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Dec. 15, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:06
559 Art Part 4
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Good evening, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is the un-podcast-y time of 21-23.
9-23 on the 15th, I think.
Yeah, 15th of December.
2006, I just finished off doing some Christmas shopping after the company party where I had one of those flashy, knife-wielding Japanese chefs shovel massive amounts of food at me and others, and I am rather a fool.
So, it's the bloatcast.
I wanted to finish off...
Oh, how modest of me.
I just wanted to finish off the whole question of art.
It's all done now.
All done forever. I wanted to just put some closing thoughts, at least on this round of our conversation about art, because it seems that people like the topic.
And if you like, I provide.
So I wanted to talk about the sort of the why, the why of art.
And the why of art is a subset of a much larger set of whys, which is really wise around things like recipes and formulas and philosophy really as a whole and logic.
The question is sort of why.
Now, when you're young...
You feel, most people feel, I felt at least, and most of the people I know felt this way as well, that you really had an eternity to recover from or to remediate any mistakes that you might make, right? So, what was the cost of going out with a crazy girl when you were younger?
It's not that high.
You feel like, oh, heavens, I'm 20.
I've got forever to do X, Y, and Z. Why am I going to...
When you're young, you're going to have fun, and this and that and the other.
And it's...
It's not so much true.
It's really not so much true.
There is not an eternity of time with which to recover from mistakes in life.
And I don't mean the little ones, but the significant ones.
Marrying the wrong woman, having kids with the wrong woman, heaven forbid.
Not preparing yourself for any kind of challenging career.
Not getting education.
It's tough. Life choices, they whittle down just a little bit as you get older.
There's not a whole lot of people.
Who say when they're 45, hey, I'm going to be a lawyer.
It doesn't really happen that way.
So you don't have, although it feels like that when you're young, you don't have an eternity of time to make mistakes.
And I'm 40 now, so I'm going to live double this time, for sure.
I don't really count my life as having started until I was in my 20s because it was such a wretched beginning, but...
I sort of say, okay, well, I'm going to live to at least 80.
I'm guessing 90 or 95.
All other things being equal, I come from a long-lived family on both sides, and I try to take care of myself.
I've been off the horse for weeks now, so that's got to help, right?
So, you know, you can double this.
But, you know, when I get to be 45, well, you know, you can't really double it and be sure that you're going to make it, right?
I mean, it's possible, of course, but you can't be sure.
And that is something that is important to understand.
Of course, when you're young, you feel like you haven't...
This is a cliché, and it's not anything particularly inspiring or original, but it's true, nonetheless, right?
Sometimes clichés are true, just because they're clichés.
And you don't have an eternity of time to correct your mistakes.
So you don't want to have to keep reinventing the wheel when it comes to ethics or to morals, right?
So you don't want to just make mistakes and say, gee, I really shouldn't have chainsawed that cheerleading squad.
Now I feel really bad.
Because there are some things which can't be undone.
Similarly, our sensitivity to exploitation has been somewhat blunted by a variety of things.
Marxism, I would sort of say, is one of them.
As if exploitation is some distant capitalist rather than your own family or, say, Marx himself.
Our capacity to really understand exploitation...
has been sort of blunted and our capacity to sort of respect and to look for virtue in those we spend time with has also sort of been blunted and so there's a lot of meandering In youth at the moment, there's a lot of fame, I'm going to live forever.
There's a lot of that stuff where, and it's true for me, and it's true for a lot of the people that I know, which is a bit of a self-selecting group, of course, but nonetheless, it seems that it's not that uncommon, that there's just a kind of forever and a day.
Procrastinate, and procrastination is breathing, so to speak.
It's like, oh, later, I'll do the dull stuff later, I'll do the heavy lifting later, later, later, later.
And, of course, there's some value in that, right?
I mean, it's not like procrastination is always a bad thing.
I mean, it's important to be able to enjoy the moment.
And there's one of these delicate balances in life between the things that you have to do and the things that you enjoy doing.
You want to enjoy your life overall, which means going to the dentist even if you don't like it, right?
I mean, but it doesn't mean...
Only doing things that you have to or are supposed to or should do.
In the sort of quote, should, there really aren't any shoulds.
It's a wonderfully liberating thing about the argument for morality is there really are no shoulds.
There's only a shall not and there are no shoulds.
But you want to find that balance, right?
You want to be responsible for your future while enjoying your present, and those things change over time.
But art, really, in my sort of humble opinion, one of the central things that art does...
It is a warning about time.
It's a warning about time, and it's a warning about consequences.
I can't remember who said it, but it's a good quote.
Somebody said a book, like a novel, is a chance to try on someone else's life for size.
There's some wisdom in that, I think.
There's some real wisdom in that. To take a fairly obvious example, if you look at a movie like...
Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close and Michael Douglas.
Here's an example of, I mean, it's a bit of a brutal and really only in Puritan America could this kind of repercussions or ramifications occur to a man having an affair.
I mean, in France, he would be cheered, right?
But only in Puritan America would you have this kind of Adam and Eve story or, you know, the good wife and the bad mistress and the murderers and the bunnies and all this kind of stuff.
But there is a tale of, you know, any guy who's got sensitivity feels for Michael Douglas when he finally has to tell his wife.
Like what a horrible mess he's gotten into by getting involved with this borderline woman.
So there is a, it's a scary morality tale.
What is it someone said about that movie?
It scared the pants onto American men or something.
It scared the pants off.
It's a kind of morality tale, and it's kind of a way of going through, as Aristotle says, right, through this catharsis, right?
So you feel the fear and terror and horror of the hero's journey, and through that, you expunge some of the fear and horror within yourself.
Now, certain people have looked into this question of catharsis and found that it's really not the case.
And in certain situations, it does seem to be not the case, right?
Because It's fine if you feel the fear and horror and then feel relief when it's over and it's all released.
But, of course, the fear and horror can be addictive, right?
So you have people who are really into violent video games and they don't end up, you know, burning the violence out of their system.
But instead it becomes like if you listen to rap music and play violent video games, it's not a whole lot of catharsis.
You don't end up strolling out of that kind of media exposure as Francis of Assisi levitating on the forehead of Buddha.
So this question of the emotional journey that we take with characters is a way really of bringing choice and consequences to life.
Or it's a way of putting choice and consequences to death.
And in certain films that really does seem to be the case.
If you look at another movie like Clerks, then you have a clear message at the end Jason Mewes, the potty-mouthed sloppy seconds guy, he is saying, you know, you've got this girl who brings you Your lasagna and shows up for you and takes care of the store for you.
And then you've got this other girl who's cute and this and that.
But, you know, she's kind of cold and mean and difficult and dangerous and so on.
So go with the good thing.
Go with the good thing.
And that's a kind of morality tale, right?
Right there, which is... You can't just judge a woman by her body and by her looks because she didn't earn those things.
You judge a woman by the virtue and the way that she treats you and the way that she treats others and her kindness and her gentleness and her generosity and her courage and this and that.
I mean, there's some morality tale in that.
And there is also a morality tale in Clerks in that Dante constantly complains about everybody else but never does anything himself.
Right? And there's another kind of morality tale in that.
I guess if we keep the Kevin Smith theme going, in Mallrats, Shanna Doherty has this speech at the beginning, which is good, where she says, you know, they're out there in the world, there are people doing great things, and surgeons saving lives, and explorers conquering deserts and so on, and I'm basically spending my life sitting here shagging you, and that's pretty sad.
And so there is a kind of you do nothing, you get nothing done, and so on, and there's a morality tale around that as well.
You know it, right?
No need for me to say it.
And so, when we go through an emotional journey with a character, it's very much like a really good cook This is a metaphor, if you don't mind.
A really good cook is going to be able to look at a recipe and say, uh-uh, that's not going to work.
That's going to taste bad, or it's going to need a pinch more of this, or it's going to need a dash more of that, because they look at the recipe and they can taste the result.
The best art, in my view, and I think that all art does this to some degree or another, but the best art is the art which lets you look at the recipe of a life and taste the dish that's going to come out.
And the best art trains you emotionally to see the consequences of particular traits in people's personalities and see down to the core so that you don't have to waste time.
So that you don't have to waste time.
So in a movie, for instance, if you have a character who's always arriving late and then you show that he's kind of cute and he's kind of charming and so on, right?
But he's always arriving late.
And then the woman sort of falls for his cute and his charm and his, you know, good looks or whatever.
And she marries him, she has children, and he turns into this sort of Robin Williams before the fake breasts in Mrs.
Doubtfire. He turns into an irresponsible guy who won't get a job, who shows up late for interviews, who gets fired because of this, that, or the other.
And what it is trying to train you to do is to be sensitive to an inconsequential or seemingly inconsequential detail like a guy who shows up late.
So, you know, for instance, I mean, this can work sort of in a way that makes sense and also in a way that doesn't so much make sense, right?
So, I mean... We all know the cliché that every bad guy in the history of movies for the last ten years has had to be a smoker, right?
If you're a smoker, you're immediately a bad guy.
It's an optional, you know, it's a choice habit, and that's very different from the Cary Grant or the Humphrey Bogart films where the good guy was the smoker.
So art is also trying to train you to see the details at the beginning and how they play out.
The details at the beginning and how they play out.
So, you can look at...
I mean, this could work all the way from Kevin Smith to Shakespeare, right?
I mean, you look at Hamlet at the beginning, and there's a certain amount of self-loathing.
There's indecision. There's an over-attachment to the mother.
There's a morbid... A morbid absorption with the death of his father and so on.
And as he puts it, so is the native cast of resolution.
Sorry, sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.
I can't remember the line that leads up to it.
Sicklied over with the pale cast of thought.
Analysis paralysis, right?
I mean that somebody who is very introspective and cynical and negative is going to be unprepared for making Large decisions or fundamentally powerful decisions or life-changing decisions that there's going to be a kind of worry wart paralysis that's going to occur with this kind of person and that's something really to watch out for.
This kind of person is going to be incapable of real love and you can see from the way in which he just attacks Ophelia.
Attacks, you nickname God's creatures.
I've always loved that line. It's such a wonderful way to talk about sentimental femininity.
You nickname God's creatures.
And he just is savage, right?
And so there's a certain amount of things which you can pull out of Hamlet, right?
Guys who are overattached to their moms can be sexually volatile and dangerous.
There's a lesson for Hamlet.
For women in Ophelia and her relationship with Hamlet.
However exciting and brooding and melancholy this kind of morbid personality is, this is not a fit If you fall in love with such an unstable, no matter how brilliant, no matter how many flashes of brilliance there are, if you fall in love with such an unstable personality, no matter how beautiful his poetry is, no matter how stirring his speeches are, you will die.
You will die and you will drown and you will sink.
Actually, I think it's to drown and then die and then sink and then rise, gassy and bloated.
Anyway, we don't have to get into the whole after story of Hamlet.
But there's a story, there's a moral in there as well, right?
So then when some...
A woman meets a darkly exciting guy who's got incredible verbal skills, is over-attached to his mother, and is pretty pessimistic.
He wants to die. Well, sure, she's going to want to rescue him, and she's going to think that it's very exciting, and so on.
But one of the things that the story of Hamlet is going to say is, don't be an Ophelia.
Don't fall for this guy and get your heart torn out.
Because that's what's going to happen.
So, this is why the greatest artists are the greatest psychologists who can see the small details at the beginnings of things and show you how they play out.
Right? So, in...
In Fatal Attraction, it's been a long time since I've seen it, but Glenn Close basically jumps, is incredibly sexually forward, jumps Michael Douglas' fairly tired old, even by then, Bones, and then becomes obsessive.
Are there clues at the very beginning?
Well, of course there are. Of course there are.
And what is not explained in the movie, of course, because they do want to make the heroes sympathetic, is that you don't end up in a mess like that unless you...
This is what art... One of the great dangers of art is that it's going to externalize things, right?
So it's like, oh man, I just had an affair with a woman and she just out of nowhere turned out to be crazy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, it's never that simple.
It's never that simple, right?
There's always something crazy in the person who gets involved with a crazy person.
It's not just, oh man, who could have guessed, right?
Now, a lot of art is around obscuring that, right?
Because there's art that comes from the light side, and there's art that comes from the dark side, right?
There's the Yoda art, art there is, and there is the Vader art.
And it's important to differentiate between the two.
So, in dark art, in black art, and this is so common now, it's ridiculous.
It's not just a convenience.
But in dark art, people solve their problems with violence.
People are cool.
There's slow motion shots of the guys walking down the street with their sunglasses on and blues playing and all this kind of stuff.
So people solve their problem with violence.
People fall into bed with each other and then end up being in love.
So you meet someone and you have sex with them and then you get to know each other and you fall in love.
All of which is complete nonsense.
If you have sex with someone the moment that you meet with them, you're both disturbed.
Now you can start flaming me about this.
But I will still stick to it.
That is going to not work out.
Because you have no trust yet.
No trust, no knowledge of the other.
It's just lust.
And there's nothing wrong with lust. But lust and love is the real ambrosia, right?
Lust alone leaves you kind of empty, right?
But... Bad art will have you want to do the wrong things, right?
So bad art will stuff gorgeous naked women who just want to have sex with you, no commitment, no family, no marriage, no kids.
And it's not like not wanting those things is bad or anything like that, but I think that the truth is that the majority of people do.
I mean, it seems to be the case. The majority of people do want these things.
And so art that puts you in the wrong direction to achieve these things And then lies to you and tells you that you can achieve them is, to me, bad, misleading, and corrupt art.
So, of course, the Tarantino stuff and to some degree the Woody Allen stuff.
I saw some movie on the weekend with Woody Allen and Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson.
And so Hugh Jackman meets Scarlett Johansson and then they basically, on their first date or second date, she stays the night.
But they don't know anything about each other, right?
And they don't want to know anything about each other.
They just want to have sex with each other.
It's kind of cool, right?
You can get mad and call me old-fashioned and so on, but it's kind of cool.
And then they try to build a relationship, and it works fine.
It works very nicely.
It works wonderfully. No problems, right?
And this is just not true, right?
I mean, of course, Woody Allen is a pretty disturbed fellow himself, but...
This kind of stuff, where you have people solving problems with violence all the time, where you have noble cops and noble firefighters and noble soldiers and so on.
It's all just...
That's propaganda, right?
It's propaganda that leads people down the wrong path.
Because what it does is, like if you have art that shows everybody who has a certain amount of self-respect and doesn't jump into bed with someone on the first or second date, if you show everyone like that as a screwed up prude, and everyone who is sexually open and adventurous and everyone who is sexually open and adventurous and jumps into bed with each other and so on, if you show them all as fun-loving and cool and hip and sexy, and then you have the little Christian girl in the thick glasses who, oh, don't you touch and then you have the
You sort of make fun of everyone who has some restraint, and you portray everyone who has no restraint as cool, and that really is the story of teen flicks pretty much since the dawn of time, and certainly since Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Then, what are you sort of saying?
What are you sort of really saying?
Well, you're saying that anybody who has self-respect around sexual matters and wants to get to know you before having sex with you It's screwed up.
It's emotionally weird and retarded and stuck up and needs to be loosened up, man.
Chill, relax, relax.
You always hear this kind of nonsense, right?
And this is the nihilism, right?
This is the rage against virtue.
And everybody who just sort of falls all over each other and just has sex with each other at a moment's notice and doesn't care about getting to know each other and, you know, the hooking up kind of stuff, right?
I mean, in Weeds, you see this, right?
The son gets the girl pregnant and, you know, consciously to, you know, to screw up her life.
Well, to keep her with him, which would be to screw up her.
And he's portrayed as, you know, I mean, a bit of a brat, but, you know, obviously kind of cool, right?
And that is art that points people in the wrong direction.
It points people in the wrong direction.
So there's... I remember some old Remington Steele.
I think I only watched one or two of those shows in aggregate.
But this is Pierce Brosnan's old show from...
I don't know...
Early 90s or something?
Late 80s? And I don't even...
I think I only watched just the last 10 minutes of it or something while I was eating or something like that.
I'll forget the excuses. I watched the show.
And... He was upset at some bureaucrat and he grabbed the bureaucrat and he dragged him across the desk and he shook his fist in his face and he grabbed his head and made him nod and say whatever, whatever, whatever, right?
And yeah, of course, I mean, I know the bureaucrat is a statist and this and that, but still, it's using violence to solve problems.
And what it does is then people who don't use violence or who don't feel that insane to do that kind of stuff...
It makes those people feel like, well, I should be tougher.
I should be stronger.
That's the standard, and I'm a deviation from it.
That's how people get things done.
They go down to the Department of Motor Vehicles, and they shake their fists in people's faces.
Well, of course, what that does is it lands you in jail.
But people put out this kind of stuff.
This is how people deal with their problems.
This is how people deal with conflict.
They get a gun, they yell, they scream, they this, they that.
And it really is pointing people in the wrong direction.
So it's the emotional flavor that you put on the consequences of decisions that gives people, like it either firms up their compass when it comes to truth and reality, or it totally screws up their compass when it comes to truth and reality and points them in the wrong direction.
And this is another reason why statism is just working so beautifully in a hellish kind of way, because people are sort of emotionally tuned to hate capitalists and to love the thugs of the government.
And even, in a sense, to sort of respect the mafia.
To respect, you know, Scarface and the death cults of these many different cultures, right?
And if you look at religion as a kind of art as well, well, people are taught Through the parables of Jesus to obey your masters, to obey your secular government, to obey your church, to obey God, to not question, to not think. And those who do think and who do question are evil and go to hell, right?
That's a piece of artistic triumph that trumps any piece of movie making that's ever been achieved, right?
Because then you have the moral is very clear and is actually considered to be something that's going to happen to you, right?
So... So if you look at something like fatal attraction, if you end up not having an affair, although you really want to, because you're scared that the woman's going to boil your children's bunnies, that's not really the same as being virtuous.
This is a threat. This is a Christian approach to virtue, which is that you need to bully people, except you can't bully priests, and you can't bully God.
So it doesn't exactly conform to the argument for morality.
And that teaches people bad ethics, right?
Oh, but she could be scary.
She could end up stalking me.
That's got very little to do with virtue.
That's just fear, right?
That's just, oh, well, I'd steal, but I could get caught, right?
And I mean, I've been there when I was younger, and that's not virtue, right?
That's just calculation, right?
That's just odds, right?
So, art is a lot about training us as to the consequences of certain decisions, and art has an aesthetic cheat that philosophy just can't match.
So, as I said, if you make all the cool, good-looking people, if you have them doing bad things, then...
Those bad things will look cool and good, right?
Especially to you sort of young, impressionable teenagers.
And if you have the people who are interested in virtue, being sort of stuck up and priggish and nose in the air and heads in a book and no life and cardigan sweaters and, you know, if you have in a teen movie, if you have the virtuous girl, she's got a pink bow-tied room and teddy bears on her bed and she's, you know, obviously kind of stunted and retarded emotionally.
And so she lives in that.
That's got an implicit statement as to morality being a kind of childishness.
And you do see this kind of stuff quite a bit, right?
The virtuous girl is a stutterer.
She desperately wants to fit in, but she's afraid.
And it's her virtue that's holding her back from having a good time and from getting into the cool crowd and so on.
Or you have this sort of Charlotte Simmons stuff from Tom Wolfe's last book where...
Her virtue is prudishness and priggishness and so on, and it's just a withholding or a withdrawal or a negation of the sexual urges of more corrupt people, but it's not a sort of positive, virtuous thing, and she gets sucked into this kind of stuff.
Anyway, this is like a medieval, sorry, 19th century kind of Samuel Richardson and Pamela morality tale, that sort of stuff, but he makes me look funky and new-fashioned.
But... It's important, you know, if you really want to sort of get a hang of what art is doing in terms of training your moral sensitivity, training your moral sense.
You know, a soldier, sorry, a movie where the soldier just shoots guys in a bloodless manner and charges up the hill and takes and gets cheered and, you know, gets the girl and so on is saying one thing, right?
A movie, Three Kings was one of these, a movie where you get to hear things from the other side is a whole different kind of movie that's going to teach you something quite different about moral sensitivity.
So a movie is really about tasting the results and the recipe, and it's training you emotionally to associate certain emotional characteristics with certain states of morality or certain moral choices.
And I think that's a very important thing to understand.
In terms of reversibility, there's this guy.
What's his name? I can't remember his name.
He's on The Daily Show.
Manji something? Anyway, he's foreign.
And he's just brilliant.
I mean, he just makes my—he gives me goosebumps, his analyses of things.
He did one the other day. Rumsfeld said, yeah, well, people talk about Iraq like it's all bad, but there are lots of sections of it that aren't— You know, on fire or something like that.
And he said, no, this is exactly how Americans, you know.
Of course it's absolutely true that the vast majority, or the majority of Iraq, is not currently on fire.
And he said that's exactly how...
The Americans reacted to 9-11 when they said, well, there's vast amounts of the U.S. that aren't currently a smoking crater.
So seeing the perspective from the other person from the other side, seeing the hypocrisies of those who are putting certain ideas forward, All of this can be achieved through art.
And art argues through consequences.
It creates or affects emotional states by an argument from consequences.
It's not a rational argument.
It's an argument from consequences.
And as such, it's a very powerful technique, which is why religions and propagandists and statists always use art to get their message across, because it allows people to bypass art.
The question of rational evaluation and understanding and just make the moral arguments in terms of casting, in terms of coolness, even in terms of music, right?
The corrupt people come on screen and you get this really cool music or whatever, that's very different.
Whereas if you get the sort of moral priggish people coming on and you get some sort of hopped up Disney nonsense or some sort of swaggering country and western idiocy, That's the music makes the argument, casting makes the argument, and the script, not in its content, but in its form, right? If you make the moral person a stutterer, you're making an argument about what morality is.
And it's just very important to, I think, really review and understand what art is doing to your moral sense and how it's conditioning what you consider to be, you know, good and cool and right behavior and so on, and compare that to rational standards that I think are a bit more universal and make sense.
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