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Dec. 17, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:29
3933 The Truth About Star Wars: The Last Jedi
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So we're going to have a couple of spoilers in here, but I think it's going to be worth your while.
I did go and see the new Star Wars.
I have a challenging relationship with Hollywood since the Me Too stuff came out, but this was the sort of last hurrah.
I did want to see where one of the great charismatic childhood heroes of my youth ended up, which was Mark Hamill, of course, playing Luke Skywalker.
And I remember the first Star Wars movie that came out was really kind of an antidote to the 70s nihilism that was all over the place in art and in culture.
It was something glorious and fun-filled and exuberant.
There was actually something to fight for, and I thought that was quite...
Delightful. Now, I'm going to pull apart some narrative threads in the story, and they're going to be troubling to you, but that's good, right?
Philosophy should not be easy or obvious.
And some of you are going to respond and say, are you sure that's what the writers intended?
And the only people who say that are people who aren't themselves creative writers.
I actually started out, I wrote my first short story when I was six, wrote my first novel, When I was 11 and have written a lot of fiction, about 30 plays, half a dozen novels and so on, lots of poetry.
And creativity.
is a negotiation with the unconscious.
What flows in a fertile manner through the pen, through the keyboard is something that you do a dance with.
You want the story to go a certain way but the energy of the characters, the life of the story, you're in a constant state of wrestling with it.
If you dominate the life of the story with your intended purpose then it ends up kind of wooden and lifeless.
But if you let the story merely flower of its own accord, it ends up chaotic and disorganized.
So it's a real balance, like it is in life, between reason and emotion, between inspiration and purpose.
And I go with Socrates.
Socrates, 2,500 years ago, heard from a friend at the Oracle, who can't be wrong, not the one in The Matrix, but the Oracle had said that Socrates was the wisest man.
And Socrates said, well, I don't believe that.
I barely know anything. And in order to find out what the oracle meant, Socrates went and talked about philosophy and thoughts and reason and evidence and knowledge and virtue and all of that with poets, priests and politicians and sophists and, quote, philosophers and teachers of every kind.
And he said when he went to the artists, when he went to the poets, when he went to the playwrights and questioned them about the meaning of their work, he said that they were completely clueless.
He said, I can only think that they work from a kind of divine inspiration or perhaps even epileptic madness, but what translates from their mind to their pen seems to go unfiltered through any particular reasoning.
And although their characters in their plays are wise, they themselves are playwrights or not wise.
Although the characters are philosophical, they themselves, the writers are not philosophical, so they're kind of empty vessels for either individual or collective expressions of unconscious fertility.
So just because the writers intend or don't intend something doesn't particularly matter.
What matters is what's there.
So, with Mark Hamill, the actor who plays, of course, Luke, he really didn't like where the character went.
And I think I can explain to you, Mark, exactly why that is.
By the way, good job on Corvette Summer.
That was a fun film. So, after reading Rian Johnson's script for The Last Jedi, Mark Hamill said, quote, I at one point had to say to Rian, I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you've made for this character.
So, again, spoilers away, but let's get into it.
So Luke Skywalker has checked out of society.
Ha! Isn't that interesting?
He's a white male who's checked out of society.
And we see this all over the place with white males, right?
I mean, they're not happy, neither is Luke Skywalker happy.
He's got this bitter, grizzled, half-homeless kind of determination to survive another day, but for no particular purpose other than to watch the slow extinguishing of his own possibilities and his own life.
Destined to die on an abandoned, desolate rock in the middle of nowhere, no one even to bury his body.
And this is true of a lot of white males, right?
They're heavily in debt from terrible educations.
They're living at home.
There are endless diversity mandates in society, which means it's very, very hard for a white male to get a job, which means that white males kind of have to go into entrepreneurship, which has its ups and downs, of course.
And there are jobs openly saying, basically, if you're a white male, you have no chance of getting this job.
There is, of course, the Men Going Their Own Way movement, or the MGTOW movement, where men are eschewing relations with women for fear of being preyed upon by a state that favors females vastly in the court system, family court system in particular.
Massive amounts of unemployment.
There is, of course, the opioid crisis that is striking white males particularly hard.
And white males, for the first time in centuries, are seeing And this is true of whites as a whole.
They're seeing their life expectancy decline.
And depression, suicide, drug addiction, and so on are striking white males extraordinarily hard, which is not surprising since white males are the recipient of an enormous, virtually bottomless vat of social hatred and opprobrium.
So it's not particularly surprising that a group that is excluded, alienated, attacked, and hated ends up being depressed, anxious, and prone to drug addiction and so on.
So the fact that Luke Skywalker, the great hope of the rebellion, has ended up bitter and alone and without family, without friends, on a rock where he's basically going through bare animalistic rituals in order to survive is not particularly surprising.
The movie opens, in terms of Luke Skywalker, who I think is the most important character here because he's the biggest change from the arc of the early story, So Ray, the young woman, hands him a lightsaber and he just kind of shrugs and throws it over his shoulder.
Mark Hamill's actually supposed to have a famous sense of humor if you look at the pictures of the inscriptions he's made on the Star Wars cards.
It's pretty funny. But that's really quite fascinating, and you see a lot of this destruction of the archetypical history of the Star Wars universe in this.
You know, there's trash-talking the quasi-Nazi Empire general, and there is this undermining of the existing history.
Admiral Ackbar is kind of wiped out with barely a moment's notice, and...
This end of the sort of first round of history, which happened with the death or the murder of Han Solo, which now happens, of course, where the death of...
Well, Leia survives, but she died in real life, and we don't know exactly where that's going to go from the end or the death of Luke Skywalker, which is interesting because, of course, in the first movie, the 70s one...
It's true that the elder mentor died out, who Alec Guinness, right, famously actually made more money from the Star Wars movies than he did for the rest of his illustrious film and stage career combined.
So the original Alec, the Obi-Wan Kenobi character, did die out, but first of all sort of lived on and became more powerful, but he had the next generation.
Whereas Luke Skywalker is dying out, and there is no next generation.
And that, of course, is the boomers, followed by the kids who aren't having children, the demographic decline among the whites that is happening in Europe and in North America.
Whites, I think, are down to about 8% of the world's population, and that 8% is very top-heavy in terms of age.
So in terms of childbearing age, white females are like maybe 2% or so of the world's population population.
There is a danger of, well, a quasi-extinction event in the not-too-distant future.
It's sort of similar to what's going on in Japan, but with diversity and fewer robots.
There is no continuing of the line.
And this destruction of the history that is occurring in the new Star Wars movie, Kylo Ren actually says it.
You have to break with the past, kill it if you have to.
And that happens. Luke Skywalker takes the most powerful symbol to the Jedi and just tosses it over his shoulder.
And that is happening, of course, a lot.
Whites are not allowed to have A history to be proud of.
Not allowed to have in-group preferences.
The religion of the West must be burned.
And this, of course, you see.
The tree and the Jedi texts get burned down.
And it's the end of a lineage.
It's the end of a history.
It is the end of...
And that which sustains you going forward to the future.
So this is sort of white male civilization as a whole.
Of course, we see this in terms of like the Jedi, the end of the Jedi Order and so on.
We see this with white civilization.
You've got to pull down the statues.
You've got to ban white males and their historical texts from academia.
And there is, of course, this don't hire white males in particular.
And it's interesting because this break from the past is very singular to whites, and in particular white males.
So, for instance, nobody says to blacks, well, you have to break with the past, kill it if you have to.
Nobody says to Muslims coming to Europe from the Middle East, well, you've got to break with the past, kill it if you have to, right?
They're allowed to retain their ancient traditions and hopes and resentments, but whites and white males, it is specifically disallowed.
You know, there's an old saying that if you ever want to know who rules over you...
Figure out who you're not allowed to criticize.
And I would add to that, I would say if you ever want to know who is really enslaved in society, all you have to do is look at who's not allowed to get angry.
And that, I think, is pretty...
Pretty important. Now, this sort of end of culture, end of Europe, end of pride in history and so on, I think is mirrored in Luke Skywalker.
And here, what's interesting is you see this young white woman, Rey, she comes out and begs him to return to the fight.
This will happen. This will happen.
There is a huge amount of unhappiness among women these days.
So, 28% of young British women, for instance, are mentally ill.
Now, they've not been formally diagnosed, it's based on sort of a survey, but that is some pretty chilling stuff.
Very hard to date and to settle down to have a family with and so on with these women who are just kind of crazy.
Women as a whole are unhappier than men throughout the course of their lives until women are about 85 or so.
So hang in there ladies.
Happiness is... Just a blue rinse away.
And of course, right, I mean, with the death of opportunities, economic opportunities for white males, well, women don't have as much of a chance to settle down, to have kids.
They don't really end up with the kind of job satisfaction that is promised to them in feminist literature.
And of course men are shying away from women because men don't want to get eviscerated in the family court system if the woman suddenly decides she's dissatisfied and wants to move on while taking half of his stuff.
You know that old saying, some guy who got divorced said, I'm not going to get married next time.
Next time I'm just going to find a woman I hate and buy her a house.
That is pretty important.
And the stories of celebrities, right?
Mel Gibson was worth like $900 million.
He and his wife got divorced.
She ended up with $450 million because, right, she did all those great movies and Hamlet.
Anyway, so men are shying away from women for long-term commitments because it has become too toxic and dangerous.
For men in the family court system.
And so men are only using women for sex.
And this, of course, creates anxiety, depression, and a feeling of being used.
Because you are being used.
And so this is just part of the general feminist after effects, right?
This death spiral shitstorm of cultural destruction.
So women are going to beg men to return, to protect them, to save them from other cultures that don't respect women as those other cultures work assiduously to take over.
European and North American political systems, women are going to come back to men and say, oh, by the way, we need you now.
And that is going to be kind of a challenge for everyone involved.
And if you want to see this kind of hatred, to me, it really came to focus, right?
So there's a salt planet, I think it's called Crate.
Because, you know, they didn't want to completely rip off the Empire Strikes Back with this Ice Battle of Hoth.
So what they did was they just created a bloody snow called Crate.
Crate. Now, crate, of course, you know, white skin and red underneath.
Well, that's Caucasians, right?
White skin and red underneath.
And in that battle, Luke shows up and, you know, it drove me kind of nuts that he was missing the gray in his beard, but then we sort of realized why.
So Luke shows up, and then, like, every weapon in the known universe is aimed at destroying him.
This is the hatred directed at white males.
And... Of course, he's just a projection.
He's not actually there. And so the fact that projection is really there, you know, there's a lot of frustration out there in the world.
This is why I talk about race and IQ, is that I want people to get along.
I want people to understand and to have peace with the way that the world and its cultures are, because there's this incredible frustration out there in the world that other cultures are just not able to reproduce the former successes of white male culture, of European and North American culture.
So there's this immense rage and frustration because Race and IQ are not talked about, and it's not really fundamentally possible to reproduce a Jeffersonian democracy in Somalia, because Somalia has an average IQ, what is it, in the high 70s, low 80s, or something like that.
I mean, you just can't do it. And, you know, it's like having a bunch of Chinese people go up against NBA stars, you know?
I mean, there may be the occasional net, but it's mostly going to be luck and circumstance.
And so this rage against white males comes from a frustration at not being able to reproduce the great things, the great civilizations that white males have produced, which is why there's this implicit despair about other cultures and countries and civilizations, which is why everybody swarms to the countries built by white males and then ends up screaming racism.
There is this incredible frustration.
Fleeing to a European country is a confession of despair that what you want in Europe can never be recreated in your home country.
But this is what happens, right?
I mean, white males build great civilizations and then elements within those civilizations open the borders.
Everyone comes in and then finds that they can get more money screaming racism at white males than they can getting jobs.
And that's, of course, statistically what happens.
What's like north of 80% of the migrants in certain places in Europe don't have jobs.
And so the idea, hey, let's import lots of migrants so that we can...
Pay for the boomer's retirement.
Not gonna happen. Accordion crash.
And so all of this rage directed at, you know, the archetypical white male who's Luke Skywalker.
He doesn't die. He just disappears.
And the tension between Luke Skywalker and Kylo Ren, right, his pupil, is really interesting because that's to me the boomers and the generation, the millennials or the post-boomer generation.
Boomers let communism and sort of endless rampant diversity and open borders into the culture and then they have a huge amount of problems with the next generation.
Well, of course. Of course.
And that is, to me, summed up in the endless, you know, quote, diversity in the, I mean, you've got women in charge of everything, you know, lots of minorities around and so on doing stuff.
And this diversity, which was barely present, you got Lando Calrissian, I think, in the second Star Wars, but this diversity was not very much present in the first couple of Star Wars, but it's very much relentless and a core feature of the new Star Wars universe.
And that, to me, is quite fascinating because this relentless diversity is actually very revelatory, whether the writers like it or not.
Because, you see, in the first Star Wars, They win, right?
They destroy... Oh, spoiler for decades ago.
They destroy the Death Star and they have this, you know, big medal ceremony and they win.
Whereas in the newest Star Wars, which is so diverse...
Well, they just, you know, this was kind of weirdly painful to watch them just going from disaster to disaster to disaster.
They lose, they lose, they lose.
So it's like, well, more diversity equals more disaster.
And it's very clear in the movie.
They don't really strike back any kind of blow.
That is based on skill.
You know, one woman sacrifices herself by jet-setting through a spaceship, like she's playing a giant cosmic game of Fruit Ninja.
But it's not skill.
That's just self-sacrifice.
So, yeah, this sort of reminds me there was a tweet that was pointing out that when America was only 10% diverse, America helped beat Nazism.
But now that America is 25% diverse, they've spent, what, more than a decade and a half in Afghanistan and can't close the victory.
So the idea that diversity is a strength, Even in the new Star Wars, you know, they go from disaster.
I mean, who wants to sit there and watch a hospital ship get blown up and endless numbers of rebels get killed?
I mean, that was really a decimation fest from the very beginning of the bombing run on the Dreadnought or the big spaceship.
I mean, it was just...
I mean, what a population decline count.
I mean, somebody should do a body count of the movie.
I mean, the rebels just get...
Shredded and destroyed to the point where you end up with like a dozen running out through a rock wall and trying to escape with the tiny little ice crystal snow leopard I guess put in there so they can sell some plush toys But this increased diversity means decreased success.
In fact, it's just one disaster after another for the rebels.
And I'm not really sure if diversity is such a strength, why, now that the Star Wars universe is more diverse, do the rebels keep losing?
Well, because there's kind of a truth in that.
You know, if diversity is such a strength, then why do leftist academics never hire conservatives?
Why do communist academics never hire free marketers from the Austrian school?
Why do they never hire objectivists?
Because... They want unity in academia, university of leftism, of communism.
So they recognize, of course, that diversity is in no way a strength, which is why they relentlessly enforce it in academia, while at the same time relentlessly promoting it outside of academia.
If diversity is such a strength of the free market, then why are communists constantly pushing diversity?
Well, they push diversity because they know that diversity...
Like communism is a failure.
I mean, it may take us another couple of years to accept and absorb that and be able to talk about that more openly.
But statistically, it's a failure.
It's a complete failure. I mean, the cultures are not intermingling.
Everybody's just ending up in their own neighborhoods.
Cultural trust is down.
Social trust is down. Neighborhoods have been destroyed.
Politics are fragmenting.
It's turned into a form of tribal resource acquisition using the civil war proxy of a virtually omnipotent state.
And it's just turned into rampant vote buying and appeasement and, I mean, all kinds of nonsense.
So diversity is a failure.
And, I mean, like communism was a failure, which is one of the reasons why communism kind of morphed into being pro-diversity.
Because failure begets a failure.
And this is why, you know, when I was watching the movie, you know, these numbers were floating around in my head.
And I think they're worth talking about.
You know, everyone goes insane when they think the polar bears are dying off when they're not.
But whites are, what, about 8% of the world's population now?
And very top-heavy, as I said, in terms of age.
So whites, 8% of the world's population, they're old, numbers are declining enormously.
Endangerment is a significant reality.
And I really think that it's important to look at this movie, absorb this movie, absorb its message, though the message I don't believe was explicitly intended.
By the writers. But more diversity is more failure.
And whites at 8% of the world population, man, you better start waking up.
Better start waking up or you're going to end up old and alone and grizzled on a rock, fading into nothing.
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