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Feb. 9, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:43
2612 The Truth Behind The LEGO Movie

Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio unpacks the truth behind the full-length theatrical LEGO adventure.

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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, I braved the elements and went to go and see Lego the movie, which, as far as I can understand it, before my various stages of epileptic attacks.
It's an extremely fast-paced movie for the younger set and those of us who enjoy analyzing found therein rich pickings to understand the contemporary world.
First and foremost, it's a great movie.
You should go and see it.
It's very imaginative.
It's lots of fun.
This review may contain a spoiler or two, so just be aware of that before you tickle your way through it.
But the story starts with Emmett, who is a construction worker who basically goes to work every day, and is an empty, vacuous, desperate to please ghost of a human being, or I guess of a Lego piece.
He reads books like...
How to never disagree with everyone so everyone will like you and you'll be happy.
And he sings good morning to his television set and his carpet and doorway and so on.
And he goes to work and nobody really notices him and he's desperate to go and join everyone after work but they completely ignore him and so on.
So he's kind of this desperate ghost.
And these kinds of people are really tricky.
Because they do evoke a lot of sympathy, but they have in them a lot of anger.
This is something that is not, of course, imaginatively explored during the film.
But he so desperately wants to please other people that basically he's a manipulator.
People who say yes to everything or who enthusiastically agree with you about everything are trying to control you and trying to manipulate you.
And they're doing that because they're scared of you.
So the fact that people don't warm to this guy when he's basically trying to control them through his good, quote, good nature, when he's actually scared of them, and he's scared of them because he considers them dangerous, which is kind of an insult to everyone, and would speak a lot about his Lego infancy were that available.
But that is the reality of his environment, and it's really important to recognize the degree of fear and anger That is manifested in the lives of the over-compliant and the hysterically conformist is really interesting.
There is growing fascism in his Lego universe.
The president business, which is a very interesting term, which we'll get to in a sec.
President business talks about how you kind of have to obey or we're going to put you to sleep.
And he says that really quickly.
He moves on and the guy's like, hey, wait.
He said, what?
What?
And then they go to some sitcom and he forgets about it and so on.
And so the fact is that there's this central...
He's a hierarchical oligarch who's sort of a tyrant who's threatening to kill people who disagree with him and then everyone laughs at a sitcom.
And basically then, through a series of misadventures, he gets captured and he's about to be put to death by the Gestapo, by the NKVD, by the secret police of President Business.
And this is the price, of course, in reality, of failing to recognize or ignoring the growth in government power, is that you will be disassembled by the powers that be.
This happens regularly and happened in China, happened in Russia.
It happened in America in some instances, and it is a very dangerous thing to ignore the expansions in power within your government.
And to my view, you know, the realistic movie is that he was captured by the secret police, and he was killed by the secret police, but in his last few moments before death, he had this incredible fantasy about how special and powerful and virtuous he was.
Too little, too late.
It's kind of the anesthetic of the unconscious to think, like, to attempt to ease your way into slaughter by your government by pretending that you're some sort of moral hero.
That, to me, would be, you know, if I were making the Lego movie, I would have ended it with him as a puddle, and it would be a warning to not ignore government power.
But, of course, it's a kids' movie, so they don't go in that direction, which is why I don't make kids' movies.
Now, president business, a wonderful term, because we live in this society now where failure is not an option, and not because you can succeed or will succeed, but because if you fail, you go to the government to get bailouts or preferential legislation or whatever goodies your grasping little heart can hang on to.
And that's how you avoid failure anymore.
We used to be like a tougher culture in the West.
We used to, you know, recognize that you get knocked down, you get back up again, that life is full of success and failure.
It's like the rhythm of a heartbeat and so on.
But now we've, you know, partly as a result of maybe people can't fail in school, but there's this idea that failure is really bad for people.
And the only failure that's bad for people is death, pretty much.
All other failures, at least in my experience, however unwanted at the time, And I include cancer in this.
It turned out to be an enormous boom to my life as a whole.
And therefore I'm with, you know, old bushy mustache himself.
That which does not kill you makes you stronger.
But we've kind of got this society now where failure is not an option.
And so business goes to government whenever they fail, if they're big enough.
And they want licenses and protection from overseas competition, and they want special privileges, and they want government contracts, and they want to be part of the eight-plus trillion dollars that the Pentagon can't find under its blood-soaked couches, and they just don't want to fail.
And so there was something very interesting in the film wherein when the president business, the mean guy at the top, was explaining why He was a dictator.
It's because everyone kept building new stuff with the Lego and he didn't want them to build new stuff.
He wanted it to stay the same.
There's something very important about that to mull over, which is, of course, the people on top want things to stay the same.
There's this beautiful creative destruction that occurs in a free market.
Just as you get settled in to kick back and enjoy everything that you've built and made, some new idiot comes along or some new genius, in fact, comes along with some new Invention or process or toy that renders your hard work obsolete.
Just as you finish laying that last line of copper wire, someone comes along and runs phones over the internet or has cell phones or something like that.
So this always happens.
And it's annoying for everyone who is, you know, trying to get to the top and stay at the top of the economic heap.
It just happens to be enormously beneficial for every other human being on the planet.
But there's this creative destruction.
Industries rise, industries fall.
In every generation, 20 to 30% of the poor go to the middle class and above.
Staying even in the top 1%, it's easier now than it used to be because the government's grown so much bigger that you can use it.
But it's hard.
I mean, you tumble down all the time.
The 20 to 30% of the people in the rich go to the middle class or below.
There's this cycle.
And so when you're at the top, you want to freeze everything.
And that is, you know, subsidizing banks that have made bad decisions is freezing everything.
They can't fail.
Well, no, they should fail.
Scandinavian countries let banks fail in the 90s, and they're doing pretty well now.
I mean, you let the banks fail.
You let, you know, kids who don't study.
When I was a kid, you didn't study.
You got an F, you failed.
You didn't get to subsidize your marks with all the smarter kids' marks.
That kind of marks isn't never allowed.
So I thought it was interesting how the guy in charge didn't want new stuff, didn't want creativity, didn't want all this stuff, and basically was going to glue everything in place.
Well, that's taxation, regulation, preferential policies, subsidies, borrowing, debt, and all that.
Even a printing of money benefits the existing power structures that are.
So I thought it was interesting and quite telling that rather than allow the creativity of the master builders in the Lego movie to continually build new stuff and to overturn everything, the guy on top wanted to glue all the pieces together and have it fixed.
It's like central planning, and we're going to decide how things are going to be and that there's going to be end to that turmoil and creative destruction of the free market.
So I thought that was interesting.
This idea of specialness, oh God above...
It's such a challenge in movies.
So, as there is in so many of these movies, if you believe you're special...
You are special.
And, you know, because it's a movie, you know, he basically just has to stare at a cat poster until he believes he's special, and then all of these talents and abilities erupt out of him because the belief wire has connected with the fantasy wire, and lo and behold, he can do everything, which is why I think it's a death fantasy, because it's not how things work in real life.
You know, I can close my eyes, and I can believe That I am a tenor opera singer or an excellent jazz pianist or somebody who can win a gold in gymnastics, none of that is going to occur without putting in 10,000 hours of work for the aforementioned two or going back say 30 years in time at least for actually more than 40 years in time.
I'm 47.
40 years in time back to when I was younger and start practicing then.
So this idea that if you believe it uncorks this Mount Vesuvius of rainbow-colored, phantasmagorical, fireworks talent out of you is nonsense.
When you believe that you're capable of doing something, then you basically set your goals, and then you begin the process of logging in the 10,000 hours that it takes to become actually good at anything, none of which is, of course, covered in a Lego movie.
So there's this idea, this fantasy.
If you believe in yourself, you will be special, and so on.
Pretty terrifying.
And this is a...
I mean, the guys who made the movie didn't sort of put their heads together and say, let us believe that this movie is out there.
No, they wanted to make the movie, and that's, of course, necessary but not sufficient to making one.
And then they wrote it, and then they put it together, and they, you know, spent all that...
all that claymation moving everything a millimeter at a time until they wanted to shoot themselves, I'm sure.
And that's how they made the movie.
It wasn't just believe and it happens.
Believe and it happens is associated with the other very dangerous message in the movie, which is you can be passive and empty and a conformist.
And then a wise old man is going to appear in your life or someone is going to appear in your life and is going to start events in motion that put you into violent conflict with others.
You can't get your own life going.
There's nothing you can motivate yourself to do.
You can't set your own goals.
Somebody has to kind of bungee in, tap you on the shoulder, and yank you off to these matrix-busting D-Day adventures, wherein, you know, violence in the service of others is going to be your reason for being.
Well, that is...
That's a big problem, because that's basically the story of the draft, right?
You're laboring away in obscurity, say, on the planet Tatooine, and then some old guy, or now sometimes it's a younger woman, comes by.
It's Marshall, though.
I mean, the woman who shows up, Lucy, is a ninja extraordinaire and disassembles Lego more easily than Hannibal Lecter disassembles old friends.
He's having over for dinner.
And so people bungee in with martial abilities and tap you for a great adventure.
Well, this is the story of being conscripted by the state to fight in wars, right?
And you're bewildered and you don't know what's going on and so on, but then you end up just, you know, those are the enemies and you go and you kill them or you disassemble them or you attack them or whatever.
And that's, of course, a very dangerous message, and it primes youth for war, which, of course, these...
I mean, if you look at these movies, you're a little hobbit living in the middle of nowhere, and then the dung-dung-dung, you know, Gandalf comes in, and then he whisks you away to combat and adventure.
It's the story of The Matrix.
It's the story...
I mean, you name it.
You look at any of these movies.
Somebody living an innocuous life, somebody marshal comes by, taps them on the shoulder, yanks them off to violent adventures, and this is priming children To answer the call of war.
And it's, of course, very, very dangerous.
So the believe you're special is believe you're special when we get you to fight.
That is the message.
You're not special until we put a giant gun in your hand.
You're not special until we tap you Yank you out of your environment and tell you to attack people.
Then and only then are you special.
And I'm not saying that the filmmakers are conscious of this.
This is a template that Joseph Campbell has talked about before.
I'm the one who associates it with the draft.
Maybe other people have as well, but that's sort of my particular association.
But that seems to me a very strong drive for that kind of narrative.
So I think it's a good film.
It's very creative.
It's entertaining.
I certainly would recommend seeing it in 3D. The messages are troubling and inevitably troubling.
I mean, these are not philosophers.
I mean, I've done some art.
I've acted.
I've directed a play.
I've written more than one, actually.
I've written a bunch of novels and plays and so on.
So I have some approach to art that's probably different from most people.
And I would caution you against this.
This empty person at the beginning is filled with basically blood at the end through violent combat.
He's not become any deeper or any richer.
But the very ending of the movie...
It's very interesting.
I'm not going to go into it because if you haven't seen it and you're watching this anyway, naughty, naughty, naughty, it's worth not mentioning.
But there's a reconnection at the end of the movie that I think is much more about defusing this kind of, you know, tap you on the shoulder, older guy drag you off the bloodlust war template that I think is actually quite sweet and quite beautiful at the end.
And it has to do with a father and his son.
I think that's where the real reconnection occurs.
And that is the true antidote To the violent fantasies that drench most of the film in ceramic-colored blood.
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