to kill people, This man, who then, when his dipsy wasp wife says, Oh, politicians don't pay to get people killed.
They don't kill people.
Well, she's talking to a guy who has just been overseas for a number of years, killing and killing and killing and killing, so much so that he got a medal for it.
Which is, I think, very tightly reasoned, very well argued and very positively put.
Now... The other aspect that is also very helpful to understand is the relationship between Don Corleone and his political friends, which is never directly shown in the movie, but it's mentioned that he's got lots of judges in his pocket, that he's friends with lots of politicians and so on.
And that's very interesting.
Because the politicians are the ones who come up with the laws, which ban these sort of crimes, both as they're termed, legitimate and non-legitimate desires, right?
The non-legitimate being hard drugs and so on.
The politicians create the rules and then are friendly with the people who break them.
And of course, you know for a simple fact that when Don Corleone talks about his friends who are politicians and judges and that he has them in his pocket, that he is paying them.
So this is part of the general economics of...
What you could call state mercantilism or fascism, which is that, as I've mentioned in a number of articles, you have a situation wherein the government passes laws and the taxpayers pay for the enforcement of those laws.
And then the government officials make a fortune by letting people break those laws.
I mean, that's the whole kickback reality scheme of the modern fascistic state.
I mean, it's just as natural as crap in the corner of a pig's pen.
And so, this to me, again, they are the same kinds of people.
And that to me is very interesting.
The direct parallel at the beginning, that they both dispense justice, both the state and Don Corleone, both express, both provide justice.
So there's a parallel, it's the same kind of people.
There is a racket going on, and of course there's the protection rackets and so on in the mafia, and there are protection rackets in the government, right?
Pay your taxes or we throw you in jail.
There are people who murder for the profit of others, and that is, of course, the case with the war profiteers, right?
I mean, the politicians and so on who all make a fortune out of war while shifting all the burdens in terms of life, blood, and money to the taxpayers.
So it's all too similar for words, and I do find that to be just absolutely fascinating, the way that power is portrayed.
Now, another interesting aspect of the movie is that the question of violence against women is interestingly portrayed.
I can't remember in which film it is, but it's either the first or the second.
I think it's the first, that somebody says to Don Corleone, have you ever hit your wife?
And he says, she has never given me cause to.
Oh, just fascinating.
Absolutely fascinating. So, you can hit your wife, but I married a good enough wife that I never have to raise my hand at her.
I mean, this is very primal, right?
This is very ape-like. I have the right to strike whoever I want, but if they please me, then I'm sort of honor-bound not to.
I mean, that to me is quite fascinating.
And this is something that's very similar to what occurs with taxation.
This is the way that violence is hidden through compliance.
So, because... Don Corleone's wife complies with his every wish and respects him and does what she's told.
She doesn't get hit.
Whereas, I don't know, the daughter is married to some small-time bookie who beats her and she screams at him and throws plates at him.
And so this is a wife who doesn't obey and then...
She gets beaten up and then Sonny goes and kills the guy and this and that and the other.
But that to me is another very interesting aspect of violence, right?
That violence is reserved to the right of the patriarch in this case or the head of the family.
That that person has the right to use violence against those who are dependent on him, his wife or I would assume his children of course as well.
But that if they comply, he is to some degree honor-bound not to just randomly wail on them, not just sort of wake up this one morning, stub his toe, and beat the crap out of his wife and children.
And that, I mean, is a kind of what they call a social contract, right?
And this is very much constitutional democracy.
This is the idea that the government has the right to impose whatever rules it wants on you, but if you obey those rules, then the government is honor-bound to not grab you randomly and toss you into...
Some small feces-ridden cage in Gitmo or Abu Ghraib or something.
Of course, it's going to fly you overseas to do that because it's sort of on a band in this country, right?
Morality changes over in Turkey.
I mean, it's just a whole different world over there.
Up is down, black is white, good is evil.
So that is another very interesting aspect of the film, the way that it deals with...
The best you can hope for is that you have a leader...
Or somebody who's in control of the violence within your environment who will not randomly attack you unless you disobey his instructions.
And this is, of course, what Shakespeare talks about at the end of most of his plays, his tragedies, where order is restored, that, yes, you have a king, but you want a good king.
So the power is always, always, always unquestioned.
The fact that Don Corleone has the right to beat his wife, the fact that kings or politicians have the right to tax their subjects, that is never, ever questioned.
All that is ever questioned is...
or all that is ever suggested is that a good leader is better than a bad leader.
I mean, that's really quite fascinating when you think about it.
That the issue is not with power, but you want the power to be held by someone who's somewhat restrained in their use of power, I guess you could say.
And that's quite a fascinating thing.
And there's a lot to be learned about the state...
In this movie.
Now, the other thing, of course, is absolutely fascinating is the incredibly tangled epistemological and ethical mess of the statement, and to make you an offer you can't refuse.
They make you an offer that you can't refuse.
That is a very complicated and a very sort of intellectually packed statement, which is why it became sort of famous, right?
Of course, if you can't refuse it, then it's not really an offer.
An offer is conditional to your acceptance.
It's like saying taxes are voluntary.
If it is coerced, then it is not an offer.
Absolutely fascinating.
So, I think that the statement comes up something like Johnny Fontaine, the Sinatra singer character, that Johnny Fontaine was a singer and he had a band leader who had him on contract and he began to get bigger and bigger and the band leader wouldn't release him out of his contract.
And so Don Corleone went to this guy and said, I'll give you $10,000 to release this Johnny Fontaine character from the contract so we can go off and be some other bigger singer.
And the guy refused.
And so then he ended up signing the deal for $1,000 rather than $10,000.
That is a very, sort of, you know, this wife, I think Michael's telling the story at the wedding, the wife says, well, what, how did this happen?
And Michael says, well, Luca Brasi and he went over to this band leader's place and Luca Brasi held a gun to the band leader's head and said that either his signature or his brains were going to be on the contract and so on.
Now, that is very much, of course, the way of the state.
But it's also very interesting that, of course, they need the contract because of the state, right?
Because then they can get the state to enforce it.
Like, the mafia can make this a valid transaction because now that the contract is signed, they can hand it over to the state for processing and enforcement, right?
So that's also quite important.
But the idea that you are making someone an offer when you have a gun pressed to their temple is absolutely fascinating.
And this is, of course, why people can't see the gun in the room because they see people comply and they see people pay their taxes and there's no civil revolt and this and that and the other.
And so they think that an offer is being made.
Well, you see, you get a chance to vote.
You get a chance to do this, that, or the other.
And so, yeah, there's an offer.
Yeah, you can absolutely voluntarily do this, that, or the other.
And so they do believe that some sort of offer is being made, which is really quite fascinating when you think about it.
And so they think that there's a relationship that's voluntarily based and so on to mutual advantage, but in fact there's a gun to their head.
I think it's also very important to notice the structure of that particular story, which is that it's not Don Corleone who has the gun to the band leader's head.
It's Luca Brazzi. And that's something that's very important.
During the whole time that we see this in The Godfather I, it's not the case in The Godfather II, but in The Godfather I, Don Corleone never, never holds a gun to anyone's head.
And this is very, very important, because in the state, right, there are the figureheads, and they can afford to be nice because they don't get blood on their hands.
So you have George Bush, who's not out in Iraq shooting people.
And so he can have these speeches, he can look good in a tux, he can dance with his wife in an inaugural ball, and he can do all of this fine stuff, because he's not the one who's actually got a gun to anyone's head.
It's the police and the military who do all of that, and that's something that's very important to understand as well.
The moral corruption of somebody who allows somebody else to do the dirty work and then can be noble and kind themselves, so to speak, is very important, right?
In this sort of metaphor, Luca Brazzi is the police or the military, and Don Corleone is the politician, right?
So he's not getting his hands dirty.
He's just looking civilized and letting other people do it.
Again, I think that's all very interesting, very instructive, and there's a lot to learn about the nature of power, both political, primarily political, because all of this is an effect of political power.
Everything that goes on in this movie only exists because there is such a thing as political power.
And you can learn a lot about the nature of the state by looking at this film.
So if you get a chance to rent it, and if you haven't seen it yet, I'd certainly recommend it.
But have a look at it relative to what we're talking about here, The anarcho-capitalist world, because I think you'll enjoy it.
And then, when you're done, come by and subscribe to FeedBlitz at RadioFreeDomainRadio.com And if you'd like to donate to me, I would certainly appreciate that.
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