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Dec. 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:20
546 Art Part 1

Art. Why?

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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It's 7.50 on the 7th of December 2006.
I'm dipping back to my regular, or my old microphone, just because it's the first snowfall in Canada this winter.
So, with any luck, we'll have a white Christmas, which is a lovely thing to behold.
And we will...
And of course I want to make sure that I have both hands available for steering when the weather is a little bit icy.
I'm not so bad with winter driving, but every year there are a number of people who do their winter driving for the first time either because they're new to the country or because they have just turned 16 and so it is a...
There's always some new people on the track, so to speak.
And if you can imagine throwing some people...
When it's winter, it's kind of risky, right?
So throwing some people into a NASCAR race who don't really have any experience driving at high speeds is bound to cause a problem or two.
So I'm going to dip back to low audio for a little while, and then we'll see.
Thank you so much for listening.
As always, I really appreciate it.
I wanted to talk this morning about some theories of art.
I've sort of touched on theories of art in a variety of different ways, but since my first love before philosophy was art, Particularly language arts writing and so on.
I thought it might be worth having a chat about that, if this is at all of interest to you.
This is not exactly going to be a how-to.
That's sort of planned for a little bit later.
But I did want to sort of go over some of the theories around art and why it's compelling and what it's for and so on so that we could have a discussion about that and it would be nice for me to have a discussion about art because it's a little bit less controversial than the stuff we've been talking about lately and that stuff, for me, becomes a little tiring.
I had to withdraw from a debate last night On the board, just because if I haven't convinced someone by now that, you know, given the history of prostitutes, that banging away at them is not a great thing, that, I mean, if I haven't convinced someone, then it's not going to happen, right?
So I had to withdraw from debate about that, because there's still a fairly, gosh, I guess I could say healthy contingent, but I'm not sure I would put it quite that way.
There's still some people out there who are, you know, well, why do I have to learn about the prostitute and this and that?
Of course, if... If the fact that somebody has been raped as a child doesn't give you sympathy for them in terms of their sexual nature, then there's...
I mean, if that click doesn't occur, you know, in terms of empathy, then there's no words that are going to change someone's mind.
And just before we jump into the R thing, this is an important thing to understand.
That if you are both looking at a sunset, like if you and a friend are standing, or you and someone are standing, On a mountaintop and looking at a sunset and the sky is these ragged nets of color and the ice on the mountaintops is turned to a marble kind of red by the sunset and there is deep shades in the valley and the lowing of cows and so on and it's all just too beautiful for words and you've got a few stars coming out and you even have a perfect crescent moon hanging over one of the mountains.
That lovely shading of azure that occurs at high altitudes when you are watching a sunset.
And it's just, you know, you absolutely know you could sell it for a million bucks if you could get the perfect picture.
And if you're looking at that and you turn to your friend and you say, isn't this beautiful?
And your friend says, eh, I don't think so.
Then sort of getting into an argument with him about it is not going to be too productive.
And that's just something to sort of be aware of when you're talking with people.
That this is an important thing to understand.
That there's some things which, if they don't strike the senses, it's almost impossible to get them to strike the senses.
I mean, there's a sort of first impression thing that I think is important when it comes to not necessarily good and evil, but some of the more aesthetic aspects of life.
And, of course, this question of prostitution and other questions that we've had is something to do with the aesthetic aspects of life.
This is not, you know, there's no specific direct violence used by the John against the prostitute and other sort of things as well.
But... If when you sort of lift the lid on the life of a prostitute and show somebody what it looks like and where they've come from, and if the person doesn't sort of...
If it doesn't strike them emotionally, that that is a horrifying life, that they are enabling and expanding, and also that they are...
That they are a stand-in for the rapist when the child was young.
If they don't kind of get that emotionally, like if it doesn't strike them emotionally, then what will happen is you'll get into all of these little arguments about, well, why should I be responsible for the history of the prostitute and things like that.
And that's, you know, there's nothing...
First, I mean, I never used things like responsibility and morality and so on.
I just painted a picture about somebody's life, right?
I just painted a picture about the life of a prostitute and a picture that's not exactly made up, right?
I mean, with some pretty significant statistics and research behind it.
And, of course, my wife's many, many years of experience, but as a therapist, just for those who are new to the program.
But if you paint that picture...
And it doesn't cause somebody to connect to that horror emotionally in the same way that if you're standing on a mountaintop and you are looking out at a stunning sunset, a beautiful sunset, and you can't tear your eyes away and your tears are welling up and the beauty is just so staggering.
And if your friend or your companion is not moved, I don't know any I don't know any argument that can make somebody love a sunset.
You know, if this sort of makes any sense.
I don't know any argument that can make somebody emotionally connect with beauty or horror or some of the things that we need as guideposts in our life, right?
Because As we've talked about before, the emotions are mostly what people use to guide themselves, because they're much faster than argument.
People will generally make their decisions based on emotions, and to some degree then, to a large degree, if they feel compelled to or required to, they will then backfill those decisions with sort of, quote, logic.
But fundamentally, people will make their decisions based on emotion.
Emotion is incredibly fast.
Emotion occurs not prior to thought, but so simultaneous to thought that it feels almost exactly the same.
It's like there's thoughts and then there's emotion, but the thought is largely unregistered.
I mean, you have to go to therapy to get the thoughts that are behind the emotions.
But the thoughts then are largely unregistered.
And the purpose of philosophy and therapy, of course, is to get these thoughts to the surface so that you can analyze the ideas that are sitting behind your emotions.
Because you can't change your emotions.
Anybody who's been upset and tried to will themselves not to be upset knows how futile that is.
It's like trying to will puberty back without dieting.
You can't change your emotions.
And you can only change the thoughts that produce.
This is sort of the cognitive therapy behavior model, but there are other kinds of...
This is a little bit Adlerian, although I'm not a huge fan of that as much anymore, but there is this thing that you can't change people's feelings, you can only change their thoughts.
And you can't argue somebody into empathy.
You cannot argue somebody into empathy.
You can't argue somebody into sympathy.
You can't argue somebody into falling in love or falling out of love.
You can't do any of that.
There is this very large emotional aspect to our natures that is where little things like meaning and joy are and love and devotion and nobility and all of these wonderful, wonderful feelings.
The meaning of being human is not in the thoughts In the experience, but in the emotions, right?
I mean, the experience of being human and the richness of being human is in the feelings, not in the thoughts.
The thoughts are very important.
The thoughts are crucial. But the thoughts are methodologies for achieving happiness, right?
Happiness is not a thought. Happiness is a feeling.
Contentment and joy and so on.
These are all emotions. And they cannot be...
Wills, and they cannot be created by thought alone.
They have to be created through thought and virtuous action and courage.
You act the virtues and then you feel the happiness.
And sometimes you act the virtues a little bit even when you don't feel like acting the virtues the same way that you don't have a cigarette even when you feel like one if you've quit or whatever.
So, you can't argue somebody into something like empathy.
And... If you paint a portrait, and I do this in podcasts sometimes.
I've done it with the Iraqis.
I've done it with the Luxembourg invasion of space aliens to try and get the Americans to have some empathy with the Iraqis.
I've done it with the children in the Humiliation podcast.
I've done it to the sense of loss that I experienced in leaving my last job and so on.
And those are not syllogistic arguments.
I mean, they should be based on facts, of course.
But if somebody shrugs at the beauty of the sunset, there is no argument that is going to make that emotional connection for him.
Because if somebody fundamentally does not have that sensitivity or empathy to the world around them, And we're just talking about a sunset, I mean, let alone the horror of a victim of child, a continual victim of child rape and sort of what that does to the soul.
If somebody can't connect with that, then getting into debates with them is not going to help anything.
Right? So, I mean, if somebody doesn't sort of feel that fear And terror and hatred and so on that goes on when a kid is in a public school and is being bullied and there's nothing he can do or, you know, they have to have metal detectors in the school because there are people going up and down trying to kill each other in these government schools and so on.
Or if they can't feel the boredom and general diminishment of the soul that occurs for children in more placid public schools who are simply taught how to be small all day long.
If they can't feel that, right?
If they can't feel that, if they can't feel what happens to the third world when we give the dictators money or sell them arms or destroy their agricultural economy by subsidizing and dumping our food on the general market.
If we can't feel that horror and that frustration of the amount of destruction of control that goes on around the world as the result of governments where people simply don't have choices, don't have options.
If people can't get to that emotionally, then really there's no point debating.
There's fundamentally no point debating.
Because my experience with this sort of person is that they will take a kind of ironic distance and they will mock your sentimentality and they'll be sort of like, well, that's fine.
But anywho, this kind of stuff.
And they simply won't...
They won't have empathy for the situation that you're talking about.
And empathy doesn't mean agreement, of course.
But... You can't argue somebody into feeling sympathy for other people, and if they don't feel sympathy for other people, even if they then agree with your arguments, they still won't be able to act in a sort of sensitive manner towards others, right?
So, morality in action is emotion.
I mean, morality in action is emotion.
We can't simply stop every moment of every day and run through all the syllogistic reasoning about whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
And so, if you're debating with somebody who doesn't have, or is not really displaying any real empathy, then even if you get them to agree with your argument, which is highly unlikely because they'll just keep changing the topic, or they'll sort of keep skewing your argument and so on, but even if you do get them to agree with your, you see, to corner them with some, you know, ninth Dan belt jujitsu logic move, then what will it matter?
What will it matter? It's like saying to a smoker, smoking is bad for you.
They'll come up with all these things, excuses as to why they shouldn't quit, but let's say that you finally do get them to admit that they should quit.
Does that mean they're going to quit?
Well, no. They've just been cornered.
I mean, they're not going to do anything.
The people who will change their behavior...
In the realm of something like the arguments around prostitution or the arguments around free will.
I mean, people who will actually change or maintain decent behavior or change their behavior are those who got it emotionally when I put it out in a passionate manner.
I mean, those are the people who will actually change their behavior because they get it.
They kind of get it in their gut.
They get it in their soul. They really understand it.
And that is going to motivate behavior in people, behavior changes.
And if somebody doesn't get it, or they get it only at an abstract intellectual level, you're not working any levers that is going to actually change their behavior.
You're not getting down to any motivational level that is going to change their behavior.
Because it's just a dry, abstract argument.
So you really have to be on the lookout for that.
Again, you don't want to, you know, if the door is locked, then stop trying the handle, right?
That's sort of important, because otherwise you're going to start to feel futile and vaguely stupid after a while, and so you've got to be aware of that feeling.
When you feel like you're not getting anywhere, you're going around in circles and so on, and somebody hasn't changed their position, then you're dealing with a defense that's designed to frustrate you and designed to keep all capacity for empathy at bay, right?
I think, sort of my experience has been that Once or twice I've gotten through that sort of cynical, ironic, snappy kind of distance, and changing stories and so on, and there really is an extraordinary degree of emotional hell on the other side, and it's far too much for the ego, which remains relatively undeveloped, to handle.
These are not arguments, just so you understand, right?
This is just my experience. There is an extraordinary kind of hell behind a detachment, behind a lack of empathy, right?
Because first and foremost, there's a lack of empathy for the self, and there's a lack of capacity for empathy for others, and that arises out of extraordinary amounts of abuse.
And so, when you get beyond that, the person will have a breakdown, and then the defenses will...
I mean, it's kind of a trick, right, as far as I can see.
I mean, again, this is not an argument, this is just a thought, right?
And the trick is that the false self will take down all the defenses, which will then justify those defenses coming back up.
So, in the realm of government, this sort of takes the following form.
And this is as predictable as sunrise in the state world, right?
So, So if you say to the Department of Public Education, D-O-P-E as it should be called, if you say to the Department of Education, we're going to have to cut your budget by 20% because you've got way too many administrators, then it's absolutely impossible to imagine that The administrators,
the head of the department, is going to cut the administrators and reroute any additional money and any additional savings to the students, right?
Because that's to say we've been stealing from children all along, and of course that's not something that people are going to get into.
People who have that capacity don't end up running those departments.
So what's going to happen is all very simple and predictable.
What's going to happen is that the teachers' salaries are going to get cut, that the heating for the school is going to get cut, Sorry, not the teacher salaries.
The hiring of new teachers that's going to be stretching.
They're going to cancel extracurricular activities.
They're going to cease to clean the garbage out on a regular basis.
And the toilets are not going to get cleaned.
And they're going to basically, whatever is the most dramatic and visual...
that they can conceivably achieve with those budget cuts, they will achieve.
And they won't get rid of any administrators and they won't get rid of any of their, you know, their sort of departmental junkets to Hawaii to look at new kinds of educational methods and they won't do any of that sort of stuff.
They won't get rid of consultants.
They won't get rid of, right, what they'll do is they'll get rid of all the stuff that is most photogenic in terms of making their case for having their funding restored.
That's just inevitable, right?
I mean, then they'll say, look, these are the results.
We had to cut the funding, so of course we can't clean the toilets.
I mean, every dollar we have is used.
Every dollar we have is focused on the children.
How could we conceivably blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, in other words, when there's a move towards a slightly better state, the worst, like, the most sensitive and worst...
The most sensitive people are hurt, and the worst client-facing stuff is done, and that's the leverage they use, because then, of course, the parents get angry, and then the parents demand that the schools be fixed up, and they say, well, look, this is the issue.
We don't have the funding.
You cut our funding, and we had to get rid of this stuff, and that's why there's no extracurricular activities, which means that The kids are done at three, which means that the parents who work, who are single parents, are doomed.
And so, you know, maybe they have to quit and go on welfare.
The government's not really saving any money.
I mean, all this sort of stuff. They'll basically hold the children hostage and screw the parents in order to get their money back.
That's sort of inevitable. And in the same way, when you penetrate somebody who's had a real habit of this sort of ironic distance and snappiness and arguments from absurdity and slippery slope arguments and all this sort of stuff that they use to keep any potential empathy at bay, when you...
When you pierce through that, if you do, and it takes an enormous amount of work, but if you do pierce through that, what will happen is they'll completely dissolve, and then they'll be shocked at their own breakdown, and then they will reconstellate.
Their false self basically says, ha, you see what happens when we empathize?
We are destroyed, and therefore we must not empathize.
And so the false self then takes its weary throne back, and so on and so on.
So that's sort of an analogy from what I've seen in the public sphere.
So let's get to art.
And art is an emotional argument for reality.
It's an emotional argument for reality, but more fundamentally for morality.
Art is an emotional argument for ethics, or for a certain kind of ethics.
And I was watching last night, no, two nights ago, I was watching a few minutes of The Daily Show, And Nathan Lane, who is a ribaldly gay American actor.
I think he's American, although he's got certain British air to him.
He played Robin Williams' lover in The Birdcage.
He's in a play, and he described the play.
He said, I'm a professor.
And in the course of a single day, my two most important relationships fall apart, and I drink, I start heavily drinking, and I go in a self-destructive spiral, and that's the story of the play.
And then he sort of made fun of it, and he said, you know, it's Christmas fair, you know, that kind of stuff.
And you almost don't have to see any kind of synopsis about a play these days, or certainly in the last while.
You know that it's a tragedy.
And it's a petty tragedy.
That's almost a given. I used to go and see a lot more plays, particularly when I was in the theater world, but I did get tired of the sickness and dysfunction that was continually portrayed on the stage.
And it's something that I've tried to avoid.
In all of my characters in a novel, right?
In all of my characters, I try to have some...
Sorry, there's bad guys and there's good guys, and the good guys are conflicted, and the bad guys maybe have some decent aspects in some ways, but I've tried to sort of stick away from everyone is pathological, everyone is sick.
Because when you put a piece of art together, what you're drawn to talk about is a very strong indication of where you sort of are emotionally and where your life is and what you think about life.
But it's also a very strong indication of what it is that you want to communicate to the audience.
Obviously, it's a total indication of what you want to communicate to the audience.
But you are attempting to highlight certain aspects of the world and claim that they are universal.
In a play, when you sort of sit down to write a play, you can choose any topic.
Any topic, past, present, or future, current, or imagining, or whatever.
I mean, you can choose any conceivable topic to focus your attention for the next 6 to 12 months or however long it takes you to write the play.
And also to focus the attention of the audience for the two hours that you have their attention.
And so whatever you choose, in a way that life is not, art prioritizes.
In a way that life just doesn't, right?
So, many years ago I saw a play by Ayn Rand called The Night of January the 16th.
It's not a bad play. And in it, the bad guy was in a wheelchair.
And there was some controversy about this.
And the controversy was, well, they're saying that to be a moral cripple is to be a physical cripple.
They're translating those two things.
And then there were lots of people who said, well, that's silly.
It's just a random decision they made.
Well, the thing is, in art, nothing can be counted as a random decision.
If you decide to put a character in a wheelchair...
In life, that doesn't have anything to do with anything.
Unless the guy shot his own leg off because he was in Iraq or something, in which case there's a certain moral element to the injury.
But you can't make any moral judgments about somebody because they're in a wheelchair.
That would be silly, right?
But that's because there was no other choice.
You assume that they didn't just decide to go and sit in a wheelchair because it's comfortable.
So, given that there's no other choice, there's no moral element to where they are.
If they ended up in an accident, or they did something, or whatever, and they end up in a wheelchair, you can't judge anyone who's rolling down the mall in a wheelchair.
Where there's no choice, there's no morality, right?
That's something I sort of argued from the beginning, right?
So if somebody sticks a gun to your head and says, go and do X, Y, and Z, X, Y, and Z has no moral content because you really have no choice.
Yes, you can choose to get your head blown off, but that's not really a choice that you didn't sort of create the circumstances and create the choice yourself.
It's just something imposed on you by the outside.
I mean, if somebody has a knife against their ribs and someone says, give me your wallet, whether they give the person the wallet or decide to fight doesn't mean anything to me.
I mean, either one, I don't care, because there really is nothing for me to judge, right?
They're just responding to a horrible situation the best way they can.
So, where there's no choice, there's no ethics.
Now, in life, of course, for the vast majority of things that occur, you don't have control, you don't have a choice, right?
So, I mean, if something went bad on my drive this morning and somebody t-boned me and killed me, it wouldn't be a moral thing, right?
For morality, you need religion, right?
I mean, religion turns everything into ethics, right?
So, with religion, everything is a morality tale, and of course, this is why you get this insanity, like 9-11 happened because we're allowing gays to marry, or something like that, right?
Where there's a choice.
It could have gone a different way.
I mean, there are morals around 9-11, but not those ones, right?
It's a lot more complicated than that.
But if somebody gets hit by lightning, it's not a moral thing.
If you have somebody get hit by lightning in a play, then the choice to create that circumstance or that situation is entirely yours as the writer or as the creator of that story.
The choice of what it is to communicate about is entirely open in art.
So everything in art has a moral dimension.
Everything in art has a chosen dimension.
Whereas very little in real life has a chosen dimension.
So here's an example.
I don't get a lot of emails and a lot of posts and this kind of stuff from people saying, you bastard.
You could have created world peace any time over the past 40 years of your life.
You could have just snapped your fingers and you could have created world peace.
You son of a bitch.
You haven't done that. You are a totally bad dude.
And not in a badass kind of good way, but totally bad dude, right?
You're responsible for the deaths of people in Rwanda because you could have created world peace at any time.
I don't get a lot of those emails.
In fact, I don't even think I've gotten one because everyone recognizes that I don't have the ability to create world peace.
I simply don't. So because I don't have that power, nobody blames me for the existence of war in the world.
I mean, that's fairly...
I don't think you're going to spend much time on that.
That's fairly obvious, right? Now, on the other hand, if I were to sit down and write a play about the future...
And I were to write about a future wherein, you know, let's go on a real wild speculation here and out of nowhere talk about a future wherein the corporations took over and dominated the earth.
Right? I mean, this is a common truism from just about every futuristic film in the world that it's all about the evil corporations or whatever.
I mean, there's something to do with the evil state, but mostly it's the evil corporations.
Then you have said, very, very importantly, and very centrally in your story, you have said that the corporations are the danger, and we have to watch out for the corporations.
In the same way that people say in future dystopian films, the robots are the danger, right?
The machinery, technology, capitalism is the danger, right?
So I remember in a film, Robocop, there was a company, a private company, That wanted to replace the policemen, who were hard-working, honorable, decent blue-collar fellows.
They wanted to replace the policemen with robot cops.
And a demonstration went horribly wrong, and the robot shot up some guy who was trying to do the demonstration.
Now, of course, this had to be a private company, right?
This couldn't be the police force that was creating this robot.
This had to be a private company.
Now, the message there is quite clear, of course.
That private companies will screw it up and get people killed and the officers are noble and good and decent people.
Well, that's an emotional argument, right?
I mean, it's not a logical argument, right?
That's just you hire good-looking, charismatic, square-jawed fellows to be the policemen and you give them noble lines and nothing but life and death dedication to their task and so on.
And then you make all of the capitalists, you make them sort of greasy with shiny suits and sickly smiles and you get sickly and homely looking or oily kind of Alec Baldwin kind of people to...
To play them, and then you make them do really bad things, you make them, you know, not care about their workers.
I mean, you just, you make, this is an emotional argument, right?
I mean, this is what art is all about.
Art is about, it's an emotional argument for ethics.
And when you look at...
I mean, this is a continual process of propaganda, right?
I mean, all art is propaganda.
Ayn Rand's art is less propagandistic because she provides arguments for her portrayals, right?
She provides reasoning for the portrayals that she has in her book.
So it's much less propagandistic in many ways than most pieces of art, where the reasoning is not put forward, but the emotional arguments are put forward on a continual basis.
So you will have in most art, right, the cops and the good guys are just sort of single-mindedly devoted to fighting the bad guys, and they just want to catch them and so on. And they sort of don't have any other relationships.
Maybe they're always divorced, you know, a bitter divorce or something like that.
And they're, you know, really focused on this and catching the bad guys and the monomaniacal and so on.
And that gives people a certain kind of comfort, right?
And, of course, it's considered to be a tragic hero to be somebody who is, you know, misunderstood and his wife doesn't understand why his case is so important and why he's such a fighter and vigilante for justice and so on.
But, you know, we're out there, you know, sayeth these monomaniacal guys, cops and PIs and so on, we're out there fighting for you, we're fighting, you know, we're screwed up, but we're out there fighting for you and making the world safe and that's all we care about and, you know, we're the cops who just slave night and day to keep the world safe and make you, you know, we are the people on the borders guarding your teddy bears and so on.
And what's much more accurate, of course, is in Prison Break, the guy who's trying to catch them is himself, you know, stone evil, and part of a larger sort of mess.
And, of course, if somebody does have a wild desire to chase down and harass, you know, people say who have a joint on them, then I guarantee you that they're not interested in fighting justice.
They're interested in exercising power and bullying people.
I mean, there's no question of that.
There's no question of that. There's a place for legitimate defense of property and so on, but that doesn't occur in the world as it stands, right?
I mean, you don't call up the cops and say, listen, my vacuum cleaner got stolen.
Can you go and find it for me?
They're like, yeah. Yeah, I'll fill out a form.
Thanks. We'll be all over that.
I'm sorry we don't have any time to work on that.
What we do have time is to go and get everyone who hasn't paid their taxes, and we do have time To go and get drug dealers and we do have time to...
All of this, we have time for that, but we don't have time to actually defend your property, right?
I mean, that's inevitable, right?
I mean, the comps aren't coming up with things like Alarm Force, you know, where you have this...
This sort of two-way speaker system where people will come out and check your home if you push a button.
I mean, there's not cops coming up and installing that despite all the tax money they get, right?
They're just not interested, right?
So people like this fantasy that there's these sort of cold, single-minded people out there trying to defend their liberty and protect the planet in this sort of alias-slash-James Bond-slash-Hill Street Blues kind of way.
But it's all nonsense, right?
I mean, it's an emotional argument for...
A kind of moral view of the world that doesn't exist, right?
That there are people out there with no self-interest other than protecting other people, right?
That they just live and die to take care of others.
Of course, it's fundamentally narcissistic on the part of the viewer.
Because the viewer is not like that.
I mean, the viewer himself knows, whether he's a cop or not, the viewer himself knows that that's not how he's like.
He doesn't want to wake up every morning and say, how can I be of service to others with no...
and put myself in enormous risk and danger and give all my money away just to take care of everyone else?
I mean, nobody... I mean, basically, the viewer doesn't wake up with that idea, but...
When the viewer sees all of these people who work night and day and simply will not rest until the case is closed and so on, and, you know, will do anything to put the bad guy away and will rack their brains and shake down people and so on just because they're so burning with justice to put the bad guy away.
Well, it's kind of selfish, right?
To want to believe that there are all these people out there who are going to take care of you and who are only focused on you in a non-reciprocal kind of way.
I mean, the DRO and anarchist model is everything has to be reciprocal.
Everyone has to provide value to everyone else.
Whereas all the propaganda that goes on in art about the state, I mean, just sort of focusing on the state and protection at the moment, all of that stuff fundamentally appeals to the narcissism in people, which is that There's a whole bunch of people out there who are really interested in me, for me, and all they want to do is get up in the morning and take care of me and help me and make my life better and I don't really have to do anything in return, right?
That's the sort of narcissistic approach and it appeals.
It appeals to the very childish, not childlike, but childish nature of people, which of course is stunted by the fact that this wasn't provided for them when it should have been, when they were children, so they have this need left over.
To have resources put into them in an unreciprocal manner, right?
That's what we expect as children.
It's what we all should get and deserve as children.
But this appeal to narcissism often goes on, right?
And of course what it does also is it sets up a different category of human being, right?
Which is what you need to break the argument for morality, right?
So there are these people out there who are cops who are just dedicated to the social good, or they're soldiers or whatever.
They're just dedicated to the social good, And all they do is focus on taking care of others and so on.
And it's not personal and it's not about power and they're not greedy and they're just different.
They're just different from us. And of course you need that category so that you have a government.
So every time that you see this kind of stuff...
Where the state people or the state representatives are noble or...
Even if they're totally corrupt, right?
If everyone else is corrupt, then...
Because the reverse is true, right?
Where the state people are corrupt and the business people...
I mean, they may be corrupt in their personal lives, but they're still working if they're not directly using the state for control of their environment.
They're still then...
They're using the principle of reciprocal benefit, which of course is something that you need to get rid of as a theory or as an idea.
If you're going to maintain state power, you have to really constantly erode this idea that reciprocal benefit is virtuous and non-reciprocal control is bad.
You have to absolutely get rid of that kind of stuff.
That's just a very bad idea.
If you want to keep the state power, you have to get rid of the reciprocal idea of virtue, or the virtue of reciprocal mutually beneficial behavior.
Sorry, it's scattering around.
I finally nailed it.
So art, of course, is very much for creating this separate class of people, this different group, and it's very much for focusing on things that don't exist in reality, right?
Because, I mean, if things did exist, if things were obvious, right, there's not a whole lot of movies about sunrise, because sunrise is available and obvious to everyone, right?
So, Art as a whole is about selectively, as Ayn Rand has put it, selectively recreating reality, and it's the selection part that is absolutely essential when it comes to understanding how art works and why it works.
It appeals to the emotions, and the emotions arise out of empiricism, and this is why you get the same monotonous kind of stuff coming out of most art in the world.
The emotions arise out of repetitive exposure to stimuli in the absence of thought that occurs.
And so art attempts to present you with stimuli that is going to manipulate your emotions.
And that actually has a far more powerful effect on how people really act compared to something like philosophy, which is fine if philosophy does an enormous amount of good if it connects to the emotions.
Because the emotions are the final determinants of action.
Just about always, right?
That's something that people who are statists, and particularly dictators, understand.
Very well, right? Because that's why they focus so much on propaganda.
Art is what actually motivates people into action, and that's why philosophers are constantly losing in this realm.
That's why they're constantly losing out, because they keep focusing on syllogistical arguments, and they keep trying to argue people into seeing that the sunset is beautiful in a way, that the virtue is beautiful, and so on.
But if people don't kind of get it in their gut, you're just yelling into a hurricane.
It doesn't really matter. We'll talk about this a little bit more this afternoon.
Donations have been a little dry if you've got some spare change floating around.
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