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April 20, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:33
1646 Heroism: A Dissection

You think it is feeding you, but it is really eating you...

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Oh, hey everybody, it's Steph. I hope you're doing very well.
This is a warm-up chat, which I'm sure will be eventually considerably thinned down.
But I did want to lay down some thought pipes, so to speak, about the question of heroism.
And I've talked about some of this stuff before, so I'm sorry if you've heard some of this before, but I wanted to put it together because I really wanted to do a...
A video on this, and try and keep it one of my sort of short, relatively snappy videos, because I think there's a lot of confusion about heroism, and I think that the world obviously will not be saved without heroism, but it seems to me that there's an enormous, almost industry, you could say, that is designed to keep heroism at bay, and far away from the potentialities of the Genpop of the livestock population.
So, without any further ado, I'll put forward the thesis with...
I mean, this is just examples off the top of my head, but I hope that they will be somewhat useful.
And of course, if you know others, and I'm sure that you do, please feel free to send them to me, and I will be happy to consider incorporating them, depending on time, length, and scheduling, and all that sort of stuff.
So the basic thesis runs something like this.
Heroism is essential for the world, and heroism is bad for those in power.
There it is. Oh, we're done.
So, heroism is essential for a free society, but heroism, in its truest form, is bad for those in power.
However, people have a tough time living without a sense of heroism, and also heroism is needed by those in power to praise their thugs, right?
So heroism is necessary for soldiers.
The myth of heroism is necessary for soldiers and cops and whoever it is, even prison guards, perhaps.
So, human beings are more effective at serving their rulers if they believe in their own heroism.
But real heroism is a big problem, because real heroism does not work for the ends of the rulers.
So, this is a challenge.
And how do you solve the challenge?
Well, fundamentally, you solve the challenge by inventing Well, you say two forms of heroism.
The first is heroism in service, right?
Heroism in service, and we don't really need to talk about this very much, I'm sure it's very...
Self-evident. But heroism in service is, you know, you serve your country, you nobly discharge your duties in the pursuit of what are really the goals of the ruling class, but are always touted as the goals of the common man, society as a whole, right? Maintenance of freedom and ending slavery and all this kind of stuff, right?
So, I don't think we really need to talk about this very much, other than to say that this form of heroism is heroism in the face of ordered or compelled danger.
Right, so this is heroism in war.
Well, war is not heroic.
War is cowardice, right?
Because war is saying my life is so cheap and so useless that it can be morally and rationally disposed of by people in power who are ordering me to go kill people that I don't know or care about or who've never harmed me or anything like that.
War And soldiering is the ultimate act of self-sacrifice in the worst conceivable way.
It is always something that has struck me that people say, human beings have a survival instinct, and we want to survive.
Well, that's all nonsense.
If human beings really had a survival instinct, there wouldn't be such a thing as war.
That's not the case. Human beings have precious few instincts, but the only instincts that really matters when it comes to philosophy It's the instinct to conform.
And that is a tragic, tragic...
Millions, thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, and probably millions, Of young men in the First World War were killed, fundamentally not by shells or bombs, but by women wielding white feathers, and white feathers were the symbol of cowardice.
And if you were a military-age man walking around the streets, women would walk up to you and hand you white feathers, indicating that you were a coward, because you weren't out there getting your bowels blown up through your forehead for the sake of preserving the status quo.
And, uh... The emotional traumas of the previous generation's psycho-classes, right?
So, that's how little human beings want to survive.
They can be felled by feathers.
It's sad, but a true fact of history.
And so this kind of heroism is always, you know, we order you to go and do something suicidal or highly dangerous to yourself.
And, of course, what sane human being would ever want to do that?
Well... Um, none.
Right. And so we have to invent a reason for you to do it, and we'll call it moral virtue, and we'll call it heroism, and we'll call it service to your country, and giving back, or whatever it is, or whatever shit the sheep will swallow is what will be fed to them to get them to eat it.
And, as I've always said, it is the immoral among us who fully understand the power of morality far better than almost all the virtuous people around.
All the virtuous people believe that you have to have some massive proof of morality or that human beings are fundamentally amoral, pleasure seekers or resource maximizers.
But it's not true.
The evil people understand the power of morality and the degree to which the average person really, really desperately needs wants and yearns and burns and will literally die to be good.
And that's why they use so much propaganda, of course, right?
But it's all of the intellectuals who believe that human beings don't care about virtue.
Perhaps because they spend so much time around the ruling class as a whole.
But the average man and woman and even child desperately wants to be good.
And that's the great secret of power, right?
You define virtue and you own the sheep.
The fences are moral standards.
So once you've defined courage as Slavery and, you know, it's effective slavery in the face of mortal danger against your interests and for the interests of others, then you have a pretty A pretty common set of...
Sorry, a nearly endless supply of lambs to the slaughter.
And I just had a Sunday call-in show a couple of weeks ago with a guy.
His friend was deciding to go into the military, and all his friends were like, yay, good for you, you know, courageous hero, and so on.
And this is after... I mean, this is the amazing thing, right?
This is after 30 years of fairly substantial anti-war propaganda.
Not propaganda, even, but showing the realities of war.
I saw Oliver Stone on a show once where he was talking about how bitter he was that, after all of his work, that people are still as pro-war as ever.
And, uh, he seems to...
Well, he seems to be bitter about this and feel that people are...
people have failed him, when that's not, of course, true, and he's an artist, not a, uh...
I'm not a philosopher.
And so, I think it can be understandable.
But if stuff doesn't work, I think the responsible and intellectually mature thing to do Is not to just throw your hands up and curse the world in, to some degree, the objectivist format, but to say, what have I missed?
What have I missed? What have I missed? Right?
If the cure for cancer, if your cure for cancer doesn't work, you can, of course, just throw up your hands and say, cancer can't be beaten.
But I think that's lazy and destructive and an abdication of a very, very fundamental responsibility, which is to figure out how to solve the problem of violence in the world.
And for me, I, of course, tried many, many, many things, and they didn't work.
And I was, of course, was tempted, and still am sometimes tempted, to say, well, damn the world.
The sheeple won't learn.
They want to so damn them to their fate, and, you know, pull a sort of Socrates, and fade away from the...
But I won't do that. I won't, I won't, I won't.
This cancer violence can be beaten.
It will be beaten. We will beat it.
Because we will stop at nothing to continue examining the causes.
It wasn't like I wanted to go to the family.
It's just that. That's where all the evidence led.
And I, as a humble empiricist, I'm not so vain as to argue with the facts.
Nothing else works. And the state is an effect on the family.
The statistics and the information and the science is there to fully back up that thesis.
So that is what will work.
And it's the people who don't want to confront their own selves and their own histories, their own families, who constantly throw their hands up in the air and say, violence can't be solved because people are too lazy or people are too stupid or people always want to have somebody tell them what to do.
Cowardly form of cynicism, rather than continuing to say, well, I have a thesis.
It didn't fit. Let's look for alternatives.
Let's re-examine the data.
So we don't have to talk a huge amount about the false Heroism of being willing to have yourself die for the sake of others' profits and power.
That's obviously such a ridiculous sense of heroism.
And, of course, this is why Socrates didn't make it as far as his philosophy went, because he was a soldier and did not I often think about this in terms of Churchill as well, right?
Churchill was a soldier who went and killed a bunch of boers, murdered a bunch of boers, for no particular reason other than to prop up England's, or the ruling classes of England's, exploitation of African resources.
And to what degree that...
Did those murders that he committed, this hitman, murders that he committed for the sake of his ruling classes, or his ruling class since he was part of it, how much did these murders affect him and his lust for war, which came out disastrously in Gallipoli,
and in a way as disastrously in the lead-up to World War II? So that's the first kind of heroism that you need to establish, and we all have experienced that, and I don't think it's particularly worth exploring.
I hope that you understand it, and I'm sure you do.
Now, the second and even more important exploration of heroism that is necessary to understand how this operates is the...
The heroism of fantasy.
Fantasy heroism.
So, here's a thought experiment, right?
So, let's say that you don't know anything about a guy, except one fact.
I guess two facts. He's 25 years old, and he's completely into comic books.
Haunts the comic book stores in the true Big Bang Theory way.
Goes to comic book conventions.
Maybe has a couple of outfits that he trots out on an age-inappropriate Halloween, where everybody's looking around wondering where his kids are.
So the only thing that you know is that this guy's in his mid-twenties, and he's completely into comic books.
If you had to guess, if you had to put a significant sum of money on trying to figure out His level of philosophical courage, his level of integrity, what would you guess it to be?
Would you guess him to be philosophically brave, or would you guess him to not be philosophically brave?
Well, I think that we all know the answer to that, that we would imagine that such a fellow would not be philosophically enormously courageous.
And I think that's very interesting.
And we can say the same thing for somebody who's 30, or 25, or whatever, who's...
Anything you know about the guy is he's heavily into Star Trek.
Do we feel that this man is courageous, a morally stand-up fellow, philosophically lives with integrity, and so on?
No, we would not imagine so.
Um... If we think of the same sort of fellow, and he's really into Star Wars, right?
Or even Indiana Jones, something that's a little less fantastical, but equally comic book-y.
Would we think that this fellow is courageous and stands up for what he believes in, fights the good fight, and so on?
Well, we would not. We would not think this.
The same, I mean, Dungeons and Dragons, right?
All aspects of heroism, and these stories are fundamentally all about heroism.
And so the question is, if art is a kind of training for the mind, which it must be, otherwise it would not be so prevalent in the same way that music is training for the mind, Which explains why it's so prevalent.
If art is a kind of training for the mind, then what is being trained for in these depictions of heroism?
Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker and Captain Kirk and Picard and the chick with the helmet hair.
Janeway. Catherine Janeway.
Oh, proud to know it.
Anyway... Now, heroism, therefore, for the ruling classes, cannot be dismissed or ignored completely because you need it for your thugs.
Right? I mean, to use the colloquial use of the term heroism, which is obedience to the orders of those who want you to kill people.
Now... The primary heroism that the ruling class needs from its livestock is heroism in attack, not in defense.
Because heroism in defense is something that is pretty innate to human beings.
If somebody comes at you, you're going to...
If somebody comes and tries to harm your family, harm your family, you're going to do everything that you can, for the most part, to prevent that.
So heroism in self-defense, not that necessary.
And, of course, the ruling classes are not about defense.
They're about attack. And so you need to keep heroism alive in two spheres.
One sphere needs to be kept alive, and the other sphere needs to be killed.
The place where it needs to be kept alive is in the abstract other foreign realm.
And you need that heroism kept alive so that people will go and attack strangers in other countries.
So heroism in terms of attacking others in exotic locations and locales and so on, that needs to be kept alive so that you can continue as a livestock farmer to have your livestock be ready to attack other farms.
But where you cannot have criticism, sorry, where you cannot have heroism at all, where you just can't have it, is the heroism of the everyday, of the basic philosophical virtues.
Of honesty and courage and honor and integrity in people's personal lives.
You can't. You can't have that.
So, for instance, you can have heroism about attacking the other, some sort of foreign nonsense.
That's essential, and that's all over the place in heroic literature and mythology.
And you cannot have, but you cannot have heroism in identifying the simple moral truths of your environment to those around you.
That you cannot have, which is why everybody loves, but nobody will buy my novel The God of Atheists, because that is exactly about identifying the simple moral truths in your local environment.
That heroism, which you can actually achieve, cannot ever be discussed.
I mean, there's a complete radio silence on that kind of heroism.
So, I'm not going to do this in any chronological order.
This is all off the top of my head, and I'm certainly no expert in mythology, but these are the stories that I can think of, right?
So if you can get people in crushed circumstances to believe that there is heroism in some exotic foreign place, then that achieves two things.
One, it keeps them ready to attack others when you tell them to, to attack foreigners.
And two, it makes sure that their association with heroism is that it is never in their life as it stands in their environment, right?
So let's take a simple example, right?
So Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars films...
And I'm only going to talk about the first three Star Wars films because I don't like to talk trash.
But Luke Skywalker starts as, you know, a farm kid with big dreams, and the cliche, right?
And drinking his blue milk and getting yelled at by his rat-faced uncle.
And he's got these big dreams, and he's in these crushed circumstances.
So he's in a humiliated position automatically, and to begin with.
And that's natural. That's inevitable when it comes to dealing with any mythology.
Harry Potter is the same way.
He's in this crushed environment, and he's got these big dreams.
And what happens then is...
An external circumstance or event shakes him.
He doesn't actually have to act.
He only has to react. So people come and kill Skywalker's aunt and uncle, and then Obi-Wan Kenobi slithers in, and...
Talks to him about his heroic past and his potential future, and other people whisk him up and take him off to battle.
And you need, for heroism to work for the ruling classes, you need it to be reactive, not proactive.
You can't proactively be heroic.
You need to be reactively heroic when it comes to attacking foreigners.
What that means is that then when they tell you to go and fight, you're lifted, like you had enough conditioning that you're lifted out of.
Your depression and your enslavement and you have been primed or prepared by mythology to anticipate or expect or at least accept that when other people tell you when other people inject quote adventure into your life which is always about murdering others when other people inject this kind of excitement or adventure into your life then you must respond positively And that's being drafted.
That's being hauled into some army.
This is all prepared.
You have to understand, all mythology has to be sanctioned by the ruling classes.
Otherwise, it just doesn't work.
It absolutely doesn't work.
And, well, it doesn't work.
It's not allowed. It's more fundamental than a realistic way to put it.
It's just not allowed. And...
So Skywalker is whisked off to these adventurers, and he's passive.
I mean, it looks active, but he's passive.
And it turns out that the skills that he had developed have been, you know, useful and good and helpful, right?
Bombing womp rats or whatever swamp rats from his little helicopter thing have all been turned out to be really useful, and he's got this natural flair and ability for fighting.
And this is another thing that is very common in mythology, that the farm boy has a secret mighty warrior within, right?
And that's something that is really necessary for the ruling classes, right?
Because if you're going to go and invade other countries, then you're not going to be very good at what you're doing.
And draftees are always terrible at military matters, right?
For obvious reasons. No experience.
And you're not pulling the right number of...
Chill-hearted sociopaths from the gen pop, right?
You just got a bunch of people who, majority of people in Second World War didn't even fire their weapons, right?
I mean, even when they were on the battlefield.
That's what they had to fix in Vietnam and beyond.
So that's why they intensified all of the ugliness that occurred in these circumstances of boot camp and so on, right?
To make sure that you can condition people to be more savage and brutal.
Because if you're some farm boy and you're hauled into the army, which is what basically happens to Luke Skywalker, it's a draft story.
If you're just hauled into the army, you're going to look and say, well, Jesus, what have I done?
I've moved around a rake and a hoe.
I'm not going to be a sword fighter.
I'm not going to have these amazing abilities, right?
And that's why you have to put...
This mystery juju into it, right?
Whether it's God's will, God is with us, or the force, or some magic talent ability that this kid is supposed to have, that's supposed to even the odds that he's an inexperienced warrior going up probably against merceries or more experienced warriors.
Because he's going to look at that and say, well, I'm not going to be any good at this for obvious reasons.
How could I be any good at this?
A fighting war, right?
I mean, if you and I get drafted into the National Ballet, yeah, we could practice for six or twelve weeks, but we're still going to suck relative to people who've been doing it their whole lives.
If you ever have any doubts about this, pick some video game, practice for 6 or 12 weeks, and then try and enter a video game contest and see if you can win.
Go up against Fatality or whatever, right?
I mean, you're just going to get carved alive, right?
And I know that. I've played against some really pro players on occasion, and they just chew me up.
It's not even a contest, right?
They're just chatting merrily away and I'm sweating and dying, right?
I mean, people who've been doing it for a long time, even if I've been playing for a while, I'm just, I'm not trained, right?
I know maybe there's a natural talent or ability that I don't have, but you're just going to get chewed up, right?
So you're going to say to yourself, well, if I'm just some farm boy and I'm getting hauled off to go into this mad battle, I'm, you know, what chance do I have?
I'm just going to get cut up, right?
In which case, they're not going to go, right?
And of course, in the past, it was really impossible if people just didn't show up to the draft, and 200,000 Americans in World War I just didn't show up to the draft, and they didn't have the technology to control and manage these people and force them to go.
So you have to have some way of evening up the odds in mythology so that the farm boy doesn't look at his realistic chances of survival and say, well, what's in it for me?
I'm going to get bad pay, no sleep, lousy food, my family is going to have no provider, so what the hell is in it for me to go and do this shit, right?
I mean, it makes no sense at all. No sense at all.
So you have to have some crazy mythology that's going to even it up, right?
So you have this farm boy turns out to have these secret amazing abilities and this magical history and the forces with him and I guess Harry Potter turns out to be the son of powerful wizards who were killed by Voldemort or whatever, right? So you always have the same thing, that there is this amazing hidden ability that is going to make it possible for this novice to compete against The enemies.
And that, I mean, that's complete nonsense, of course.
I mean, there is none of this magical stuff.
It's just complete nonsense. I mean, battles are generally pretty even.
I mean, with the exception, I guess, of Mussolini invading.
Abyssinia? Assyria?
Abyssinia. For the most part, battles are fairly even, and there is no magic sauce that lets one person win.
But this is why you see, right?
So, in Star Wars, you have a smuggler who's not a warrior, Han Solo.
You have...
A farm boy, right?
You have a guy who doesn't really fight, who's Obi-Wan Kenobi.
You have a bunch of incompetents as far as the military goes.
And you have stormtroopers.
And stormtroopers have, you know, full body armor, which does nothing other than seemingly electrocute their innards whenever they're hit by an AC adapter.
You have these stormtroopers who have full body armor, and it is their professional full-time job to be soldiers.
But some smuggler firing from the hip, and some farm boy, you know, take down hundreds of them, right?
I mean, it's just silly.
I mean, it's embarrassing. It really is quite ridiculous, right?
And, yes, you need these stories, because otherwise the farm boys aren't going to go.
They're going to say, well, why the hell would I want to charge over a hill and get cut down by everyone in sight?
It's ridiculous. I've got no odds, no chance, right?
You say, oh, no, but it's, you know, the fervor, the patriotism, the British blood, the, you know, the magic, the force, the god is with us, right?
Some magical crap has to be there to even up the odds.
And you see this continually in all the mythologies that you can imagine.
And same thing's true, of course, of...
Indiana Jones, right? He's a professor.
He's not a warrior. You put any professor up against any full-time mercenary, who do you think is going to win, right?
But he's got a magic weapon.
He's got, I don't know, right?
He's got a gun. The other guy's only got a sword.
So, this is all just nonsense.
Burn Notice is a little bit different in that way, but of course it's not a story.
It's not heroic mythology, right?
Because this guy does have skills, and the people he's up against don't have the skills, so he tricks and outfights them, and is willing to fight dirty.
It's a good episode where he's taken prisoner in a bank, which is well worth watching, in terms of how a spy would fight.
I'm not saying it's accurate, I'm just saying it's interesting.
And when you look at all of these kinds of mythologies, you just see this stuff going continually all the time.
That you get some kid plucked out of obscurity by forces beyond his control.
A massive hidden plot is revealed that makes his former life look like a complete waste of time and idiocy.
He's revealed to have this magical power, this historical lineage, the force, the spells, you know, whatever, right?
And this is going to even it up and allow him to mow down the enemies and so on, right?
And of course, the people on the other side are being told the exact same mythologies.
All of this is priming for war, right?
I understand. All of this is priming for war.
Priming in the technical sense, right?
In terms of programming the unconscious to accept murder and suicide for the sake of others.
For the sake of no personal gain.
No personal gain, right?
So, I think that's really, really important when you understand what mythology is all about.
Mythology is about priming the livestock to slaughter each other by creating this magical fantasy world where heroism is killing others when you're told to and you're hauled into, by circumstances, beyond your control.
And which is only tempting because of the existing depression of your life, right?
These terrible lives, right?
But rather than try and improve your life, you'll just wait to go and kill other people.
That's great for the ruling class, not so much for anybody else.
So, that is the typical template.
And when you look at the The psychology of it to me is also very interesting, because depressed people...
Depression and aggression have always seemed to me to go very much hand in hand.
Depression can arise from, obviously, internal paralysis, a lack of courage or integrity or...
Virtue results in depression, but depression, of course, can also result from extraordinarily controlled or minimized or minimal circumstances or possibilities.
So if you're in some dictatorship, then you're going to be depressed, and you're going to be frustrated, and you're going to feel like your life is dripping away.
Not everyone. Ayn Rand's sister was quite happy with Stalinism, but a lot of people would feel that way, certainly those who would make for good warriors.
And so you have a lot of pent-up aggression and a desire to escape The humdrum repetition, mindless repetition of your everyday life.
Because the medieval people, right?
The medieval society was so disturbed that people regularly went, like, completely insane.
Entire towns would dance until they died.
I mean, it was just such a hideous and psychotic environment full of just the most unbelievable child abuse.
And people believe that demons lived in their brains.
I mean, it's just a truly psychotic environment compared to some of the more refined aspects of ancient Greece.
It was a massive and catastrophic step backwards in human evolution, but that's what...
We're going to have to get into the causes for that.
You can go to psychohistory.com for more on that, I think.
But when people are in a dictatorship, then you need aggressive and brutal people.
And a way to do that is to fill them with fantasies of bloodshed while at the same time crushing their possibilities in the real world, which creates a huge amount of pent-up frustration and rage and a desire to lash out.
And then you just point those people either at each other in the form of torture guards, you know, the Gulag Apicalago folks, Or the others, foreigners in terms of soldiers and so on, right?
So that's your deal as far as that goes.
And it works just beautifully.
I mean, this is the great tragedy is that human beings are so incredibly and immensely profitable to own and control that it seems to be almost impossible to do it.
So I'd like to go a little bit more.
I know I'm not tossing tons of examples at you, but you can look at the Iliad, the Odyssey.
All of these things are around massive journeys into fantastical realms where courage is required, and of course where external people come in and get the ball rolling.
It's not something that you initiate, because if you initiate it, then it's something that you would do in your personal life.
It has to be other people who initiate it in order for the ruling class to profit from it.
And Lord of the Rings, of course, a completely obvious example.
Some guy's just sitting around in a pretty boring and dull existence, though he's not particularly unhappy.
He's just kind of empty and vaguely restless and unfulfilled, and surrounded by idiots.
And, um... It's Bilbo, I guess, and Frodo eventually, right?
But Bilbo beckons, and what happens?
Well, of course, in comes Gandalf and yanks him away, right?
Gandalf is the recruiting sergeant for the war, and yanks him away into all of these perilous adventures, where he has...
Now, the interesting thing is that the hobbits don't actually have any magical abilities, but they're protected by others, right?
And they have the ring, the ring of power, and so on, right?
So that at least allows them to be invisible, and so on.
Though, of course, it causes danger as well.
But here we have the typical, right, boring, dull existence, wrenched and provoked into action by a mysterious other with strange powers, you know, like Obi-Wan Kenobi and Gandalf.
It's the same damn guy, over and over again.
And... Off you go to the war!
And against all conceivable odds, you survive, and, you know, you end in triumph, and at the end of Star Wars...
Getting all crowned. Oh, they're getting all these medals, and everyone's cheering.
At the end of Lord of the Rings, the same thing's happening, right?
So, this is supposed to be your big payoff, right?
And nobody dies, right?
Or few people die, right, in this war.
So it's the same story over and over again.
And this has been translated into comic book form, because it really is at the level of comic books, all of this stuff, right?
This has been translated into comic book form in a very interesting way, because nobody really believes in magic anymore, or at least it's not very credible, unless you're in a really fantastical realm like Lord of the Rings.
But even in Lord of the Rings, magic doesn't play a very large part of the story.
Lord of the Rings is more about the First World War than the Second World War.
But anyway, it doesn't really matter hugely.
But just because in the First World War, people just got so relentlessly massacred that they were like hobbits in the face of these.
Although the Nazgul are the Stuka dive bombers and all that, right?
We all understand that. But in the modern realm, we don't really believe in magic, right?
So... So what are we going to do?
Well, we have to have superpowers, right?
That's your magic, right?
So you have to have a pseudo-scientific explanation, right?
So if you're Peter Parker, you get bitten by a radioactive spider, and then you have all of these amazing powers, right?
That allows you to do all of these wonderful things.
And that's the equivalent of the Force in Star Wars.
The Ring in Lord of the Rings and, you know, the sort of hidden magical powers or hidden martial abilities in every other fantasy slaughterhouse provoking to war horror story.
Or you come from the planet Krypton, right?
So you come from the planet Krypton, and gosh, don't you know, you have these amazing powers.
Because, you know, Earth is different, and you have...
Right?
And that is something else that is really important to sort of understand.
Batman, well, I mean, his superpower is money and gadgets, right?
Which is, you know... Fairly interesting and okay, right?
Has a sort of cool factor.
But, you know, without the money, what's he got, right?
You know, the Hulk gets his powers, I guess.
I can't even remember what happens with the Hulk.
He gets exposed to some radiation or something like that.
Some external thing that happens.
Always, always, always. And it's either a person who comes in and yanks you into war, or it is some external circumstance that occurs.
I guess with Batman it's his parents being killed or whatever, right?
But it's always some external circumstance that occurs.
Sorry, the Batman one is not exactly perfect, because that's not someone doing something to him directly.
But I think that's a really, really fascinating thing.
And I don't know enough about comic books to come up with more examples.
I'm sure people can let me know.
And if you do, please let me know so that I can do a video on this.
Because I think it's really important. Why is it so important?
Well, you need people to believe in heroism, but you also need them to believe, or to, I guess, be primed or programmed to believe.
That heroism is something that you observe.
It's something you watch. It's something for others.
It's something for ridiculous, crazy, exceptional, bizarre circumstances like coming from another planet or falling into a vat of radioactive something-something or getting exposed to some electrical bolts or getting some weird, creepy thing happening.
That makes you heroic.
It is not your life.
It is not your choices and your possibilities in your circumstances wherein heroism is possible.
Heroism is possible for people who've been bitten by a radioactive spider.
It's not possible for you.
It's possible if you come from another planet.
It's not possible for you.
And that, I think, is really, really fundamental.
And it's so anti-philosophical.
You know, one of the things that I have continually, continually, continually, from the very beginning, said that philosophy is something you can do now.
You can be heroic in the next ten minutes, right?
I mean, think back to the beginning of Star Wars.
In the beginning of Star Wars, what would be heroic for Luke to say is, I really don't like it when you talk to me like that.
I feel bad.
I feel angry. I feel frustrated.
I feel humiliated. The basic value and virtue of honesty in that relationship, now, would that make for a gripping space opera?
Absolutely not. But our purpose here is not to continue to fuel canons of war, but to slowly disarm them, and the way that we disarm them, right?
As he would attempt to improve his relationship with his uncle and his aunt, and he would really, really work to get to a better place.
And if he couldn't, then he would, if I were him, I'd say, okay, well, I've got a life to live.
You guys have made your choices. I've got to go and make my choices.
I'm going to go elsewhere, and I'm going to do good things with my life in some other place or circumstances.
And that would be heroic. In a way that, hoping that Obi-Wan Kenobi is going to give you some phallic laser sword and lead you off to battle with the Death Star, I mean, that's just nonsense, right?
Because that's never going to happen, right?
Gandalf is never going to come to you and give you a ring and tell you to go fight Sorin, right?
An owl is never going to fly into your room and yank you off to Hogwarts and reveal to you your mysterious and hidden destiny.
You're never going to pull out a sword from the stone and rule a kingdom.
You understand that it's never going to happen.
And everybody knows it's never going to happen, and that's what these stories are for.
Heroism is never going to happen.
Unless, right, the only way that heroism is going to happen in these stories is if you're told to go and slaughter foreigners or your fellow citizens.
Not, I guess, that the two mean that much in an anarchistic society.
But what is going to happen is people are going to come and put guns in your hands and have you led off to the slaughter.
And that's what all this shit is designed to prime you for.
But heroism is not for you.
It's not about honesty and integrity in your life, in identifying and clearly communicating your own thoughts and feelings to those around you, the virtue called honesty, and at least the potential for intimacy.
It's a necessary but not sufficient.
Criteria. Criterion for intimacy is honesty.
That's possible for you right now.
You don't need to read comic books to do that.
You don't need to go and watch movies.
You don't need to go into all of that nonsense.
Heroism is possible.
True heroism, like the real heroism that really saves the world, is possible for you in the here and now.
In the next five minutes, the next ten minutes, in the next hour, you can make the calls and you can talk honestly to the people in your life.
Not just about your own thoughts and feelings, but also some of the arguments that we've talked about here, like the against me argument, like if you support the state, Then you support me being thrown in jail for disagreeing with you.
You support the use of violence against me.
You are enthusiastic about the use of violence against me.
You want me thrown in a prison and possibly raped because I disagree with you.
What does that mean for our relationship?
Can it be called a relationship?
See, that's the kind of honor and honesty and integrity and virtue that is available and possible for us right now.
And you understand that Almost all of society and almost all of mythology and almost all of art is entirely dedicated to keeping that knowledge away from us and having us dream about fantasy slaughter initiated by others,
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