Dec. 23, 2015 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
24:09
3159 The Truth About Star Wars: The Force Awakens
“Star Wars” occupies an epic and unique place in the pantheon of youthful fantasies, and the recent reboot by JJ Abrams deepens and extends the glowing mayhem and radical anti-family message of the original series.The original Star Wars emerged during a time of catastrophic family breakdown in the West – the divorce rate had risen 300% from the 1960s to the 1970s – leaving hundreds of millions of boys without fathers. Luke Skywalker’s multi-movie quest to find and save his father mirrors the search for masculinity which has obsessed and crippled entire generations of young men.What is the Truth About Star Wars: The Force Awakens?
Star Wars occupies an epic and unique place in the pantheon of youthful fantasies, and the recent reboot by J.J. Abrams deepens and extends the glowing mayhem and radical anti-family message of the original series.
In most epic stories, parents are conveniently removed from the home, allowing the young hero to easily slide under the tutelage of a warrior master and learn the ways of obedience and drama and war.
In the original Star Wars, family life was portrayed as mundane and humiliating as a young Luke Skywalker was expected to work productively on his uncle's farm.
Historically, epics tend to be fantasies.
That feed the murder-lust of the young who were needed by the aristocracy to wage war on their behalf.
The word adventure basically means learn the dehumanizing joy of murdering for your masters.
In these stories, boring parents are replaced by wise hypnotic elders who teach young men and now young women the excitement and joys of war.
This conveniently allows the authority of the state to displace the authority of parents, transitioning young men from pimply-faced teens to hardened warriors serving their economic and political masters.
Hey, who wants to work for a banker when you can kill for a banker?
The original Star Wars emerged during a time of catastrophic family breakdown in the West.
The divorce rate had risen 300% from the 1960s to the 1970s, leaving hundreds of millions of boys without fathers.
Luke Skywalker's multi-movie quest to find and save his father mirrors the search for masculinity which has obsessed and crippled entire generations of young men.
The resentments against men harbored by abandoned boys and their bitter clinging single mothers showed up in the all-male evil of the Empire and the endless phallic symbols scattered throughout the movie from Darth Vader's helmet to lightsabers to the insemination sequence of navigating a dangerous trench to drop a tiny sperm into a giant Death Star egg in which birth is destruction.
The modern semi-socialist state made necessary by the collapse of Western families – the welfare state is in reality the single mother state – is shown by the giant Death Star Egg, which has the capacity to destroy entire civilizations, as unleashed and state-subsidized female hypergamy has repeatedly done throughout human history.
Single mothers tend to be furulently anti-male, as do radical feminists, which is why the two rose as one twinned monster in the 60s and the 70s.
Feminists portray men as evil and patriarchal in order to provoke the white knight, protect the eggs, response that actually characterizes historical masculinity, While single mothers have to pretend that all men are shiftless and irresponsible, otherwise they themselves will be blamed by their children who are forced to grow up poor and fatherless.
Almost always the same thing because their mother chose to mate with a bad man or drove away a good man, which is even worse.
When hundreds of millions of children grow up without the security and benevolence and high standards of fathers, someone is to blame and society generally far more comfortable blaming absent men than present, difficult and dangerous women.
Darth Vader's name is pretty much an open acknowledgment of this anti-male theme.
Vader sounds like father and even is the actual word for father in Dutch, and so Darth Vader, dark father, themes dominate the series.
Now, not content with killing off one father, Darth Vader must also kill his own father figure, the Emperor, in order to save his son, but not himself.
Vader's mask is a metaphor for the absent father.
When the father is found and the mask is removed, a broken loser is revealed, often the experience of fatherless boys who track down their own absent sperm donor.
Now, the fall of Rome geopolitics of the later Star Wars series, tragically overshadowed by the petulant zombie pseudo-presence of Hayden Christensen as the young Darth Vader, showed with some accuracy how republics tend to devolve into dictatorships through sophistry and the endless generation of artificial fears.
While the new movie contains within its hyperkinetic core a certain weariness at these blindly repetitive cycles of history.
Friedrich Nietzsche's old warning that when one hunts monsters, one has to be careful not to become a monster shows up in the upgraded CGI rehash of the earlier story.
So, in the new movie, the Empire has been destroyed, but now a new villainous gang has arisen from the ashes of old evil.
It's called either the First Order or One Direction, I can't remember which.
Now the parallels between this and the destruction of Saddam Hussein and the rise of ISIS are clear.
You even have poor defenseless villagers in the desert who are repeatedly bombed from the air.
Meet the new faceless sociopath!
Same as the old faceless sociopath, but bigger.
It's hard to avoid the repetitions from the original story.
The Force Awakens is not really a new Star Wars movie, but kind of Star Wars 2.0, now with better graphics and more diversity.
A droid has something of value, everyone tries to grab it, a Death Star destroys planets, and endless computer cycles are eaten up, rendering mosquito swarms of spaceships squirting laser cannons at each other.
This repetition of dastardly evil is mirrored, and in fact caused, by the complete absence of any exploration of childhood trauma and its effects on the characters.
In the first film, Luke Skywalker's aunt and uncle are brutally murdered, and he discovers they're smoking corpses, then...
Basically walks off whistling to his new life as an intergalactic slaughter merchant.
He shows no sadness and never refers to them again.
He has no emotional bond with them whatsoever, despite being raised by them, which means he's basically a complete sociopath.
His cold heart has all of the human features of a stormtrooper's helmet.
In the new film we meet Finn.
Now Finn is a stormtrooper who was cloned, raised without parents, and trained to be a mindless, obedient, killing robot pretty much from birth.
As an adult, he has a strong conscience.
He is engaging, charming, funny, enthusiastic, and, for obvious reasons, mindlessly horny.
In other words, despite being raised in conditions that your average African child soldier would find utterly horrifying, he is a perfectly well-adjusted, mentally healthy, courageous, he's a good team player, he's socially poised, warm, and funny.
This mirrors the fantasy of Harry Potter, who was also endlessly abused as a child and shares most of this eerie steroid mental health characteristics that Finn has.
This denial of the effects of childhood trauma is the fundamental reason for the consistent re-emergence of intergalactic evil, not just in Star Wars, but in all these stories and in the world as well.
Until and unless we, as a worldwide culture, begin to accept and deal with the planet-destroying effects of child abuse, the effects of that abuse will continue to manifest as the fearful loathing and endless hunger for control that characterizes the unhealed, broken mind.
In the West, perhaps in the world as a whole, the ancient fantasy that evil can only be fought by murder and that after the murder comes a tranquil time of eternal paradise Well, it's finally beginning to unravel in the post-Iraq world.
By the way, this is actually one of the great strengths of the book The Hobbit, which is that the death of Smaug brings not peace, but war.
Now, evil is not bred by child abuse alone, but rather the abuse that remains unacknowledged.
It is not victimhood that breeds destruction, but rather victims who are further abused and rejected By being attacked for the symptoms of their abuse, rather than receiving sympathy, strength, and healing from those with the moral strength to side with the victims by openly identifying the evils of the abusers.
Which most people are afraid to do for the simple reason that sympathizing with victims provokes the wrath of their abusers.
And apparently, we have forgotten what real moral courage looks like.
Since unacknowledged trauma breeds evil, killing evil tends to multiply evil.
Blowing up the Death Star in the original Star Wars creates a power vacuum filled by the First Order, an even greater evil.
The original Death Egg could only destroy a single planet.
The new Death Egg can destroy three!
And for more on this, please have a listen to my reading of Lloyd DeMoss' great book, The Origins of War and Child Abuse.
You can get this at freedomainradio.com slash free.
It's free.
Now, interestingly, and I think tellingly, in The Force Awakens, the fight against evil transitions from a desert to a snowy forest, which mirrors the original desert war in Iraq and Syria, which is now shifting to Europe, as over a million migrants have illegally entered Europe from the Middle East and are currently driving up rape rates in Sweden, home to a fair number of snowy forests.
Now, much has been made of the casting of a woman as Rey, the new Luke.
It is somehow considered to be a break from convention.
While her, I don't know, let's just say character, is in fact perfectly boring and predictable.
A hyper-empowered, pearly, feminist robot of implausibly infinite abilities.
Ray is what by now has become a yawningly cliched stock character.
The all-competent ingenue or the ACI. Now the ACI starts off as a low-status character.
Whose endless and escalating waves of superlative competence quickly wash away any and all hints of reality or limitations.
A superwoman fetish of automatic and unearned abilities who ends up as little more than a delusional mangina hymn to bottomless female vanity.
Rey, this film's ACI, turns out to be fantastic at hand-to-hand combat, flying various spaceships, sword fighting, using the Force, CGI cliff climbing, to name just a few.
Compare this effortless estrogen excellence to Luke Skywalker's slow grind to mastery.
Luke had to work for three long films to even begin mastering the Force, apprenticing at the gnarled feet of Yoda for months at a time.
Rey, on the other hand, she's a woman.
See, she merely has to frown for five or ten seconds in order to master the force.
When standing with Han Solo at the controls of the Millennium Falcon, Rey fixes a problem that Han Solo cannot even identify.
She also goes below deck to repair its malfunctioning innards.
I mean, come on!
Han Solo flew and maintained the Millennium Falcon for decades!
Knew it inside and out!
Then this vapid ACI wanders in with no knowledge of the complex spacecraft and knows exactly what to do to fix problems.
Some people could argue that as a scavenger she knows how machinery works, but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.
Being a garbage picker does not give one the magical powers of a master mechanic.
Rey also regularly fights grown men trained from birth in the ways of combat and wins easily.
She weighs maybe a little over a buck ten and regularly takes down multiple 200 pound jacked up monster warriors.
She's never shot a blaster before, doesn't even remember to take the safety off, but wins gunfights, soldiers trained from birth in the ways of combat, who seem to think that the best way to win a blaster fight with an ACI is to stand under a tree and stare at her boobs.
This is like expecting a chess newbie to confidently and easily beat a grandmaster who has been playing for decades.
Now this is a very toxic and dangerous message to give to girls.
And it is only believable because it has been so mindlessly repeated over the past few decades.
If you say to a girl that they do not need to work hard to master any particular skill or ability, and do not reinforce the need to respect well-practiced competence, you infect them with the delusion that they can achieve great things simply by being alive and being girls.
Look, many people lament the lack of female high achievement in various fields.
This, in fact, is one of the primary culprits.
When I watched the original Star Wars as a kid, I clearly got the message that it took a long time to master any particular discipline.
And that process was often unpleasant, painful, and difficult.
What happens when girls watch the new Star Wars film?
Nowhere is it portrayed that girls need to work hard to acquire skills and that they're really bad at things until they put in that work.
I guess apparently being bad at things, that's just a man's job.
When Finn, a soldier trained from birth who has spent most of his life learning to fight in and on spaceships, grasps the defensive guns on the Millennium Falcon, he has no idea what to do and it takes him a while to get reasonably good at it.
The same thing happened to Luke in the 70s.
On the other hand, has spent her youth picking up garbage, Wally style, but is able to pull off the most ridiculous aerial maneuvers on an unfamiliar spaceship, outflying professional pilots trained from childhood.
I'll actually talk more about this insanity in more detail on my review of the movie Frozen, we'll put the link.
Now whatever reasonable backstory you think might explain her abilities, Luke was an amateur pilot on Tatooine at least, it is nowhere explained how Rey gains her miraculous abilities to take on a master swordsman.
Sword fighting is a pretty difficult and dangerous skill to acquire, as I remember from playing Macbeth.
Rey simply has the skill and credibly engages in combat against a master swordsman.
This is beyond ridiculous and it is not a message I want my daughter to see.
So you see, boys trained from birth to fight are terrible at fighting, but girls who've never flown a spaceship are immediate experts who can outfly relentlessly trained pilots.
Men have to work for years to become maybe half as good as completely inexperienced girls.
This is not female empowerment!
This is paternalistic condescension, the patting on the head of an idiot child who produces a vaguely comprehensible drawing.
This mad appeal to short-term female vanity comes at the expense of long-term success.
Excellence is hard, hard work.
It is not just immediately granted to those accidentally in the possession of budding breasts.
But somehow, showing a girl achieving excellence through grueling labor is insulting to women.
Instead, automatic female excellence insults male competence.
But who cares about that?
Those are only men's feelings.
The final point, imagine if these situations were reversed.
And there's a movie where men wandered into areas of female expertise and did far better than the women did without any training at all.
This would be considered highly insulting to women and a vainglorious portrayal of delusional and impotent male vanity.
Reverse the genders, though, and everyone calls it empowerment and a great role model for girls, which it most emphatically is not.
Any group you portray as being great without effort is not a group you have any love and respect for at all.
You are damning them to inconsequential vanity rather than empowering their tangible achievement.
The end result?
Well, Almost a quarter of American women in their 40s and 50s are on antidepressants.
Perhaps if someone had told them the truth about achievement when they were younger.
Here's another important point.
Given the endless hyper-competence of modern women in movie and video game combat, how could women ever be the victims of physical violence in real life?
Two strong soldiers get their asses kicked by Ray.
In the movie Salt, Angelina Jolie regularly throws her 95-pound stick-figured combat moves at giant neck-bearded men beating them handily.
Since this is all accepted as valid and empowering, how could there possibly be any such thing as rape culture?
Or patriarchy, for that matter?
If women are victims, they must be weaker.
But if they are weaker, They obviously cannot take on men twice their size and weight.
Which is it, ladies?
If you're victims, you cannot be fighters.
If you're fighters, then you cannot be victims.
And isn't it dangerous to endlessly encourage women to fight men twice their size?
Why do women ever even bother calling the cops?
I can easily imagine a feminist complaining that the fantastical fighting competence of movie and video game women is a great insult to female victims of violence, because it perpetrates the myth that women can easily fight back against larger and well-trained male opponents.
At least I could imagine that if I thought feminists were even remotely interested in consistency.
Now, little has been made of an even more hardcore female hypocrisy in the movie.
Finn, terrified of the monstrous intergalactic death cult that raised him to pretty much kill anyone not wearing a Teflon mask, wants to run away and hide on distant planets.
Rey roundly condemns Finn for his cowardice, making that scornful World War I lemon-white feather face that indicates a complete denial of egg accessibility.
However, shortly afterwards, Rey has an unpleasant vision and runs away, saying she wants to have nothing to do with fighting or the war or anything.
In other words, Rey has nothing but contempt for Finn's fear of those who destroyed his childhood and have the power to destroy entire planets, while her fear of a bad dream is portrayed as perfectly legitimate.
Hey, if I said you had a choice to go to war or have a bad dream, which would you take?
It is only the modern Western cult of women are wonderful that blinds us to this bottomless hypocrisy.
Women are not wonderful.
They are people.
Anything else is sexism.
Excessive praise arises from the same bigotry matrix as excessive criticism.
Yes, pay attention black people.
On a lighter note, I did find the admixture of easily identifiable accents to be most enjoyable in the movie.
It seemed at times as if half the city of Aberdeen had collided with half the cast of Downton Abbey in zero gravity.
By the way, Scotsman in space, please, please, no kilts.
I beg you.
Also, um, resource management?
Never the evil Empire's strong suit in these movies.
Seriously, they have so many spaceships that they just leave decrepit Star Destroyers to rot in the desert, but they seem so perpetually short of TIE fighters that they can only ever send two or three after the most important fugitives in the galaxy.
In Star Trek, it's a well-known cliché that characters in red shirts generally never made it back to the Enterprise from the papier-mâché alien sets of the first series.
Similarly, here's my tip.
If you want to survive a Star Wars movie, take off your mask.
No one with a visible face ever seems to get killed, at least up close.
Also, if you want to live, be a woman!
There's only one direct threat against an evil woman in The Force Awakens, and that is to throw her into a garbage chute, which happens off-screen if it even happens at all.
The Force Awakens is like a mini morality lesson of the 20th century.
Don't be a disposable white male if you wish to survive!
Finally, there's a feminist challenge called the Bechdel Test, which is the presence of a scene where two women talk about something other than a man.
Let us institute a test of movie masculinity called the Ball Crush Test, which goes like this.
Do men and women die in equal proportions?
If not, is this not virulently anti-male sexism?
Are there equal numbers of male and female villains?
I'm guessing not.
If there are female villains, is there villainy explained in a sympathetic backstory?
Maleficent!
Do male villains get the same sympathetic backstories?
When male villains are killed, is their death more brutal than female villains?
If male villains target women, are they depicted as more evil than the male villains who target men?
Do women sacrifice themselves to save men, at least to the degree that men sacrifice themselves to save women?
If these standards are not met, you're not watching a movie.
You are watching anti-male war propaganda.
Because it dehumanizes and objectifies men, let us deploy the ancient saying that the beginning of wisdom is to call things by their proper names.
