Chewie the mangina, R2D2 the lopped john-thomas, and Voldemort the blindness of the self to violent madness. Stefan Molyneux, host of Freedomain Radio, goes out on so many limbs it's like riding a spider - http://www.freedomainradio.com
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| Hi, everybody. It's Defend Well and You. | |
| Let's continue talking about the Wookiee Chewbacca and some more impact or aspects of Harry Potter. | |
| Now, I watched the first 10 or 15 minutes of the movie this morning just to check this theory. | |
| And I must say, I think it holds up really well. | |
| So, do you remember I was talking about how if you don't have choice... | |
| In other words, if your accidental relationships, like your family, you didn't choose your parents, you didn't choose to be born there, and for almost all of your childhood you have no legal or economic or practical option to leave. | |
| And so, if family is an absolute higher than virtue, higher than being well-treated, higher than decency and empathy and all these kinds of things, then you are in, if you're in an abusive family, then you are in a situation of no choice. | |
| And a situation of no choice... | |
| And abuse breeds dissociation, breeds flights into psychotic fantasies, breeds rage, breeds paralysis, breeds depression, and so on. | |
| And the general continuum seems to be that men act out and women act in, right? | |
| So that when women feel that they're in impossible and abusive situations, they become depressed and passive-aggressive and compliant and annoying that way, whereas men tend to act out, become aggressive or rage-filled or abusive in turn. | |
| Well, how does this fit into Harry Potter? | |
| Well, it's right there at the beginning of the film. | |
| So, I think it's McGonaghy or whatever the woman's name is, the Maggie Smith character. | |
| The Maggie Smith character and Dumbledore are dropping the baby Harry off at the Dursleys, right, at his, quote, aunt and uncle. | |
| And she says, I wrote this quote down, she says, I've watched them all day. | |
| They are the worst sort of muggles imaginable. | |
| They really are. Right? | |
| So they're dropping off this baby with this family. | |
| And the woman clearly says, they are a terrible, the worst kind of people imaginable. | |
| They are the most abusive people that can be imagined. | |
| And we are giving them a tender and helpless dependent baby. | |
| And what does Dumbledore say? | |
| He says... They're the only family he has, right? | |
| So it matters infinitely more that they are family than that they are incredibly abusive. | |
| I mean, they threaten him with no food for a week, which would be close to starvation. | |
| They keep him locked under the stairs. | |
| They scream at him. | |
| They hiss at him. They verbally abuse him in unbelievably sadistic ways. | |
| But none of that matters because they're family, right? | |
| Right? I mean, this is a revolution that still needs to happen, where we begin to look at the parent-child relationship at least as voluntary as we look at the husband-wife relationship. | |
| I mean, that's just something which is going to happen. | |
| It is inevitable. It sure has taken its sweet time, but we really need to do that. | |
| But this is something that's very important, that this is the family, even not direct blood-related family, but this aunts and uncle, family matter infinitely more than virtue. | |
| So we're not going to give him to parents who will treat him or to people who will treat him well, who will love and respect and honor him. | |
| We're going to give him to this gruesomely abusive, sadistic, psycho family because they are related through blood. | |
| The only thing that matters is family. | |
| Abuse is irrelevant. | |
| Doesn't matter. | |
| And of course, I mean, I guess we don't know whose aunt and uncle it is. | |
| Maybe it's explained somewhere in the book. | |
| But it wouldn't make much sense, of course, if the one brother turned out completely toxic and the other brother was a complete hero. | |
| I mean, again, that's not... | |
| Anyway. So, I think the important thing to understand about... | |
| Fantasy. And certainly Star Wars is in this category because, I mean, yeah, there are lasers, but there's the Force and so on. | |
| There's this thing called magical thinking, right? | |
| And magical thinking is, okay, so he was drunk all the way we were dating, he was drunk all the way. | |
| We were engaged. | |
| He was a drunk on our wedding day. | |
| He passed out on our wedding night, but the next day he's going to sober up because, you know, or, you know, he was abusive to me, but I'm going to have his kid so that when the kid comes, he's going to be nice to us both, right? | |
| This is, you know, a basic refusal to recognize that by far the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior, and there's no better way to predict how someone's going to behave than look at how they have behaved in the past. | |
| But there's this magical thinking that happens. | |
| The magical thinking is this politician is going to solve the problems of society. | |
| The magical thinking is this next government program is going to solve the problems of poverty or drug use or whatever. | |
| This next round of spending, this next round of deficit financing, this next round of stimulus spending, this next round of this next war, this next law is all going to solve these problems. | |
| It's all magical thinking because, of course, it just makes these problems all worse. | |
| But the important thing to understand is Is that in art, magic, magic is madness. | |
| Magic is madness. | |
| And that's why we know that it's magic, because it is madness. | |
| And so, you know, early on in the first Harry Potter film, they go to a zoo and Harry talks to a snake. | |
| That's insane. I mean, he's old enough that he knows that snakes can't talk. | |
| It's completely mad that he talks. | |
| It's insane. It's completely insane. | |
| And he, you know, because he's enraged at his cousin, I guess, he makes the glass wall disappear. | |
| The snake comes out and says, thank you, and slithers away. | |
| And then his brother gets, so his cousin gets sealed back up into the snake enclosure and his pseudo parents freak out or whatever. | |
| And Harry has no problem with any of this. | |
| I mean, he's quite mad. He's quite insane. | |
| Because magic is madness. | |
| And the character who is most comfortable with magic is the character who is mad. | |
| And the character who learns the ways of magic is the character who is becoming more and more psychotic, more and more insane. | |
| Right? So when Luke Skywalker goes... | |
| You know, with that little Zen sock puppet Yoda to the planet with big trees and goo and learns the ways of the Force, he is being trained in madness. | |
| And also when Hagrid comes to take Harry away, yeah, this is clearly, this is somebody coming to take him away to an insane asylum because Harry's not afraid of him. | |
| And he also, he validates Harry's madness. | |
| And that's what you do when you want to get somebody into an institution, is you validate their madness to keep them calm. | |
| It's the same thing that happens... | |
| At the end of Streetcar Named Desire, when the guy comes to take Blanche Dubois away from the Kowalskis, he sympathizes with her, he's with her, he understands, he's sympathetic, he goes into her world of madness in order to... | |
| Anyway, and you can keep watching, but violations of physics, violations of causality, violations of possibility, talking snakes, of course, that's straight out of the Garden of Eden, right? | |
| That's the magical talking snake made from the... | |
| That convinced the rib woman to eat from the tree and pissed off the deity. | |
| But he's perfectly comfortable talking. | |
| He talks to snakes. Of course, if your child comes and very seriously tells you that they were talking to snakes and the snake told them to do stuff and the snake was the one that was responsible for the other child being injured, you'd assume that they were lying. | |
| And if they really stuck to it, you'd really begin to worry about how well they were doing mentally. | |
| But that's the way it works. | |
| Whenever you see magic... | |
| And this includes pseudoscientific things like time travel and so on. | |
| Whenever you see magic, you are dealing with madness in art. | |
| And art, of course, is a way to make madness spread, for the most part. | |
| Why is humanity so crazy? | |
| Well, humanity is so crazy to a large degree because artists, and by that I include religious writers and proselytizers, artists infect other people with madness all the time. | |
| People do it with UFOs. | |
| People do it with a wide variety of conspiracy theories. | |
| People do it with art all the time. | |
| You've seen this a million times. | |
| It's such a cliche now. | |
| Thankfully, it's not being used as much anymore. | |
| Which is, you know, a man goes back in time to King Arthur's court and he wins the... | |
| The handkerchief of some fine lady, and then he comes back, and it turns out he just fell and knocked his head, but he doesn't know if it was real or not, and then he finds the handkerchief, but he doesn't know if that's real or not. | |
| Dissolving the barrier between sanity and madness is the perpetual, it seems, push and program and obsessive-compulsive disorder of art at all times. | |
| it is attempting to dissolve the real into the unreal and to provide an escape valve and a place of quote safety for people's insanity right everybody's looking in the world to hang their bag of crazy somewhere and there's a big vat of lakes called art where people go where they don't feel as mad anymore because it gives their madness validation it gives their madness validation and | |
| And whether that madness is about gods, or whether it is about family, or whether it is about politics, or whether it is about violence and the utility of violence, it is everywhere. | |
| And you have to be on guard against the corrosive power of art to undermine your unreality. | |
| Now, there are some slow steps forward in art in terms of being able to validate reality. | |
| So, for instance... And this is, again, this is a theory, I don't know if he put it forward originally, but Carl Sagan put it forward in The Demon Haunted World. | |
| The theory that the idea of being abducted by space aliens and anally probed is simply a way of unconsciously talking about sexual abuse without having to really talk about it. | |
| There is a step forward. UFOs are a step forward from demons. | |
| Because demons are purely supernatural and UFOs are pseudo-scientific, pseudo-real. | |
| And that's a step forward. | |
| I mean, it's slow and it's painful and it shouldn't damn well be this slow. | |
| But it is really hard to peel crazy off people. | |
| It really feels like you're going up to them with a hot spinning spatula saying, here, let me take off your outer skin and you're going to be so happy, right? | |
| They run away from you, right? | |
| You're giving them a pill to make them well, but they think that you're giving them a snake to make them sick. | |
| Because that's how sick they are. | |
| And, I mean, you can see this all over. | |
| The one thing that struck me about Voldemort in Harry Potter is he has no nose. | |
| No nose. Again, if you have dreams about that, you would say, okay, the unconscious always plays around with language and dreams. | |
| No nose. He lacks knowledge. | |
| He doesn't know. He has no knowledge. | |
| No nose. He doesn't know. | |
| This is a symbol of ignorance. | |
| Harry doesn't know that Voldemort is himself. | |
| Now, as to Chewbacca, the Chewy Vagina, that is a really bad name for a band. | |
| Look, I mean, there's no penis. | |
| I mean, the man, they could have put little shorts on him or whatever, right? | |
| A couple of Speedos? But there's no penis. | |
| It's very tall. And, of course, if you're a boy and, you know, you happen to see your mother's bush, then, yeah, you'll be looking up to see it. | |
| Yeah. But what struck me in thinking more about this, and look, I'd have to watch all the movies with notes, and you understand, this is not an exact science. | |
| You know, take it or leave it. I certainly don't claim to have any final answers here. | |
| These are just the thoughts that they've stimulated in me. | |
| You could say that they say more about me than they do about the movie. | |
| That may be perfectly valid. | |
| But in the first Star Wars that I saw, which... | |
| I can't remember the name of it, but... | |
| Chewbacca and R2-D2 are playing a sort of pseudo-chess, like an animated chess on the Millennium Falcon. | |
| And R2-D2 is, you know, as I said, it's sort of a penis metaphor, you know, and a circumcised penis metaphor relative to the helmet of Darth Vader, which is an uncircumcised penis metaphor, I think. | |
| But if you sort of say, well, okay, R2-D2 is a penis and Chewbacca has a vagina... | |
| I can't believe what I say on this show sometimes. | |
| Anyway, I hope it makes some sense. If RCD2 is a penis and Chewbacca is a vagina, then this is a child battling a mother over a chessboard. | |
| And what happens? | |
| Well, the penis cannot win against the vagina. | |
| And this is exactly what happened with Aunt Beru at the beginning of the movie, where she would not help him stand up to Uncle Owen and to get him some satisfaction and some sense of identity in life. | |
| And he goes down and he sees two sons. | |
| Well, again, in a dream you'd say, well, there are two sons. | |
| This means that he's experiencing a psychological split, a psychic split within himself. | |
| There are two sons here, right? | |
| And he's, you know, going crazy. | |
| But what happens is the gay C-3PO says to the penis R2-D2, let him win, because Han Solo says that Chewbacca's going to rip your arms off. | |
| If you win. | |
| And, you know, this is another metaphor of take your arms off is disarming. | |
| It's emotional manipulation. | |
| It's psychological manipulation, which is usually the hallmark of maternal verbal abuse. | |
| So, again, you... | |
| You know, this is the penis fighting, the boy penis fighting the mommy vagina, and you can't possibly win. | |
| She has all the power, she's much stronger, and she will use any means necessary to win. | |
| And then Chewbacca sort of leans back in a very smug and satisfied way, as if he's actually won, which is incredibly immature and abusive and destructive. | |
| And of course, the robots are treated like crap throughout the entire movie, right? | |
| They're disposable, they're junk, they're just crap, right? | |
| And they would be the symbol of the children, right? | |
| Anyway, I just want to leave this with something that is sort of tangentially related. | |
| I mean, it was, to me, very sad. | |
| I mean, watching Amy Winehouse live and emaciate herself into a sort of vapid and vaporous ghost of singing sensationability was pretty tragic. | |
| And I'm always curious. | |
| I always want to know sort of what are the childhood histories that lead people to this kind of violent addictions, self-destructive behavior, abusive relationships, and so on. | |
| And you almost never hear the truth. | |
| Nobody talks about the truth about these kinds of things. | |
| To not talk honestly and openly about these things is one of the greatest disservices that human beings do to each other. | |
| And it's rampant and so commonplace that, I mean, the worst propaganda we get in the world is about the lack of connectability between childhood traumas and adult disasters. | |
| But Anyway, there was a little glimpse that I saw about this with Amy Winehouse's mother. | |
| So she tells a story about 12-year-old Amy Winehouse was asked to leave school because her grades weren't up to par. | |
| And this is Amy's mother talking. | |
| She says, the same day I had to take the family cat, Katie, to the vet. | |
| I dropped off the cat, went to the school, and then went back to the vets. | |
| We had the cat put down. | |
| My joke... I should have had Amy put down and the cat moved on. | |
| Right, so she's said this since, according to the interview, since Amy was 12, this joke has been floating around that her mother really wanted to put her down to save the cat and to murder, to suffocate, to slaughter, to kill her own daughter. | |
| You know, what do you think it would be like growing up, looking into the stone-cold Medusa eyes of a mother who regularly make jokes about wishing you dead? | |
| How hard would it be to not listen to that slaughtering voice in your head, to spray it out through music before it circled back and boomeranged off your own head? |