Nov. 17, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:42
3899 The Truth About Stranger Things
“Stranger Things” is a fantasy horror story set in a small town in 1980s America. A government experiment based on drugging people produces a young girl with magical powers, who opens a portal to an alternate dimension. Monsters begin to spread through the town from this alternate dimension, and the girl ends up closing the portal.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Other than the fact that this review contains spoilers, there's one other note I wish to make before we begin.
Every time I review a complex work of art, countless people who apparently learned how to type with their foreheads tell me that I am overthinking things, that I must be a drag to go to the movies with, that I just need to relax and enjoy entertainment, and there's nothing particularly deep or rich or meaningful in any work of art.
Thus a blind man who cannot see the moon thinks that the tides are merely imaginary.
Listen, I am sorry that you had no education in art or storytelling or meaning or the power of allegory.
But I'm going to break it out for you real slow and simple.
The world runs on stories.
Empires rise and fall on stories.
Gods and governments rule through stories.
Think about it. When you were a child, if you were taught anything about religion, did you learn abstract arguments for the existence of God?
Or were you told powerful stories?
Our personalities outside of their genetic elements are little more than stories.
Stuff happens.
We extract and internalize a story about what happened.
Those stories become our personality and so our future.
When I was 13, I asked out the queen bee of my junior high school.
I failed. That was something that happened.
Pretty unimportant.
What mattered was my story about what happened.
The event itself passes by in a blur.
Asking her out took little more than 60 seconds.
What happens passes by like a telephone pole racing past a fast car.
The meaning I ascribed to the event is what I carry with me and who I become.
When you ask someone out and she says no, what does that mean?
You can curse and say that you are unworthy of love, that you will always be rejected, that you will never get what you want, or all women are garbage, or all that crap.
And that will become your future.
The event itself, wow, passes by.
Our story about the event stays and grows and dominates us.
It becomes us.
An optimist is a person with a particular story about the world and life.
A pessimist is a person with a different story about the world and life.
In my case, I was rejected and felt discomfort, which always happens when we don't get what we want.
That's how we know we want it.
And I had a choice.
I could choose to believe that the girl said no because I was unattractive.
Or... I could choose to believe that the girl said no because she was too shallow to appreciate my qualities.
I knew I had great qualities, so I had that empirical evidence.
I know that I am a great husband and father now, so I have that empirical evidence.
So I resolved to avoid aiming for mere looks and popularity again in the future.
My failure was not because the girl was aiming higher, but because I was aiming lower.
I only fell for that trap once more in my life when I chatted up my yoga teacher one afternoon after class.
I was in the locker room, and a really good-looking guy was bragging about dating the yoga teacher.
Now, he was more physically attractive than I was, and I felt a flash of resentment that she would choose a man based only on his looks.
And then, of course, it hit me.
How on earth can I blame her for choosing a man for his looks when I am only choosing her for her looks?
If she wants to date a man who brags to half-naked strangers about going out with her, that tells me all I need to know.
Germany once had a story that God chose certain nations to rule over others.
Thanks, Hegel. Germany now has a story that it is weak and polluted because of the Second World War.
Britain once had a story that it had the responsibility to bring limited government, relatively free markets, and political liberty to the world as a whole.
Now it has a story that it has the responsibility to import, accept, and pay for just about anyone who can make it to the island.
What has changed?
Just look around you at the people you know.
Everyone has a core Story about themselves, about the world.
The job of philosophy is to compare these core stories to empirical evidence, which I do in my call-in shows all the time.
That's the greatest benefit that rigorous philosophical thinking can bring to an individual.
Your personality is a hypothesis, a conjecture, a story.
Is it true?
Look inside yourself.
You have a core story as well, based on your experiences.
Sure, you have made choices as an adult based on your core story, but that merely reinforces a story it does not create it.
Let us suppose your parents got divorced and hated each other.
This probably created in you a story that love can easily turn to hatred.
This makes you cynical and suspicious of love, which robs you of love.
The story becomes your reality because it was never compared to objective reality.
My parents got divorced when I was a baby and hated each other.
I have been blissfully married for 15 years because I chose to criticize my parents rather than hate love.
If your family has a history of heart disease and all the men die in their 40s, you can either say to hell with it and live a life of hedonistic abandon and die in your 40s, or you can decide to eat well, exercise and stay healthy and die in your 70s.
Do you see? A story can add or subtract decades to your lifespan.
That is the power of art.
We are all a canvas and we all hold the brushes.
If a parent tells you that you are worthless, you can either accurately identify the parent as an abuser or you can internalize the world and define yourself that way.
If your parent is telling the truth, you are destroyed forever.
If your parent is lying, your relationship is destroyed, at least until the truth is admitted.
It is your choice.
Go with the evidence or submit to the story.
If you believe you are worthless, you will act in a way to reinforce it.
You will aim low, withdraw from challenges, seek out trashy company, cultivate bad habits, gather resentment and repel good people.
What starts as a trauma becomes a story, which becomes a documentary.
The abuse creates the fiction, which becomes the narrative, which becomes the truth.
If you are told you are worthless and you believe it, your inevitable worthless actions produce a worthless life, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
My whole childhood, whenever I would argue with my mother and I would say, I think, she would scream at me, don't think!
Look at me now. All I do is think and it works beautifully.
If a nasty person tries to define who you are, run.
Do not walk in the exact opposite direction.
My mother has a terrible life, and her central commandment was, don't think.
The lesson is pretty clear, don't you think?
Do the opposite. Am I overthinking things?
You YouTube commenters, you're kind of like my mom, you know that?
There is no such thing as overthinking.
There is only thinking, which you are not doing at all.
But I really invite you to try.
Stranger Things is a fantasy horror story set in a small town in 1980s America.
A government experiment based on drugging people produces a young girl with magical powers who opens a portal to an alternate dimension.
Monsters begin to spread through the town from this alternate dimension and the girl ends up closing the portal.
Of course, it is far more expensive to set a show in the past, so why was the 1980s chosen?
First of all, in order to have shadowy monsters and missing people, you cannot have a population armed with cell phones.
However, I would also argue that since the entire story is an allegory for mass immigration, the setting of the 1980s is not accidental.
For Darwinian evolution to work, genes must have in-group preferences.
You must prefer your own children to the children of strangers, and you must prefer your own tribe to alien tribes.
Personality is largely genetic, which means that different tribes develop and enhance different personality traits.
These tribes can live together in relative peace under two conditions.
There must be economic freedom, which means that individual tribes cannot use the power of the state to rob and dominate other tribes and enrich themselves.
Second, the dominant culture must promote and reinforce objective reason and evidence.
The first condition means that tribes must learn to negotiate with each other rather than use identity politics to rob each other.
The second condition means that the more irrational accesses of tribal cultures are sanded down by continual exposure to rational philosophy.
Neither Of those conditions are present in the modern West.
There is no separation of state and economics, which means that various groups are currently engaged in a form of political civil war, just as religious groups were when there was no separation of state and church.
Radical Marxist postmodernist relativism and subjectivism have destroyed the cultural value of objectivity and rationality, which creates a fetid breeding ground for escalating tribal conflicts.
In Stranger Things, a government program opens up a portal to another dimension called the Upside Down.
The actual government program called MKUltra peaked in the 1960s, which was also the decade that saw the initial opening of Western countries to endless waves of third-world immigration.
In the story...
A government scientist convinces a young girl named Eleven to not run from the dangers she sees in the Upside Down, but rather to approach and touch them.
This opens up a portal through which the monsters pour.
Please understand I'm not saying that everyone from the Third World is a monster.
I'm just talking about subjective fears and perceptions.
This modern hippy-dippy subjectivist mantra that you should approach your fears, confront your fears, overcome your fears, that fear only exists in the mind, not in objective reality, is truly civilization-endangering rampant nonsense.
You do not run towards a tiger in the jungle in order to overcome your fears of tigers in the jungle.
Sometimes your fears exist for a damn good reason.
Only when our healthy fears of the natural world have been suppressed by the modern protections of cities and civilization do we end up with the bizarre idea that all fears are somehow irrational paranoia.
Third world migration is causing significant problems in Western countries.
Concern is not paranoia.
When the girl listens...
To her corrupt papa and approaches the monster, touching it, the portal is opened.
The same lie is also told to the boy, Will, who is terrified of a shadowy alien, but his mother's boyfriend tells him to stop avoiding the alien, which results in Will being infested and infected with an alien consciousness.
He literally loses his will and turns on his friends.
This is basic Marxist social justice warrior indoctrination which denies free will for the sake of economic or tribal determinism.
Do not be scared of the other, say the socialist educators who would rather riot than hire someone who was not a socialist.
After the girl ignores her fears and opens the portal, the aliens start infiltrating the town.
But it is very subtle and hard to see at first, just as mass immigration produces effects that are very subtle and hard to see at first.
The aliens come to America for its resources, just as illegals and immigrants come to America these days, mostly for its taxpayer-funded resources rather than its freedoms.
The aliens take and hunt will.
The son of a single mother, just as the immigrant rape gangs in England and other places take and hunt children.
The lack of a father figure in the household creates a vulnerability for the child, since the children of single mothers are 30 times more likely to be abused by a man in the house.
Also, the introduction of the welfare state gave rise to the destructive phenomenon of single motherhood, which in turn drives the demand for more and more welfare programs, the welfare programs that are used by legal and illegal immigrants at the expense of the domestic population.
In Stranger Things, when the aliens enter America, they do not assimilate.
Rather, they turn parts of the town into the environment they came from.
This fear that there is a hard-to-see invasion combined with a complete lack of interest in assimilation is a deep modern anxiety that has significant empirical evidence.
How do the aliens come in?
They come through walls and tunnels.
You understand how obvious this is, right?
The aliens can walk through walls.
There is no border.
And they build tunnels.
In the tunnels there are bodies and diseases.
This is the death count of aliens crossing borders and the fact that they bring diseases with them.
Stranger Things is primarily a children's story.
Most of the adults are oblivious to the dangers growing around them.
This is because changing demographics affect children far more than adults.
The boomers in the story do not really care about the aliens, just as boomers tend not to care about demographic replacement, because they have been told that immigration is necessary to pay for their own pensions, and so they are willing to sell off their culture in return for a handful of fiat currency, just as they were willing to sell off the future of their children through national debts in return for endless government programs and promises.
It is important to remember That the problem is not the aliens.
The problem is the government.
It was the government who was experimenting on the young and using them to advance its own agenda.
A clear analogy for national debts and the modern hellscape of government schools.
The government opened the portal of endless immigration and the government is unable to close it because admitting their errors would cause problems for politicians.
In a fascinating subplot, a balding, bearded, paranoia merchant thinks that the great danger to America is coming from Russia and fears of Russia continually erupt in the dialogue.
The girl 11 is a Russian agent and Russians are infiltrating America and so on.
As it turns out, The real danger is coming from the American government rather than Russians on the other side of the world.
I'm sure I do not need to break down this parallel any further.
My Russia bot stole the election.
The girl, Eleven, has extraordinary powers, but lacks social skills.
She has the ability to peer not just into other dimensions, but also into the future, which gives her great anxiety.
She was raised by the government, but escaped.
Eleven represents the alternative media in the modern world.
Most intellectuals are in a very real way kidnapped by the state and its allies.
They are offered cushy tenured professorships, positions in think tanks, well-paid public roles in the media.
Endless goodies await those who subjugate their mental powers to the demands and dictates of those in charge.
Eleven rejects being provided for, and thus enslaved by, the state.
She knows the truth about the evils of government, as well as this other dimension, the upside down, and has the power to close the portal.
I'm not saying that Eleven is Ann Coulter, but I'm not saying she isn't either.
Eleven bonds with a boy, which provides her the emotional fuel to protect their world.
The current European leaders are largely childless.
They have little bond with the next generation, thus little incentive to protect their own culture and demographics.
The girl, Eleven, is first hidden by the children, and then protected by a gruff and vaguely simian police officer named Hopper, no relation to Hans Hermann Hoppe.
This has been the path of the alternative media.
Those who first see the dangers support the new fledgling media just as the children protect and feed 11.
And then the police must protect the free speech of modern intellectuals who can, with their powers, close the portal.
The police and honest intellectuals may seem like unlikely allies, but it is the police who must deal with the increasing violence in various immigrant communities, and so the police have a natural incentive, even if just for the reasons of personal safety, to ally with and protect the honest individuals.
Talking about the dangers of mass immigration, who can in turn control the flow and protect the police.
Even dangerous refugees show up in Stranger Things in the form of a very cute, tiny, pretend lizard named Dart.
When he first shows up, he is helpless and dependent.
Later, he escapes his cage, eats a cat, and attacks anything that moves.
This is analogous to radical Islamic terrorist groups who embed fighters in the refugee flow.
These statistics are also very clear that the second generation of Muslims in Europe are far more radicalized than the first generation.
Stranger Things is set in America, which is mainly dealing with the 20 to 30 million illegal aliens from Mexico.
This has created a shadow society within America, just like the no-go zones in Europe, which parallels the alien world that intersects with and overlaps our own.
Even the name given to this alternate universe, the Upside Down, is a reference to Mexico.
The closing scene of the second season is the camera turning and tilting and showing the decayed mirror image of a school underneath the real school.
If you look at a house overlooking a lake, you can see its reflection on the water.
It looks upside down and below the house.
Mexico is below America, just as Africa is below Europe, the Upside Down.
Stranger Things directly references Republican politics because Reagan-Bush signs are all over the lawns in places.
And so the struggle to close the portal directly references Donald Trump's plan to significantly reduce immigration into America.
It is interesting that the police do not have the power to close the portal, but the girl 11 does.
This indicates that the struggle to reduce third-world immigration is primarily a mental battle, not a physical one.
There is a story that the aging and childless West needs an infusion of third-world immigrants in order to maintain itself, which is utterly false.
A falling population raises the value of labor.
One of the main reasons that we have a modern world is that the medieval Black Death plague decimated the number of workers, which increased the negotiating power of the remaining workers, which got them out of the soft chains of serfdom.
The ancient Roman Empire tried to deal with a reduced birth rate via mass immigration, and we all know how that turned out.
When the number of workers declines, the value of workers increases, which simply increases the value of automation.
Robots do more work and do not require healthcare and education and welfare and the endless pandering of leftist politicians for their votes.
Robots do not bring an alien culture to overrun the West.
In the natural cycle of things, when the government runs out of money, children will become more valuable once again and people will start having them.
Having the government intervene in a demographic decline is like having the government intervene in an economic depression.
Trust me, it will only make things infinitely worse.
The cultural goal of Stranger Things is to reinvigorate and reinforce our fear of aliens.
It is not an intellectual argument, since it relies on magic rather than rhetoric, to close the portal.
But it does prime and reactivate people's legitimate fears of losing their culture.
We can save ourselves, our culture, our civilization, if the police follow Hopper's example in Stranger Things and continue to protect our free speech as we tell the truth to the world.
If our free speech is not respected and protected, the upside-down world wins.
