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July 12, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
33:24
2747 Dawn of the Planet of the Apes - Revealed!
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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
Day one of Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, I went with Mike to go and see the movie.
There is so much to talk about in this film.
I'll give it a medium to nose hair thumb up.
I think it's worth watching.
First of all, I mean, the technology, the CGI is truly astounding.
And when you are as flatlined an actress as Kerry Russell and you can't even remotely hold pace with electronically generated apes, I guess it's time to return for some serious Stanislavski brushing up on your acting technique.
But there will be some spoilers in this.
I can't really talk about the philosophical depths of the ape obsession movie land without a few spoilers.
So if you haven't seen the film yet and you don't want them, you might want to wait until you have.
So, the movie starts.
This is all at the very beginning.
There's an experiment being done on monkeys.
Simian virus emerges, wipes out most of mankind.
And you know you're in for a bit of a propaganda fest when you hear an announcer saying that...
The essential functions of government are shutting down.
And then sort of one by one, the lights of the cities go out and mankind returns to a bestial state.
Because naturally, with smaller government, you just get a completely Mel Gibson-inhabited hellscape of brain-slicing boomerangs and people on flaming motorcycles shooting nunchucks at each other.
And then we sort of switch to...
A monkey community, an ape community, and they're all living together in kumbaya, peace and harmony.
Not exactly the way that apes are in the wild where they're...
Pretty rapey with each other and actually really enjoy hunting and eating each other.
But in this noble, savage Rousseauian fantasy, they're all learning ethics and listening to each other and being wise and figuring out all the deep, complex problems of the universe and trust in the future.
A lot of really abstract concepts for...
A group of individuals who've yet to figure out pants, for instance, and who have no genitals.
I guess they come from the Kendall school of asexual reproduction.
But, you know, not that I was really hoping for, but, you know, for the amount of money you pay for the 3D experience, you want a few swinging monkey balls in your face.
Am I right?
Well, let's find out if you go and agree.
So, in the ape community, they're hunting these deer, and they're all swinging through the trees.
Visually spectacular.
I mean, just amazing.
And they're all swinging through the trees, and Caesar and his son, Caesar is the alpha male who's in charge of the pack of apes.
He brings down, or his son brings down a deer, and then his son is about to go...
And get the deer and his father is like, wait, son, wait!
But the son doesn't listen, goes forward and is almost killed by a bear and all this kind of stuff.
And this is, again, a real trope, a real standard of these kinds of movies where the wise elder is in charge and you've just got to listen.
And he says to his son afterwards, son, think.
Before you act, whereas actually he was not appealing to his reason, but only his filial obedience, his sense of doing what his father said, which is not really the same as thinking for yourself.
And this filial piety, this photocopying of the traditions of the tribe, is...
One of these things is very common throughout human history.
Throughout human history, more advanced tribes, more advanced civilizations or cultures often come crashing like tsunamis into the brittle sand castles of more primitive, more repressed, more brutal tribes.
And this is one of the great tensions of human existence, that the...
Old or the age never want to feel obsolete.
They always want to feel like their knowledge is valuable to the young, and therefore they hope that society doesn't change.
If you've ever tried to explain to your grandmother how to use a smartphone, you can understand that it's really hard to hold the aged in high esteem and their competence in the world when they seem bewildered by a good deal of what has sprouted while they were looking.
The old always want their knowledge to remain relevant to the society that they live in, which means that they have a vested interest in society not changing, which is where the conservative impulse in human nature comes from.
The young, generally, want society to change and progress and want to challenge their elders.
Now, Western European society for a long time was very much on the conservative side.
This is sort of known as the Dark Ages.
From sort of the Quattrocento onwards through the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and so on, there has been a lot of challenging of existing wisdom, a lot of challenging of existing ways of thinking and existing ways of doing things.
I mean, in the Middle Ages, you basically inherited the job that...
I don't know.
I don't know.
And then you've engaged in a conversation and you might be taking business away from the guy with the next store.
So it was a very rigid, very photocopy the past kind of situation, which when the world doesn't change, when society doesn't change, then the wisdom of the elders remains sacrosanct.
When society goes through a lot of changes...
Then society values the elderly much less, right?
So society has done a huge amount of work to outgrow racism, and yet there are a lot of older people in a variety of races who remain somewhat vestigial racists, and they're considered somewhat tolerable because their age would never be accepted in a younger person.
But they look kind of foolish, and they look kind of retrograde, and they're kind of showing the length of their teeth in their old perspectives, in their historical perspectives.
Now, because Western European culture, really going back to Socrates, has really fought against the ossification of society through an over-reverence of the age, in other words, we've been willing to kick down all of the sky-shredding paragons of virtue known as historical conservatism and carve new paths in the world, there's been a lot of progress and a lot of technological advancement and so on for good and for ill.
Now, when Europeans go crashing into societies like Africa or North America where there are natives to the country, those natives tend to be in a pretty stagnant situation.
Very primitive, very stagnant.
And that's because there's a lot of brutality towards the young to conform to that which gives the elderly the most value.
In this movie, there's a challenging of the young towards the old in the human communities, but not really in the ape communities.
And that, again, I think is very telling.
You know, son, in the ape communities, don't do this.
And the kid does this and almost gets killed, and it reinforces the value of the father ape.
And at the same time, though, there's in this view of the apes, there's this really fascinating and very common, again, it's a real standard in sort of post-Rousseauian views of ancient cultures or primitive cultures, which is called the noble savage, which You know, the Conan who is in touch with nature and uses all parts of the buffalo and lives in harmony with the natural elements and all this.
They're gentle, they're beautiful, they're loving.
And if they observe the highly predacious white man, it is with a tear rolling down their stone-faced cheeks and all that kind of stuff.
And that is a very common view.
And essentially it comes from religion, right?
Because in religion...
God, who is perfect, made man.
And, of course, throughout most of human history, and even now, man is in a pretty sorry state relative to divine perfection.
And so, in religion, humanity, as a creation of an all-knowing, all-loving, all-perfect God, must have started at the top.
And then, somehow, it has to be explained how he's wallowing in medieval crap and dying of smallpox and getting cholera from drinking from moose tracks and stuff like that.
So, how do we go from up here?
Ah!
Right down to here.
Well, this is, you know, we disobeyed God.
There was a fall from grace.
You get kicked out of the Garden of Eden and so on.
And that's how you explain that you go from up here to down here.
That's the religious approach.
The Darwinian approach, you know, really reverses this.
And says, well, we started as like disgusting sexed protozoa who are having orgies with themselves in fetid primordial soup rainwater.
And it was pretty much uphill from there.
And so from the Darwinian view, we start low and we're trying to sort of climb higher.
But from the religious view, we must have started high and we have fallen from grace.
Now...
When the more primitive cultures were found, there was this idea that, again, comes from the Garden of Eden, that it must have been perfect at some point in the past and we fell from grace.
There's this sense of...
These primitive cultures have this wonderful symbiosis with nature and they love it and so on.
Now, I personally, myself, I lived for a year and a half in the woods, in the middle of nowhere, in a tent, in summer, in winter, looking for gold and prospecting and claims-taking and so on.
Not that nice in a lot of ways.
Not the end of the world.
A lot of beauty in nature and so on, but...
Ducks and bears and so on.
So, I don't really think that it's fair and realistic or rational to say, well, you know, back to these ancient cultures, it was just so wonderful, it was so great, and so on.
That, again, comes from the religious standpoint, but you can see it in this movie.
When you look at the eighties, You know, gentle and peaceful and they've figured out an ethical system.
Ape, not kill other ape!
You know, which is great to know that apes that we taught how to speak can figure out ethics while we remain head-up-brass cultural Marxist relativists, except when it comes to politically incorrect stuff, in which case it's release the tigers of moral outrage from the horde.
Now, something else...
Which you see, and again, I don't want to say that the whole movie is cliched, but there are cliches in it that are really important to see, and know why they're there.
Okay, so, it's the Jabbermob.
And the Jabbermob is...
And then the leader says, Enough!
And everyone's like...
You see this in courtroom movies all the time.
The lawyers are like, and they're just like, my courtroom, enough!
And the lawyers are like, okay, let's listen to what the judge says.
So the Jabbermob is this rising cacophony of disagreeing views, everyone talking, no one listening, no sense being made, and you zoom in on the leader.
And the leader gets this stony-eyed, fierce Dwayne Johnson taking a deep crap face look on their face.
And then it's like, ENOUGH! And then everyone's like, and this is...
Not only is this siblings with a parent, you know, siblings yammering.
Yeah, I didn't do it.
It's my fault.
He stepped on my toe first.
He stole my toilet.
ENOUGH! But this is why people think you need the centralized authority in society to tell people what to do.
Like in the absence of a government, you're just going to have this mad cacophony of everyone disagreeing with everyone and not listening and fighting.
So in order to cut through the jabber mob, you have to...
Enough!
We will do this.
I will decide at dawn.
Everyone's like, okay, I guess that beats the jabber.
Everyone's saying rhubarb in the background.
And the same thing happens in the human community.
So the human community hears about the apes.
Or the apes can...
And then the leader's...
Enough!
I will give you a speech that will calm your rabbit-shrieked cocaine-based nervous system into some sort of compliance.
I mean, every time you see it, it's literally the same scene over and over and over again.
Obviously, there's apes and lawyers, because one day we hope that lawyers as a whole will evolve into some sort of ape-like life form.
But this is something that is so common.
And it also ties into the fact that it's really hard to have social dramas without a very strict hierarchy, right?
So, both the humans and the apes work on a very strict hierarchy.
It's alpha, you take orders, there's a guy in charge who tells everyone what to do, and everyone's just like, okay...
Okay.
And this is just silly.
Imagine, you know, if some little kid is playing around and says, there will be war!
Everyone's like, okay, I guess the kid's playing, right?
But when the, enough!
The leader says, there will be war!
Everyone's like, oh, war!
There will be war!
So without the leader who gets to tell everyone to do...
It's pretty hard to have these big stone-shaking dramas of massive war.
There have to be, like, these leaders, Enough!
War!
And then everybody's like, Let's go along with that guy.
And, I mean, there's kind of a truth in this in a lot of ways, right?
I mean, most people live their lives like a javelin thrown into a deep pond.
They'll even leave a ripple behind them.
And they live their lives as badly rendered CGI extras in the background that you don't even know are there.
Because there's just some vague movement where the leader's eyes are like, enough!
War!
And so there's some kind of truth in it, but it is pretty revealing.
And it's interesting to think what these movies would be like if there wasn't this rigid hierarchical leader-based structure that everyone had to sort of follow in line with.
Also fascinating in the movie is it is rabidly pro-gun.
I mean, gun control, you know, as the old saying goes, God created man and woman, but Smith and Wesson made them equal.
Nobody listens to anyone.
Unless they have a gun.
You know, I'm sorry, I can't hear you because your gun comes with a silencer.
But if you can hear the gun and see the gun, it's like, okay, now you have my attention.
So, of course, nobody's scared of the apes.
Nobody cares about the apes fundamentally until the apes get a whole bunch of guns and then magically learn how to ride horses and shoot with no training or experience whatsoever.
But it is amazing The degree to which it is pro-gun.
And again, there's nothing explicit, but it's very much in the movie, interwoven the whole way through.
And I think that's...
That's really important.
Now, there's a bad ape, and his number is Cobra.
Now, Cobra has a hatred towards humankind, and that's because he was an animal in a lab, and they tested on him, and he says they tortured him, and so on.
And so he really, really dislikes humans.
Now, there's also a human who really dislikes apes.
For no reason other than he's a complete moron who blames the apes for the virus that killed people, even though the virus came from human beings experimenting on it.
So he's ridiculous.
No reason whatsoever.
And that, I think, is really interesting that the bad ape has to have a whole backstory that explains why he's bad.
But the guy, the male, the human male, just bad.
Just, you know, bad, mean, stupid, idiot guy.
And again, I think that's really interesting and falls into what is generally the man-woman paradigm, right?
The apes are a weaker species.
They don't have guns, right?
And so everything gets explained, but the dominance, the white male, he's just bad, right?
And again, as people get worse, I swear, they get hairier and grimier and more of the stuff that I talked about in a couple of other movie reviews.
Bad!
Because beards.
There is one interesting character.
His name is Maurice.
And he basically is a pretty plump Chewbacca with an Astra face who's pretty maternal and caring and so on.
He's male.
Maurice French.
Male, French.
Anyway, worth watching to see what happens to good people during a time of increasing tyranny.
I think that's fascinating to watch.
And again, for those of us who are trying to fight for virtue during a time of significantly declining freedoms, I guess I can count myself as among the tribe of the plump-ass-faced Chewbacca types.
So...
The humans have to go and get a dam working to get power.
And again, this is something that happens so often throughout human history, which is the more advanced culture needs resources that the less advanced culture, in this case the apes, happens to be sitting on.
And they try to negotiate and this and that.
And again, you know that the price of conformity is a lack of progress.
And the reward for rebellion against the tropes and sayings and, quote, wisdoms of your elders is progress.
And the apes pay a price for a strict hierarchy and for not being allowed to question their fathers and so on.
And that is really important as well.
The other thing that's important is that at the beginning...
The mean ape, the bad ape, and you know he's bad because he looks like you put the elephant man in a blender and added dinosaur teeth.
He is incredibly violent and is willing to attack the bear and kill the bear and so on, and then he turns out to be a bad guy who's a totalitarian dictator and so on.
Well, you know, when violence serves the state, right, serves, in this case, sees that the leader, when the really psychotically violent and aggressive serve the leader, well, then they're heroes!
But then when they turn on the leader, that's...
Well, that's really bad, right?
As the old saying goes, treason doth never prosper.
What's the reason?
Well, if it prosper, none dare call it treason.
So, generally, the last thing I want to say about the movie is two things I want to say.
The first is that there's this cliché throughout history that war is a tragic misunderstanding.
War is, you know, just a tragic misunderstanding.
So there's a story of, I think it's ancient Greece, it's maybe in the Peloponnesian War, there's these two armies that are facing each other, and both generals have said, there will be no war!
Enough!
There will be no war!
Unless somebody else, like, if you see the other guy making an aggressive move, then there'll be a war, and they're both sort of in this stasis, and then one soldier sees a Snake crawling up his leg.
He lifts up his sword and hacks it, and everyone thinks that's a signal to charge, and then the...
There will be war!
There's this huge war that goes on, and it's all a tragic misunderstanding, and this series of misunderstandings, this is like a grim, exceedingly hairy episode of Three's Company, because there's all of these misunderstandings that, like dominoes, propel people into war, and...
There are these betrayals and mistrusts and so on, but basically it's just a bunch of misunderstandings.
There's this trope, this cliché, I think, that the bloodthirsty mob clings to when the bloodlust has dissipated, which is to say, well, that was a real tragedy, wasn't it?
Like, you know, like, I go and shoot some guy in the chest.
And then I throw the gun over my shoulder and I say, whoa, smell of cordite.
Oh my god, that guy has a giant hole in his chest and two shotgun shells sticking out of his shoulder blades.
What a terrible tragedy.
I wonder how this happened.
And this is what is continually told as a story of war.
War induces a kind of bloodthirsty, sociopathic alter ego state in people.
And, you know, for those who are around for the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003 and to the retaliatory war against the Taliban in Afghanistan after 9-11, You can see this war fever growing over people.
They go literally mental.
All capacity for empathy, all desires to understand, all desires to search history to try and figure out why the attacks are occurring completely goes out the window.
And it's basically, want to drink blood, bring skull of enemy.
I wish to take a sweet dump on their departed souls.
Actually, they probably don't quite say it like a gay...
Montgomery Cliff.
But anyway, there is this bloodlust that happens for people, and then the war happens, and then the shit happens after the war.
And everyone's like, whoa, that war was a total tragedy.
Like they didn't take the shotgun and point it at their enemy's chest and repeatedly pull the trigger until their arms ached.
Until there was just a click and turn.
Give me more shells!
There will be war!
People do all of this crazy, psychotic, alter-ego, sociopathic, violent, bloodlust cheering, right?
And then when the crap of war occurs, like when the bodies start coming home, when the blowback continues to happen, when the soldiers who are traumatized come home, because, you know, being a soldier in a repeated deployment, basically it's mass murderer training, it's serial killer training.
These guys come home completely traumatized, which is why there's such high rates of suicide and divorce and so on.
So that's pretty crappy.
When, let's say, the government prints a massive amount of money so that it doesn't have to raise taxes to the point where personal financial losses might interfere to a small degree with the rabid, soul-slaughtering bloodlust of the general population, when they pump a whole lot of money into the economy to shore up a war-destroyed economy and then say, let's say, you know, There's a housing crash as a result of a housing bubble that was created through the overprinting of the money.
And then let's say there's massive unemployment.
When all of the crap of war happens, everybody kind of wakes up from this bloodlust daze.
This coma of vampiric, flesh-eating madness.
They wake up and they say, what a tragedy this war is.
What a horrible misunderstanding.
But this is all nonsense.
This is all nonsense.
This war, the war between the humans and the apes, was not a result of a series of misunderstandings.
It was a result of manipulative bloodlust on the part of the leaders and everyone's willingness to follow those leaders.
Everyone's willingness to follow those leaders.
Now, when the mean ape...
Gets in charge of the apes later on in the movie.
He kills an ape who won't kill a human.
And everyone, all the other, he's completely unarmed, just standing there alone, and all the other apes around him, and they've got guns.
Why don't I shoot this guy?
They've got a rule that says, ape, not kill ape!
And he just killed someone, so they should shoot him, right?
right?
I mean, at least according to sort of basic third-party self-defense ethics.
But they don't.
And then later he says, some ape says, they are following Kobe out of fear.
It's like fear?
They're not following him out of fear because he's leading them to war.
If they were afraid, then they wouldn't go to war, right?
They're following him because he gives them permission to vent their bloodlust.
It's like political correctness.
Political correctness puts like a sky-painted laser target on groups you are now allowed to hate.
You're now allowed to hate a variety of groups who are labeled sexist or racist or misogynist or white males or privileged people or whatever, the rich.
Now you're allowed to just full-on, full-bore hate in the same way that you just hate the Taliban, in the same way that you just hate Saddam Hussein.
You're just allowed to hate these people.
And once people can generate that fiery, smog-breath furnace of hatred in your chest and they point it at someone, Most people, they just turn into these sky-bombing drones of nationalistic compliance, just willing to disassemble other human beings because some asshole points at them and says, War!
Bad people!
Org!
Rip them from limb from limb!
Okay!
Right?
I mean, the war is the result of the compliance with the leaders, but people don't like that.
They like to say it was a tragedy of...
Misunderstandings.
This is not what happens with war at all.
And then, the last thing I want to say is that when a more advanced culture conquers a less advanced culture, and basically, since most free people want to trade with each other, this means when a government that has more resources because there's more of a free market in the home country It's no accident that throughout history, the big empires have always been preceded by massive advancements in free trade.
This is true for the Roman Empire, which had free trade throughout most of the empires.
It's true of the British, the German, the French.
You get freedom, free trade, and the wealth of your country vastly increases, which you can then tax and use to build a military and then go and have an empire.
And the Empire then destroys your freedom.
It's a lovely, lovely merry-go-round, which hopefully at some point will have the good sense to step off these champing, blood-soaked horses of history, going round and round.
Sometimes we will get tired of photocopying graves over and over again and calling them art and culture.
What it means is that a government that has grown fat on the fruits of free market freedoms and economic progress then goes and attacks a country whose leadership, whose state or tribal leadership, has not allowed a free market and therefore has fewer resources with which to fight off the invaders.
That is the first round of cultural destruction.
And then the second round of cultural destruction occurs when the new rulers of whatever land it is, the new inhabitants, the new citizens, then get this sentimentality recoil.
And then where formerly they viewed, like come over to North America and the natives here are first viewed as little savages, you know, scalp them, kill them, kill them.
And then you get sort of Graham Greene movies where they are noble savages and so on.
The first round is the military round, which kills, and the biomedical warfare round, which smallpox and all that, which kills millions of the local inhabitants.
The second round, which in some ways is really the coup de gratte of the entire culture, is the sentimentality, which then drives people to use the state to give a bunch of resources and...
Ends the culture.
Culture and progress is like a muscle.
It works against resistance.
If you want to be a stronger human being, then get engaged in a difficult fight.
If you want to be a stronger physically human being, lift weights that are hard for you to lift.
And it's the same thing with culture.
When resistance is removed, human inspiration dies on the vine.
And there's been tons of experiments done Throughout history, whenever people get a lot of free stuff, their cultures tend to die.
Or as the great economist Thomas Sowell said, the welfare state has done more damage to the black family than slavery ever did.
When you give people a whole bunch of free stuff...
Their ethics decay, their communities decay, their families decay.
It basically is like encasing a human being in a body cast.
The bones and the muscles rot from inactivity.
So when you overwhelm a more primitive culture with a military might, that is horribly destructive enough.
But the final coup de grace of that culture is then when you're Guilt-ridden, hallmarked sentimentality, tear-laced sentimentality arises in your breast.
Then what you do is you then give them a whole bunch of guilt-ridden free stuff that you actually haven't earned but simply allow the government to borrow or print into existence.
You give them a whole bunch of free stuff out of guilt, which is actually really the coup de grace, the end slaughterhouse of the existing culture.
And that's why I think that the noble savage idea is so dangerous.
It tends to provoke...
Guilt and the guilt...
People who act out of guilt usually end up acting in an extremely destructive manner, particularly when the guilt is unearned.
So, I think it's worth going to see.
I hope that I've given you some stuff to think about.
I certainly thank the filmmakers and a good chunk of the actors for the work that they did.
You really just...
You do have to listen to Kerry Russell as her character...
They have one human habitation and they go over a hill and the human habitation is burning in flames and she's like, oh look, the human city is in flames.
And you can almost hear her teeth widening a little bit as she yawns saying the line, it's the end of the world as we know it.
Where's my Oscar?
Oh yeah, one last thing.
One last thing.
So the leader of the apes is killed.
And he's on basically a mountaintop.
And he falls, not down a mountain, but he falls onto the ground.
This is the middle of the night.
Some point in the night.
The human characters who are in the monkey slum, the human characters run like the wind to secure their freedom and escape the apes who are chasing them, right?
Flash forward to like 9,000 things that happen in the movie, flash forward past all of that, and what happens is the humans have been running and running and running for approximately 12 to 16 hours.
Now, I'm not a terrifically fit fellow.
Fairly fit.
Pretty sure if somebody gave me 14 or 16 hours to run, I might make it slightly further than about 47 feet.
Because they've left the top of the mountain.
They're running!
They're running!
Literally, it's the next day!
It's morning time!
It's not just a really bright full moon.
There's no giant supernova.
Zeus is not redescending from his throne.
It's the next day!
And where have they gotten to?
They've gotten from the top of the mountain to where the monkey's body is.
First of all, they find him, which is a miracle itself.
And they fall to where the monkey's body is.
They've run in 12 to 14 hours, about 45 to 50 feet.
I mean, what are they stopping?
For rock, paper, scissors?
Okay, charades.
We're in a rush, right?
Monkeys aren't.
Anyway, I just, you know, I don't mind...
You know, a leap of faith in a movie, but please don't make it a leap of complete insanity.
That's just one minor bit that the movie makers were slightly harder on.
But anyway, enough, enough, enough.
Thank you everyone so much for watching this review.
If you enjoy these reviews, fdrurl.com slash donate if you'd like to help out the show.
This is Stefan Molyneux for Free Domain Radio saying, have yourselves a great weekend, everyone.
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