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Oct. 1, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:14
1473 District 9' - A Freedomain Radio Movie Review

The philosophy behind the science fiction movie.

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
Hope you're doing well. This is a review, a philosophical review, of the science fiction movie District 9.
And it will contain spoilers, so if you haven't seen the film, you might want to wait until you have before watching this.
The basic story of District 9 is that 20 years ago, An alien mothership sort of hovered over Johannesburg in South Africa and the aliens were sort of captured or taken off and then put into this shantytown, into this ghetto outside of Johannesburg with all the resultant crime and dysfunction that comes from being sealed off and not allowed to integrate or discouraged from integrating in society.
And as a result, they're causing problems, the aliens, they're referred to as prawns derogatory because they don't look like big shellfish.
And the residents of Johannesburg don't want The aliens there, so the government hires a corporation called MNU to forcibly remove the aliens and move them to a concentration camp 200 kilometers outside of Johannesburg.
And this officious guy named Weikers, I think Weikers Weikers, he's a sort of low-level bureaucrat in over his head.
He's got this sort of dumb idiot grin throughout the first bit of the film, which is slowly wiped off his face.
He goes in with a bunch of mercenaries To perform this pretense of legality.
In other words, if we can get the aliens to thump or hit or sign a piece of paper acknowledging their eviction, then you can evict them without feeling bad, because you've got this pretense of legality.
And it's even called in the film a pretense of legality.
While he's in District 9, he goes in to explore one of the prawns' shacks, and he gets sprayed in the face with this black substance, and slowly turns him into one of these aliens.
As a result, he can use the weaponry because the aliens have all this weaponry, but only they can use it.
Human hands are DNA encoded or whatever.
So he becomes very valuable and they start experimenting on him and they're going to cut him up and he fights his way out and goes back to District 9 and all this stuff that goes on after that, which is not particularly important relative to the philosophical themes.
That are in the movie. So, clearly, I mean, I think to state the obvious, the fact that it's set in South Africa does give this away to some degree.
The District 9 is a metaphor for, you know, what is sometimes called the other or the alien.
This would be obviously concentration camps and so on.
This would be Soweto and other places in South Africa actually visited them, where illegal aliens or immigrants and other undesirables are kind of housed in these ghettos.
Or it could be the shanty towns in South America or in the Far East, where those who don't have access to political power or the economic fascistic clout of corporations aligned with the government live as an underclass of workers.
Or it could be the underground tide of migrants who are illegal immigrants all over the world, whether it's in Turkey or America or Europe or other places.
Where they kind of live off the grid, right?
So aliens' metaphor works really, really well, I think.
And of course, they're blamed for the problems that result from being enclosed with no rights, no economic participation in society or very little, and so on.
So it's a very, very good metaphor for things like that.
But I think even more fundamentally, it is a metaphor for the challenges of empathy that basically come from a kind of imperialism.
imperialism is kind of like the ruling elite which fundamentally rule through the political power of the state and trade favors with corporations who donate to the state and who pimp the politicians who in turn rob the populace to pay off the corporations and so there's a basic class analysis of society not in a marxist sense because marxist analysis is based upon economics whereas i think a rational analysis of class is based upon Coercion is based upon the proximity to the use of institutionalized violence.
Those who are close to the use of institutionalized violence, which includes people like academics, part of state protected unions, and the media who need access to politicians in order to get the cheapest news out possible rather than do investigative reporting.
and of course the politicians and other state unions and people who benefit from the state in a variety of ways those people are the ruling classes and everybody who's further and further away from the proximity to the violence of the state is lower and lower classes and those who are victims of that such as particularly poor people in welfare or public housing ghettos whose children are mentally mangled by the terrible state of school education,
public school education and so on.
They're all the sort of underclasses.
But this is an extreme end of the underclass where it literally is physical segregation.
So to make the case that the film is about empathy This Vickers fellow, he's brutally culled at the beginning of the film.
Brutally culled.
And he makes jokes about unplugging alien babies and calling it abortions, and he is very focused on this sort of pretense of legality.
I get the quote signatures in order to ship these And he has a little bit of sort of vague, not exactly empathy, but he treats them as disobedient children and does sort of say, don't shoot these people.
And he's sort of commanded to because the media is there and doesn't want all of this violence going on.
But he does sort of treat them as recalcitrant children, but he's not sadistic in that way.
He's just cold and officious, unfeeling and brutal.
The army guys, and I mean this is something you always notice in films, that if you're going to portray the military in a negative light, you can't call it the military.
That's just a rule, right?
You just can't because it will anger too many people and piss off the military.
If you're going to present the military in a bad light, you have to call them mercenaries, right?
Because it's just the way that it We simply can't talk about the realities of the world acceptably or metaphorically.
So when they say mercenaries, what they mean is the military, because it is the military who keeps these kinds of things going.
So he has no empathy for the aliens, for the prawns, in the beginning of the film.
Then he starts to become an alien.
He's infected by an alien.
It's interesting because what happens is when he sees some tenderness and concern between a father and son, an alien father and son, he is infected by a kind of empathy.
And the interesting thing there is that he's popular in the world that is, in Johannesburg, in the human world, he's popular.
He's married to the daughter of the head of the corporation and so on.
And at his surprise party or whatever, there's tons of people there and they're all very friendly.
This is all based upon conformity, because the moment that he develops this sort of alien claw, he gets infected and starts to turn into an alien, the moment he gets this alien claw, he's completely ejected from society.
He is still who he is, he just has an alien claw, he hasn't turned into an alien yet.
But the moment that he begins to metaphorically become one with the aliens, he sees this father-child interaction, he gets infected, and he begins to, quote, empathize with the aliens.
And the metaphor for this is he physically starts to turn into one, partially, a little bit, right?
And his society completely rejects him.
They're going to use him.
They're going to kill him. His wife doesn't want to have anything to do with him.
So his success or the inclusion that he has in the ruling class of the society is only because he conforms.
The moment that he begins to empathize With the victims of this localized imperialism, the ruling class will completely reject and attack him.
And I think we've all had that experience to some degree or another.
If you really begin to empathize with the victims of violence, you will be attacked.
I mean, you don't see any victims of the invasion and imperialism that the US has inflicted upon Iraq.
You don't see those victims in the media.
You don't see the children with missing limbs or eyes or You don't see the District 9 concentration camps or 10 cities that are floating around the outskirts of Iraq as people are fleeing.
The violence has been unleashed by the US invasion.
You don't see any of that.
We can't look at that as a society, which is tragic.
We can only look at it metaphorically through these kinds of films.
Or, I think in Battlestar Galactica, one of the seasons, It was to do with being kept in this sort of captivity by the Cylons, and that, of course, was a direct, even down to the attacks upon the local humans constricted as police, that was a direct metaphor for Iraq.
But we can't look at it directly, we can only look at it metaphorically.
That is a step forward. That is a step forward.
Even the film itself is a step forward, however small it might be.
If you look at the way that, say, the Indians were portrayed in sort of old westerns of John Wayne, they were just crazy savages that you shot without remorse and so on.
There was no empathy for the genocide committed against the Native Americans.
Millions slaughtered for the sake of land expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries.
There was no empathy for the Indians who were just faceless, savage enemies in the Old Westerns.
In District 9, there is some sympathy for the victims of imperialism.
There wasn't in the past, there is to some degree now, and that, however small a step it might be, is still a step forward.
So, when this Waikis fellow develops this claw and begins to really identify He begins to experience what the prawns, the aliens, are experiencing.
So he's embedded in the ruling class.
He develops some empathy for the aliens.
Metaphorically, he starts to turn into one.
He's immediately ejected from the ruling class and cast down into District 9, which is the only place where he can really go to hide, where he is not attacked, because he's a fellow victim now.
And that's really, really interesting.
And I think we've all experienced this.
If we show genuine sympathy and empathy for the victims of imperialism, we are ejected from the ruling class.
This is how tenuous our relationships are, right?
The moment we show, in general, not completely, but in general, the moment that we show genuine empathy and sympathy for the victims of predation from the state, whether it's the poor in our society, the excluded in our society, or the victims of overseas imperialism and other societies, the victims of our wars, The moment that you show sympathy for the victims of institutionalized violence you are threatened with eviction from your current social circle.
I mean it's chilling and if you run up against it you will really understand what this Weikers Fellow is going through.
So he says very very interestingly and to sort of support this case when he holds up this little cylinder which is what sprays him in the face and begins to turn him into a prawn He says repeatedly, it's not a weapon, but it is very powerful.
It's not a weapon, but it is very dangerous.
It's not a weapon, but it is very dangerous.
And I believe that what he's talking about here, metaphorically, is empathy.
Empathy is not a weapon.
Empathy will not blow people away.
Empathy will not eliminate violence from the world.
It doesn't jam guns. It doesn't disable bombs.
So it's not a weapon.
But it is very dangerous.
And it is very dangerous. To develop and show fundamental moral empathy to the victims of violence in society is highly, highly dangerous to your social circle, whether it's friends, relatives, family, whoever.
The moment that you really begin to talk about The violence that is fundamental to our system, the coercion of taxation, the coercion of regulation, the coercion of war, the hideous ways in which the poor are driven into a permanent underclass through the welfare state, through unemployment insurance, through terrible schooling, through ghettos, through public housing, through the way that they're just herded and narcolized.
by Nagatai, sorry, by state power is just hideous and brutal and the moment you really begin to show empathy for it you are faced with eviction from your current social circle and so this works, I think, very well metaphorically And so he's driven into this underclass because he shows empathy for the underclass,
so he's kicked out of the ruling class and he's driven into this underclass and he begins to develop relationships with his fellow outcasts, his fellow aliens, because he's becoming an alien, because he's empathizing and sympathizing with them, which has stripped him of his former arrogance and brutality as an officious person.
Now, empathy leads to morality.
You can't have morality without empathy.
Empathy for both good and evil, as I sort of talked about earlier.
So, what's very interesting is that as he begins to empathize with his fellow victims, he begins to gain strength and power.
Now, the only way That philosophical power is shown in movies, and you can see this in The Matrix, you can see this in this movie, you can see this in a number of movies, when people discover the truth about the world, whether it's Neo in The Matrix or Weikers in this film, when people discover the truth about the world, you do gain great power through the humility of realizing that most people have only accepted you because of your conformity with the particular class that you're lodged in.
When you gain access to or knowledge of the world itself, you do gain great great great power.
Unfortunately, it is only represented in movies as the power of violence, as martial power, which is a shame.
I mean it's understandable why people would do that.
It's more visually, I guess, stimulating or whatever, but it is not the power that truth actually provides you.
The truth that The power that truth actually provides you is simply the power of unmasking.
Of unmasking others.
Of unmasking yourself first, and then of unmasking others.
Of asking them the persistent, impatient, and sometimes assertive Socratic questions.
That actually lead them to see the reality of the world that they live in.
The fact that we are addicted to using violence to solve social problems through statism, and that we are addicted to the indoctrination of children through statism and religion in order to maintain the lies that our society is built upon.
It gives you the power to unmask that.
That is an overwhelming power to other people.
It completely overwhelms them.
It feels like they're being vaporized.
And you see this particularly often in the film, that once he has the power of this alien weaponry, and the alien weaponry is ethics, is virtue, is universally preferable behavior, as I've termed it, is a system of ethics and goodness that has real power.
And it is something that is only shown metaphorically as blowing people away.
And very often it does blow people away.
I used to have these I used to have these dreams for years about tidal waves hitting me.
Tidal waves, massive tidal waves that blotted out the entire sky and seemed to scrape the bottom of the moon, just rushing in, cascading and blowing everything away.
And I could not understand what these dreams were about.
I could not understand. For years I puzzled over these dreams.
And finally then I understood that this is how philosophy strikes other people.
It was my primitive way to attempt to empathize.
With how the truth blows other people away, or appears towering or destroying their entire world.
And after I figured that out, I literally have never had that dream since.
It was a repetitive, terrifying, overwhelming dream for years that I had, until I figured it out, really understood it.
And never have had the dream again.
So I'm very big on sort of self-knowledge that way.
It's very, very important. As Socrates said, the first commandment is know thyself.
So when you have empathy, you can develop real virtue, real moral power, and that will strengthen some people and it will frighten and terrify most people because the unmasking, right, the exposing of the skull beneath the flesh is really, really terrifying for people.
So he does, through his empathy, and you can begin to see The beginnings of empathy, even throughout the film, because at the very beginning of the film, or near the beginning, as I said, he's unplugging these babies, these alien babies, and they're dying, and he makes jokes about keeping the souvenir of an abortion and so on, right? So he's basically just killing babies and making jokes about it.
That's his level of empathy. When he begins to turn into one of these monsters, and they sort of hook him up to an alien weaponry, an alien gun, And they stand an alien in front of him and order him to shoot it.
He refuses. He says, I won't shoot.
I'll shoot a pig. I won't shoot this creature.
So he's beginning to develop empathy because he is now becoming one of them so he doesn't want to kill them.
And before he was willing to kill the babies and make jokes about it.
When he begins to turn into them he won't They have to force him to kill the alien.
That again, the beginning of the growth of empathy, and he does gain this terrible alien power, which only the virtuous can wield, only the empathetic can wield, called morality.
That is sort of my argument.
And the reason you know that it's morality is it actually only destroys evil.
Morality does destroy evil and there is a fight in the world between good and evil that I very strongly accept as a reality of the world.
There are people who are telling the moral truth and there are lots of people who are lying to corrupt and control others with the pseudo morality called propaganda and patriotism and religion and nationalism and so on.
But when you begin to empathize with the underclasses, and you realize the tenuous nature of your relationships in the class that you're currently in, and you begin to fall from grace, so to speak, as you empathize with these others, you do gain, you are crushed, you are humiliated, you are broken down, but you do gain this great power called empathy.
Now, there's another interesting moment in the film.
I'm sorry, and through empathy, you gain the true power of morality, which is an alien technology that blows bad people away and strengthens good people, gives good people strength.
As he becomes better, he becomes stronger.
And this alien technology becomes not just something which he can use to attack evil, but something which also gives him protection from evil.
He ends up in this sort of full metal jacket, bodysuit, alien armor device, sort of robot thing, like an Iron Man contraption.
Which gives him great power and that occurs after he has really empathized.
He's actually gotten inside the skin of these aliens.
He's actually inhabited the skin of these aliens.
That's what the metaphor is of this sort of big metal contraption that encases him.
So once he has gotten actually into their skin, truly empathized, then he gains great power to repel, repulse evil.
And again, it's not something that should ever be used in a violent way, but it's always dramatized that way because it's more dramatic and people haven't figured out.
How to put philosophy into a narrative in a way that gives real power.
I've done my own attempt with it in a novel that I've written called, a number of novels, but one called The God of Atheists.
You're welcome to check it out if you like.
So, once he has this real empathy, he gains this great power, and he really has the power to repel evil and to aid and protect good.
And again, it's a father-son relationship that goes on.
You can also really look at the way that these prawns are represented as children.
And this is another way.
I mean, the society, not universally, but to a large degree, It's quite brutal towards children even now.
Corporal punishment is still very common in many many areas of the world and some brutal corporal punishment is quite common.
There's still unfortunately a huge amount of sexual exploitation of children throughout the world and so you could also look at district 9 as you know these are children and this is an attempt to really empathize with the sufferings that all too many children go through and the degree of Moral clarity and horror and power that gives you is very very strong and very very powerful.
But it is again something that is very terrifying to go through.
When he starts to help Christopher, who is one of the aliens, the intelligent alien who's built all this stuff and built the suit that he ends up encased in, it's very, very interesting because, again, he's been turned into a claw guy, sort of on his way to becoming an alien, and he says to this fellow, to Christopher, how long, like, I want to be cured, and Christopher says, yes, I can cure you if you do X, Y, and Z, and they go, And he says when they get back from their mission, I want to be cured now.
Cure me. Turn me, make me human.
Make me human. Right?
Which is a very different human than he was before because he was inhuman before.
Now he's been infected with empathy.
He's been cast out of his class.
He's developing sympathy by living the life of those that he used to rule.
And he says to Christopher, make me human.
And so he says, give me, you know, give me the shot.
Make it happen right now, right now.
Make me human. And Christopher says, it will take about three years.
About three years. That's an interesting number.
That's an interesting number and an interesting length of time to become fully human.
There's lots of ways of looking at this, but fundamentally I would say that a couple of years is what it takes as a minimum if you work very hard and if you get a really great therapist and you work really hard at it.
For me it was about three years.
I did two years of Three hours a week, very intensive therapy.
I spent 10 to 15 hours a week journaling and doing sentence completion exercises.
So just really dragging myself ass backwards through the thorny hedge of individuation.
And it took a long time.
It took years and years. So when he says, make me human, when Vikas says, make me human, and the alien says it will take about three years, he explodes with rage, attacks the alien, and doesn't want to.
He wants the quick fix.
Because the quick fix is what we're all addicted to in society.
Whether it's the quick fix of entertainment or video games or sex or drugs or popularity or attractiveness, those quick fixes rather than virtue, self-acceptance, peace of mind, empathy, goodness and so on.
We're all addicted to the quick fix.
The quick fix being there are poor people, so let's have the government use guns to rob from the rich or the middle class and give to the poor.
That's a quick fix. The slow fix is let's make the world as free as possible to allow the poor to rise without control, without the inhibitions of state violence and power.
We're always addicted. Oh, we don't like people who do drugs.
So let's pass a law that throws them all in jail and attacks people and robs them and so on.
This is the quick fix. Statism is exactly the same as any other kind of drug.
It is a quick fix to reduce anxiety about an issue rather than to patiently work to solve the issue proactively and in a voluntaristic and therefore permanent and ever increasingly effective way.
So when he's told that it will take him years to become human, he explodes with rage and attacks and retards his progress towards empathy, begins lying to Christopher's child.
Daddy's just dealing with some stuff, let's take this thing and get out of here and so on.
So the moment he loses, the moment he's faced with the degree of difficulty it's going to take to become authentic, to become fully human, years that it will take of painful work, he attacks, he starts lying to children, he slips back into His non-empathetic stance, his cold and cruel and bureaucratic lying to everyone stance.
And that is very important.
And I think we all face that.
I mean, there's no clear path to rational and empathetic and virtuous individuation, becoming actually who you are, not reliant upon the approval or disapproval of others, but being at one with yourself and standing in full The sunlight of virtue, going out of Plato's caves, looking at the world as itself, getting out of the matrix, ripping the electrodes of propaganda and lies from the back of your head, and looking at the world, clear and straight and direct.
Well, that is a difficult and painful process.
When he's told about it, he explodes with rage and backslides towards his cold and deficious and lying and manipulative and brutal self, which, you know, we've all had that experience, and I think it's interesting the way that that's portrayed in the film.
The last thing that I'll mention is that virtue is a constant theme throughout the film, in my opinion.
The conceit at the beginning of the film, which is really very accurate, It's that the government and the military, these mercenaries, they can't just rip people out of their shanty towns and force them elsewhere.
They have to get their participation.
They have to get their approval.
So they create a social contract, which people are forced to sign, which the aliens are forced to sign.
And if the alien Christopher, who he laid up to friends, it's interesting, when Christopher won't sign, The Weikers fellow threatens to take away his child, and so his child is going to grow up in a one-meter-by-one-meter box.
He's going to be sent off to child services.
So he threatens to smash this guy's entire life, take away his child, because he won't sign this document, He's forced to sign.
They've got a gun to his head, signed the document.
That is, to me, a perfect metaphor for our relationship with the state.
Of course they need it to be voluntary, they need it to be virtuous, because that way we can patrol each other, we can attack each other for our lack of adherence to this social contract.
So, to me, it's a very interesting false morality at the beginning, where you're forcing people, you're forcing these aliens at gunpoint to sign a social contract and therefore be bound by it because they signed it.
Hey, you signed it. You had 72 hours to look at the health care bill.
Now you're bound by it because we gave you the chance to give us your feedback and blah blah blah.
So this social contract at gunpoint to me is very very interesting and the military The army that he was using to enforce that social contract to gain the, quote, cooperation of these aliens, it turns against him completely when he begins to empathize with the aliens.
So this veneer of morality at the beginning of the movie, where it is morality that is inflicted at gunpoint upon people in order to ease the bad conscience of the imperialists by saying, well, they agreed, it's voluntary, you signed, therefore fuck you, right? That false morality at the beginning, the veneer of morality, the, you know, taxes are a social contract which you must pay because of civilized society and goes to help and how would the roads be built and the poor and the sick, right?
All the guilt and Crap that is piled upon you, right?
Social contract is identical to original sin, right?
You're just bad for being born, but you can buy your way into goodness by paying off people, priests or the government, right?
You're born selfish and mean and bad, but if you pay the government, your money is redeemed and put to a good end in the same way that if you pay the priest, your soul is redeemed and you have a chance to get into the gates of heaven.
So this false morality at the beginning, which is based upon a lack of empathy, a narcissistic kind of selfishness, right?
I'm only concerned about my own bad conscience and getting this contract so that I can pretend that it's a voluntary relocation to myself.
It turns into a real morality and the army that was supporting his infliction of this social contract on the aliens then turns against him when he begins to empathize with them which is really fascinating and we think we've all experienced this as long as you're repeating and parroting some particular prejudice or bigotry or bullshit within society some group will always welcome you with open arms but the moment that you begin to really speak the truth to really empathize with the underclass to really universalize the moral But the morality that society is supposed to be based on,
because everybody claims compassion and virtue and voluntarism and so on, but the moment you begin to really see how society actually runs, the compulsion that is embedded at the root of society, the violence that is always hidden and pretended to be voluntary throughout the world, then the society that claimed to formally protect you will almost immediately turn upon you and attack you.
I've experienced it, others have experienced it.
It is a fascinating and illuminating and instructive and terrible but fundamentally important thing to see.
So when you go out into the world and you begin to question the dominant paradigms, you begin to apply fundamental philosophical or Socratic reasoning or questions to the brutalities and violence embedded in society when you say to people who support the government so you support the use of violence against me because I disagree with you about how the poor should be helped about how drug use should be curtailed about how the sick people should be aided because I disagree with you you are willing to turn this army and all armies are mercenary armies because they're all in it for profit and pay You are willing to turn this army against me if I question the virtue of our addiction to violence in society and I begin to put forward voluntary and productive and permanently improving methods of solving social problems are then the guns are turned from the victims to you.
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