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Jan. 12, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:18
1554 The Mind-Frackery of Harry Potter

There are no survivors, and it is an insult to think otherwise.

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Hi everybody, hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. This is going to be a long ramble cast, but I think the content is very important, so I hope that you will bear with me.
I am really going off an inspiration that came out of watching a British adaptation of Bleak House, with an absolutely impressive Gillian Anderson from The X-Files, who's just fantastic in it.
And the acting, of course, as a whole, in general, in the British dramas in particular, the cultural pride dramas such as Shakespeare and Dickens are, is fantastic.
And in Bleak House, there's a young woman who was cursed as, you know, it was better if you'd never been born, and she never knew her mother or her father, and was an orphan at a time where that was particularly traumatic, out of wedlock, and just abused and neglected her whole childhood.
And, oh, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling you, I'm telling you.
It is not, sometimes it is not a lot of fun to have the hyperactive, mad stampede, gerbo-fest-in-a-wheel brain that is thundering between my ears.
It is a challenge. I mean, I'm just watching this little drama.
Oh, you know, it's a Dickens thing.
I read the book many years ago, and I just watched a little good British drama.
So I took it on vacation, watched a little bit, and was watching a little bit of it last night.
And I'm watching this thing, and then this idea comes to me, and I don't get any sleep at night.
Because that is what it's like when you regularly have the sniper of deep thought blowing up your forehead.
You just spend half your life trying to dodge the lasers and get something done.
But it seems to be rather a challenge.
Anyway, so this is what happened.
I'm watching this little drama from England, and you'd think, ah, it's Little Dickens.
Not the end of the world. Nothing too deep.
Nothing... But no, in comes a thought and an idea which has gripped me ever since, which I'm going to share with you now, really off the cuff.
So, I'll tell you, I'm not going to tell you much about Bleak House, but this girl, I can't remember her name, the character, we'll call her Pam.
Pam, cursed out and an orphan and an outcast and abused and neglected and all this kind of stuff.
And she is like the soul of wise maturity and is circumspect and grave and good-natured and steady and, you know, has all of the, you know, slightly sycophantic but positively conceived virtues that we talked about in a recent podcast.
The usefulness to the ruling class is of cliched virtues.
And this struck me as fundamentally unbelievable.
And I had the same experience, I think like most people, I dipped into the Harry Potter phenomenon.
I read the first couple of books and then just got very tired.
It just seemed to get very silly and long-winded.
Let's not perhaps stand in that glass house and throw stones, but it was still not that great for me.
And I do remember thinking, though, that there was something fundamentally malicious about the Harry Potter series.
And it took me a little while to put my finger on it.
There was just something nasty and malicious and underhanded and mean, if not downright malignant, about the Harry Potter series.
And I realized that the reason that I experienced those books as malignant was because Harry Potter is an abused, clearly abused child.
He's forced to live in a cupboard under the stairs, he's neglected, he's abused, his scorn is heaped upon him, his fat pseudo-sibling is constantly berating and hurting him, and he is just emotionally and verbally, and to some degree even physically if you count his living quarters, abused throughout his entire childhood.
And then when he is, what, 12 or so, this owl comes by and summons him to Hogwarts, where he is mature and wise.
And courageous and trustworthy and special and, you know, oh, oh, oh, oh.
Now, of course, it is the mark of the psyche that those who are humiliated seek comically exaggerated powers in fantasy.
And we've talked about that before, that the whole comic book industry and WWF and the military and the police and all of the exaggerated and cliched extensions of hyper-masculinity or hyper-femininity result from You know, the crushing humiliation of abuse, which blows out the other side in exaggeration.
I mean, if you take a ball bearing on a string up to a height, you know, like those little back and forth Newton things, like a pendulum, you take a pendulum all the way up to horizontal and you let it go, it does not come to rest in the middle.
It rather swings to the opposite extreme.
And it's the same thing with humiliation and grandiosity.
And... Brutality and sentimentality, but particularly with grandiosity and with humiliation.
Those two very much go hand in hand.
And so the fact that this abused kid has, as his fantasy life, being special and picked by the hat and have all these amazing powers and the chosen one and revenge fantasies, right?
And somebody killed my parents, I must take revenge.
Voldemort, of course, is his uncle.
I mean, anyway, we don't have to get into all of the obvious stuff about Harry Potter, but But there it is again, and you see this all over the place.
You see this with Luke Skywalker.
And again, we don't know much about Luke Skywalker's early childhood, but we do know that he has a heavy, overbearing, cynical, dour, dream-crushing kind of uncle.
He can never be the parent, right?
And in his fantasy life, like everything that happens after the beginning of these films is a fantasy reaction to the humiliation at the beginning of the films.
Everything that happens in the last nine-tenths of these epic films is a psychological fantasy based upon the crushing humiliation of the first 10%.
That is a guarantee.
Whenever you see somebody, and again, if it's not a...
So the kitchen sink drama, if it's not hyper-realistic, whenever you see a young person being humiliated at the beginning of a show, you know everything that follows is the fantasy reaction to that in terms of grandiosity, and I am the chosen one, and my father was a hero, although I've been told he wasn't, and I am chosen and special and great,
right? That's all just a reaction to being constantly humiliated, and it's a tragic reaction and something that I think remains underappreciated in art, as most of the psychological ramifications of art remain underappreciated, but That is, you know, it's this massive seesaw.
You put 10% humiliation at the beginning, you get 90% grandiose self-aggrandizing megalomaniacal fantasy at the other 90%.
And the rest of it goes from there.
You see this all the time, particularly in some of the British children's films, right?
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Charlie is an abused child who then goes on this grandiose Oompa Loompa-fueled fantasy, fame, wealth, power, money, and candy!
Right? So this is a privation, right?
It's like when Solzhenitsyn describes how those who are starving in the Gulag Apicalago are They're constantly, constantly talking about food and fantasizing about food and thinking about food and how to cook it and, you know, in their minds because they're just starving.
It's all a massive reaction to humiliation.
Almost all of children's literature that I've read, at least, is a massive reaction to humiliation.
Same thing is true, of course, of C.S. Lewis, right?
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the Narnia series.
Abandoned and humiliated, but I stepped through this cupboard into a magical world where I'm special and amazing and wonderful and, you know, it's just this fantasy reaction, the scar tissue.
Of humiliation, neglect and abuse is all of these ghastly, repetitive fantasies of all that stuff.
I mean, even in Lord of the Rings, to some degree, although the hobbits are clearly children, and they are on the periphery and considered unimportant and small and unworthy, and they have these fantasies that the hobbit is the neglected child's fantasy that he is the salvation of the future.
And, of course, that is very true from a psychological perspective, but it always gets transmuted or transubstantiated into these abstract fantasies of power and worth and proving your worth to those around you through Valiant acts of tiny courage and all that, right?
It's inevitable. Anyway, so sort of to move on from that, we have this consistent drumbeat.
And the same thing occurs...
Hamlet, of course, is just another example of this, right?
They scorned, humiliated, and abused young man who had these grandiose fantasies and ends up impotent and dead.
He takes this to his conclusion, right?
He takes the myth of grandiosity to its conclusion, right?
Which is when you try to step up into the airy clouds of grandiose atmospheres, you step off the cliffs of reality and plunge to your death.
It's a very, very dangerous thing.
It's a very dangerous thing to be grandiose.
It is a very, very dangerous thing.
It is one of the quickest routes to spiritual death, second only to violation of the innocent.
Second only to evil as grandiosity.
And the two are greatly coupled, of course.
to spiritual death.
And this thing that happens in art all the time, all the, all the, all the, all the time, can be termed the manufacturer of the survivor, right?
It's not that catchy, but I'll explain what I mean, if it'll make some sense.
Art is... Art can be about highlighting what is real, and I think it should be, highlighting the essence of life, what is real, the meaning in the mundane, which is sort of what I've tried to do in Togo, The God of Faith is my novel, and my other novels, but...
Art is also, of course, so often used for propaganda.
We all know that art is used for propaganda.
And there's almost no greater propagandistic arts than family mythologies.
You know, the clumsy one, the angry one, the bitter one, the resentful one, the virtue of the parents in all cases, all that kind of stuff.
It's just a form of art.
And I think one of the most destructive and nasty and underhanded types of propaganda is the myth of the survivor.
The myth of the survivor. So, let's say you're Harry Potter, but not Harry Potter.
Someone who has Harry Potter's life, but not is Harry Potter.
And you have been locked in a cupboard and ignored and starved and verbally abused and all that.
And then you read Harry Potter and you see, well, gosh, Harry Potter, he receives a calling, you see, from an owl and he goes after Hogwarts and he does all of these wonderful, amazing, courageous things and he becomes the hero of the school and he's the savior of the world and he's great and he's grand and he's courageous and he's...
You know, all of this, you know, when he gets older, all these kinds of things, right?
He gets the girl, he, you know, he has no problems.
Assuming the mantle of leadership in a challenging and chaotic and dangerous world, he strides forward, seizes Excalibur, I guess the broomstick with the stupid Quidditch game, which makes no sense.
But anyway, he does all of these amazing, wonderful things.
And what does that do? Well, it holds up a standard.
You see, it holds up a standard.
That you can be abused and locked in cupboards and starved and ignored and humiliated and all of that.
And then you can pop out of it at the age of 12, no less.
At the age of 12, you can pop out of that and you can assume your rightful place as the leader of the world and the center of the universe and a master of sports and a master of social interactions and well-liked by the virtuous...
Right?
Right? I mean, it's insane.
It's insane. It is to say that a child can escape the physiological effects of child abuse, significant long-term verbal child abuse, which in some ways is the most toxic, in many ways is the most toxic.
It is to say that a child can survive.
A child's brain will not be affected fundamentally by this.
And at the age of 12, he can achieve the most stellar kind of emotional and mental acuity and maturity.
To the point where he can take on tasks that adults tremble before, like this Voldemort, defeating this Voldemort character and so on.
Would you see just how completely mental and insane that is?
And if you don't, and I'm sorry to repeat myself, but hey, everybody has a signature, and mine is to repeat myself again.
And let's look at it from this standpoint, right?
So we all understand that a child that is fed 500 calories or 700 calories a day is going to be incredibly skinny and malnourished and sick and so on, right?
Imagine if you saw some film, and this is an extreme example, but we're just looking at how crazy the idea is portrayed in all of these movies, Harry Potter and Bleak House and even Hamlet and Luke Skywalker's film, Star Wars and so on.
So let's say you have a film about children of the Holocaust, and the children have spent years in a concentration camp where they have been worked very hard and they've received very little nutrition.
Very little nutrition. And you see these children come parading out at the end of the film, liberated by the Americans or the Russians or whatever, and they come out at the end of the film.
And you see these stumbling, stick, bony, emaciated, sunken-cheeked, extended-ribbed, stomachs pressed up against their spines.
You see these children come stumbling out of this concentration camp.
But the last kid who comes out is the picture of radiant, muscular, rosy-cheeked, white-toothed health.
Well, you'd say to yourself, what the, what the frick, right?
You say, what the frick? This is completely unrealistic.
This kid had the same diet as all the other kids, which is a couple of hundred calories a day.
He was worked to death. He was beaten.
He was humiliated.
He was attacked. He was, you know, confined.
So how on earth does he come out?
Not just not unhealthy, but radiantly healthy.
The most healthy child that one could imagine.
How does that happen? And you would understand that if you were a filmmaker and portrayed this, it would be completely incomprehensible.
And you'll see what I mean as we go forward with this other stuff.
It would be completely incomprehensible.
How on earth could this child have not just survived, but flourished under this environment?
How could the brutalization of children in a concentration camp produce even one radiantly healthy child who was warm and affectionate and courageous and good, right?
You understand that this would simply be a piling on, Of additional abuse to the children who were emaciated, right?
Because you would be saying to them, hey, you don't have to be that way, because look, this kid's really healthy.
So if you got emaciated in a concentration camp, if you came out sickly and brittle-boned and with rickets and dysentery and, you know, coughing up your last lung, um...
Well, that was stupid, wasn't it?
Because there are ways that your condition can be radiantly healthy under such a concentration camp.
You can come out radiantly healthy from such a concentration camp.
So if you didn't come out radiantly healthy, it's because you did something really bad and stupid and wrong, and fundamentally it's your goddamn fault.
We all understand this. With a concentration camp movie, to have one child come trotting out amazingly healthy and happy and positive and sing-songy, that this would be complete propaganda for concentration camps.
And it would be a complete kick to the nads, spit in the face, to the emaciated children.
Who would then self-attack when they saw this other kid and said, well, why am I so thin and rickety and starving and why are my teeth falling out and why are my fingernails falling out and why am I barely able to keep skin and bone together when obviously I'm doing something wrong because some kids in this environment flourish.
You see? They flourish.
They become radiantly healthy. They defeat the Death Star.
They defeat Voldemort.
They do things which even adults cannot do.
They are the hobbits who can climb up Mount Doom and they can do all of these amazing things.
But I am not that way.
And that's the thing, right? So, some kid's locked in a cupboard verbally abused.
He looks, reads Harry Potter and says, holy crap, you can become like that?
Even with this kind of upbringing?
Well, how come I'm not like that?
I must be doing something wrong.
I must be weak. I must be deficient.
I must be doing something wrong.
I must be taking things the wrong way.
I must be looking at things badly.
I might... And as we've seen in the recent Bomb of the Brain series, the physiological effects of child abuse are as foundational and as inescapable as the effects of starvation on the body, right?
You don't get to will yourself to be healthy when you're getting only a couple hundred calories a day or a thousand.
You can't will yourself to be healthy.
You can't think fat. Right?
And children cannot will themselves to be healthy and mature and socially competent and good at sports and courageous and excellent leaders and all the things which we hope that children can become with great parenting.
You can't will that.
You can't just have that happen to you because a fucking owl flies into your room and shits a note on your desk.
Right? But to even have this as a fantasy is to fundamentally shift the blame to the victim.
This is a really, really important idea, and I'm going to flog this dead horse until it turns inside out, and I apologize for that, but it's just so important that you get this.
Imagine if you had a movie about two sisters, or a book about two sisters, and one...
So they were both brutally gang-raped, right?
Again, sorry for the strong metaphor.
They're both brutally gang-raped.
And one of them spirals into, you know, drugs and S&M and prostitution and all these tattoos and all this kind of terrible stuff, right?
Well, the other one... She becomes happily married, has a wonderfully happy marriage, is a fantastic mother, a productive, moral, competent, happy and virtuous member of society, a good citizen, so to speak, a good citizen of the world.
And there was no external difference between these two situations.
It wasn't like one of them turned to drugs while the other one turned to therapy.
Neither of them went to therapy, but one of them ended up spiraling into this disaster of PTSD and trauma, while the other one became a magnificent glowing specimen of moral femininity, like genuine, real, not just cliché, but real philosophical virtue.
He understands that if you made a movie where the two sisters who were both brutally gang-raped, one who was traumatized into oblivion and the other who became, with no intervention, became a wonderfully healthy and happy and productive and loving and affectionate member of society, That you would actually be basically just mind-raping the other sister, right? Saying, well, you're weak.
Obviously, there's something wrong with you. Because, you know, people who are...
Women who are raped can become...
With no help, with no fixing, with no sorting out, with no guidance, with no mentoring, with no therapy, with no medication, with nothing.
It's just a choice, right?
You can... With no further intervention, you can go from being raped to being wonderfully happy and loving and productive.
Wife, mother, executive, whatever, right?
And not a fake, not a Stepford-wise kind of thing, but a genuine, right, virtue.
Or you can just go spiraling off with the drugs and all that kind of thing.
Prostitution and suicidality of various kinds, right?
You can go borderline or you can go radiantly healthy and happy.
And there's no difference between these two, right?
You understand that a movie portraying these two things would be an act of rage and hatred.
Against the sister who had the legitimate and genuine symptoms of post-rape psychological problems and post-rape mental health issues.
And if you were to try and make such a film, people would howl at you that you were just being unbelievably unfair, you being ridiculously unrealistic about the capacity for women to get over such a thing with no...
like, to just have it blow completely past them, right?
Why? Because Obi-Wan Kenobi shows up with a nice glowing phallic symbol, right?
Because some external force calls you forward to take your rightful place among the heroes of the galaxy and so on.
People would say, well, that's ridiculous.
You don't get over rape by having some guy in a ratty bathrobe wave a glowing stick at you.
Right? They would say that's a ridiculously...
it's an offensive characterization.
Right? It's an offensive characterization to say that you can get radiantly healthy in a concentration camp as a child.
And it is an insult to the memory of those who suffered and died by pretending that their suffering and dying was somehow self-induced and they could have just magically or randomly chosen to be happy and healthy.
And that it would be an insult to the victims of rape to say that, well, you could just be happy.
I don't know what the problem is.
I don't know why you rape victims are so upset.
Just, you know, do like this woman and be happy.
It would be an insult. It would actually be a further attack, you understand, upon the rape victim.
Because it would add humiliation of self-attack to the legitimate, genuine, and physical after-effects of the external attack.
And yet we do this with children all the time.
We do this with children all the time.
We regularly see portrayals, or we regularly have portrayals, of children who've gone through completely horrible and abusive childhoods, who then come out healthy and happy and wonderful and great and powerful and magnificent and heroic, and save saviors of the universe, right?
And we don't consider this to be a massive insult, a massive humiliation, a further form of abuse against the children who have, in fact, not in art, but in reality, in fact, suffered such childhoods.
Right? And it's so sad that we can't see this.
So sad that we can't see this.
And it's so essential that we do see this.
And, of course, we see the same thing in Avatar, right?
This guy, a metaphor for childhood.
His brother's been murdered. He himself has been crippled.
He's abused and used by his superior in the military.
And how does he become happiness?
Well, he transforms himself into some alien being.
And of course, to a traumatized child, health is an alien being.
Mental health is an alien being.
And he trots off to save the Na'vi, right?
And it's so, so sad.
How does he become happy and healthy and loved?
Does he go through any kind of therapy, any kind of self-knowledge, any kind of self-understanding, any kind of self-exploration, any kind of resolution of his prior trauma, whatever it was?
Let his brother into a murder and himself into a wheelchair as a soldier, where he's just willing to go and kill things, kill whatever he's pointed at by his superiors.
No, he doesn't deal with any of that.
He just flees into fantasy, which is a kind of death.
And it comes back, of course, to the fundamental consumers of this kind of art are those with a strong desire to forgive their parents.
And not justly, but unjustly forgive their parents.
The concentration camp guards cannot fundamentally be blamed for the traumas on the children if even one of the children comes out radiantly healthy and mentally healthy and physically healthy and happy and confident and secure and brave and all that, right?
Instead, we can't call a concentration camp evil if it produces healthy children.
Evil cannot produce healthy children because evil is the result of traumatized children, right?
An evil environment cannot produce a healthy child.
That's a fundamental axiom because evil is an environment produced by traumatized and brutalized children who act out as adults, right?
So, if an environment produces even one healthy and happy child, then it, by definition, cannot be evil.
Right? So the fantasy that from trauma can come great virtue is the fundamental argument that those in authority over the child who's traumatized are not evil.
Right? Which is...
Which goes back to the idea that harsh discipline, right?
The Dr. Cork's metaphor, if you've ever watched Scrubs, right?
That harsh discipline, though difficult and unpleasant, is for the good of the child, right?
This hurts me more than it hurts you.
I'm tough on you because I want the best from you.
I hit you because I want you to be better, right?
There is this desperate desire to have the abuse against children produce a virtuous child, a genuinely virtuous, not compliant, not a genuinely virtuous child.
In the same way that boot camp in the military is something they've pursued with the insane goal that you will produce a healthy human being out of this savage kind of verbal abuse and physical abuse and emotional abuse, right? It's this mere desire.
It's a mad fantasy that you can produce healthy human beings from this kind of abuse.
So do you see the fundamental message that is put forward when the healthy abused child is put forward in art?
And it always has to be in art because it never is in reality.
When the healthy, abused child is put forward.
When one kid comes out of the concentration camp healthy.
When one rape victim is made happier by her victimization.
Do you see what is really being said to the children by the makers of art, who are always the adults?
Well, since kids can come out of a concentration camp healthy and happy, if you didn't, it's your fault.
If you are sick, it is your fault.
Because there is nothing intrinsic to the environment that makes people sick.
Because one kid...
Came out of the concentration camp healthy.
So if you didn't, my son, it's your fault.
You did not take advantage of everything the environment had to.
You made yourself sick, not the environment.
Right? If one guy who's a chain smoker can win a marathon and be radiantly healthy, then it's not the smoking that does it.
It's something else. And of course, if you were to portray a chain smoker as radiantly healthy marathon runner, people would say, well, that's ridiculous.
His lungs are going to be clogged.
His heart is going to be mucked up.
He's not going to be able to win a marathon as a chain smoker.
It's ridiculous. It's unrealistic.
And it's an insult, right, to all the people who've tried and failed to quit smoking.
And it's encouraging people to smoke, saying you can smoke and be radiantly healthy.
See, it would be railed against, right?
As ridiculous, as embarrassing, as unrealistic, and as insulting.
But that's not how we treat children.
We will continually portray the victims of child abuse as radiantly healthy and happy, powerful, courageous, and stronger, which is just.
The most egregious and fundamental insult to the basic reality that there is no flourishing in the realm of child abuse.
There are no survivors. There are those who endure and those who can strengthen themselves through that endurance.
But there is nobody who escapes and bypasses it.
And there are no survivors.
And there are no healthy children in concentration camps.
And there are no radiantly healthy and happy victims of rape.
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