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Dec. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
29:40
556 Art Part 3 (Part 4: 559)

Two stories about my mother...

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Good evening, everybody.
It's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's been a long day.
I started coding. Oh, the crack of coding.
I've got a lot of data to analyze about the manufacturing industry, so I've hurled it into a database and I'm doing lots of coding to extract the data.
Oh, it's just too delish for words.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I've decided to...
I know this is going to be a shock, but I have decided to listen to the listenership.
I have decided to listen to the...
Take a moment. I know it's a shock.
But I'm going to listen to the listenership who seemed to like the art series.
So this is going to be art part three.
So I hope that you enjoy it.
So we sort of left off the discussion last time, talking about how art was sort of an emotional argument for a particular kind of worldview, for a particular kind of essence.
Art is an argument for essence.
What is the essence of life, right?
So it has a lot to do with the difference between the accidental and the natural.
The natural and the accidental, right?
So a biologist will tell you that it's natural for human beings to give birth to babies with one heads, and it's unnatural.
For human beings to give birth to babies with two heads.
And an artist will similarly juggle the natural and the unnatural in sort of very important ways that are well worth examining because this argument is made perpetually within art, right?
So we talked about last time how in art nothing is chosen and that's a very important thing to understand because there's this selective focus in the world of art There is inevitably a focus on that which is not accidental and that which is essential.
And that which is essential is the sort of theme of the story or the movie or whatever it is that you're looking at, even the painting.
So, if you see a movie or read a book wherein everybody continually fails, right?
They attempt to achieve things and they continually and perpetually fail.
Well, it certainly would not be unnatural.
It would not be odd to understand if you're a movie maker.
Let's just make it a movie where everyone sort of tries to achieve things and fails.
It would not be a weird thing to be a movie maker and to say, well, occasionally people succeed.
Because, of course, you've succeeded in, yes, making a film, right?
So there's a lot of odds against making a film and having it succeed.
Well, at least getting it out to a market, as I sort of know from personal experience.
So if you actually get to make the film, then you have achieved something pretty significant, I would say.
And so, you have obviously done a lot of things that have failed, as we all have, but you have managed to get this movie made.
And then you make a movie, and in the movie, you continually focus on all of the people who are failing.
And so, what is it that occurs in the mind of the listener when you are talking like that?
Well, the first and major thing that occurs is that everybody knows that people do succeed in life, right?
Assuming you're not in a communist dictatorship or something like that, or working in the public sector, let's just say that there are people who succeed in life.
Now, given that we know that there are people who succeed in life, If you have a movie wherein everybody is failing, it's very clear, I think, that you're saying that, yes, there is occasional success in life, but it's really accidental.
The norm is failure.
The thing that we need to focus on is failure.
So when you think of Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman, Here you have a guy who's a really bad salesman, a sort of pathetic Jack Lemmon kind of salesman.
I actually saw the touring play with Judd Hirsch.
He was very good. This guy who is psychotic, he has breaks with reality, he's domineering, he's bullying, he's mad in a lot of ways, and his long-suffering and noble wife and all this kind of stuff.
Now, Arthur Miller knew that there was such a thing as successful salesman, because he himself was one.
Every artist is a salesman to some degree, which is why you need agents, right?
But, uh, Arthur Miller saw that there was success and he'd achieved great success, but what he wished to do was to focus, focus people's attention on the, um, uh, on what he, the Lohman, right?
Willie Lohman is the name of the character, the Lohman, right?
The man who's, uh, who's not doing well.
So he knew that there were successful people, but he wanted to focus people's attention and say that the really important thing in life is that which is a failure, those who are failures.
And not just people who strive and fail, but Willie Lohman as a particular kind of, and fairly scabrous kind of, social metaphysician who attempts to make up realities.
He goes along, and people always sort of get that this is blamed on capitalism, but actually Arthur Miller himself pointed out when talking about the play that the nicest guy...
In the whole place, the capitalist.
But people always say, you know, the salesman is a sort of degrading...
And there is a sort of an attack on capitalism here because...
There is this, you know, this is the bad salesman kind of myth, right?
Not more than a myth.
I mean, it's certainly reality in many ways.
But a salesman who doesn't work to sort of provide value and doesn't work to sort of give you the lowdown on products and services that will end up saving you money or making you happy, but the guy who just lies to take your money and so on.
And yet... He portrays this salesman who basically has been cheating on his wife, cheating his customers and so on.
He portrays him as a tragic hero and gives him great moving speeches about how he just wants to amount to something and so on.
So there's a very sort of a strong argument that's made here, right?
Which is that this guy is helpless.
He's helpless in the face of his delusions.
He's helpless in the face of his failure.
He's not responsible For his failures.
And that's how we have sympathy, right?
Once you remove the causality and the self-causality of disaster, it becomes tragedy, right?
So when tragedy... Tragedy is what happens to people despite their best intentions, and justice is what happens to people as a result of their own actions and as a result of their bad intentions.
So... If Arthur Miller or someone were to write a play about my mother, then there would be this, you know, sad, broken, lonely woman festering in a rotting apartment, and nobody came to see her, and she had turned into a sort of obsessive human being and had not taken care of herself, and this would be tragic.
I mean, people would be heartbroken and would feel very sad, and so on.
And that would sort of be one way of telling the story, right?
And she would have flashbacks to the war, and she'd be this lonely person whose spirit had been broken young by the brutal Nazi regime, and who was living out the end of her days, and her kids didn't want to see her, and her husband didn't, she'd been divorced for many years, and you know, there'd be a sort of sad,
pitiful loneliness to it, and she would have long, wistful stares out the window, and she would shuffle around, and And she would try and call her sons in the way that Amanda in A Glass Menagerie tries to call the woman and tries to sell her a magazine subscription and then tries to...
Sort of get through to her son and so on in a sort of wistful, feminine, wouldn't it be nice if everyone was nicer kind of way.
And that would be a particular argument around morality and its effects, which is that you get swept up in world events.
You are torn apart by forces beyond your control when you're young, war and Nazism and so on.
And then you try to raise your kids the best you can.
They can't understand how difficult your life was, and they can't understand how you became what you became.
And... The argument would then be that there's a sad inevitability to family breakups, there's a blank space between human beings that can't be crossed based on separate experience, that the children are shallow and materialistic and have no interest in this old broken wreckage of a war child, and so on. I mean, there would be all this kind of stuff, and they would all be a very self-indulgent and, I would say, sentimental in the worst kind of way approach to telling that story.
And that would be to say that, you know, that there is connection in the world, maybe, but there's an enormous amount of non-connection and enormous amount of loneliness that isn't anyone's fault, or maybe it would be sort of vaguely put on the children, but no one is to blame, right? There's an enormous amount of art that is like that.
And another way to tell the story of my mother would be And I'm not saying either one of these is perfectly accurate.
I mean, a blend is important. But the complete opposite tale to tell would be to pick up with a sort of stunningly attractive and slender and svelte woman in her mid-twenties who was jetting around the world as a personal courier and met a guy and ended up, you know, going for...
The gold, because he was educated, she thought he'd make a lot of money, and she settled down with him, and then she had two kids, which she didn't like, and she screamed at them, and she shook them, and she worried about her figure all the time, and she got angry at her husband for not doting on her hand and foot, and she became petty, and then she divorced her husband, and then she sort of...
She started dating around and just trying to milk her looks for everything that she could, and she had these wonderful, sensitive children, and she brutalized them, and she was screaming at them, she threw things at them, she terrified them.
And then, you know, later her children drift away and she's left with the wreckage of the mess that she herself has created, right?
I mean, that would sort of be another way of telling the story.
That would be more, of course, it would be enormously sympathetic.
To the children, right?
I mean, so, if you have a broken old woman and you don't see her abusing her children, then she looks like a sympathetic person.
If you see a broken old woman and you get the flashbacks about her beating kids' heads against a wall or throwing things at them or shaking them or punching them or whatever, then you're like, and good riddance to you, right?
I mean, that would sort of be the emotion that would go through a lot of people's hearts, unless, of course, they themselves had abused their children, in which case they'd be, Highly offended at the movie.
So this is just sort of two ways of telling a story about a woman, right?
Where you pick up...
It's important, right?
If you look at the sort of two bookends of my mother's life, right?
An admittedly terrifying and horrible childhood in Nazi Germany...
And then a very pathetic end to a life, shuffling around in a bathrobe in an apartment filled with mold and horrible things and papers and all this kind of stuff.
If you see those, right, then you see, okay, well, you know, frightened child in a world of war, and then a lonely woman whose son doesn't want to see her, you know, shuffling around in an apartment and living hand to mouth and so on.
Then it's like, oh my god, what a tragic life, right?
I mean, that would be...
It's where you pick, it's what you pick out of people's lives that is the argument for what it is.
And this, of course, people do this all the time.
I mean, if you really want to see art, you see...
How people talk to you when you first meet them.
That's art. I mean, that's a monologue of selective attention, if ever there was one.
I mean, if you really want to see art, then see how people talk about themselves on a first date.
I mean, that's the kind of art that you just couldn't reproduce in any more of a compelling kind of way.
What is it they tell you about?
What is it they don't tell you about?
And it can be either way, right?
I mean, it doesn't have to be that they're always telling you about the best things.
They could be telling you about the worst things.
I remember going on a blind date once.
A woman spent 45 minutes telling me about how her ex-boyfriend ran up all her credit card debts and then ran off, and she's still paying them off.
And it was like, thanks, bye.
Right? I mean, then I had to sort of say, well, look, since you're not quite ready to date, at least not me, so good luck with all that.
But, I mean, there's somebody who's putting across a pretty clear message, right?
So, when we tell people about ourselves, there's a certain kind of artistic creation in all of that, right?
So... Of course, the more you know about someone, the less art is possible, right?
Which is... This is what I mean when I say art is a form of propaganda.
This occurs when we meet people.
It occurs in our grooming. It occurs in, you know, do we have a secret taste for Green Day, but we only tell them that we listen to Bach, right?
I mean, all of this is part of a self-portrait, right?
It's part of an artistic approach.
So whenever we tell people about ourselves or introduce ourselves...
We paint a portrait of ourselves, right?
Because we give them a selective amount of information.
The grooming, of course, is pretty comprehensive, but when we tell them about our lives, that's all we give them, right?
So, if you were to sort of show my mom's life bracketed by a hellish war and then a lonely old age, it would be tragic, right?
Oh my God, that's terrible.
If you sort of skipped over the violent abuse that she enacted upon her helpless children, then it's tragic, right?
And you're saying one thing about a human being and her relationships to those around her, or lack thereof.
If, on the other hand, you don't show the brutalized childhood that she went through, and a much more frightening one than I did...
If you don't show that, and you don't show the sort of sad and pathetic old age, but you show this brittle, vain woman who would rather go gallivanting around town and leave her children, you know, with ten bucks for two weeks to sort of survive, because she wanted to fly down to Houston to meet a guy she wanted to date, you know, you would see this incredible shallowness.
She'd be very good looking, as my mom was, so...
There'd be all of that, and you'd have this sort of contempt and hatred for this Jessica Lange kind of mom, right?
So, what you choose to present is the moral argument that you're making for existence, really, for existence.
If all of the characters in your stories are violent, well, clearly you know that there are non-violent people in the world, right?
And there's quite a few of them, right?
But if you're a Tarantino guy and everyone in your stories is violent, then it's clear what you're saying.
You're saying, yeah, there are non-violent people, but they don't matter.
You know, what really matters, what's really important is...
This is this, right?
It's people pointing guns and cutting each other's limbs off and so on.
Blood spurting and beheadings and so on.
Yeah, there's non-violent people, but they don't matter, right?
They're inconsequential.
They're the detritus.
They're the accidental. The essential is what it is that I'm portraying to you, what it is that I'm portraying.
So, certainly in my novels, I've tried to focus on what I consider essential in life, and those who have read them or listened to them can let me know.
And I will get back to God of Atheists at some point.
I'm sorry that I haven't finished it yet, but I have chosen to do other things.
So, given that there is this very selective approach to talking about reality in art...
Then I think it's important to really get a hang of not just what art says about the artist, but also what art says about the consumer.
Also what art says about the consumer.
I knew a gentleman, he's now a professor and not the one that I've talked about in economics, but I knew a gentleman when I was younger.
Who was very disturbed.
And he would self-mutilate at parties, get heavily drunk, and he was into music that was...
You know, it sort of ranged from the psychedelic furs on the sort of alternative up here in Canada, the CFNY kind of stuff, to bands like King Kurt, I think was the name of the band, where he went to a show when they were throwing around animal entrails and bathing people in blood and just some really, you know, in my mind, some sick stuff, right?
And he also was into a band that would record these chillingly, like literally give you goosebumps, kind of demonic songs where there'd be a children chanting and then a growling and just this absolutely sociopathic stuff.
I mean, I remember listening to it with a friend once and we both just had to turn it off because we got really freaked out.
It's pretty scary stuff. And, of course, he's never had a close relationship.
He's never had a girlfriend.
He's never dated, to my knowledge, except for, like, one really tortured relationship that never went anywhere.
So, you know, these kinds of things give me some sort of indication about the role of art in people's lives.
Certainly in the dark times in my life, it's been particular bands that have attracted me, right?
As a teenager, I listen to Side 3 of the Wall every night.
Before going to bed, because it was a fairly good representation of the kind of stuff that I was going through, right?
Especially the movie, right?
This guy, this boy, who's got an overprotective mother and the father is gone and so on.
So, it's certainly been in my case that when I am a happier person, I'm drawn towards happier sorts of music.
Try the Millionaire Waltz by Queen, just a delightful piece of riffraff.
But when I'm happier, I tend to return to most happier music.
And when I'm I'm sad or upset that I tend to be drawn towards other kinds of music.
I had a guy I knew who was a programmer, and he was severely dysfunctional in his personal relationships, right?
And also somebody who did not tell the truth to himself and to others.
And, you know, so he ran into his ex-girlfriend, who he lived with for a couple of years and had a nasty breakup with, and he was like, no, I'm fine, right?
But his hands were shaking. He simply could not admit that this would be a surprising and shocking thing for anyone, a surprising thing.
And the kind of music that he was into was, you know, the sort of treble charger and bad religion and, you know, all of this kind of angry alternative stuff that was pretty significant.
And I thought it was interesting.
He once played me a song that he had on his MP3 that was by Garth Brooks.
And this was, of course, the guy knew it was nothing to do with country, so I was just like, whoa, dude.
And I sort of felt that I had a soul tussle for this guy's soul with another gentleman who worked at the company that I ran.
And the other gentleman was a very dangerous, at least to my mind, a very pleasant, but also a very dangerous person.
A kind of seducer to the dark side in a way.
He was heavy into drinking and kind of not into very healthy relationships and so on.
And so I would chat with this guy and sort of try and point him in a direction that I thought was better.
But this guy had a history of drinking in the past and then fell into this crowd, this like four guys who lived in a house all together.
They called themselves the frat boys.
And they just had these like long weekend benders and he'd It took me once, or I went to a birthday party of his, where he ended up basically getting bullied, sort of peer-pressured heavily into drinking to the point where he got really sick, and that was just a complete mess, right?
So, when he began falling into this guy's orbit, he then began listening to and enjoying the only country song that I ever heard him mention.
And, of course, the Garth Brooks song, which I'm sure you'll have guessed if you know country music, was, well, I got friends in places.
Where the whiskey drowns and the beer chases my blues away.
And I'm here to...
Oh, I went too low. Oh, dear, subsonic.
But I've got friends in low places, right?
And this...
How does it start?
Blame it all on my roots.
I showed up in boots and ruined your black tie affair, right?
This is about sliding down the social ladder into friends who are simply there to sort of drag you down and have all these bad things happen and so on.
And the fact that this song kind of went into his mind was, I think, quite significant.
The fact that he began to enjoy it, right?
Art will tell you an enormous amount about yourself, if you listen to it, what you're interested in.
When I was younger, and thought I knew a lot more than I think I know now, and was very much into philosophy...
And felt that I had, you know, pretty much worked out, except for the fact that I wasn't applying it in my own life.
But I thought I had worked out theoretically.
I was interested in, I would get sort of, this song would run through my head, like, for months at a time.
Longer, I think. It's a Phil Collins song, just when I thought it was going all...
Right, I found it. Just when I thought it was going all right, I found out I'm wrong when I thought I was right.
It's always the same, it's just a shame, that's all.
And that really was a, it would just get stuck in my mind, go round and round over and over again, right?
And of course, that's a piece of art that's sticking in my head from my unconscious, keeps floating it up like a trial balloon, saying, dude, you haven't got it all figured out.
You think it's all right, but it's wrong.
The only way that I was able to change that was I reprogrammed my unconscious, or tried to, by reversing it.
So just when I thought it was going all wrong, I found out I'm right.
When I thought I was wrong, I just reversed it, and that gave me some relief from the song going around in my head.
So that kind of stuff, if you look at what it is that you're drawn to, you can learn an enormous amount.
I mean, art is a kind of waking dream, that you can analyze your own attraction to particular forms of art, to particular kinds of art, And find out quite a lot about yourself.
And, you know, somebody who is into house or somebody who's into rap or somebody who's into thrash metal or ska or these kinds of things, they have particular kind of characteristics that draw them to this kind of music, this kind of beat, this kind of emotional content or non-emotional content and so on.
So... When you look at art, I think it's enormously helpful and instructive to understand that you can really judge someone by the kind of art that they're interested in.
Assuming that they're not giving you the false positive of being into art because they kind of get it and it's the effect that they want to pursue.
It's that old Saturday Night Live sketch sketch.
With the guys who are going to the club and that Baby Don't Hurt Me song.
Well, what's partly funny about that, of course, that's exactly the kind of song that people like that would be into, right?
Shallow and empty and emotionally barren and yet, you know, with a lot of pain underneath, right?
What is love? Baby, don't hurt me.
Don't hurt me no more. So there's this empty, shallow giddiness which is cloaking a lot of pain.
And you can have a lot of fun with this kind of stuff.
Analyzing things in art.
Somebody walks up to you and says, my favorite movie is A Room with a View.
That tells you quite a lot.
And that's one of my favorite movies, by the way, if you ever get a chance to watch it.
Oh, it's magnificent. But that tells you one thing or something about that type of person.
If somebody comes up and says, my favorite movie is Saw 3, or my favorite movie is American Psycho, or my favorite movie is Scarface, well, that tells you quite a lot about that individual.
Somebody who comes up to you and says, my favorite novel is Glamorama, or my favorite novel is The Fountainhead, tells you quite a lot about that person.
It doesn't tell you everything, of course, because there's lots of reasons.
People are attracted to art because it mirrors something in themselves, or they yearn for something, and they can't or haven't achieved it, right?
So some people love The Fountainhead because it mirrors something in themselves.
Since I grew up with my brother sort of like Peter Keating and have struggled in similar ways to Howard Rourke, there's things that I love about that novel, but there are other people who love The Fountainhead because they yearn for this kind of virtue, but they do not find it mirrored within their own life, right?
So they sort of yearn for it, but they can't achieve it, right?
So it's more of a sort of despairing thing to love.
It's like the guys, you know, who...
You know, tubby short guys who don't take care of themselves want to go out with, you know, supermodels, right?
There's a kind of yearning that is kind of like self-hatred as well at the same time, right?
Even though they, you know, fetishize the physical attractiveness of these women, there's a kind of yearning that is actually quite self-destructive, and that can occur with art as well.
Where people, you know, just read nothing but Ayn Rand or other, you know, whatever it is.
And they yearn for it, but they don't actually try to achieve it in their own lives, right?
So there was a guy I knew who was really into Ayn Rand, and we go to prostitutes.
And, you know, it was not healthy.
You can see this, right? I mean, you can see this sort of very clearly.
At least I could. But this was not healthy stuff.
So why was he into it? Well, he was into it for the same reason that guys who don't take care of themselves sort of trail after or end up getting attached to, you know, really attractive women or stalk them or whatever because, you know, it's kind of a way of just driving away the good by becoming obsessed by it, right? So it's not always easy, right?
It's not like everyone who loves Ayn Rand is a virtuous and rational person or anything like that, as we know from our conversations with objectivists.
And with libertarians, but there are still indications, right, that can be very important to trace when it comes to art.
I think that when Christine and I, our second date, I showed her Room of the View because it had just come out in DVD and I hadn't seen it in quite a while.
And she loved the film. And the fact that she loved the film that I loved was quite important.
It was very important to me.
And that kind of visibility that we yearn for, where we really want people to love the things that we love, is very important.
I've also sort of found that people who...
I think, I mean, this is sort of the last thing I'll say before I stop here and let me know if this is of interest to you and we'll maybe pick it up at Art 4.
But what I've found is that, I mean, generally there are two types of people in the world, right?
There are people who are defensive and aggressive and then there are people who are curious and open, right?
And what I've found is that if people criticize my art, like my choice in art or say it means bad things about me or whatever...
Or maybe non-complementary things about me.
I'm sort of like, oh, well, tell me what you think.
Maybe that's the case. Maybe there's something I can learn from this.
But I found that when I... When I put forward the kinds of art that I think are ignoble or base or, you know, represent sort of a low self-esteem or something like that, then I find that people get very prickly and defensive.
And that just sort of confirms the diagnosis.
It's just kind of funny that people think that by getting mad at somebody who's questioning their taste, they're somehow refuting it.
But, you know, all it does is confirm the diagnosis because...
If I'm wrong, right, a kind and gentle and secure person will tell me that I'm wrong by stepping me through a logical pattern and not being offended and so on.
But that's not what happens.
People often will just get mad.
So I just sort of suggest be careful when you're talking about this sort of stuff.
Oh, this art means X. Just be careful, because people do get very volatile about their artistic choices.
They don't like what it reveals about them, but they can't give it up without learning more about themselves and becoming better people.
So I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much for listening.
I'll talk to you soon. I look forward to your donations.
It's been a little bit dry, except for the one small one today, so if you would like to throw a couple of bucks my way, it would be enormously appreciated.
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