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Aug. 26, 2013 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:28
2464 The Truth Behind 'Turbo' - A Philosophical Movie Review
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyne from Freedom Main Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
Oh!
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Okay, let's get on with the show!
So I would like to talk about two movies today.
One is a children's movie, like just about everything that Ryan Reynolds is involved in, called Turbo.
And the other is an indie film called My Sister's Sister.
And kind of at opposite ends of the spectrum.
One is a highly...
It's choreographed and predicted, of course, because it's an animated film, which means every frame has to be done ahead of time, and there's no room for improvisation, maybe a little bit in the recording, but certainly not in the execution, and the other is a sort of indie film about relationships with the usual Cabin in the Woods isolation, but with fewer demons at the end, at least of the supernatural kind.
But I think these films have something in common.
I sort of make a case for that, and I think it's very important.
I'm always interested in...
The zeitgeist.
No, not that one!
Not the assembly line of Marxist robots that delivers of the future in packaging that's impossible to open, but the zeitgeist in terms of where people are thinking probably would be the closest word.
So when I was a kid, I went out with a girl.
We'll call her Steve.
No, I went out with a girl.
And...
One night we watched...
I must have been...
I was still in high school, so I was 16 or 17.
And one night at a parent's place we watched a movie.
I have no idea what the name is.
If you remember it, please let me know.
It's like one of these things of my ute.
I would like to see it again.
But I watched a film, and it was about a woman who went back in time to King Arthur's Court and had all kinds of madcap shenanigans and adventures in King Arthur's Court.
And then she woke up.
From these adventures.
And like all of these kinds of stories, the question was, was it real?
Was it live or was it Memorex?
Was it real or was it not?
And she had been given to her by Lancelot some scarf.
And so she woke up.
And she perceived that it was a dream.
Wow, what a vivid dream I had.
Ah, but you see, she still had the scarf.
So was it real, or was it not?
Now, in the distant past, this wasn't even a question.
This wasn't even a question.
Like when, in the ancient Greek myths, or the Roman myths, or what have you, when the heroes did these wild supernatural things...
There was never any possibility that the end of the story would be, and Ulysses woke up, or Ajax woke up, and it was all a dream.
And it was all a dream.
Even when they're battling supernatural beings, and even when the heroes get lashed to a mast so they don't throw themselves into the ocean and drown for the siren song, and all these kinds of things.
There was never...
The ending called, and he woke up, and possibly it was all a dream, even though it was patently impossible in the real world.
And this is true of religions as well, right?
So there's no, the deity or the son of the deity or the angels or the devils or whatever.
With these intense supernatural stories, there's never a, and then Noah woke up, And it was all a dream, a crazy dream, with all the animals in the world, with the possible exception of koala bears, because it's tough to find eucalyptus leaves in the Middle East, as Peter Boghossian has mentioned, and you can only feed koala bears eucalyptus leaves, which means that we have koala bears now, which means that the story can't be true, blah, blah, blah.
But there's never a question of, you know, he woke up and it was all a dream.
All the supernatural crap that happens to To Job, or to Abraham, or to Moses, or, you know, you name it.
It's real.
The supernatural, the fantastical, the impossible is all real.
Now, after the Black Death, sort of 14th century, there are a couple of theories as to why it took the Black Death, in a sense, to be the trigger for things like The Reformation, right, the breakup of Christendom with some more skeptical Protestants causing trouble, as we are wont to do, followed by the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, the Scientific Age, and so on.
What happened?
Well, one theory is that the dumber parts of the population were wiped out in the Black Death, which caused a general rise in IQ. I have some skepticism about that because IQ tends to revert to the mean, right?
So, intelligence has some component of heredity involved, ranges from sort of 50% to 80% depending on which estimates and so on that you're looking at.
So there is some element of heredity, but there is generally, I mean, excepting the Flynn effect, which is, you know, a couple of points IQ rise in each generation, but there is generally a return to the mean.
So the odds are that Christina and I, not the dumbest pieces of protoplasm on the planet, my wife and I are more likely to have a child of average intelligence than a child of exceptionally high intelligence, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
Anyway, so there's some skepticism about that.
Another argument is that With the Black Death came a massive reduction in the amount of tax livestock of serfs available to the lords.
And so because there were fewer serfs, because most of them got wiped out, because there were fewer serfs, the serfs could negotiate for some private property, some freedom, some economic independence, some capacity for initiative, and so on.
And so the lords, the aristocracy, even the clergy had to provide some concessions and could no longer treat them as disposable tax livestock or surf livestock because there were fewer of them.
Therefore, those who survived could negotiate for more.
And another argument, and I think that's somewhat credible, and another argument is that after the Black Death, there was a growing skepticism towards Catholicism, towards what was then called Christendom, Which was the priest died most of all, right?
I mean, because the priest would be there at the deathbeds, which would give them wonderful opportunities to be infected with the buonic plague.
And so the priest who had always counseled the wages of sin, our death, were dying the most.
And this gave some skepticism.
And also, because there were fewer priests around, there was less capacity for indoctrination, right?
Because In those days, the commoners could not read the Bible.
It took Martin Luther in the 16th century.
It's so sad to get the 15th and the 16th.
It's the 1900s, but it's the 20th century.
I mean, how hard is that math to do?
But nonetheless, my math brain, unfortunately, was eaten by my language brain.
Burp.
So, Martin Luther translated the Bible into the vernacular.
Before that, you had to be able to read Latin to read the Bible, and the masses were conducted in Latin and so on.
And so, without the priests, people really didn't have access to any religious doctrines.
And in a book called Montaille, which was a record of one of the inquisitions that occurred in a French village, there are people there who are outright agnostics, not quite atheists, but You know, one guy said that the world was created by screwing and fucking.
And, you know, this of course would be complete heresy because it would be counter to Genesis.
But there was a fractioning, through the Black Death, there was a fractioning of Christendom, which opened the fissures which allowed for, or at least made possible, things like the Reformation and so on.
So, through that process...
There was skepticism towards religion and a more prosaic approach or examination of miracles up until the 18th or 19th century when it became sort of famously described that the age of miracles is over.
The age of miracles is over.
All the miracles that occurred in the ancient world are no longer going to occur in the modern world, which is sort of to explain why there were no miracles, no burning bushes which did not consume themselves, no loaves and fishes, no Magical healing on the part of the priesthood and so on, right?
That the age of miracles is over and the age of science, which specifically bans miracles, right?
Miracles are unexplained scientific phenomenon, but you don't get to call them miracles.
You can call them unexplained, but miracles is like a non-answer.
It's an anti-answer in the scientific realm because it claims knowledge, i.e.
there's a supernatural divinity behind this particular physical phenomenon, It claims knowledge which is invalid.
There's knowledge, there's ignorance, and then there's anti-knowledge.
Ignorances just don't know stuff, but doesn't necessarily have hostility to learning stuff.
But once the priesthood claims dominion over a particular phenomenon, then it becomes heresy to encroach upon it with science.
That having been said, and I've been reminded of this, and I think quite rightly so, that the Catholic Church gets a bit of a negative rap For its responses to science in the sort of Reformation and so on, it really wasn't as bad as some of the atheist historians would have it be, that a lot of the clergy was quite sort of scientifically minded, and of course a lot of the clergy would actively sort of fund and promote science.
So it wasn't sort of official, and of course there was the Torturing of the aged Galileo, which only took the papacy 400 years to apologize for, but there was not...
I mean, Martin Luther was threatened, but not actually killed.
I mean, there was some sort of progress.
Anyway, so this incredible, like, millennia-long, multi-millennial-long process of Pounding back fantasy and imagination where it belongs, which is squarely between the two ears of the human species and not out there in the world.
You and I can yearn for the touch that heals an illness.
I certainly have yearned for that this summer.
We can yearn for the touch from the deity that heals the illness, but this does not exist.
We can yearn for the dance that brings rain to our parched crops, thus perhaps saving our lives, But this does not work.
We can think up the most fantastical tales and stories, but these are merely stories.
You know, it's interesting, my daughter, we've read through The Hobbit, I don't even know how many times, but she's never asked if The Hobbit is real, because she knows it's not.
On the other hand, we're reading Eric Kastner's, I think for the second or third time, Emil and the Detectives, which is a book that I read when I was a little boy.
And she asks if this is a real story, because there's nothing fantastic, there's no giant spiders, no dragons, no magic, no wizards.
Because there's nothing fantastical in it, she wants to know if it's a real story, and that's a great question.
And, you know, one of the hints that it is not a real story is that you know the character's thoughts, and in one extended drug trip, you know what the character of Emil is dreaming about on the train to Berlin.
It's a good book.
It's worth reading, I think.
Interestingly written.
And there's a new translation, which is not too bad.
So, in the history of art, which is basically the history of art attempting to eat religion, this is very, very important.
Art, we know, is fundamentally false, but can create truths, or can contain truths about human nature or human relationships or whatever, but art is fundamentally false.
A lie, and it is the suspension of disbelief that is interesting, right?
I mean, so it's always struck me in The Hobbit, there's a scene with a giant spider, and the motives of the giant spider are explained, you know, in the...
The giant spider doesn't speak, but the motives of the giant spider are explained in the story, right?
So when Bilbo leads the spiders away, the author tells us that...
One spider had remained behind in the hopes of starting to eat the sort of captives early, right?
And, I mean, how could you possibly know the motives of a spider who doesn't talk, right?
So, anyway, these kinds of things are sort of important.
The moment you see an internal...
a thought that has not been expressed, you know you're in the land of falsehood.
And one day, perhaps, my daughter will have a thought that she does not express.
But who am I in the 2500s of podcasts to talk out about not sharing a thought?
So, the sort of history of art, it has been how far can art spread before hitting religion, right?
I mean, the Bible is a story.
It's a work of fiction, presenting itself as truth, of course, but it is, you know, and I've read a book which basically looks at the Old Testament deity as a literary character and examines that as a literary character, which is well worth reading.
I think it's called God, a biography, or something like that.
But art has been always attempting to eat religion, and sometimes it looks like a god or snake attempting to dislocate its jaw and gorge itself upon a brontosaurus egg, but that really has been the purpose, because once we move religion into the realm of art, we can keep the valuable truths contained in the religious narratives, of which there are a few, some, but we don't mistake it for truth, right, any more than we...
Teach the Lord of the Rings as history.
I mean, there's a fictional history in Lord of the Rings, and some people are entirely too well-versed of that, rather than versed in, say, vaginas.
But, nonetheless, it's not real history.
And this attempt for art to eat religion is only, of course, beginning in the realm of the state, but it's coming along.
Bit by bit, you can see it.
And Like in Burn Notice, he says a spy is just a criminal with papers, with paperwork.
And you can see this happening a lot in House of Cards and so on, both the British and the American version, that you see this continual process of skepticism towards the unreal.
But of course, the unreal is presented as real, like countries and gods and so on.
The unreal is presented as real, and skepticism towards it The moment you bring a truth to someone and that person gets offended,
then you know, almost for certain, that they do not have any truth or any proof, but they are hoping to intimidate you into not pointing out the unreality of that which is not real.
Typical.
Anybody who slanders, anybody who aggresses, anybody who claims to be offended is simply confessing to anybody with half a cataracted eye to see, simply confessing that their beliefs have no basis.
At least to their knowledge, their beliefs have no basis.
Which is why something called blasphemy is invented, right?
And why When you question the morality of the state, the argument instantly shifts to consequences, right?
You know, the state is immoral, here's my argument.
Well, what happens if we don't have the state?
Well, of course, this is a way of simply bypassing the argument of whether the state is moral, which is a way of confessing that there is no argument that can be made that the state is moral other than an appeal to consequences, which is not morality, right?
So, if a woman is beating up a husband, and you say to the husband that it's immoral for her to beat you up, and he says, well, what am I going to do if I leave her?
You get that he's bypassing the question and simply attempting to avoid the question of the morality of his wife beating him up by a desperate appeal to impossible-to-predict consequences.
Slavery is evil.
Well, who's going to pick the cotton if we don't have slaves?
That's a way of avoiding the question of whether slavery is evil or not.
Countries don't exist.
I find that highly offensive.
You clearly hate the poor.
It's simply a way of avoiding the obvious and basic question that countries don't exist.
Taxation is theft.
Well, without taxation, there'd be chaos and starvation and poor would...
Simply a way of avoiding the argument about whether taxation is theft or not.
People will constantly just attempt to shift...
The debate is something else.
And the moment they do, it's a confession that they cannot answer the question, and they find the question disturbing, and they will attempt to project their disturbance onto you.
Anyway, so what has happened is that In the Middle Ages, the story of King Arthur and the magic sword and Guinevere and Lancelot and dragons and all that kind of stuff, all of this was presented as fact.
Like, there was never an ending to King Arthur's tales similar to or exactly the same as, and the narrator woke up and it was all a dream.
It was all real.
It was all real.
And then what happened is, Like a slow, molasses-based moat going around a fiery volcano, art began to wrap itself around fantastical narratives and to absorb fantastical narratives back into the realm of art.
And so, when I was 16 or so, lo, those 30 years ago, right, in 1983, I could watch...
A movie with all the stories of King Arthur's court, and there could be an ambiguous statement at the end about whether it was real or not.
In other words, the possibility of it being unreal was revealed.
This was something that I remembered, thought of as very important at the time and have remembered ever since.
It's an essential question.
And now, things are becoming even more positive in this realm.
So, in Psych, for those who haven't seen it, it's a fun show.
And James Roday is very funny.
And Julia Hill is the appropriate level of irritation that comes with dealing with shallow, talented, and random people.
In it, they are pretend psychics, right?
So, James Roday's character has incredible abilities of perception that he was trained in from a child, as a child, by his father, who was a police officer.
And so, he just notices tiny little things and then pretends to have these psychic revelations.
And in that situation...
There's no real psychic ability.
And that's a real improvement.
That's a real improvement.
That's a real step forward.
And you can see this happening in a lot of places where...
I mean, it comes out of the Scooby-Doo tradition, I suppose, where everything that is supposedly supernatural turns out to have entirely natural and human causes, right?
So, the house that's supposedly haunted...
Is only pretending to be haunted by a guy who wants to get the people to move out so that he can buy the house at a cheap rate or something like that, right?
So he's got pulleys and sheets and all that kind of stuff where there is no supernatural.
There is only manipulation on the part of narcissistic, greedy, and self-interested people.
Which is, I think, a pretty important reality to understand and to process.
And so let's talk about this absorption of the fantastical and this kind of stuff that occurs for kids.
Now, in the movie Turbo, there's going to be spoilers here, so...
Don't listen if you don't want to know what happens.
But I can't talk about the movie philosophically without talking about the whole movie.
So in the movie Turbo, there's this snail who wants to be fast.
This snail who just really loves speed and has a TV in the garage and watches all of these races.
And he really, really wants to be fast.
And he works at it, so he tries to go a couple of feet and it takes him only 16 minutes and so on.
So he's really interested in being fast.
Now, his brother and all of the other snails in the colony, they tell him that he's crazy.
Like, stop being such a dreamer.
You're a snail.
You've got to accept your limitations and don't try and be something that you can't or something that you're not.
Now, this is interesting because you see this stuff portrayed a lot where you see someone who is...
Crazy, who has expectations which can't possibly be achieved, who is told to not be crazy, right?
Who is well-meaning, sensible, caring, sane people, or snails, around this person say, what you want is impossible, you're setting yourself up for a life of misery and dissatisfaction, right?
And that's all kind of miserable, right?
That's all pretty miserable.
And so what happens is, he's told to stop being crazy, and he's like, no, man, I'm a dreamer.
I'm, you know, they said it couldn't be done, but it can be done, I can do it, and so on.
And this is considered to be a positive.
And this unreality, this insanity of a snail who wants to be fast is portrayed sympathetically.
This fantasy of a snail who wants to be fast is portrayed sympathetically.
And this of course is a hangover of religiosity.
So a mortal being Who wants to live forever, it's also portrayed sympathetically.
Because the people who then say, no, man, you're going to die, and that's it.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
You will have as much knowledge of the 23rd century as you had of the 18th, which is to say, none at all.
And you will have as much being or existence after you're dead as you did before you were born.
That is the reality.
That is the truth.
You have to live with it, and the fantasies of eternal life are crippling.
And this is something that's always bothered me, that people who have patently insane ideas are dealt with sympathetically.
And there's not a lot of quit dreaming, quit fantasizing.
Dreaming is great, you know, dreaming is great.
You know, I had to dream I could be an interesting and useful addition to the thought of the world in order to achieve it, but it wasn't impossible.
For me to become a principal dancer in the Bolshoi Ballet, well, that would be a fantasy.
I can't do it.
I have very little flexibility in my legs, and I'm 46 years old, and I've never taken...
Oh, I guess in theatre school we took a couple of dance lessons, along with stage fighting and all this other kind of cool stuff, but it's not going to happen.
So, if I said I want to go and be a ballet dancer, Then it would not be helpful for people to support me in that because it's not possible.
This impossibility of fulfilling irrational desires is something that is really hard for art to block.
A lot of art is fundamentally the provocation or the sustainment of insanity.
Against all odds, this unknown person becomes a hero.
This person who everyone told it was not possible.
They all laughed when I said I could build a suit that allowed me to fly and combat bad guys.
But I achieved it, and it's impossible, and so on.
And of course, it's true that artists do have to overcome significant odds in order to be in a position to portray their art properly.
To the majority of people, right, I mean, to become a film director or a screenwriter of major films, big budget films, is, I mean, it's rarer than winning the lottery.
There are more people who win the lottery than who become famous artists or even prominent artists.
Artists are even crappy mainstream artists.
I mean, hundreds of people win the lottery.
Significant amounts of money in the lottery every week, and thousands of people, millions, probably win the lottery at some level.
But to actually become a great artist, or a significant artist, or a popular artist, is very much against the odds.
And so, we understand that They can say, well, everybody said it couldn't be done, but I did it.
But what they want to achieve is not impossible.
It is impossible for a snail to be fast.
But it is possible to become the screenwriter, against all odds, to become the screenwriter, or screenwriters, I think, in this case, of a movie about a snail that becomes fast, that is fast.
And the one thing that is interesting is that there seems to be a defensive posture on the part of artists when they communicate how to become great to others.
Thank you.
So, to become a screenwriter, I mean, you have to write like crazy all the time.
In Bullets Over Broadway, Woody Allen basically says, you know, you write ten plays and 10 of them suck, and you write 20 plays, and 19 of them suck, but the 20th one is good, and then you write 30 plays, and 28 of them suck, or 27, but 2 or 3 of them are good, and so on.
So you've got to work like crazy, you've got to take a lot of emotional risks, you've got to get out there, you've got to get an agent, you've got to suffer rejection, you've got to suffer rewrites, you've got to play the game, you've got to do politics, you've got to be relatively easy to work with, and so on.
But none of that is generally portrayed in the How to Achieve Greatness.
Aspect of art.
The how to achieve greatness aspect of art is, hey, be a billionaire with super cool toys, like Bruce Wayne of Batman fame, or be bitten by a radioactive spider, or come from the planet Krypton, or have something accidental happen to you that makes you great.
Or successful.
Success is a series of fairly well-defined steps, none of which guarantee success, but the absence of which will certainly guarantee non-success.
You just keep writing.
I think every 200th video I do is successful.
I mean in terms of getting a huge number of hits relative to the couple of thousand that the majority of them get.
I mean, could I try and make them more successful?
I could, but I have to balance that with also wanting to do shows that I enjoy as well.
I mean, I'm not a sort of slave to the numbers.
It's not freedom.
But the reality is that the majority of what I do is not particularly successful, and that's fine.
And that's fine.
Certainly, for sure, if I don't make videos, they won't get any hits.
If I make videos, the majority of them won't get many hits, and then a few of them, like the Trayvon Martin video, will go with mirroring over a million, plus the podcast downloads as well.
So, yay!
I guess it surprises everyone that I can still pull off a Hey Jude once in a while, which is fine.
So...
In the popular portrayal of greatness, a miracle occurs.
Something fantastical occurs.
And then, greatness is not achieved, but inflicted through unpredictable happenstance.
Right?
You become a superhero through some accident.
And sometimes, of course, Villainhood is achieved through accident as well, right?
Like the Joker falling into the vat of acid or whatever it was.
But it's accidental.
Now, very little about success is accidental.
It is mostly just repetitive, hard, lonely, boring, sometimes boring work and vastly more failure than success and vastly more rejection than acceptance and vastly more poverty than wealth and so on, right?
But, of course, the masses want to believe in the miracles so that they can avoid the possibility of greatness through mere hard work.
I think Bill Maher was once talking about the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.
It's like, okay, so you've got a movement.
Yay!
You know, you can have your kumbaya sing-outs and, unfortunately, rapes and murders in the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon.
Tent-a-thons.
But now, it's time to do the really boring stuff, say, for instance, that the Tea Party did, which is, you know, raise money, get signatures, start the political process, and so on.
But the majority want to avoid the possibility of greatness by pretending that greatness is a lightning bolt from a clear blue sky.
And therefore, what's counseled if you want to be great is passivity, not...
You know, massive amounts of work and loneliness, rejection, poverty, blah, blah, blah.
And this is a way, of course, that people who are successful reduce competition.
A huge amount of art is keeping people from competing with successful artists by portraying to them success as accidental, which makes them passive in the pursuit of success.
Which means that they're not going to compete with existing and successful artists.
That's kind of important, right?
Entertain people while keeping them from competing with you is great.
So you get paid for entertaining people and your pay remains high because you create a cartel by constantly portraying the exact opposite of how you become successful to other people who might compete with you if they actually do work productively to become successful.
And comic books, of course, are all about this.
They're all about making greatness impossible.
And then chiding people who point out that it's impossible as not being committed to their dreams enough of squelching other people's dreams and so on, right?
Like if some kid says, I want to be a weightlifter, a bodybuilder, I want to be Mr.
Universe or whatever, and to say, well, you really should go to the gym.
And he says, no, I'm going to wait for lightning made out of butterflies to strike me on the chest and make immense muscles out of my puny frame.
You would say, well, then you will never be Mr.
Universe.
Hey, man, don't squelch me.
I'm allowed to be a dreamer.
It's like, well, yeah, you're allowed to be a dreamer.
You're just not allowed to be insane.
I mean, you're allowed to be insane, but recognize that it will not get you what you say you want.
Right?
I had a friend years ago who, you know, wanted to meet girls, but went over every night to his mom's place for dinner and then stayed to watch TV with her.
And as a friend of mine pointed out about this guy, well...
There are women around, and there are women who want to get married around.
There may even be women who want to get married to this guy around, but they sure aren't at his mom's place, right?
Which was kind of an important consideration in that situation, right?
And so artists are continually portraying The exact opposite of what you need to do to compete with artists.
And this is not accidental.
It serves the needs of the artists in that it reduces competition and it serves the needs of the audience in that they are constantly being programmed with the idea that greatness, that success, that an extraordinary life, that having an impact on the world, that achievement of significance is accidental and must be patiently awaited for.
And of course that will never work and that will never occur.
Waiting to be discovered.
That's the Lana Turner story, when she was sipping a float in a diner, and she was discovered.
And yes, but of course, what you don't hear is that tons of pretty girls were discovered in Hollywood in the day, but they didn't work hard to take acting lessons, they didn't work hard to stay fit, to stay healthy, to stay beautiful.
And they weren't easy to work with.
They didn't negotiate hard with their contracts.
They didn't take the right roles.
They didn't read tons of screenplays.
They didn't learn how the movie business worked.
All of which Lana Turner did.
And so people think, well, someone's just going to whisk me away to be a movie star.
And you may get a screen test.
You may even get a movie.
But that does not mean you're going to be a movie star.
There's a huge amount that has to go in over and above all of that.
And so it bothers me when I see patently insane characters in movies being portrayed as really successful, wonderful dreamers that the petty bourgeoisie, narrow-mindedness, square-box thinking of those around them is constantly crushing the dreams of and so on, right?
What would be a much more realistic movie Would be the snail who wants to be fast, who spends all of his time trying to get fast and never really gets much faster, and ends up lonely, bitter, alone, with no family, no kids, no money, because he has spent all of his time not listening to people who told him to stop pursuing the impossible, to accept his limitations and work with reality.
That he gets progressively more hysterical and insane and possibly dangerous as he begins to panic in the grip of this insanity and the rest of his companions maybe abandon him because he's just dangerous and crazy and insane and is poisoning the minds of their children with these fantasies and becomes progressively more irrational and destructive and he ends up alone and bitter because he simply refused to give up his delusions and those around him who worked with reality were successful.
That would be, of course, a movie that would be highly offensive to people as a whole, because it would be to point out that fantasies are failures.
And most people, of course, live on fantasy, the fantasy of country, the fantasy of deities, the fantasy of the automatic virtue of the immediate family, and so on.
I mean, these are all just fantasies.
And, of course, the reason why people don't want to pursue anything great It's not because they themselves wouldn't be willing to do it.
The reason that they don't want to pursue anything great, for the most part, is that those around them will mostly attempt to crush their dreams.
And that's really quite tragic.
But it's very common.
It's what occurs when people attempt to achieve something that is very hard.
You don't see a lot of stars Of the music or literary or movie scene who still have a lot of their friends from high school still hanging out with them because they really have to usually abandon those narrow relationships in order to achieve something great.
I mean, unless their friends also happen to achieve something great.
Malcolm Gladwell was talking about that there were three friends when he grew up in a small town, I think in Ontario, The three friends who wanted to achieve great things all stuck together and all did end up achieving great things.
And he said how remarkable and what a general part of the success it was and so on.
But when you want to achieve great things, I know this from doing this show, that when you want to achieve some great things, it's really, really tough to do that with friends from your youth.
Who know you as someone who wasn't in pursuit of great things and whose own discomfort at the smallness of their own lives tends to rise when you see someone achieving great things.
If you're not pursuing your dreams, then seeing other people pursue their dreams is something that makes you very uncomfortable and often quite aggressive or certainly subtly sabotage-y.
And you will attempt to level them back down and ignore their success or mock their success or roll your eyes at their success or absorb their success without any particular comment that's attempting to deflate their excitement and joy at their success and so on.
And this, of course, is all very dangerous.
You generally cannot achieve success with people who are not Accepting of and enthusiastic about your success.
You just generally can't do it.
And there generally tends to be a shedding, you know, like a caterpillar that emerges into a butterfly, there tends to be a shedding of unsupportive relationships in the process of achieving something significant or important.
And that is tragic.
It's necessary.
I mean, if you look at something like America, America was a massive break with all the relationships of the past.
Most of the people who came to America left their friends and parents and family and all that behind.
And those friends who wanted to come to America, you know, generally would sort of come to America together.
So, there is usually a shedding of the small, narrow-minded people Sabotage-y kinds of people when it comes time to achieve something of significance.
And that doesn't really happen.
What happens is You achieve significance in the world of movies and your friends are all like, wow, good for you, great for you, I can't believe it, I'm enthusiastic, I'm supportive, I've come around, I'm entirely behind you, I'm this, that and the other.
And again, this is a sort of fantasy that allows people to avoid the reality that if they were to achieve great things that their friends and family, not always, but generally, will sabotage, will turn on them, will View it with resentment.
Because, you know, the implicit possibility that they themselves could achieve something great except for their...
It's the classes who keep each other down.
I mean, that's basically what I'm trying to say.
Let me just look at, you know, the black kid who tries to do well, who gets attacked by his black peers.
I mean, it's not just in the black community, but that's an example that's fairly clear and fairly obvious.
So it does bother me And I think it's important to notice in the media that you watch.
It's important to notice when this is occurring.
You see that pattern all the time.
I want to achieve the impossible.
I want to achieve the impossible.
Oh, get your head out of the clouds, get your feet on the ground, accept your limitations, be boring like me, right?
The fantasy that occurs in good will hunting Where the dumb guy says to the smart guy, you know, if you're still working here in a year, I am going to kick your ass.
You get out there and you achieve and you be great.
It's not impossible, but it's pretty rare.
Because anyone who can see that has the emotional maturity and skills to do more than be a dumbass construction worker, right?
Not that all construction workers are dumbass, but their jobs as portrayed in goodwill hunting are particularly brain dead.
Now the other thing that's interesting in the movie, Turbo, is that the recession is actually being portrayed in a cartoon.
That's actually quite interesting.
The Great Recession slash Depression of the last four or five years in America, and I guess to some degree in Europe as well, is actually portrayed, right?
There's people in a sort of strip mall, and there's a toy store, and there's a nail salon, and there's a garage, a mechanic, and there's a Mexican food stand and so on.
And they've got almost no customers.
And they're all, you know, the stores, the businesses, they're all dying on the vine.
And they don't have any particular answers or any particular solutions.
But what saves them is this It's a turbo snail, right?
So the snail falls into a race car, like a street racing car, and gets nitroglycerin or nitro, whatever it is.
Probably not nitroglycerin, that would explode.
It gets nitro or some sort of massive speed boosty juice fused into his DNA and then becomes super fast and leaves a blue trail and so on.
And you know, oh boy, what a juxtaposition, a fast snail.
Oh, genius.
Anyway.
And what happens is he then enters the Indy 500 and so their way of solving the problem of a bad economy is a super fast nitro snail that wins the Indy 500.
Still makes more sense than what the Federal Reserve is doing and has more chances of enactment and the achievement of success.
But it is interesting as well that you do see economic decay in this situation.
And there is no answer other than magic.
We will be solved through magic.
And that is interesting, because you are actually seeing this showing up, and there are no answers.
I mean, to have a magical snail win the Indy 500, and that's how you save your mall, is basically the equivalent of saying, we have no answers.
Now, that's actually kind of positive, right?
Because in past films, there were answers, and they were terrible answers.
Which was get the government to do something.
Get a law passed or whatever it is.
Now, at least, that's no longer an answer.
Now, the backup answer is, you know, have the magical snail win the Indy 500.
And that's interesting.
But what's interesting about it is there's not, you know, like in the second season of The Wire, or the third...
The answer is, you know, let's try and get the government to get some jobs going down at the docks, to spend money to dredge the dock or to dredge the harbor or something like that.
And that's how we're going to solve it.
That's a terrible answer, and it turns out to not be a very realistic answer, but that's the answer that's sort of proposed.
And I'm not saying that the writer is behind that answer, but nonetheless, that is what is proposed.
Or if you look at something older, Mr.
Smith goes to Washington, he wants to use the government to build, I don't know, some kids camp, some Boy Scout camp or something like that.
And he ends up, I think, on this filibuster and so on to achieve the government spending on this kids camp that he wants the government to spend.
And that's a good solution, right?
This comes out of the sort of Fabian socialist tradition.
Did you know George Bernard Shaw, by the way, of course, a very famous playwright, I said that under the socialist society that he wanted, if you were not of use to society, you would be executed.
He says, kindly executed, which is, of course, all the difference in the world.
But, you know, somebody who was pretty genocidal and the advocation of whose policies throughout the 20th century did result in more deaths than the Nazis.
But, of course, if he'd said that about Jews...
Then he would be reviled as a Nazi, but he says that about people who don't want to fit into a totalitarian dictatorship, so naturally he is revered and considered to be one of the premier men of letters of the Western canon and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
But this is sort of natural.
I mean, murderous socialists are revered, murderous Nazis are not, even though the murderous socialists got far more people killed than the mere Nazis.
But they got, you know, The right people killed, or at least not the wrong people killed.
So it's very different.
And so it is, I think, important when you watch the film to see just how we are out of solutions.
And that is a wonderful thing.
I mean, what a step forward.
I mean, the idea of government spending more money, government controlling more.
I mean, this is no longer a particularly credible solution.
I mean, you do have...
You know, arse-faced Ewok idiots like Paul Krugman saying, well, the problem with the stimulus package was that it wasn't big enough, right?
The problem with quantitative easing at $85 billion a month and the stimulus package at $7 trillion, at least for the financial industry, it wasn't big enough, right?
You just need more.
I mean, it's no longer, right?
I mean, there's not a lot of people, as I said before, who are currently saying, well, what we need, you see, is more spending in government schools.
Like, that is not...
A credible answer anymore, because the spending has simply gone up so much.
There finally has been accumulated enough evidence that people don't believe this anymore.
And that is some pretty significant progress.
And in this film, and again, I know it's a kid's film and all that, but there's a lot of truth to get out of this kind of stuff, is that there is a depressed economy And there is no solution, right?
So you don't have some snail who ends up running for office and getting a subs...
I mean, I know that that's not going to be a kid's movie exactly, but you could make that sort of part of the story.
And, you know, the snail's speed could be used to get the attention of a politician who would wave his magic spending wand and restore wealth to the...
More.
But this is not what happens.
There's no mention of government at all.
And the solution is the magical snail.
So that is something that is important.
And it's been quite a while, at least from what I've seen, it's been quite a while since the government has been invoked as the magical wand to solve social problems.
I mean, it doesn't occur in The Wire, doesn't occur in Lost, doesn't occur in Desperate Housewives, doesn't occur in Burn Notice, doesn't occur in Psych, doesn't occur in...
Oh my God, I watch too much TV. No, I'm trying to attract the zeitgeist.
That's, you know, my job.
These are the digital bullets I'm willing to take for you lovely listeners, is to watch TV and look for what it means.
This is...
Important stuff, that there is not a solution, which was pretty much the 20th century solutions.
There is not a solution called more government, more power, more spending, more taxes, more control, more...
You know, that's not really shown that much.
And that's interesting, because that was such a pattern in the past.
And I think that's really important to understand.
So anyway, well, sorry for the long review.
I hope it's useful.
We will get to the next...
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