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Feb. 27, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:45
2627 House of Cards: What They Aren't Telling You!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedomain Radio.
Hope you're doing well.
So, this is a review of House of Cards, a Netflix original series starring the sinister and fairly reptilian Kevin Spacey, upgrading his career from playing a grasshopper in A Bug's Life.
And I'm going to make a case that this is cause for enormous optimism in the ongoing drama of human liberation.
So if you look at the history of how government is portrayed, then you see that this is really a sea change.
There was a lot of heroism in 19th century politics, and there was a lot of heroism all the way up to the mid-20th century in politics, if you think of sort of the towering giants of Benjamin Israeli and Woodrow Wilson and not so much Coolidge, I guess, FDR, Churchill...
And so on.
There has been this hero worship of the giant men of history, generally men, and that has really come crumbling down.
I would argue it's really come crumbling down since the 70s, but in particular with House of Cards, we are really starting to see naked force for what it is.
If you think of a movie like Mr.
Smith Goes to Washington, where a nice guy goes to Washington to Get some funding for a Boy Scout camp and cleans up the whole place, almost against his will.
That was the wild optimism, matched really only by the truly cavity-inducing, saccharine optimism of Aaron Sorkin's West Wing series.
But now we've seen a joining together in House of Cards.
We've seen a joining together of two genres of...
Movie making, of storytelling.
And I would argue these genres have always been the same, but here we see them coming together for the first time, which is the mob movie and the government movie.
And this is really fantastic for those of us who are trying to illuminate the general population as to something which used to be well understood.
As George Washington said, government is not eloquent, it is force, pure and simple.
As Mao said, political power flows out of the barrel of a gun.
As one of the Nazi leaders said, whenever I hear the word culture...
I take off the safety on my revolver.
In House of Cards, Francis, when talking to a man worth over $40 billion, says, I don't care how much money you've got.
I have all the men with guns.
And that is a very powerful statement to be made, that money interests are fundamentally subjugated to political interests.
Everyone says, oh, corporations run the government and so on.
But the truth is the government does have the men with the guns and the corporations in general don't.
And where they do, like Blackwater and like some quasi-private but really fascistic prisons, what they have is money being flowed to them by the state who is taking it from people at gunpoint or stealing it from people who aren't even born yet in the form of national debt.
So, one of the things that I think is underappreciated culturally is the degree to which we became completely fascinated by mobster films in the 1970s.
Before that, there were mobsters, sort of the Edward G. Robertson kind of characters, but they were always the bad guys.
There was no sympathy, no fascination, there was a complete moral condemnation.
Part of that was the moviemaker's code, but also part of it was just the audience demand.
For that kind of resolution of a story, bad guys got shot and good guys got ticketed parades and so on.
Now, in the 70s, you could really argue starting with Scorsese's Mean Streets, but definitely with The Godfather and just about every other mob film thereafter, from Goodfellas to The Sopranos and so on.
What you have is a morally neutral exploration, and sometimes even with Brando's character Don Corleone in The Godfather, a sympathetic exploration.
Brando, for the rest of his life, every time he'd go to an Italian restaurant, he would be unable to pay because they'd almost want to give him free meals because they felt he depicted this mobster so benevolently and sympathetically that they loved the guy.
I mean, that's quite wild.
Can you imagine going to Germany and having restaurants give you free meals because you effectively portrayed Hitler in a sympathetic way?
Wouldn't happen, right?
So why did mob movies become so powerful?
Such a powerful genre in the 1970s, sympathetic mob movies.
Well, I would argue it's because there is two kinds of organized crime, or two kinds of mobs, In the world, there is what is called organized crime, the mafia and so on.
And then there's disorganized crime, which is the government.
Both of them use force to get what they want.
And one of the things that's really interesting is right after, in the West, we took this radical experiment, particularly in the 1960s, Of giving more and more and more power to governments, of willing to slide ourselves under the jackboot heel of government power, which we had spent hundreds of years fighting to get out from under.
We slid back under for fear of enemies, foreign and domestic, for a desire to end poverty, for a desire to educate the ignorant, for a desire to heal the sick, and so on.
We handed all this power, which we'd spent hundreds of years fighting our way out from under, we handed all this power back to government.
This was characterized by Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs, the welfare warfare state, right?
So the government is supposed to take care of the sick and the poor and the needy and single moms and all that kind of stuff.
So we gave all this power to government, and then we became fascinated by mob movies.
I don't think that's a coincidence at all.
The people who grew up in the 70s who were the movie-going audience...
Sorry, the people who grew up in the 50s and 60s who were the movie-going audience of the 70s, movie-goers tend to be younger people, In the 1960s in America, it became illegal to fire teachers.
And teachers unions and government unions of every kind began to really get their stranglehold on the economy.
And, of course, unions, particularly public sector unions, are heavily associated with the mob.
So...
Children were raised by teachers protected by mob interests and whose economic interests were advanced by mob interests and who, you know, the Jimmy Hoffa stuff, I mean, people regularly saw the mob union connection, particularly in the public sector, because there's not that same driver of profits to minimize the negative economic effects of coercion.
So you have a whole generation of people raised by teachers protected by and whose economic interests are advanced by mob interests to a large degree.
And...
Naturally, they turn more and more power over to the state.
The state has to be viewed as benevolent in order for us to give all this power to the state, to have it heal the sick and feed the hungry and so on.
We have to view the state as a benevolent power, but we all know deep down, I mean this is not any kind of secret, we all know deep down that the government is an agency of coercion.
And we had turned to an agency of coercion to solve all of our problems, to take all of our money, to sell off and educate our children, and to auction off our hopes, dreams and futures to well-connected foreign banksters.
So we basically had switched to not government as We turn to it as an agency of salvation.
Violence became something that we thought could be used to achieve good.
And then the next thing you know, we are sympathetic to mob bosses in mob movies.
This is an unconscious story.
Affinity, right?
And it's actually quite clear in The Godfather.
Al Pacino's, I think it's Diane Keaton, says to him, like, you know, congressmen don't get people killed.
And he said, now who's being naive?
Right?
So basically the mafia has always looked at politicians as better mafia, as better at taking things, at being on the right side of the law, just as people in gangs view the military as a really good gang, which is why they regularly go into the military and now infiltrate at almost just as people in gangs view the military as a really good gang, which is why They go into the military to learn how to shoot and how to kill so they can take that back to the streets and continue to wage the drug war more effectively.
So mob bosses look at politicians as better mob bosses and street fighters and hitmen look at the military as better street fighters and hitmen with good reason.
Yeah.
And so our fascination with mob movies, I believe, has a lot to do with our understanding that we have surrendered.
Virtue to violence.
But we couldn't make that connection very clearly because it was very scary for us to say, oh look, we just turned our entire futures and our freedoms over to a bunch of sociopaths in suits who shape nice language and carve us into tiny, tasteable, delectable, consumable morsels of financial...
And we are used fundamentally as tax livestock.
Our productivity is used as collateral to borrow, to bribe us, and pass the bill forward.
And there is this wretched aspect to the state of coercion and counterfeiting and bribery.
And, you know, this is the reason why the approval of Congress is at about 6% or so.
Now, as a reaction to all of this, there's a splitting, right?
Splitting is a phenomenon where you take one person and you then turn them into good and bad.
You know, when my mom was in a good mood, she was great, but then when she was in a bad mood, she was really bad.
Or, you know, my husband who beats me when he's not beating me, he's sweet and angelic and so on, but then something comes over, something takes over, right?
So you split.
And so what people on the left did, and the left generally run Hollywood and the media, what people on the left did was they said, okay, well, there's the good guys called the Democrats and the bad guys called the Republicans, who are racist and reactionary and angry that minorities are coming into the country and gripping their guns and their Bibles.
And they had this whole narrative which came out In a lot of movies and TV shows and so on.
Like the West Wing.
They were all Democrats and they were all noble and heroic and virtuous and struggling to do the best and the right thing.
But they were frustrated, don't you see, by those goddamn Republicans.
And this is why virtue could not be achieved because there were too many people opposed to the exercise of virtue in government.
Well, nobody really believes that anymore.
This has all become silly nonsense.
I mean, the Democrats, in order to shore up their defense credentials, have become warmongers.
And the Republicans, in order to shore up their social compassion credentials, have become full welfare status.
I mean, the Republicans no longer challenge Social Security or the welfare state or unemployment or Medicare or Medicaid or any of those things on the principle that they violate.
Freedom, they violate individuality, and they require the initiation of the use of force.
And the people on the left don't really oppose military spending that much and are not going full-tilt boogie against the war on drugs and so on.
So they've really become two sides of the same coin, the bichromatic rainbow of choice that you're presented with in every election.
And this comes out, and I know that...
House of Cards has its origins in British novels and British drama, I think.
But it's the same kind of thing over there.
So now what we see is the union of politics and mob movies, of political movies and mob movies, wherein Politics is viewed in the same lens and through the same machinations as a mob movie.
With the difference being that the violence all occurs off-screen.
You don't see people not paying their taxes being dragged off to jail.
You don't see people with a joint in their handbag being dragged off to jail.
And you certainly don't see any bombs falling on foreigners.
What has occurred, and this is why it's still very hard for people to sort of get into grasp of this and to understand this, There are two murders, if I remember rightly, in House of Cards, committed by the Vice President, and there are two white people.
One he asphyxiates in a car, the other he tosses in front of a train in really kind of a cartoony and silly way.
And this is supposed to be horrifying, of course, right?
Because why?
Because they're white people?
Because they're politicians?
Because they speak English?
The fact that these people are organizing drone strikes and wars around the world and torturing people overseas, shipping people off to extraordinary rendition camps or torture camps and so on.
That can't be talked about.
And there's no mention in House of Cards of a war.
And you could say, well, this is to make sure that it stays relevant even after the war is over and so on.
But the reality is that that's where most of the death occurs, that these people order.
There's no mention of prisons, you know, that America with like 5% of the world's population has 25% of the world's prisoners and so on.
So you have these kind of cartoony murders, which is supposed to make us horrified, but...
The murders that occur as a result of fewer foreign policy in the US has been estimated to be responsible for between 15 and 20 plus million deaths through its foreign policy since the Second World War.
Well, that's a little bit more than a hit on a fellow politician or a hit on a meddlesome reporter.
The real murder occurs Overseas and generally among the underclasses domestically, but that's not portrayed because, again, we're still inching our way towards an emotional understanding of the degree to which we have surrendered our freedoms to the flag-wrapped mob called the state.
What is interesting as well is that it's a child-free universe.
Most politicians have children.
I don't remember seeing a single child.
Children are sort of mentioned.
The president mentions all my kids are going through a tough time and all of that.
But children aren't there, present at all.
They're never talked about in terms of policy, and they're never present on screen.
And that's pretty terrible.
So one of the reasons it stays entertaining is you kind of view these people as sociopaths playing with sociopaths, right?
Evil playing with evil, manipulators playing with manipulators.
There's a voluntary aspect, like you could leave public life, you could go and be a librarian or something like that.
And the fact that they're all playing with each other makes it more entertaining.
If we saw them being brutal with their children, it would be quite a different matter.
I mean, the vast majority of politicians spank their children.
You never see that on screen.
But why not?
If violence is a great way to solve social problems through the power of the state, violence must be a great way to solve child raising problems through the power of the open hand or the fist.
And it is interesting also that one of the ways in which society has, dare I say it, elevated itself is that in the past, if you challenged the king, the king would just have you killed.
It would be this Macbeth moment where Macbeth kills King Duncan and so on.
And now there's just this endless harassment.
You get subpoenaed.
You have to go and testify.
And, you know, they talk about the president and the vice president going to jail.
All of that is complete nonsense.
I mean, politicians don't go to jail.
I mean, One of the reasons you become a politician is so that you never really have to go to jail.
And so there's no longer, in general, outright murder of opponents.
There's just this kind of harassment, this kind of wearing you down, this kind of feeding things to the media so that you get embarrassed and all that kind of stuff.
And that's a step forward, but it does also indicate another central aspect of House of Cards, which is the degree to which none of these human monsters...
In power, care at all about morality.
There's a great line where this woman says to the vice president, you're just one step shy of treason.
And he says, yes, therefore politics, right?
What's that old great quote?
Treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason?
Why, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
If you win, you ain't treasonous.
It's only if you lose and you're treasonous.
If you win, you're the new king and so on, right?
So they don't care about moral standards at all.
When the president's wife reveals internally to the political party that she's had more than one abortion, they don't care.
They just care about public perception.
When an affair comes up, nobody cares that she has an affair.
What they care about is that the public cares that she has an affair.
So it's very interesting the degree to which these monsters completely and totally understand ethics and the power of ethics.
And how the public's addiction to moralizing renders them susceptible to this kind of manipulation.
Oh, she had an affair.
What a terrible person.
I mean, the president basically gets impeached because he and his wife were going, or is threatened with impeachment because he and his wife are going to therapy.
In other words, they promote a two-time direct murderer to the presidency in the form of the vice president because the president went to therapy.
I mean, talk about having your values, I guess charitably you could say misaligned, I think is pretty important.
I mean, what's the harm in going to therapy?
Therapy is very beneficial versus, you know, killing two people and being a general lizard-eyed, sleepy-dode sociopath.
There is...
A fantastic amount of power that goes on.
Like, one woman's father is being prosecuted in another country.
The vice president says, with one phone call, I can get the charges dropped.
I mean, what an astounding amount of power.
And that is, I think, very, very true.
Now, the other thing that's interesting as well, which you don't see, you saw a little bit of it In, I think, season three of The Wire, when they were talking about running for the mayoral office, you know, recently a Democratic mandate has gone out in the Democratic Party that candidates need to spend five hours a day fundraising.
I mean, it's what you pay them to do, is to get people who are willing to bribe them With your money.
That's how you...
This old idea that you should...
Congress people should have stickers like NASCAR cars.
They should have stickers all over them of who's funded them.
But you wouldn't be able to see them.
It'd be this big giant ball of paper like Robert De Niro in Brazil.
And you don't see any fundraising at all.
But of course, that's a major part of what people do.
This begging and cringing and pleading for money and promising and bribing.
I mean, it's just this massive tsunami of money that just goes back and forth through the political process.
But you don't really see that at all, because that's just kind of mundane, but that's a fundamental part of what they're doing.
It would be fascinating to see that, I think, to see the fundraising.
You saw it in Season 3 of The Wire, but what you didn't see was why people gave the guy money.
You see him on the phone saying, give me money, give me money, give me money.
But money buys access, access buys preferential legislation, which is profitable for your business, and that's why you give money to politicians.
If you're well-connected, that's why you give money to politicians.
People are just worried about slush funds and super PACs and so on.
While there's wars and incarcerations and so on, people getting their doors kicked in, the wrong doors kicked in sometimes in the war on drugs and having people shot by accident and so on, you only ever really see fundamentally trade disputes or warship maneuvering.
Again, there's no war and there's no real focus on spending, on the need to control spending or the need to even limit the growth of spending.
It is fascinating, at least to me, just sort of the last point that I'll make, is that we are now very close to understanding that the government is the mob that wins, right?
So historically we know this with the aristocracy, right?
The aristocracy were the best murderers, right?
The people who could kill the most with the least conscience.
Political power always concentrates those with the least conscience at the top.
You know, like you hear all these stories about, you know, some guy just got released and got a couple of million dollars, I think, in New York State after serving 20 plus years after being framed by a cop.
Well, to frame someone and have that person rot in jail while you go on with your life means that you're missing like the 12 or 13 complex centers of empathy that need to be developed in the brain for you to be a vaguely decent human being.
I mean, if I did something horrendous like that, I would be unable to sleep.
In my mind's eye, this guy pacing back and forth in his cell with his life destroyed would be burning in my brain, and I wouldn't be able to take it.
But these people can, right?
They could just pass laws, throw people in jail.
They don't look twice.
Some other journalist gets basically threatened with 35 years of jail, and they're like, well, he's out of the equation.
And this is all par for the course.
You can't exercise violent power If you have empathy.
Like you can't shoot people if you have empathy.
You can't spank your children if you have empathy.
You can't advocate for violent solutions like political laws for complex social problems if you have empathy.
I mean fundamentally you can't cheer for your sports team We're good to go.
What's it got to do with me?
I mean, maybe this team sucks and that team doesn't suck.
It's not like you've earned anything.
It's not like I haven't earned something.
You're just born there and I'm born here.
Like, if you have empathy, then these artificial divisions of us versus them and my team good and that team bad and so on, you know, like, when your team scores a touchdown, you cheer, and you know the other team supporters are sad, and if they...
Their team scores a touchdown.
You feel sad if they cheer.
I mean, it's just pathetic.
It's so anti-empathetic.
Of course, sports is a lot around training people out of empathy for geographical proximity, i.e.
countries.
And, okay, so one more quick point, which is there's this fellow named Tasker who's worth a huge amount of money, and he basically gets batted back and forth.
This is the fundamental thing people don't understand about the relationship between business and the state.
The state has the people with guns.
The business people don't.
The vice president can get this guy arrested.
He can't get the vice president arrested.
This is foundational to understanding the relationship between the state and business.
Business leaders have a fiduciary and legal responsibility to maximize profits.
If they can maximize profits by using the power of the state and they don't, they can get sued and go to jail.
They certainly will get removed from their position.
So having the state around in the business arena is exactly the same as having performance-enhancing drugs legal in the sports arena.
I mean, you're not going to win if you don't use these performance-enhancing drugs.
You're just not going to win.
And so you have to use them in order to win.
And if you say, well, I'm never going to use them, you just get drummed out, you know, the second day of training.
And, you know, don't hate the player, hate the game, I think is a pretty important thing.
You know, Tusk is batted back and forth.
All he's got is eloquence and some money.
They all have the guns.
And any businessman or businesswoman who doesn't use the power of the state can go to jail for that and certainly will never retain their position.
And it is really the profit-enhancing drug called the state that needs to be called into question.
So I would recommend watch the show with an open...
With open eyes.
You know, you are watching the awakening of the recognition that the state is just another mob.
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