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May 22, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:51
1667 Lost' - The Series - A Philosophical Review

Reason versus mysticism - it is depressing, though accurate, to see who won...

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Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
A few spoilers, this is going to be my review of Lost, the paranormal reason versus mysticism slash superstition epic that has just recently concluded its run.
And the essential The fight in Lost, the essential conflict in Lost, is between rationality and mysticism, which of course is Jack and Locke, who then turns into the Locke-less monster, the smock, or the demon formerly known as Locke.
At the very beginning of Lost, Locke, who is paralyzed, is in the plane that crashes on the island, and then Locke is no longer paralyzed.
Now, a rational approach to this would be either A, something dislodged, like the crash dislodged something in my spine, which allowed muscles or nerve endings to transmit information, and therefore I'm back, or it was something which was psychosomatic, like it was in his head, he couldn't move his legs because of the psychological problem, which was shaken out of its complacency by the crash.
But that rational interpretation of what happened to Locke did not even enter his mind.
It then became that the island was a special place and that he was a special guy.
He had a destiny and so on.
In other words, he became addicted to the mild psychoses of superstition and the grandiosity of feeling that you're swept up in some cosmic tale that positions you as the chosen one, as the neo, as the whatever, right?
Between the man of science, the man of reason, the medical doctor, and Locke and the other mystics was really fundamental throughout the entire show.
Now, if this show had been made in a hundred years, then the rationalist would have won.
The man of science, the man of reason, the man of Of objectivity, of evidence, the philosopher Jack would have won.
Unfortunately, and I think that Last very much did take an accurate pulse of the times, What is happening in society at the moment is that there is absolutely zero chance that we will be able to bring the world to reason before the irrationality of the past few thousand years takes it down.
There is no chance whatsoever that that is going to occur.
That doesn't mean that the world won't be saved.
The world will be saved in time.
The Dark Ages ended eventually, but it's not going to happen in the foreseeable future.
The world is far too addicted and bribed and wrecked into irrationality for mere reason to save it.
Reason and evidence are roundly rejected by the vast majority of people in this world, and they are reaping the whirlwind that they have sown with the upcoming financial political disasters.
You can't do anything to avoid these at the moment.
It's far too late in the game.
Five years ago, I said five to ten years.
Sadly, I was right, and since bringing the world to reason is a multi-generational process, there is no chance whatsoever that the world is going to become rational in time to avert a disaster.
And unfortunately, like any addict, the disasters are always externalized, right?
So the irrationality and coercion that is at the root of a status and religious society, or status and or religious society, Reaps the endless disasters that we're going to see coming up, and we can already see starting to occur in Europe.
But no addicts will ever take responsibility for their actions.
The moment they do take responsibility for their actions, they're no longer addicts, but actually mature and aware human beings.
And so the violence and superstition and irrationality of statism and religion will always blame freedom and reason for the miseries that they inflict upon themselves and upon others.
So if the show had been made in 100 years, then Locke and the mystics would have been either, if they had strength or power, they would be viewed as human predators, because mysticism is a form of human predation.
And they would have been the enemies, and they would have fought, and if they had little power or no power, they would have been pitied, as we would pity somebody who is not dangerous but mentally ill.
Unfortunately, or you could just say accurately, the makers of last understood where we are in society, that the reason that has been struggling and losing ridiculously badly since the days of Socrates 2,500 years ago, I mean, reason and evidence has had its ass kicked up and down the beach by the The Cro-Mannian toes of mysticism and superstition and unreason.
For thousands of years, this is not about to change tomorrow, although the Internet is certainly helping us get a lot further in communicating reason and evidence to those rare few, my beautiful listeners, you rare few, you stars in the night sky of human irrationality.
There is enough communications technology for us to actually talk to each other rather than being If fireflies lost in the ocean, we can actually see each other and we can create constellations called communities where we can actually have interactions with the other sane human beings.
But if you sort of see the arc of the story as a whole, there is this draw towards a drama and this draw towards mysticism.
The island, the island itself, represents psychoses.
And just for those who are going to end up endlessly communicating about this, no.
It does not matter if the writers intended this, consciously or not, any more than you plan what dreams you're going to have tonight.
The dreams and the art is spontaneous manifestations of the unconscious, which is not to say there's no conscious direction, but it does not matter one little bit if the artists intended this or not.
What we can say is that the message that the artists have put forward in the writing of Lost has been very well received by the audience and the differentiation.
Between ego-driven sanity, reason, and evidence and unconscious, blood-soaked mysticism has not been differentiated by the culture as a whole, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the next generation in terms of culture.
So, in this story, the island represents...
Magic. And magic is mental illness, right?
It is the projection of internal states onto the external world, right?
So Locke's legs are healed.
This is a physiological thing.
This is a psychological thing.
This is not a mystical thing. But he can't accept that because he's such a loser and so empty in his life that he is drawn towards getting involved in some magical story land of cosmic fight and good and evil and so on.
And he draws everyone else in there and this conflict between Violence and irrationality.
Violence slash irrationality and reason slash pacifism is very clear throughout the story.
The island has things which are impossible in the context, right?
So like polar bears and smoke monsters and all these sorts of things.
And this is, of course, people's dissatisfaction with mere reality, right?
I mean, if you're empty, if you're depressed, if you are full of what Nietzsche would call resentment and hollowness, Then you are driven to extremes.
You are driven to a Manichean view, to a good and evil and a mystical blood-soaked Ragnarokian view of the world.
And this we can see very clearly going on in Lost.
The escalation of drama to the point where if the island fails, the whole world is going to collapse and it just gets Further and further hysterically escalated because when you have no particular contact with your richer, deeper and calmer emotions...
I know, I know, it's me saying, but go with me for a sec.
If you have no connection with your richer and deeper and calmer emotions, then you are driven to hysteria, you are driven to panic, you are driven to violence, you are driven to an ever-escalating need for the increase of sensation because You don't feel anything, and so much like somebody who cuts themselves, any sensation is better than no sensation.
And getting swept up in a cosmic battle of good and evil in the religious sense, or even in the political sense, since this often occurs there as well, is a piss-poor substitute for actually having real feelings, a real connection with yourself, a positive and happy relationship with yourself, intimacy, trust, and love with those around you.
When you have those things, you don't need to grab to the heavens to...
Try and grab the kite tail of gods and devils and have them whip you around the sky like the sparrow tied to the back of a 747, experiencing just a little turbulence.
You don't need any of those things, because you actually have rich, deep, and positive relationships with others.
Of course, nobody on the island ever gets to know each other.
This, of course, is a great tragedy.
The first two seasons, I thought, were good, where the stories behind everybody getting on the island were told.
There was a chance for them to get to know each other and to To heal the mistakes of their former lives, which were all to do with a lack of connection and a lack of intimacy and honesty and openness.
But, of course, that would be to swap the island within treatment, and I'm sure people would not find that nearly stimulating enough for their jaded and decadent sense of emptiness.
They need this drama.
We need this. Smoke monsters.
And of course, every stupid episode had this Tarantino.
Everybody's holding guns towards everybody else.
And there's all this violence and so on.
I actually stopped watching for a while because I found the violence just to be too ridiculous.
But I thought that the themes were still worth checking out.
The island women die who have children, who are pregnant.
The island is fundamentally infertile and of course this metaphor works very well because I've talked in some of my videos about being taxed, livestock and so on.
The fundamental livestock, the fundamental The key or the fundamental crop that human beings are always after is children.
It is the young. As some Jesuit monks said many, many centuries ago, give a boy to me when he is born.
If you give him to me until he is seven, he is mine for life.
And that, of course, is very true and very tragic.
Mysticism is fundamentally sterile because it is not supported by reason and evidence.
Violence is fundamentally sterile because it is self-contradictory in its universalization, yet it always claims universal morals behind its attacks.
Mysticism and violence both prey upon children, and this is why On the Island, which represents dissociative psychoses and magical thinking and a descent into the blood-soaked prehistory projection, demonization madness of our species, There is no friendliness towards children.
Children are attacked. Children are killed in the womb.
This is what happens to children in mystical and violent societies.
They are propagandized.
They are lied to. They are controlled.
They get their foreskins and their clitorises cut off.
It is a brutalization.
All culture, all lies are the brutalization of children.
And, of course, the more false a society is, The more it is hostile towards children, because children, and I can say this with considerable confidence as a father, children are reason and evidence monkeys.
That's what they are interested in.
Try giving a child an empty box and tell him there's an invisible iPod inside.
He's just not going to be that impressed.
However, give him an empty box and tell him there is a salvation to his soul in there after you've brutalized and propagandized him and terrified him with visions of hell.
He will appear at least grateful.
But the hostility towards children that is always put forward by a society that is steeped in exploitive lies, whether those lies are of the statist or the religious variety, always comes out in these kinds of shows.
And the hostility towards children...
No child believes in Jesus.
No child believes in the semi-divinity of Barack Obama.
No child believes in countries.
No child believes that hitting is bad, but murdering in war gives you a medal.
No child believes any of these things They just don't buy into any of the lies, and they need to be brutalized if they're going to accept lies.
Children don't accept lies without the threat of force or withdrawal of affection or any of the other ways that we can brutalize children.
This is why philosophy, of course, is so important.
The more accurate we are in our thinking, the more empirical and rational we are in our thinking, the less we are threatened by the innocence and naive empiricism of children.
And I mean naive in the best possible sense.
Children are not our enemies when we think clearly and rationally.
When we are steeped in mysticism and patriotism and nationalism and classism and racism, then children represent an enormous threat to our fantasies, which is why the island represents these kinds of mystical fantasies, and this is why our children are either not present or harmed.
And the harm that goes on to children is very clear throughout.
Even the Linus fella as a kid is brutalized from a really brutal father on the Dharma Initiative.
So I think it's a very, very interesting story.
I think it's well worth looking at from the conflict of reason and evidence and the island and its psychosis.
I mean, there's a war in the world and it's a very, very powerful and very, very fundamental war.
And the war is between sanity and madness.
We are all born sane, but we are turned mad for the profit of others.
So we are turned religious for the profit of the priests, and we are turned nationalistic for the profit of the politicians, and we are turned patriotic for the profit of everybody who milks that particular teat from hanging out of our brains.
And so we are all born sane, but we are driven mad for the profit and power of others.
And that, of course, is a fundamental tragedy.
When sanity and reason and evidence begin to encroach upon the profits of those who harvest madness, those who inflict and then harvest the crop called insanity, those people, those ass-clowns, will fight back and they will lash out.
Jack of course represents a long line of fictional characters who must suffer because they are rational, who must be diminished, who must be in pain, who must be miserable because they are rational.
You can look at Monk, you can look at Gregory House, you can look at the guys from The Big Bang Theory.
All of these characters are rational, and Jack also is rational, and Jack must pay for his rationality.
So at the end of season three, of course, Jack is addicted to drugs, and Jack is an alcoholic, and Jack is desperate to go back to the island.
He's been infected.
By mysticism.
That mysticism then grows on him throughout the rest of the season to the point where he originally was saying Locke's mysticism, Locke's sense of destiny, Locke's sense of inevitability, his supernaturalism, is a massive problem and is going to threaten our survival.
That's where he starts out and then at the very end of the movie he is entirely enmeshed in the mystical psychosis of those around him because the island is just the collective psychosis of false and corrupting and brutalizing culture.
So by the end of the sixth season, Jack is entirely enmeshed in this.
He wants to save the island.
He gives his life to save the island, and he dies, and the crazy people all get away and live on, like the guy who can read the minds of the dead or whatever, right?
So mysticism flourishes, and the rational man dies down in the jungle.
And the reason that he dies, or the reason his reason dies, is because he's fully absorbed and been infected by the crazy intensity and thirst for meaning in mystical drama that is all around him.
And he, like most of us who are rational, he is unable to climb the sort of icy glass exterior, the biodome of crazy that surrounds most people's minds and hearts.
The only reason they use reason and evidence is to further corrupt and destroy others, so there's just no hooking into anything that is empirical or rational within them.
And so he is plowed under, you know, like a little petal on thick earth being hit by a massive plow.
He is plowed under the crazy.
The crazy wins. The island wins.
The destruction of the island is the letting go.
of mysticism and of the tyrannical desire for inflicted meaning and brutalized meaning, the ex post facto justifications for early childhood abuse.
And this is a very accurate representation that if the island, which is the collective psychosis of collective identities, If the island is destroyed, if the island sinks to the sea, the world will be destroyed.
Well, that is an accurate representation of the degree to which crippled and broken humanity is only propped up by continually paying for and subjecting itself to, and sacrificing itself to, and its children to, collective fantasies.
So I hope that this gives you some philosophical views of the show last, and I think it's worth watching from this standpoint.
I think it's a very accurate Look at what is going to happen in the future, in this war between mysticism and reason, between science and religion, between individualism and nationalism.
It's not going to win in the short run, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't keep fighting because we will always win, eventually.
And the last thing that I would mention about Lost, which is so obvious that it barely even needs mentioning, so I'll keep it brief, is when they get into the hatch with the Desmond, there is this button that needs to be pushed every 108 minutes or the world will end.
And nobody knows why they're doing it, why it's 108 minutes, and nobody has any verification.
of the impending disaster that will occur if the button is not pushed.
And this, of course, is a complete metaphor for religiosity and nationalism.
You know, if you don't pray, if you don't give money to the priest, if you don't get your child baptized, if, if, if these terrible, terrible things are going to lose your soul, the world will come to an end, God will send water to strike down lesbians in New Orleans, and so on.
This is of course all complete nonsense and the same thing occurs in the realm of the state.
If we don't have a government then terrible things will happen and so we keep reflexively pushing the button called God and pushing the button called voting and pushing the button called culture and history and repetition simply to manage our own anxieties.
Not because there is a single shred of evidence that these things are either necessary or positive or healthy when in fact there is every shred of evidence to the contrary.
Now, of course, what would have been great, though I wasn't expecting it, in the show would be they stop pushing the stupid button called God and state and culture, nothing bad happens, and they get to be free of these mindless, chicken-scratching, monkey-reinforcement repetitive tasks.
But that would be to offend too many people with too much of a smidgen of reality.
People's psyches are kind of a house of cards.
You have to tread carefully very often.
Otherwise, I mean, if you're in the public eye in that way, then you have to, because people will just get too upset and too angry.
The breath of reality goes past their prejudices.
So it was not to me at all surprising that they stopped pushing this button.
And look, disastrous things do happen and so on.
That is a very, very conservative, historical, anti-philosophical view, which is to say that we have these ridiculous traditions for some reason which makes sense.
Don't ask us what the reason is, but it's there.
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