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Dec. 11, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

21:47

937 Movie Review: The Freedom Writers

Can the individual save the system?

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	Good morning, everybody.
	I hope you're doing well. It's Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio, and I thought that we would take a break from flagellating the question of political action and take a little dip into a movie review of a movie that I saw last week, which stars Hilary Swank, and it's called The Freedom Writers, and basically it's sort of a true-ish story about a woman who...
	Is the daughter of a civil rights worker who takes a dip into a violent, gang-infested, minority-based school and over a couple of years turns the kids around from being suicidal, gang-addicted, gang-banging nihilists into sweet and positive and loving scholars and there is this kind of redemption in the film and so on.
	So, clearly, if you've been around the movies for more than about 10 or 20 minutes, you've noticed that there is this repetition in this kind of moviemaking.
	This is the movie that gets made over and over and over and over and over and over again, all the way back from some of the early movies in the 60s, Mr.
	Tibbs and so on.
	Through Dangerous Minds and through this and to some degree Hoff Nelson.
	But this is the movie that gets made over and over again.
	And the movie is gang of, you know, horribly abused, nihilistic culture and race-addicted kids are turned around by a plucky and positive teacher who makes them into better people, better scholars, and they go on to college and, you know, there's this massive redemption that goes on in the movie.
	And this It's the movie that gets made over and over and over and over again.
	And the question is why?
	Why would you keep going back to make the same movie over and over again now?
	There is a little bit of that in Hollywood, but this particular subject seems to be really, really sort of played out or mashed up to death.
	And I'm going to put forward a way of looking at it that might be of use to you in terms of why this movie gets made over and over again.
	There is, of course, as we know, the state educational system, and we'll talk particularly in the U.S., and we'll focus a little bit more on the inner cities, is a brain-mincing gulag wherein young minds traumatized by mostly the horrors of the welfare state,
	but other... Government institutions as well are sent to be penned up like cattle, abused, run through metal detectors, bullied in inconsequential ways, taught that they have no future, and then they're turned out often to the correctional facilities for final processing.
	It is an absolute conveyor belt of brain-mincing boredom, aggression and violence, and of course it is relatively impossible To reach the higher echelons of learning and human achievement while suffering from PTSD while effectively being in a war zone in these schools.
	If you are an anarcho-capitalist or somebody who advocates a stateless society, one of the first objections you get is, well, you see, but in a stateless society where government education doesn't exist and it's all private, the poor, you see, they just won't get a very good education.
	Boy, you really have to work hard to be able to say that with a straight face.
	I mean, you really, you have to have just frappaged your brain, you know, at high voltage to be able to say with a straight face that in the absence of government education, the poor, you see, the disadvantaged, you see, they just won't get a good education.
	And the reality behind this situation is the impulse behind movies like this.
	Behind movies like this, and also to some degree like Michael Moore's Sicko, which I did a more detailed review of in the Freedom Aid Radio Premium section, which is available on the board, donations, blah, blah, blah.
	But what happens is, like Michael Moore and this Richard Legravenese, I think it was who made this film, There is a criticism of the system while at the same time the hope of redemption for the system.
	Essentially, it's a Christian tale that the individual can save the institution.
	The institution is corrupt, but the individual can save it.
	Human nature is corrupt because of original sin, but Jesus Christ can save it.
	The school system and the bureaucracy is corrupt, but a plucky teacher can save it.
	That the government does things, according to Michael Moore, lie about the war, get us into the war in Iraq, fail to protect the 9-11 workers in terms of giving them health benefits, the volunteers who went to help dig out the rubble and the bodies at Ground Zero.
	And the government does all of these terrible things, and Michael Moore is very clear and very open about that, as is all of the other people who talk about the war.
	And so the solution, you see, is to give the government more power.
	Because the government lies to its citizens, incarcerates them unjustly, starts unjust wars, you know, the thing to do is to also turn over health care to that same institution, which is roundly criticized by everyone.
	That takes work, right?
	That's not an easy conclusion to come by.
	by.
	That is so fundamentally and, dare I say, virulently anti-empirical that it's hard to see that kind of argument with a straight face.
	I mean, for instance, in Sicko, I won't go into that in much detail here, but in Sicko, Michael Moore talks a little bit about insurance companies, which of course are nurtured, maintained, protected by the state.
	And then, for about the last two thirds of the film, he talks about all of the bad things that the government is doing in the realm of healthcare.
	And then, because of the magic Gallic infusion, we are then supposed to think that the same institution that is screwing over even the people who tried to help the survivors of 9-11, the institution that screwed all of that, and the institution that he talked about in Fahrenheit 9-1-1, is the very same institution that we should turn and the institution that he talked about in Fahrenheit 9-1-1, is the very same And this is really the most amazing, mad, 1984, 2 plus 2 is blue, not even 5.
	It's the most mad perspective.
	But, I mean, as we've talked about in this conversation before, and if you haven't seen it, have a look at some of the earlier podcasts, particularly 90 and 183.
	But it really takes a lot of work to be able to hold these ideas in your head.
	The government is evil.
	The government can do great good.
	So... In this film, what we see is the plucky individual, the white girl, her name...
	Sorry, I just have this.
	What was her name? Doo-doo-doo-doo-doo.
	Erin grew well. It's apparently a true story.
	This girl, Erin, comes into an inner-city school.
	She's 23, and she turned these kids around by having them read The Diary of Anne Frank, having them write about their own experience and a kind of cathartic psychological exercise.
	And the movie doesn't really go much into...
	It doesn't really go much into the transition.
	They're surly, and then they're happy, and then there's no real understanding of it.
	And then they all go to college or university, and she follows them there.
	She doesn't stay in the school system.
	She leaves and follows these kids out.
	And... It's really, really essential when you look at a piece of art, for me, if you really want to understand it, to look at why this and nothing else?
	Why do you deal with the exception rather than the rule?
	So if you look at a movie like Stand and Deliver, where Edward James almost played a Hispanic teacher who roused his children to mathematical excellence and so on, well, of course, if you look at the long-term story of that teacher, he is completely trashed up by the unions and prevented from teaching and spreading his methods.
	The institution of public education, which is really around turning out tax cattle and fodder for incarceration, things human beings at the state can farm and profit from rather than thinking and critical individuals, of course the system allows this to happen almost by surprise and then quickly reacts to smash it and clamp it down.
	So, in this movie...
	The focus is on the few kids who make it, right?
	Tens of millions of kids in the public educational system, of which millions are in these ghastly, PTSD, war-like gulags with weapons and violence and drugs and so on.
	What's really focused on is these couple of kids who make it out.
	And why? Why would you focus on that rather than all of the kids who don't make it out?
	Well, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to help the listener avoid a moral understanding of the system.
	Sound far-fetched? Could be.
	Let's plow on and see if we can't make some sense out of this.
	If movie after movie after movie were to talk about the kids who are psychologically, emotionally, mentally, and often physically, or sometimes physically, destroyed or maimed in the school systems,
	if film after film simply talked about The way in which state control and coercion, all the way from the welfare state through public education, maimed and destroyed the intellectual and emotional lives of these children, then clearly there would be a consistent message.
	This system is like that turning kids into sausages seen in the war, for those who are not 20.
	The message would be very clear.
	If you look at some of the anti-slavery books that came out in the 19th century, Uncle Tom's Cabin and so on, it's very clear to see that slavery is portrayed as an almost universal negative.
	I mean, there's no sort of happy slaves, right?
	I mean, the slaves are all miserable, and it's perpetual, right?
	But if you had book after book after book after movie coming out, talking about how slaves could be very happy, slavery could really work for some slaves, and every single time, It was somebody coming in from the outside, motivating the slaves, making the slaves happy, getting the slaves to be happy to serve, and so on.
	Then you would be getting a particular message about slavery, as opposed to book after book after book coming out, which says that slavery isn't evil, there's no happy slaves, it corrupts everyone it touches, and that's how you end a social institution.
	When you provide redemption within that social institution, then you are justifying that Social institution.
	If I made some sort of god-awful, monstrous film talking about how Jews and other gypsies and intellectuals and the other people in the German concentration camps or the Russian concentration camps, how those people could be really happy and learn to flourish and be wonderfully joyous under the concentration camps, what would I be saying? Well, I would be saying that the concentration camps could be good.
	Could be good. If I made a movie saying how a woman could really enjoy being raped, can you imagine the shock, the horror, the vituperation that I would be subjected to?
	And rightly so, right? If you're saying that an evil can be a good, then you are justifying that evil.
	And if we say that the state educational system, a system founded on coercion, violence, control, Can be moral, can be good, then we are justifying that system, which allows us to let other people off the hook, right?
	So the average person who comes to see this movie walks out thinking, well, this is a broken system, this is a destructive system, but by God, there are plucky people in there who can make it work, and by God, it's their job to do it.
	And that simply gets us off the hook, right?
	We get to walk away and feel like, well, we don't have to touch the system, we don't have to take on the unions, we don't have to confront the moral evil at the root of coercive systems of education.
	We don't have to do any of that.
	Because there are plucky people from within the system who will save it, who will make it better, who will redeem it.
	You can see this all over the place.
	Any piece of art that touches on a state system almost always has a redemptive individual somewhere in the middle.
	You think of cop movies like Serpico and so on, there's always some individual in the center who is pluckily fighting for a better system and who gets the system, who redeems the system, who turns it into something positive despite all the corruption and so on.
	And this is just a piece of mythology that we tell ourselves over and over and over again, that somehow the institution can be saved by the individual.
	If the right individual comes in to this institution, the institution can be saved and we don't have to deal With the moral evil at the root of the institution.
	We don't. If we can just get the slave masters to treat their slaves better, we don't have to confront the moral evil of slavery.
	We don't. We can just, well, we can tweak it.
	We can tweak it. We don't need to actually confront the moral evil.
	And this, of course, comes out of people's experience with their families, fundamentally, right?
	Everybody, if you have bad parents or parents who are difficult or parents who are negative or parents who bore you or parents that you can't connect with and so on, right?
	We all have this fantasy that if I can just find the right words, the right approach, the right rhetoric, the right time, the right topic, the right way of putting it, then I can redeem my family, right?
	So the individual can redeem a corrupt family structure.
	It's all a complete fantasy, of course, and keeps us enslaved to that family structure.
	So... In a very real way, the people who provide a moral out, a moral escape hatch from an entirely corrupt situation are more responsible for maintaining that corrupt system than the corrupt people.
	The people who say slavery can be very moral and virtuous and positive are the people who do the most to maintain slavery.
	The people who say the right, plucky, energetic teacher can come in and rescue these inner city kids is doing much more to maintain the gruesome mental gulags of state education than any other single person.
	Not even the person who goes in, who does this, the people who glorify it and communicate it and say, this is the standard that we should have.
	In this way, the system can be saved by the individuals within it.
	In this way, the system can be saved by the individuals within it.
	Which gives everybody the fantasy that the system doesn't have to be confronted, that the system does not have to be dismantled, is not rotten and evil in its core premises.
	But rather that the right individuals in the right places can magically transform this system from the evil to the good.
	Now, if we look at this young woman, we can see that she sacrifices an enormous amount for these kids.
	So, for instance, the books aren't available that she wants to give them to read.
	So she takes a job as a bra saleswoman.
	Sadly, not too many scenes of that in the movie.
	But then when she wants to take them out on a trip...
	She gets another job as a concierge.
	So at this point, she is working about 80 to 90 hours a week.
	She is in school till the evening, and she comes home.
	She grabs a quick bite with her increasingly alienated and over-hairy husband, and then she goes out to her job.
	She goes to her second job.
	She works weekends, and so on.
	So this is the standard, of course, that we are hoping for from The teachers, that they're willing to work three jobs, that they're willing to alienate their husbands to the point where she gets divorced.
	To the point where she gets divorced.
	Her personal life is a complete shambles, right?
	She loses the love of her life, the man that she married, because he gets sick and tired after years of this, of seeing his wife for ten minutes a day, and who can blame him?
	I mean, it's understandable to see why this would not be particularly compelling for him.
	So she becomes highly attached to these children.
	The other thing, of course, and her personal life gets destroyed, so really that's how we are supposed to save the system, is have people who make $27,000 a year work three jobs, including their teaching job, get their personal relationships destroyed, become utter slaves to the system, and that's how these kids are going to be saved.
	The other thing, and I don't know the story of this woman's real instructional methods, but the other thing that occurs in the movie is that you see them learning about the Holocaust and so on, and can we just stop calling it the Holocaust?
	Massive and titanic and genocidal evil that it was, it really was only a Holocaust, and by far not the worst of the 20th century, if you count 10 million...
	Kulak starved to death in Russia in the 1930s, plus another 10 million starved by Mao in the 1950s in China because of the agricultural, quote, collectivization and revolution in these two countries.
	It's just a holocaust of which there were many.
	Calling it the holocaust doesn't sit quite right.
	So she teaches them about the holocaust.
	She gets people to come in and talk about the woman who sheltered Anne Frank comes in and talks about how they're all heroes and she's not a hero and so on.
	But it's not education.
	It's just reading a book and listening to somebody talk about the Holocaust.
	It's not unimportant.
	It's good stuff to learn, good stuff to know.
	But it's not teaching principles.
	It's not teaching rationality. It's not teaching science.
	It's not teaching math. Getting people to write about their feelings and so on, all it's going to do is turn them into social worker.
	And I would bet you dollars to donuts that the majority of these kids come out as teachers or social workers.
	In other words, more people who will support and extend the power of the state over others.
	And they will all go out all fired up with the...
	With the mission of rescuing children from the state educational system and thus perpetuating it, going back in to save it, which means that we don't have to dismantle the whole system from the ground up, but we can somehow tweak it and force people to become 90-hour-a-week obsessive wage slaves to go in and save these kids, which lets us off the hook from having to confront the moral evils of the institution and dismantle it entirely.
	Now, of course, the other thing is that Obviously these kinds of teachers are very rare, and what they do is not reproducible, right?
	So there's this idea that when we get these stellar teachers in, and all power to them, right?
	And as far as saving those individual kids go, maybe they're doing some real good.
	I don't know. I'd sort of have to look at it in the long term and see what...
	Their relationships are like over time, right?
	Because when you've been in one of these kinds of schools for a decade or more, you are suffering from PTSD. I mean, you've had significant brain alterations due to repetitive stress and trauma, not to mention your home life, not to mention the bad modeling and bad parenting and single-parent households and so on.
	That's not something that a plucky teacher can just undo.
	I mean, there's a certain amount of rhetoric that will fire people up for a while, but you have to look at their long-term lives to see whether or not it really takes root.
	And I would certainly think that the kind of work that you'd need to do with a competent therapist in terms of PTSD unwinding and so on would be part of that, but of course we don't know, at least I don't know, and if you do know, please let me know whether or not that is occurring over time and into the future.
	But The work that these people do is not reproducible, right?
	So the guy in Standard& Deliver tried to reproduce his teaching methods, was totally shut down by the union, and I think ended up leaving the teaching profession.
	This woman left the junior high school and high school system and went and followed her kids to teach at university.
	In other words, what she did was not reproducible.
	Was not reproducible.
	And so, you can look at a movie like, and this is an exaggeration, and I apologize for that, but I think that it's worthwhile.
	You can look at a movie like Schindler's List, and you can say, yes, some of the Jews were saved by this guy, right?
	Oscar Schindler. But that does not justify the system, right?
	The solution to the system of Nazism and the genocides of the concentration camps was not to bungee in more people to rescue the Jews, but to shut down the concentration camps.
	The idea that you're going to bungee into these hellholes and save innocent children from being mentally, physically, and emotionally destroyed, that you just bungee people in who are willing to work obsessively in 80, 90 hours a week, trash their marriages, trash their personal relationships, have no life whatsoever, that this is the solution to what is being inflicted on our children in these hellholes.
	That the solution to concentration camps is to just bungee in a whole bunch of Oscar Schindlers and try and rescue some of these kids.
	But that's That's staggeringly wrong and corrupt.
	Staggeringly wrong and corrupt.
	And there's so much work that gets placed into this fantasy.
	There's so much emotional energy, emotional effort that gets placed into this fantasy.
	If we put the right individual in the right place at the right time with the right motives, boy, the system can be saved.

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