In this highly theoretical Zootopia universe, all the animals live in peace and harmony with each other, at the price of having nothing to eat except the odd illicit popsicle. Predators have overcome their natural instincts, have evolved past the hunger to chew on prey, and seem to have sublimated their dominant instincts into a more dangerous thirst for political power.The grim reality soon to be learned by the West is that just because you forget about nature, does not mean that nature forgets about you.Freedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyne from Free Domain Radio.
I hope you're doing well.
When I was a child, I was introduced to two fundamental concepts that I still accept to this day in which have fundamentally conditioned my thinking and approach to the world as a whole.
The first was the existence of evil introduced to me through the devil and the still vivid memories of the Second World War in the minds and hearts of those around me.
The second was the dangers of nature introduced through a series of stories and books and movies.
Now both of these concepts have largely gone by the wayside in the West.
We no longer really believe in evil and we have tamed and distanced ourselves enough from nature to view it as benevolent.
The animals that we domesticated thousands of years ago we now view as friendly and helpful and cuddly and cute.
We have also domesticated nature itself over the past few decades and now tend to view all nature as friendly and helpful and cuddly and cute.
For instance, at the turn of the 20th century, 90% of Americans were involved in farming.
Now, it's about 2%.
Who these days worries about starving to death because of bad weather or crows or mice or bugs eating their food?
Expecting people who live in cities to be nervous about nature is like waiting for turtles to fear sunburn.
Traditionally, as our species developed, men went out hunting and guarded the perimeters of the tribal lands while women took care of the children and helped with the domestic animals.
As a result, the male view of nature is very different from the female perspective.
Men viscerally understand the grim reality of dangerous predators, including the men of other tribes, of course, and the risky and sometimes deadly business of tracking and cornering and hunting and killing.
Now women, dealing mostly with animals domesticated by men, view nature through a pleasantly sentimental lens, because...
Domesticated animals are non-threatening and downright helpful.
Cats catch the rodents that can infest stored food, dogs warn and guard and herd livestock, chickens give eggs, pigs give bacon, cows and goats give milk, and so on.
Male hunters teach growing boys about the dangers of nature.
Female gatherers and nurturers teach girls about taking care of friendly animals.
For a male hunter, success is when you kill an animal.
For female gatherers, success is keeping domesticated animals alive and healthy.
A hunter's relationship with the animal is win-lose.
A gatherer's relationship is win-win.
Hunters need meat calories to keep them strong for ever-present war.
Gatherers keep the calories constant for children and nursing mothers.
Now, regarding the question of evil, and taking the assumption that the concept of evil has an evolutionary advantage, evil, in its initial conception, was that which is bad for the reproduction of my genes.
For men, an attack from the males of another tribe was the greatest evil.
If the men of tribe B attack and conquer tribe A, the men of tribe A would generally be killed off or enslaved along with their descendants, thus effectively ending the transmission of their genes.
The women, however, would usually be taken as spoils of war, which would allow the continuation of their genetics.
Thus men are conditioned by evolution to guard the tribal perimeters and fight to the death.
If they die in battle, at least their descendants may survive.
And by the way, this explains something that often confuses people about World War I. That young men would prefer to go and fight rather than be handed a white feather by young, fertile women.
The answer comes from evolution.
If women refuse to breed with pacifists, the man's genetics would end there.
If the men go and fight and live, and are thus accepted by fertile women afterwards, their genes have a chance of survival roughly equivalent to their chance of surviving the war.
If no woman will sleep with a pacifist, his gene transmission drops to zero.
If women will sleep with war heroes, and his chance of surviving the war is 50%, then his gene transmission drops only to 50% if he goes to war, rather than to 0% if he stays home.
Thus a man is more afraid of a white feather than an enemy bullet.
Women, on the other hand, would be evolutionarily conditioned to submit to victorious males.
Women who fought to the death against capture would end up taking their genes out of the gene pool and most likely with their children as well.
This is one reason why women have a highly ambivalent relationship to male aggression.
Why some women are so sexually attracted to bad boys or men in uniform or why sadistic fantasies such as Fifty Shades of Grey are so compelling to many women.
Women who universally rejected male aggression would be quickly weeded out of the gene pool since they would refuse to mate with or raise the children of the males who conquered their tribe.
Assuming pacifism has some genetic component, it would be quickly weeded out of the gene pool, although the free market, by sublimating male aggression to market competition, to some degree favors brains over brawn.
These contrasting relationships with evil and with nature have been shifting more and more to the female perspective over the past few decades in the West, elevating the multicultural denial of human evil and the sentimental view of friendly nature, while denigrating male cautions and fears as irrational bigotry.
Being terrified of infection or locusts in the Middle Ages made good sense.
Being terrified of infection in the age of hand soap and antibiotics seems just a little bit paranoid.
Traditionally, male concerns about potential aggression from other tribal males has been buried under a treacly morass of anti-empirical world-hug multiculturalism, while male concerns about the dangers of nature have been plowed under the sticky clods of sentimental environmentalism.
In other words, once men had made the world safe for women and girly men, think cities, sentimental environmentalism and the denial of human evil could flourish like the untended weeds they are.
The grim reality soon to be learned by the West is that just because you forget about nature does not mean that nature forgets about you.
Now all of these principles come to animated and gaudy life in the Disney movie Zootopia.
In this highly theoretical girly universe, all the animals live in peace and harmony with each other at the price of having nothing to eat except the odd illicit popsicle.
Predators have overcome their natural instincts, have evolved past the hunger to chew on prey, and seem to have sublimated their dominant instincts into a more dangerous thirst for political power.
By the way, here be spoilers.
A typical cliché is set up at the very beginning of the movie, which is these small-town, small-minded pragmatists versus the starry-eyed big-city dreamer.
Movies so often instruct people to follow their dreams, go for it, reach for the stars, you name it, for the simple reason that those who end up with the power and authority to make movies are those who have succeeded in pursuing their dreams.
It seems logical to tell everyone to follow their dreams because following their dreams has worked out well for them.
However, the majority of people who follow their dreams not only fail, but often ruin their lives completely.
When I was in my early 20s, I had just left the National Theatre School where I studied acting and playwriting, and I heard the following speech from a friend of a friend who was a successful businessman himself.
Oh, you're interested in theatre.
Wow.
That's challenging.
My brother is an actor and writer, and he went to New York about, ooh, 12 years ago?
Now, hoping to make it big.
And he's done, well, all right, which may be the worst thing in a way.
He's done some off-Broadway plays.
He gets just enough commercial work to pay the bills.
He always feels like he's on the verge of getting one of his plays produced just enough to keep him hungry, I guess.
Or think that great success is just around the corner.
Now he's in his 30s.
He's got no money, no car, no real career, living hand-to-mouth.
And the thing is, he looks at my life.
I'm married.
With three children, and he wants to get married and have kids, but he's basically tortured because he spent 12 years pursuing this thing, his dream, and he hasn't failed, but he hasn't succeeded either.
He's kind of stuck in nowhere land.
It's that waiting for the next thing, you know, where the longer you spend waiting for the bus, the less likely you are to get up and just walk.
And for him to, like, abandon his 12-year investment now is like torture.
Like it says, that's all been for nothing, so...
He's really stuck.
He hasn't made it.
He hasn't failed.
But he always thinks he's just about to make it.
And maybe he is.
I don't know.
I don't know the industry really at all.
But our mother always said, follow your dreams.
And he's a good actor.
Good looking guy.
Works hard.
But his dreams are like...
They've just basically taken him off a cliff.
And he's just hanging in thin air with nowhere to go but older.
So he's in this slow-motion panic.
His dreams are like quicksand.
Well, quicksand that takes forever to swallow you whole.
So beware of people who tell you to follow your dreams.
Their dreams worked out.
Sure, good for them.
But your dreams might swallow you in a slow, paralyzing nightmare.
Thus, when the little bunny's father says that it's good to have dreams, but don't believe in your dreams too much, he's actually giving some decent advice.
However...
Because it's a Disney movie, parental authority and the accumulated wisdom of many generations must forever be portrayed as blind prejudice, out of touch with modern current-year megalomaniacal sensibilities, i.e.
conservatism is always bigotry.
The father says that if you never try anything new, you can never fail.
But the movie is chock-full of so many clichés that it seems like the writers actually follow the advice of the father they mock in the script.
All right.
Here we go.
So, the basic principle in Zootopia is that you can be anything you want to be.
The tiny lady bunny who wants to be a cop can cold cock and knock out an enormous hippo, and is honestly considered to have beaten an obstacle course when she jumps from head to head of the larger animal struggling to climb it.
As a child, this same bunny could not fight a fox barely twice her size.
Even more tellingly, in Zootopia, a child who is definitely not an elephant is told that he can grow up to be an elephant if that's what he really, really wants.
This is...
Narcissistic and solipsistic madness and probably one of the reasons why grumpy Uncle Simon Cowell is so popular because he tells the hard truths to aspiring performers that their mothers seem to have had difficulty either recognizing or getting across.
Blind support of delusion is not kindness but a cowardly form of sadism.
Pretty Barbie Shakira sings the sappy soundtrack.
Try weighing 400 pounds and having her career.
You can be anything you want to be, but you'd better be really pretty if you want to be a pop singer.
This is one of the basic problems of the movie and of the modern West as a whole.
Whose fantasies do we indulgently support?
Toddlers, basically.
If tiny little Steve wants to become an astronaut, good for him.
He's only three.
What does it matter?
It becomes a little different when you start treating adults that way.
The clue is that the Lady Bunny is being treated as a toddler is in the eyeballs.
All Disney females have eyeballs bigger than their hands, tiny chins and short noses.
These are actually the features of babies rather than adults, which tells you exactly how much respect Disney executives have for women.
Neoteny is not empowering.
Neoteny, also known as juvenileization or pedomorphism, is the retention by adults of traits previously seen only in the young.
Human beings are basically neotenized apes.
Our adults look like ape babies.
And it is here, in the thorny depths of metaphysics, that the Zootopia universe runs into the first of its many, many problems.
Can you grow up to be anything you want?
Take the meme of self-identifying as an attack helicopter.
I sexually identify as an attack helicopter.
Ever since I was a boy, I dreamed of soaring over the oil fields, dropping hot, sticky loads on disgusting foreigners.
People say to me that a person being a helicopter is impossible, and I'm effing retarded, but I don't care.
I'm beautiful.
I'm having a plastic surgeon install rotary blades, 30mm cannons, and AMG-114 Hellfire missiles on my body.
From now on, I want you guys to call me Apache, and respect my right to kill from above, and kill needlessly.
If you can't accept me, you're a heliphobe.
I need to check your vehicle privilege.
Thank you for being so understanding.
Also thanks for Lauren Southern for being memetastic.
You see the problem?
A fox has as much chance of growing up into an elephant as I do of ending my life as an attack helicopter.
The female bunny says anyone can be anything.
The male fox with dusty-willed weirdness reminds her that you can only be what you are.
Now, Since in that crazy little thing we call reality people cannot become whatever they want to become, someone or something must be blamed for the existential failure of the universe to grant magical and impossible success to irrational fantasies.
Thus the only reason why people do not become whatever they want to become is because of...
Yes, yes, you guessed it.
All the prejudice and bigotry of others.
So, if the baby fox fails to grow into an adult elephant, that can only be because his family and friends somehow failed to believe in the possibility of his transformation.
This handy excuse, oh so prevalent in the modern world, allows narcissistic delusions to be transformed into resentful rage.
The only reason I didn't grow into being an elephant is because you didn't believe in me, mom!
As an aside, I'm annoyed at Disney for even making me speak such ridiculous sentences out loud.
Let me give you a personal example.
I myself have the physical flexibility of your average slab of sidewalk, but apparently the only reason I never became a gymnast is because other people didn't have faith in my gymnastic abilities, not because I have tendons shorter than the average millennial's attention span.
By the way, for those who want to tell me to just stretch, oh, I stretched every day at theatre school, but it did not help.
Recently, science has proven that stretching does not actually lengthen your tendons, it just makes you more comfortable with the pain of stretching.
So there.
In this insane, never-say-no world of utopia, a mouse can beat up a rhino, a rabbit can take down a hippo, a fox can grow into an elephant, and only prejudice and skepticism stand between the mad dreamer and his delusional dream.
Identity politics is deeply woven through the entire movie.
Foxes are considered to be sneaky, and lo and behold, foxes are, in fact, sneaky.
Now, studies have repeatedly shown that prejudices are generally founded on more than a little bit of truth.
Imagine trying to create the stereotype of criminal Asian grandmothers.
That would be too obvious comedy at best.
Or take the comedy staple of elderly ladies, or me for that matter, doing gangster rap.
So if people believe that foxes are sneaky, and foxes are in fact sneaky, what is wrong with the generalization?
Well, as the fox explains, it's not his fault at all.
You see, since everyone thinks he is sneaky because he is a fox, he might as well be sneaky, since everyone's going to think that anyway.
You see, the prejudice exists because everyone believes it, not because foxes have any tendency towards sneakiness.
Sorry for all these asides, but really that does not at all explain where the prejudice arose from in the beginning.
This circular argument, foxes are sneaky because everyone thinks they are sneaky, must have had a beginning point.
Plus, of course, small predators are sneaky.
They can't overpower much.
So here Zootopia shows us two fundamentally oppositional perspectives and makes no attempt to resolve them.
See, for the girl bunny who wants to become a cop, everyone's belief that she cannot do it is irrelevant.
She refuses to conform to other people's perceptions, which is noble, brave, and admirable.
For the male fox, everyone's perceptions are so compelling that he just conforms to their expectations.
For the money, female of course, oppositional beliefs don't matter.
For the fox, predictably male, oppositional beliefs define his entire personality and existence.
Because we all know just how easily women, rather than men, defy social conventions and general prejudice.
To help you untangle the obvious metaphors, the bunny represents a single, ambitious white human female, while the fox represents blacks and Latinos.
The bunny even calls the fox articulate, which is an ancient offensive term for intelligent blacks, once used by Democrat VP Joe Biden to describe Obama.
The police chief, an angry bull cape buffalo, because stereotypes are bad, you see, wants to use the rabbit in a non-physically confrontational role, which she objects to enormously.
As it turns out, this is in fact the role she is best suited for, figuring things out rather than trying to use her microscopic muscles.
By the way, studies also show that female police officers, presumably because they lack the capacity to physically intimidate suspects, end up shooting people more than male police officers, but I assume that none of these additional shooting victims were writers of this movie.
Now, after a ridiculously easy series of clues, if you can believe it, the rabbit sees the fox you met earlier in the only photograph of an abduction.
The fox and the rabbit find out that predators are reverting to their natural state and attacking others.
It is actually telling that the portrayal of predation is utterly unrealistic.
The predators just go completely psychotic, attacking everything in sight with wild Marty Feldman bug eyes, which is ridiculous.
Predators stalk and sneak and attack with cold calculation.
They don't attempt to eat the backseat of a limousine.
Now, fortunately for the movie, America was, and still is, experiencing a significant uptick in violent crime at the time the movie was released.
And so the question of why predators are becoming more aggressive was particularly relevant.
For the record, Canada is also experiencing a crime wave because, hey, you lock up a lot of criminals, then you forget how dangerous criminals are, so you let them out.
Then you remember how dangerous they are, and so on.
The question of whether certain groups in society are more prone to aggression is very important, and I was truly wide-eyed, slack-jawed, open-mouthed when the question was actually raised in the movie as to whether predators are somehow biologically more disposed to aggression.
As it turns out, a politician is behind the policy of setting various groups against each other in order to make the animal kingdom easier to rule.
Gosh, that reminds me of endless mainstream media race and class and gender-baiting, but that comparison is almost too obvious to make.
As it turns out, the female sheep, mare's assistant, is behind all this predator baiting, which is also especially instructive.
One goal of physically weak people, most women and some men, is to set physically stronger males against each other in order to reduce the number of males who can overpower the weaker specimens.
The fact that a female sheep is goading predators to attack in order to more easily rule over a fear-ridden population reminds me of some female European politician whose name escapes me.
Just for the moment.
By setting alpha criminals against alpha cops, the weak beta reporters in the mainstream media follow the same pattern.
If alpha males are destroyed or carry a significant liability of danger, the sexual market value of beta males rises.
If a police officer ends up more likely to be killed, women will be less likely to choose police officers and slightly more likely to choose low-T reporters with chicken chests and cushy chair butts.
The idea that women provoke fights in order to gain power reminds me of the old low-rent female habit of going to a bar, starting a fight, and sleeping with the winner.
The idea that desires rather than reception should define opportunity is the classic low-talent approach to any competitive market.
In this pathetic view, the winner of the singing contest should be the one most desperate to win rather than the one who can sing the best.
The happiness of the aspirant, not the audience, is all that matters.
Obviously, Kelly Clarkson would not benefit from this rule, while William Hung would.
The greatest singers prefer a meritocracy, while the weakest oppose it.
Opposing a raw meritocracy is a confession of incompetence, desire and hatred.
Think of the amount of energy the mainstream media puts into opposing Republicans and supporting Democrats in the United States.
For any with clear eyesight, this is a confession that the mainstream media believes that Democrat politicians are incompetent and cannot prevail in an even-handed competition.
You do not bother crippling the opponent you are sure will lose anyway, only the foe you know will win in any kind of fair fight.
The mainstream media's hatred and opposition of Donald Trump, for instance, is a form of praise and respect.
They believe he will likely win without their opposition.
Thus, the degree of their opposition is the degree of their respect for his prowess.
The end of the movie is rather chaotic and incomprehensible.
The pleas for tolerance and mutual understanding are so clichéd that one feels that even the moviemakers are bored with such platitudes.
In the context of the movie, these pleas make no sense whatsoever.
The former predators went crazy because they were drugged with a maddening pollen, not because they were misunderstood or misinterpreted.
When the weasel went crazy and attacked his driver, this had nothing to do with any breach of multicultural clichés.
Talking about mutual understanding in the face of psychotic madness is like teaching children to nicely pet a rabbit dog.
It is not only false, but extremely dangerous.
This is the subtle and highly objectionable bigotry and anti-masculinity that pervades the movie.
A movie that claims to oppose prejudice, but is full of sneaky foxes, vicious weasels, donut-eating cops, cruel southerners, king lions, slow sloths, fast rabbits, angry bulls, over-emotional women, Italian mobsters, is surely working somewhat against its own principles.
The plucky heroine who overcomes obstacles and is absolutely fantastic at everything has become a female empowerment cliché that has become so overboard it leans into the realm of narcissistic self-delusion.
I am great because eggs!
This does have some truth, of course, like all clichés.
In terms of sexual market value, young women are praised because they are fertile and sexually desirable, and the media does little to correct the natural vanity of young women and remind them That in terms of sexual market value, they are born rich and grow poor quite quickly, while men are born poor and often grow sexually more valuable as they accumulate resources.
All this having been said, however, the movie was more entertaining and a little bit less clichéd than I expected.
It had the courage to raise some tough questions.
Although its answers were silly and irrelevant, the questions, for some at least, will remain.
And may bring people to a path that can lead them to this show, Free Domain Radio, and some real answers at last.
