The Wire, Prison Break, Burn Notice, Generation Kill - many new shows are sneaking in pro-liberty themes! Stefan Molyneux interviewed at the 2010 Porcupine Freedom Festival, June 2010
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| Hi, this is Stefan Molyneux. | |
| I have not been, but I'm going to. | |
| Check out Freekeen, F-R-E-E-K-E-E-N-E.com. | |
| You might want to check it out. They have apparently great videos and great news items for liberty activists, so please check it out. | |
| Stefan, I have listened to your show forever, and it seems that you really don't like... | |
| I'm trying to figure out what you enjoy watching, because you didn't like Lost, you didn't like Avatar, you don't like... | |
| What other movie did you beat up? | |
| Oh, Star Trek. Yep. I thought The Wire was pretty good. | |
| I think it was an HBO series about drug dealers and cops. | |
| And I thought The Wire was good. | |
| It was very libertarian in that it showed constant corruption within the police force and it showed how when they legalized, they unofficially in one season legalized drugs. | |
| And crime rate went down, and the neighborhoods became more peaceful, and it was a very strong argument in a very mainstream media for the legalization of drugs. | |
| At least not an argument from principle, but an argument from effect, which wasn't too bad. | |
| I thought that was good. | |
| I don't see a lot of movies these days because I'm a new parent, so I don't get to see that kind of stuff. | |
| Burn Notice is fun. I mean, it's complete fluff, and it's absolute brain candy that's giving me a cavity in my frontal lobes, but it's very charming, and the guy has a certain kind A spy is just a criminal with a piece of paper, a criminal with permission, and so they do talk about the very thin line between government agents and criminals, and I thought that was really well done. | |
| And that's really about all I've had time to watch these days. | |
| Have you noticed that there seems to be, over the last 10 years, a more liberty-based message getting into media? | |
| It's massive. It's massive. | |
| I've been meaning to do a series about this. | |
| The liberty statements that are in mainstream media shows these days are absolutely enormous and unprecedented. | |
| If you look back just like 30 or 40 years at Hill Street Blues or something like that, or even further back, you know, I think Andy Griffith played a sheriff in Maybury or something. | |
| You know, the cops were always good, always nice, and they were maybe the thin blue line. | |
| They were overworked and overextended. | |
| But if you compare that to the way that the police have portrayed these days in the media, which is they are barely better than the criminals, it is an incredible transition that has come across. | |
| Also, if you look at something like Generation Kill, Or even there's one about the Pacific that Tom Hanks did recently, which portrays the soldiers as vengeful and murderous and heroic as well. | |
| But you really do see the dark side of war that you wouldn't see in, say, The Longest Day, which was an old film with John Wayne or something playing an American in D-Day. | |
| So I think they really do show the underside, the underbelly, the violence of statism. | |
| If you look at something like Prison Break. | |
| Prison Break has a guy who is trying to get out of prison who's just and the prison system is unjust. | |
| And it openly talks about how the police will plant evidence in order to get people thrown in jail that they dislike. | |
| So there's a lot of cynicism and I think very healthy cynicism in media these days about the police, about politicians. | |
| Politicians are almost always portrayed as corrupt. | |
| I didn't watch the whole thing, but I watched a little bit of a movie called Date Night. | |
| It was pretty bad. I couldn't stomach it. | |
| But, not given anything away, this is Steve Carell and Tina Fey. | |
| They're set upon by a bunch of thugs, and they go to the police, and then the thugs are the policemen. | |
| And then this is their sort of twist. | |
| Now, that would be shocking to see 20 or 30 years ago, but these days, this is pretty common. | |
| In the past, there was things like Serpico with Al Pacino, where he was taking on a corrupt police department, and the system always righted itself at the end, right? | |
| So there'd be a bunch of bad apples, there'd be a lone guy who was doing this Gary Cooper high noon thing, and then at the very end of it, the system would go right, like the King Lear thing, where everything goes bad and then the system goes right. | |
| The system does not upend itself into rightness anymore. | |
| So we've gone from it never goes bad to it goes bad, we can fix it, to it's irredeemably bad, but we don't have alternatives, which is where libertarianism and voluntarism comes in. | |
| So I think it's a huge progress, and people do not look at cops as just heroes anymore. | |
| I think that's really changed. Soldiers are viewed as very ambivalent light and dark forces, so I think it's fantastic what's been done. | |
| So why do you think that message is starting to get in? | |
| That's what the big question is. | |
| Do you think it's a younger population that's bringing it in? | |
| There is a younger population. | |
| There's much more access to the reality of the state through the internet, through YouTube, police brutality videos and so on. | |
| Don't taste me. All of that stuff is in effect. | |
| But much more fundamentally, I think the statistic now is that one out of ten Americans is involved at some level. | |
| In the justice system, for want of a better phrase, right? | |
| The injustice system. You've got people on parole, you've got people in jail, you've got people who are ex, you've got people who are currently in the system awaiting trial, you've got people who are under threat. | |
| So there's a huge demographic of people who've been really shafted by the state who talk about the truth, who want to see the truth, and so that's a big market that's opened up. | |
| Just because in the U.S. so many more people are being consumed by the justice system, you get much more desire for truth coming out. | |
| Particularly since the war on drugs and now in particular with all of the effects that that's had and asset forfeiture and all of the tax crackdowns that have happened, it's only going to get worse because as the government is running out of money these days, they're going to really start to crack down on taxes, they're going to raise user fees, they're going to try just about everything, you know, like a dying squid attempting to grapple every sailor on the ship. | |
| It is trying to get everything which will only raise the sense of injustice which creates a further demographic requirement for that story to be reflected in the media. | |
| The government, through brutalizing more and more of its population, has set up a demographic very receptive. | |
| And you can see this in rap videos. | |
| There's a demographic incredibly receptive to the corruption of the state. | |
| Why? Because they all grow up entirely controlled by the state. | |
| In state housing, they go to state schools, their entire neighborhoods are defined by welfare and by the war on drugs. | |
| And so in rap, you have a huge, you know, like, we hate the police kind of thing, right? | |
| Down with the popos, if I may say so, with the horribly British. | |
| But that is very, very key. | |
| That is a demographic that has no faith in the system at all, and that's because the system has been so brutal to them that they've broken out of the worship of that kind of patriotism. | |
| So, as the state brutalizes more and more people, the art is going to reflect their experience and their desire to have that experience reflected back, which is going to spread that message even further. | |
| Do you think that's happened in history before? | |
| Have you ever seen other examples of societies where it creeps into popular culture in their societies before their societies either break down or come back with something new? | |
| Yeah, that's a great question. I'm just sort of casting my mind back. | |
| It certainly didn't happen in ancient Greece. | |
| It didn't happen in Rome. | |
| It didn't happen in the British Empire. | |
| It didn't happen in the German that I know of. | |
| So this is the first time they really can't control the growth of it, do you think? | |
| Yeah, I think so. I think the degree to which the internet has changed the way that media works is absolutely enormous. | |
| If you're in the media, you're constantly competing with the truth that is out there on YouTube and other places. | |
| And to compete with the truth is really tough if you want to maintain propaganda. | |
| And so I think the fact that the media has to compete with this kind of stuff, where people are speaking the truth outside of the media, means that they do have to bend to the reality. | |
| Because if there are these completely parallel universes of the more voluntary free market media, which is the YouTube-y kind of thing, if there's that, and then there's this other mainstream media that has Completely oblivious to it, then they just start to look more and more irrelevant, particularly to younger people. | |
| So I think that people want more of their experience reflected, they can get more of it through voluntary media like this, and so the mainstream media has to bend to that, otherwise they're just going to look increasingly irrelevant. | |
| Now, your talk at opening ceremonies was rejecting basically a lot of vocabulary, attacking and putting morality behind vocabulary. | |
| Do you see that coming through in the entertainment world or in TV? It's starting to, as I said, to take the example from Burn Notice, as they constantly say in the show, a spy is just a criminal with a permission slip. | |
| So you are starting to see that there are more universal ethics that are out there, that you can see loyalty among drug dealers and you can see corruption among cops. | |
| There's a great line in The Wire where a drug dealer is in court and a lawyer is defending a cop and suing someone. | |
| And the guy says, oh, he steals from drug dealers. | |
| He's a black guy who steals from drug dealers. | |
| And he says, so you're a thief. | |
| You steal from drug dealers. | |
| And he says, yeah, I use a gun and you steal using a briefcase. | |
| We're in the same line of work, right? | |
| And that, again, that would not be possible 20 or 30 years ago. | |
| People would have just not even processed that. | |
| But the idea that there's ethics that transcend the formality of social constructs or cultural constructs, like what uniform are you wearing, what pieces of paper do you have in your pocket, or whatever. | |
| The fact that there are ethics that are surmounting the costumes that we use to differentiate people is really, really important. | |
| The idea that prison guards in Prison Break can be portrayed as run-of-the-mill sadists who are not there to protect the citizens from the criminals, but there to act out their violent impulses against people who are chained and helpless. | |
| That is something that is really new, and it's why I find myself drawn to a lot of the mainstream media to see what the zeitgeist is that's going on out there, and universal ethics are rising up, and the idea that costumes don't affect morality is really starting to bubble up, and I think it's fantastic. | |
| Thanks so much. You're very welcome. | |
| Mark Edge with Free Talk Live. | |
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