Feb. 20, 2018 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:43
4007 The Truth About Black Panther
Movie Summary: “After the death of his father, T'Challa returns home to the African nation of Wakanda to take his rightful place as king. When a powerful enemy suddenly reappears, T'Challa's mettle as king -- and as Black Panther -- gets tested when he's drawn into a conflict that puts the fate of Wakanda and the entire world at risk. Faced with treachery and danger, the young king must rally his allies and release the full power of Black Panther to defeat his foes and secure the safety of his people.”The Voldemort Hypothesishttps://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMNj_r5bccUyYzJ5G1GgvfM59JEpDkteXYour 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
So when I go to go see a movie, I know, particularly an action movie, like I know that there's going to be a lot of fighting.
And it's sort of like being in a desert.
You know there's going to be a lot of hot, super-baked nothingness in between the sweet, tasty nectar of Oasis to Oasis, but you go anyway, because you want to cross the desert and you know how to get there.
So I went to go and see Black Panther, and there were some amazing ideas in the movie.
Okay, there's a lot of...
Okay, a couple of spoilers here.
Just be aware, be alert.
You know the drill. Turn off the big, chatty forehead if you don't want any spoilers.
But there is a lot of fighting.
And it gets to the point where it's like, Lord above, can somebody just kill each other?
And so we can get back to the cool ideas that are interwoven through the movie.
But it is very visceral that way.
And the movie attempts to answer...
What is, in many ways, perhaps the greatest question of the age at the moment, and maybe it's been a huge question throughout history, but certainly in the modern world, it's pretty much front and center.
And the question is, now in particular when I talk about Africa here, I'm going to be talking about sub-Saharan Africa, but the question is, why are black communities around the world doing so poorly overall?
Just in terms of political stability and economic and political freedoms and peaceful succession of power and GDP, like you name it, right?
Just about every metric.
And not just around the world in terms of countries, but if you look at cities in the West, Detroit used to be called the Paris of the West and was one of the richest cities in the world and now is a mess.
And so when a significant proportion of blacks end up in a city, why does that city so often end up doing poorly?
So this is really the central question of the age at the moment, and Black Panther has an answer, right?
And the answer is evil white European colonialism, and this is an answer that has been out there in academia and in popular culture for a long, long time.
And the answer goes something like this.
The reason why Europe is rich And Africa is poor is because the Europeans, the colonialists, and this word is used a couple of times in the movie, The colonialist Europeans came to Africa, strip mined the resources from Africa, took the slaves, took the population from Africa, and that is why Europe is rich and Africa is poor.
You know, it's the idea that if you have a jewelry store with a million dollars worth of jewelry and someone comes in and steals your jewelry, the thief is rich and you are poor because of the transfer of this wealth.
And it is a Marxist argument, and it's fundamentally the same as the idea as to, you know, why is the business owner wealthier than the workers?
Well, the answer from the Marxists is that the business owner just accidentally controls the means of production and skims from the productivity of the workers while providing nothing in return, and that's why the capitalist ends up richer than the proletariat.
Now, this is a very tempting thesis, and we'll have a look at it over the course of this, but the way that Black Panther, the movie, answers it is it has the fictional African Kingdom of Wakanda.
And Wakanda is possessed of, like, Star Trek levels of technology and medicine and capabilities.
I mean, they have this stuff.
It's like voodoo magic resource called Vibranium.
You know, get the vibe, man, which I guess is appropriately named as Unobtainium.
Was an avatar. Now, vibranium, even by comic book standards, the science isn't even remotely explained.
It's not just inert stuff that's really cool.
It has basically magical properties.
You can power spaceships.
You can power cities. You can heal the sick.
You can, I mean, do anything you want with it.
And it's an energy source.
It's a raw material. It does your dishes and all that.
And what happened was there was a meteor that was rich in this stuff that crashed into this kingdom of Wakanda in Thousands of years ago.
And Wakanda has become so powerful because it has this technology and this has allowed it to exist independent of the outside world.
And there's a TV program at the beginning and it talks about how in Wakanda they don't trade with the outside world, they don't Receive foreign aid, but it's considered to be worse than Haiti.
In Haiti, a couple of hundred bucks a year of GDP, and they literally eat cookies made of dirt.
I mean, it's wretched, wretched stuff.
And what they do in Wakanda is because they have this magical substance, this vibranium, is they've created these holograms of jungles.
And then you fly through the holograms, and you get to these amazing cities, this futuristic African city.
So this takes the complexity of human development, of why some cultures ended up rich and powerful and relatively free, and some cultures remain mired into Stone Age and so on, and it kind of reduces it to the resource argument.
Now, this is a very tempting argument, and I understand why people think this.
But there are some questions as to what does it mean To say that Europe is rich because it stripped my resources from Africa.
Now, Africans had Africa, you could say that the length of time backwards that homo sapiens go, about 150,000 years or so.
So blacks had Africa for About 150,000 years, minus a couple hundred for the colonial period.
And in sub-Saharan Africa, when the Europeans arrived, there were no wheels really, no written language, no two-story buildings, none of that stuff.
And so that's a challenge.
So to say that It's because the Europeans took these resources and that's why Europe...
I understand the argument.
I really do. Because you see these ships sailing with slaves and with gold and with diamonds and so on from Europe, from America, sorry, from Africa to Europe and to the North Americas.
And then these countries, the European countries, the North American countries, they become wealthy.
And so the temptation is to say, well, they became wealthy because they stole.
But it doesn't really hold up.
Because if it is resources that make you rich, and Africa was in possession of these resources for 150,000 years and did not become rich, then the mere possession of resources doesn't make you rich.
This is not a very challenging argument.
And it shows just how politically correct and how unspeakable many of these things are to just have this basic argument.
If the possession of resources makes you wealthy, and the reason that Europe is wealthy is it took the resources from Africa a couple hundred years ago, then why did Africa not become wealthy when it sat on these resources for 150,000 years?
Now, another argument, of course, says, and it's tough because in Europe there wasn't slavery in the same way, but the argument is that America is wealthy, and the reason that America is wealthy is that it got its wealth on the backs of slaves, the black slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.
Again, that's a hypothesis.
And if we want to be philosophical, which I hope we do, at least on this channel, if we want to be rational, if we want to examine the evidence, we say, okay, that's a hypothesis that says slavery produces massive wealth.
Massive wealth. I mean, if you look at the line of human income, human wealth, it's like completely flatlined for about 150,000 years, give or take.
And then over the last few hundred years, it's gone through the stratosphere, like 20 times, 30 times, 40 times.
We just look over the past decade or so.
Poverty has been cut in half around the world.
So the hypothesis is slavery produces wealth.
America was rich because it had slaves and it built its wealth on the backs of slaves.
Well, okay, so if we just strip all the politically correct stuff out of that and look at that rationally, we say, okay, well, that's a hypothesis, right?
So what we would do is we would look at countries or times in history where slavery was practiced the most, and we would say, did those countries become rich?
That's the argument. Slavery produces wealth.
Okay. Well, in Africa, slavery was common, and so if slavery produces wealth, then Africa, which practiced slavery through most countries in the continent, why did Africa not become rich?
If slavery produces wealth and the Africans bought and sold each other as slaves, why did they not become rich?
Tens of millions of blacks were shipped to Muslim countries where they were mostly castrated, the males, along the way.
This is why there's not a big black population in the Middle East at the moment.
Why did the Middle East not become rich?
The indigenous population of North America, what are called the Indians, they practiced slavery.
Why did they not become rich?
In South and Central America, you had the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas, and so on.
They practiced slavery. Why did they not become rich?
These aren't that complicated to set a questions, are they?
I mean, I always am I just completely blind to as to why we want to answer questions, right?
We want to have a hypothesis.
We want to answer questions. If exploitation of workers, if the pillaging and exploitation of workers makes countries rich, well, was it true that the Egyptians in building the pyramids did not exploit their workers?
Was there no exploitation of workers in the Middle Ages when you had serfs literally tied to the land?
Was there no exploitation of workers in ancient Athens and ancient Rome?
In the Roman Empire, where there are huge numbers of slaves, why did they not achieve modern levels of wealth if slavery produces all of this wealth?
And to ask these questions is to answer them.
And so, I think that's important to kind of focus on in the movie.
The movie is attempting to answer the question, why do black communities do badly?
And the answer, because there are two answers.
There are two answers. And the one answer is, you know, white oppression, white slavery, white exploitation, white pillaging of resources in Africa and so on.
That's one. Hypothesis as to why white countries do well relatively and black countries do badly or black areas do badly relatively.
That's one explanation.
Now, there's another explanation which I've talked about a lot on this show.
I'm not going to get into it because I really want to focus on the movie.
I'm just going to call it the hypothesis that dare not speak its name.
Let's call it the Voldemort hypothesis.
There's the Voldemort hypothesis, and then there's the white colonialism and racism hypothesis.
One leads to a lot of conflict.
The other one leads down the scientific pathway of facts.
Now, there are Black societies that were not colonized and there are black societies that have been free from colonialism for, I mean, look at Haiti, right?
400 years been free of colonialism.
Haiti took a bit of a step backward in the late 18th century when they killed all the whites that were on the island.
So 400 years, Haiti's still doing terribly and say, oh, well, you know, but 400 years, well, they We had debts to pay and so there were after effects of colonialism.
And it's like, well, okay.
But it wasn't bombed with two nuclear weapons, say.
It wasn't firebombed from end to end like Japan was in the Second World War, like Germany completely destroyed from end to end.
And Japan, the entire structure of the society changed.
And you had millions killed and firebombings over Tokyo that killed more than 100,000 people in a single night.
You got... Nagasaki, Hiroshima, and so on.
And Germany and Japan Did pretty well after the Second World War.
It did not take them very long for them to achieve things.
I mean, the Holocaust, for heaven's sakes.
You had Jews arriving with a few bucks in their pocket who took, after they arrived in America, about four years to achieve income parity with the native population, with the white population.
So, it's tough.
It's tough to figure out all of this stuff.
And of course, if the transfer of resources produces wealth, right, if the reason why Europe was wealthy was because It took all the resources from Africa and other places.
Then if you look at the welfare state, if you look at affirmative action, if you look at the Head Start program, if you look at a wide variety of mechanisms by which hundreds of billions of dollars were transferred to the black community, then that is by far a larger transfer of wealth that has gone to the black community in the West, particularly in America, of course, than the Europeans ever took out of.
Africa, and that has not made the black community wealthy.
So transfer of resources doesn't answer.
Now the Voldemort hypothesis does answer this, but I'll put a link below if you want to get into more of this.
So people say, well, there were all these ships taking resources from Africa to Europe, and then Europe was rich, and therefore, right, that's why Europe became rich.
But the question is, why were there ships in the first place?
Because Europe was already wealthy.
Why did it have a need or a use for all of this?
All of these resources?
Because it already had a relatively free economy.
It already had a relatively stable political system.
Relatively objective laws.
And so it's the cause and effect.
That's sort of important.
So let's talk about a couple of the ideas that were going on in the movie.
Just amazing. Amazing stuff.
The power of Wakanda.
is the power of obviously this this magical vibranium but also as they repeat and repeat and repeat throughout the movie respect your ancestors love your ancestors know your history live for your people live for your country live for your state live for your tribe the tribe is everything Wakanda forever powerful stuff so the strength of a people is in its respect for its ancestors So what does that mean?
When white culture is forever demonized and attacked, what does it mean when you say that the whites were evil colonialists and what does it mean when you pull down statues and when you disparage everything about white culture, white history, and white civilization?
It is a blueprint for the destruction of a civilization because in the movie, respect your ancestors is key to the unity and the power and the strength and the flourishing of Wakanda.
So if respecting your ancestors is key to your flourishing and survival, what does it mean when you attack another group's ancestors?
You're trying to destroy them.
You're trying to destroy them.
And that really struck me.
Respect your ancestors. Respect your ancestors.
There is of course no slavery in Wakanda and the big debate is Looking at how badly the blacks around the world are doing.
You know, billions of our brothers and sisters need our help and so on.
And there's a conversation between the king and someone else in the kingdom.
And the king says, you know, maybe we should take refugees in from Africa.
I mean, it's amazing.
What a question to ask.
Should we take, we have this unified ethnostate that's very powerful based upon technology and respect for our ancestors.
Should we take in refugees from Africa that are black like us?
And the guy's like, eh, you bring refugees in, you bring all their problems too.
So no. Boy, try being a white person making that movie.
Have a fun day!
Right? I mean, but this is what's amazing, is that, and I knew this going into the movie, that there was going to be a rejection of political correctness and an actual ability to place some modern dilemmas into a rational context.
They don't want the refugees in because the refugees bring all their problems in.
And these are black refugees coming into black countries in general.
So they're not doing anything to fight, say, the Libyan slave markets to fight the other slavery around the world and so on.
So the whites, the white Western Christian Europeans, spent ungodly amounts of blood and treasure to end the practice of slavery around the world.
Which is also interesting as well.
If the hypothesis is that slavery produces massive amounts of wealth, then the end of slavery should have caused a collapse in the economy.
At the end of slavery, which is the big generator and source of wealth according to the hypothesis, when slavery ended the world should have descended into poverty.
But the exact opposite happened.
That when slavery was ended the world became wealthier and The areas that ended slavery sooner got wealthier faster.
Slavery was a huge impediment.
Now, not just obviously completely immoral, but slavery was a huge impediment to the true source of wealth, which is mechanization.
When you hold a bunch of money, I mean, a slave in America used to cost as much as sort of medium-sized car.
When you have people who've invested a lot of their money in slaves, they're going to resist labor-saving devices because it lowers the value of their slaves.
And so why did the ancient world, ancient...
Greece, ancient Rome, I mean, they knew about the steam-powered engine in ancient Rome.
They had a lot of, but they never were able to tip into the Industrial Revolution.
Why? The Industrial Revolution occurred in places that didn't have slavery.
And where there was slavery, the Industrial Revolution was delayed or was non-existent.
So the practice of slavery Delayed the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which is what has actually given us all this wealth in the modern world.
Labor-saving devices are the way to go.
And if you have most capital in society going into purchasing human beings, it's not going to be invested in labor-saving devices.
That is a fascinating question.
They feel kinship. In Wakanda, they feel kinship to the heart done by and underperforming, and as they see it, exploit it and control blacks around the world.
But what should they do? And they say, well, we basically, we're an ethnostate.
We remain isolationist.
Ha ha! Isolationist!
It's so funny. Stay within your own boundaries, stay within your own borders.
That's somehow called an isolationist.
Having your own country is called isolationist and staying within your own borders.
That's so weird in a way.
When you think about it, the phrase itself is very prejudicial.
Isolationist, like your Howard Hughes shuffling around with four-foot-long fingernails and Kleenex boxes on your feet in lieu of shoes.
Which is ridiculous.
I mean, in the 19th century, isolationist America is like, no, it's not isolationist.
It's called having a home.
You know, you have a home, you go home, you do stuff at home, and then you go back out into the world.
You're an isolationist! It's like, no, I have a home when I go there.
And I don't go around invading and manipulating other people's households.
You're an isolationist!
It's like, no, I disrespect. Uh, property, and so on.
So, that is a fundamental question, and the way that the movie answers it is really powerful, which we'll get to.
It's really powerful and eye-opening.
Now, this idea of the sort of futuristic but hidden African state of Star Trek capacities, it's kind of an old idea.
It didn't come up with this movie.
It's been around a bunch of movies before.
And it does say, of course, that the answer to the question of the wealth of nations isn't the Voldemort hypothesis, the hypothesis that dare not speak its name or hold hands in public.
But the Voldemort hypothesis has one explanation for the rise of nations, and it is combined, of course, with other things such as a free market philosophy and so on.
But in this movie, it is just who happens to get the resources.
Now, there's a scene, which is very interesting, where, and this actor, I gotta tell you, this actor is like mind-bogglingly good.
And his name is Michael B. Jordan.
I guess he had to put the B in.
And he plays a big hulking guy named Eric Killmonger, who has little dimples for every kill, although death gives him goosebumps.
But, and the actor, I just want to make a note, I just want to point this out.
I like movies where I don't know the actors very well.
Because it's not like, oh, this is Michael Keaton doing Batman, and oh, that's Jack Nicholson doing the Joker.
And I'm always aware of the tics, and you know, oh, Jack Nicholson is doing a great job of the Joker, and whatever it is, Heath Ledger's doing a great job of joking himself into an early grave.
But when I don't really know the actors very well, I can actually look at them as characters, and I can not think of who's playing them.
And I mean, other than...
Martin Freeman, who plays a CIA agent, because, you know, the best that a white person can be is an undercover spook.
But the acting was fantastic, almost universally.
There was a little bit of pomposity among the female characters, you know, the Mary Sues and all that, but the acting was, like, force of nature stuff.
And that was really, really cool to watch.
And I really, really appreciated that.
Done a little bit of acting in my time.
Man, these guys were just amazing.
And there's this question, why does some nations succeed and others fail?
It's answered by, well, the meteor just happened to land here rather than here.
And therefore, like everyone's the same, but the blacks here just happen to have this...
Vibranium or Vibronium, and that's why they did well.
It's a fascinating question.
There is this interesting juxtaposition of very high technological standards.
You know, like the young black woman in the movie makes Q look like somebody playing in the dirt with the aforementioned mud cookies from the Bond films.
She has the most amazing toys to provide.
And there's this incredibly sophisticated high technology that is combined or juxtaposed with really primitive stuff.
You know, sheep herding, drying animal skins in the sun.
And, you know, there is, I mean, the one guy with the big sort of, it looks like he's got a A teacup sorcerer stretched around, a lower lip stretched around, a teacup sorcerer, whatever.
It's really, really primitive stuff, not least of which is the way in which political power transfers in this highly advanced, highly technological society, and that is through brutal combat.
And that's just wild.
That's just wild to me that you would combine this incredibly sophisticated technology with a succession plan that involves beating people on the head with rocks.
It just seems a little confusing, and I'm not sure I really understood that in terms of how that was explained or what that was all about, so feel free to let me know in the comments what you think, but I just found that was pretty wild.
I also found it quite wild that the villain...
I mean, there was, of course, the stereotypical hyperventilating, you know, twisted, blown-up Ken doll of a South African named Klaw, I think his name was.
He doesn't last very long, and that's, you know, the film is a little bit disjointed with all of this stuff, but the villain is an American black.
Hmm. From what I've heard about in my conversations with people around the world and in the show and so on, There are a lot of people, a lot of blacks in particular, out there in the world who get really quite frustrated with American blacks because they basically say, well, look, if we have the kinds of opportunity that you have, you know, like if I'm stuck in some corner of Zimbabwe or Somalia and you look at American blacks and you say, well, you know, you've got a pretty stable political system, you've got economic rights, you've got property rights, you've got a relatively free market.
Man, if I had access to the kind of opportunities you guys have access to be...
Fantastic. And I've heard some frustration from not just blacks, but, you know, about the American blacks, like, why don't you do more with the opportunities that you have?
And again, the Voldemort hypothesis explains that well, but again, it dare not speak its name.
And the American blacks as well, it's frustrating because, I mean, I genuinely believe that nobody is born racist.
And I know that there are some studies that show that ethnic babies have preferences for their own ethnicity.
But see, a preference for one's own ethnicity does not imply a dislike or distaste for other ethnicities.
You know, like if you marry your wife and you prefer her company, that doesn't mean you dislike other women.
It's just you like your wife.
But I don't believe, I mean, there does seem to be an inbuilt genetic preference for genetic proximity, and that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint.
But I don't think that people are born fundamentally racist.
I mean, when I was growing up, and it's unfortunate the way the story has played out, but I mean, I loved Bill Cosby, and people loved Bill Cosby, and I don't think, I never once remember anyone saying, don't play that Bill Cosby record because he's black.
Never happened. I've always loved Nat King Cole.
I mean, what a charming and a great singer.
He had his own TV show and so on.
I don't remember anyone say, oh, turn off that Nat King Cole because he's black.
Sam Cooke, an amazing singer and songwriter and performer, nobody ever said.
Eddie Murphy, like, one of the truly genuinely hilarious people in the known universe, Eddie Murphy.
You know, if you've ever watched Shrek, and if you're a parent, you might have watched it just a few times, but if you've ever watched Shrek, I mean, Eddie Murphy's donkey, I mean, of all the roles, I mean, it's unbelievably Brilliant and funny and warm and surprising and spontaneous.
Anyway, I don't think that people are born racist.
I do think that people have the same relationship to race, or it'd be nice if people had the same relationship to race as they do to hair color.
You might prefer blondes to brunettes, but it's not because you think blondes are superior and brunettes are inferior.
It's just your kind of taste, right?
Where you look at movies, right?
I mean, people are, they really, really want Black Panther to do well, to the point where, like, people are getting in trouble for saying anything negative about the movie.
Like, everyone's desperate. Come on, man!
Do great! Do fantastic!
You know, like, people are, people certainly in the West are very, very keen and enthusiastic for Blacks to do well in society.
I mean, because of just like sort of basic human compassion and so on, but also, I mean, there are practical consequences.
You know, if the black society does well, if they did as well as, say, the Japanese community or the Chinese community or whatever, right?
Then there'd be far less crime, there would be far less societal and particularly familial breakdown, and there would be far less that taxpayers would have to pay In terms of welfare, and it would just be great.
So everyone with any kind of brain is like, come on, man, let's find a way to make this work.
Let's find a way to make things go better and do better.
And you can see that, you know, people voted for Obama to some degree because he was...
Half-black and people wanted to be able to put racism in the rearview.
Boy, that government program didn't work out so well now, did it?
And so there is this Enthusiasm for the success of the black community, like I can't imagine anyone, like I just did a show with the Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson, and I can't imagine, now he was appalled and we talked about the fact that the illegitimacy rate in the black community is 77%.
Now it used to be like 20% decades ago, and it wasn't like there was less racism 50 years ago or 60 years ago.
There was one time when the black family was stronger than the white family.
I don't think there's anyone, I literally can't think of anyone except a few half-psychotic haters, who if the black illegitimacy rate were cut in half or went down 40% or 50% or 60%, I can't imagine there'd be anyone who'd say, that's bad.
We're all like, yes.
And you see this illegitimacy and question of fatherhood really, really running through.
The movie, because there are a lot of fatherless blacks in the movie.
The king is without his father.
His father was killed in a bombing at the UN. The villain, the Killmonger, is without a father.
His father was murdered by another black.
See, when it comes to explaining black underperformance With reference to white racism, it's a little tough in the movie because I really only see blacks, for the most part, they're getting beat up by other blacks.
They're getting killed by other blacks into tribal warfare and criminality.
Just think of the wars of succession, like the individual beatdowns that determine who gets to be the next king, or black-on-black violence.
And the driver of the villain is the fact that a black killed his father.
And he ends up killing that man back.
And, I mean, it's a lot of black-on-black violence resulting in a lot of fatherlessness.
And that is powerful and relevant.
Not really expressed or commented on in the film, but definitely, definitely there.
So... I don't want to get into the plot too much.
I mean, I know I said there'd be spoilers and so on, but a couple other thoughts I wanted to mention.
I don't know exactly what to call Wakanda.
It's not an ethnostate because they reject importing other blacks that are right next door.
And the question is why?
Why do they not want to import other blacks?
Because if access to this magical vibranium is the way in which blacks do well, then...
But they don't want to.
They have to have these tattoos in their lips, which determine whether you're from Wakanda, and they only want those people.
They only want those people.
And Killmonger's big plan, of course...
Okay, there's a spoiler here, but I mean, they're all over the place.
But Killmonger's big plan is he wants to take the weaponry That Wakanda has, and I think if I understand the plan, if not the title of the movie, he wants to take the ridiculously advanced weapons of Wakanda and use it to kill white people around the planet.
I'm pretty sure I got the gist of that, because it's to liberate blacks and I don't think it was to liberate blacks from albinos.
Well, maybe, I guess. And so he wants a race war.
Well, not even race war, a race slaughter, a race genocide that he wants to kill the whites who are in charge of the blacks.
And in that way, the blacks will be liberated from white oppression and domination, and the blacks will flourish In the way that the people in Wakanda flourish.
And there is a big struggle about this.
And I really understand that.
I mean, I'm glad there's a struggle.
I hope I know which way it goes.
But it's a big question.
When you see people that you identify with doing badly, it is you want to help them.
You want them to do better.
Well, and even if they're not like you, you want them to do better.
If you have this sort of universalist approach that some cultures do, you want them to do better.
And do you go and kill who they – like, this was the issue with the communists, right?
So the communists said, well, they're a poor proletariat.
You know, there are workers who don't make as much money as the capitalists, and that's because the capitalist is exploiting and stealing from them.
And so if we go and kill the capitalists, then we can take all that money, redistribute the workers, everyone gets wealthier.
Now, the Voldemort hypothesis, the one that dare not speak its name, also explains why that hypothesis is false as well.
But again, if you want to find out more, check out the links.
We'll put a series below. And so this question of how is the black community to be helped?
It's a big question.
And the whole movie, they reject taking in refugees.
Hmm. And even at the very end of the movie, they reject Turkey and refugees.
Because they say it will destroy our civilization, it will destroy our culture, it will destroy what's uniquely us.
So what's uniquely them is not an ethnostate, but something that is absolutely unique within the boundaries of Wakanda.
It's a nationalist movie.
You could say an ethno-nationalist movie and Heaven above help me.
I couldn't help but think, I didn't know who was in the movie, but when Martin Freeman came into the movie, I'm like, hey, he played Bilbo, who lived in the Shire, which was also an ethnostate.
I'm trying not to be monofocused, but I'm just telling you, I'm fessing up to the way that my brain works, or doesn't, depending on your perspective.
And so, the question of how do they help?
Well, let's go kill all the whites, was Killmonger's suggestion, and he came perilously close to being able to achieve it.
I mean, the movie was this close to wiping out the 15% of the world population that are white people.
Whites very much in the minority around the world, just by the by, not given a lot of minority rights, but they came perilously close to wiping out 15% of the world's population, namely white people, it would seem.
So that, yay, was blocked.
And what was the solution?
Before I tell you that, let me just tell you one other thing.
Skating close to the edge here, I know.
But I'll just tell you something that I really got for the first time at a very deep emotional level.
I hope this makes sense.
I think it'll make sense. My ancestry is very accomplished.
One of my father's ancestors, my ancestor, I guess, too, was best friends with John Locke.
His name was William Molyneux. I've done a whole show about him, read his whole biography, and first came across him, just by coincidence, when I was taking first year of psychology, when William Molyneux experiment.
So, his experiment regarding perception was discussed, and that's kind of cool.
So a lot of intellectuals on my father's side.
On my mother's side, actually, a lot of poets and artists and both fiction and nonfiction writers, a lot of people very skilled with language.
And that is...
I don't know.
I've had such a mixed... Relationship with that.
On the one hand, I don't like to think, well, I can do what I do to be this public intellectual because of the family history in here.
Like, I just, I'm my own person.
I don't judge me by myself.
So I don't want this sort of, you know, like these two mirrors face each other, this infinity, you know, a part of this great chain of being and so on.
But I wonder if knowing that about my family history has given me some confidence and courage when it comes to being a public intellectual and taking on Very challenging topics that anybody with half a sense would run screaming from, but I wonder.
Hmm. And I also wonder what it means to me as a European-derived person, I guess.
Father's side is Irish Protestant, and my mother's side is German Protestant.
Some Protestants.
It's the backstory, and that's how I was raised.
But, um... There was some Jewish influence in my mother's family, but not lineage.
That was stepmom stuff. But I wonder if looking at the intellectual prowess of Europeans throughout history, I wonder if looking all the way back to the Mediterranean glories of the ancient world, the Greek and Roman civilizations, I just, I wonder if that's given me any kind of spur or any kind of momentum.
I don't know, because there's no null hypothesis.
I can't compare it to anything.
But I wonder, and this question of mentoring, this question of You know, you hear this all the time from feminists.
They say, well, you've got to provide an example for women.
Women need to be mentored. Women need to see examples of female engineers and physicists so they think they can do that stuff.
Not that Madame Curie did, but there is this kind of argument that you need this example in order to spur your own ambitions.
Well, they say that, but boys don't need male role models at all, and it's totally fine to divorce.
The father of your children because you're dissatisfied and it's totally fine to have only women pretty much teaching young boys because any man who wants to teach children must be a pedophile.
Anyway, so what I think is tragic and I mean I really got this emotionally I know you all have an ambivalent relationship to my emotions, but I'll...
I just want to sort of...
I don't know if I'm burdening myself or just talk about this.
For blacks to look around the world and to not be able to see a really, you know, powerful, revolutionary, successful, contributing to world civilization kind of culture or country or movement or whatever, that's rough.
That's rough. And the one thing that was to me sad about the movie was That to give blacks a vision of a very successful black society, you have to invent one.
You have to have this magic asteroid that lands and then, well, it looks poor, but underneath it's really wealthy and they're just hiding it from the world.
Like, I mean, that's...
To try and inspire this, I guess to some degree in blacks, to try and inspire this, it's like, You've got to make something up out of whole cloth.
You've got to have a comic book.
You can't look to the Parthenon.
You can't look...
I don't...
It's really...
I just... I felt sad about it.
And sympathy. Like, real, genuine, heel-to-toe sympathy.
You can't look at the Magna Carta.
You can't look at...
You know, a study was done that, between 800 BC and 1950 AD, 97% of the scientific advancements in the world came from Europe and North America, from white people, basically, give or take.
97%. And so I just thought, to gain inspiration, You have to invent in a comic book a society that does not exist and has not existed in the world.
To be inspiring, you have to be fictional.
That is sad. I'm really trying to put myself in the shoes of a person who can't gain that kind of inspiration from history or from anthropology.
Or from contemporaneous societies.
That's tough. And I... I'm not saying I have any kind of idea what the answer is, but I just want to tell you.
That's tough. Just try and put yourself in that situation.
Can't find inspiration in history.
Can't find inspiration across the world.
There is a nihilism that comes with that.
And I think that nihilism to me...
At the beginning of the movie, there's not really spoilers, but at the beginning of the movie, you see this, this Wakanda, this amazing, made-up, technologically sophisticated black country.
And then you go, from there, you go to America.
Now, American blacks are the richest blacks in the world, by far.
Like, the richest blacks that exist in the world.
But you go from Wakanda, you go to a black Ghetto where the kids are playing basketball and they don't actually have a hoop.
They have a milk crate with the bottom sword out and you see them playing basketball in this concrete jungle, this hellscape.
And then the next scene is like it looks like a two young black thugs planning a crime with weaponry and you know and it's like, oof, that's harsh.
That's that's really tough and I just I just kind of wanted to share that I really want to be honest with everyone out there about my experiences and That I was really thinking about a lot like what does it mean to me to have this kind of inspiration in the world?
What does it mean to me to have these kinds of examples to say?
Maybe there's a path I could tread with this path.
I do tread I become The famous slash most infamous Molyneux and how much of that is The example, the history, how much of that is the Voldemort hypothesis?
I'll never know, but I'm not going to say it's unimportant.
So let's talk about the end, because I think that's really important.
And I do I respect the filmmakers very much for bringing these topics up.
And I hope that this isn't...
It's a trap!
I hope it's not that.
I hope it's an invitation to have these kinds of discussions.
Because Wakanda has this amazing culture, this amazing science.
And instead of bringing refugees into their country, their borders...
I mean, not only do their borders remain closed, you can't even see their civilization because they have cloaking devices that make it look like a dirt poor country when it's the holodeck.
And so, you can't get into Wakanda.
It makes Japan look like England these days.
You can't get into Wakanda.
It's a closed ethno state.
So what's the solution? Well, they reject or they kill the guy who wants to kill whites.
But they still want to help blacks.
See, they don't want to help the world.
They don't say, well, there are lots of East Asians, South Asians, whites, blacks, you name it, dying from cancer or who are paralyzed.
So we want to go and help them.
No, they specifically want to go and help blacks.
That is quite something.
That they only want to help their own race.
Very powerful. It's a very powerful statement.
And what does it mean? I don't know.
I invite your discussions below.
But I don't know.
It seems to be okay for everyone except whites to have that kind of in-group preference, which means that it's a very racist construct.
Come on. We all know it. What is white privilege other than a phrase designed to make racists feel like they're actually anti-racists?
I understand. So what is their solution?
Their solution is to bring their technology to the ghetto.
So they land the big spaceship and the woman who comes out, who's the genius scientist, she comes out and she's going to start talking to the kids and so they bring their technology to the black community and that's going to make the black community.
That's the solution. The most important technology is not stuff, but ideas.
It's not things, but concepts.
The concept of the free market, the concept of respect for property rights and the rights of contract, small government, private sector, large private sector.
All state actions are coercive.
Bar none. Bar none.
You say, well, if the state didn't build roads, other people would build roads.
Yes, but the difference is when the state builds roads, it's coercive.
You're forced to pay for them.
I mean, the whole origin of the interstate highway system in America was under Eisenhower.
I was concerned about nuclear attacks.
I wanted to build a decentralized methodology for transporting people around.
And they didn't pay for it.
I think they're still paying for it, or it was paid off recently.
It's always three generations to pay for it.
And because they built this interstate highway system, you end up with this car-dependent culture, which puts lots of money into the Middle East, which causes Islam to grow.
So anyway, that's a whole other series of dominoes.
But the government is an agency of coercion.
It is an agency of force.
It is not reason, it is not eloquence, as the saying goes, sometimes attributed to George Washington.
It is force, pure and simple.
And saying, well, it's forced, yes, but it's what society wants or what society would do anyway.
Well, of course, if it's what society wants, it shouldn't be forced, right?
Of course, obviously, right?
If you say, well, I have to steal five bucks from the guy who was just about to give it to me anyway, well, why wouldn't you just wait till he gives it to you, right?
If it's voluntary, right? And saying, well, society would find some other way to do it is like saying, well, the woman's going to have sex anyway, so it doesn't matter if she's raped.
Of course it matters. It matters whether you use force or not in your interactions.
It really matters.
And our addiction to coercion and our blindness, our growing, almost psychotic blindness to the nature of the society that has crept up on us, that has crept over us, like a slow-moving, half-frozen tsunami full of bones in history.
Our steadfast and growing rejection and refusal to see that the basic nature of the society we've constructed is force, is violence.
Because we run to the state to solve just about every problem.
You don't need pensions. Well, let's steal by force from the young and give to the old who vote.
Let's take money from men and give it to women.
We have become addicted to this coercion, this coercive society.
We're gonna go into debt to get young people to go to college to subsidize what they're doing and then we will not allow the Young who've been indoctrinated and whose exposure to the toxic substance known as higher education has rendered them economically unfit.
I mean, there are studies that show that people know less about economics after taking a year's course than if they'd never taken a year's course.
It actually is the undoing.
It's not the closing of the American mind, Mr.
Bloom. It's the undoing of the Western mind.
And we can't discharge those debts in bankruptcy.
You are a debt slave.
We refuse to see how much we rely on coercion to get anything done.
Once something done, pass the law, force people to do it, comply or die.
The state escalates aggression against you until you comply or die.
That's the nature of the state.
It's the only agency with the capacity to legally initiate the use of force against citizens who are either totally disarmed or relatively disarmed.
And the reason I'm saying all of this is because the idea that we should replace coercive relationships, not really relationships.
The real exploitation is state to citizen.
It's not white to black.
It's not black to white. It's not capitalist to employee.
It's not patriarchy to feminist.
It is state to citizen.
That is the exploitation. The patriarchy can't sign an intergenerational debt note on your behalf, on your children's behalf, your grandchildren's behalf.
No ethnic group can just wave its wand and suddenly coerce everyone else into obeying their dictates.
But this is the state. The state is the true thing that we have to fear.
And the true exploiter and destroyer is the state.
And we used to know that.
If you ever want to imagine a terrifying world, imagine the world that your average social justice warrior would create if they were writing the Bill of Rights in the American Constitution.
Just imagine what kind of world you'd end up living in a dystopian nightmare.
So it is a state, and we worry about machines, and we worry about racism, we worry about patriarchy, and we worry about exploitation, and we worry about the rich.
It's like, all of that's bullshit. All of that's just designed to camouflage the true predation in society, which is the oligarchical, hierarchical, arm-to-the-teeth state that can do pretty much whatever it wants.
And you have no recourse, really, as a citizen.
That's what we have to be scared of, not each other.
Not each other and our racial groups, not each other and our genders, not each other and our relationship to the means of production.
It's the state. Now, of course, the state constantly wants to set us against each other so that we are squabbling and forget to look at the real owners, which is the government, the central banks.
The oligarchy, the party, the uniparty.
So the technology called freedom, the advancement called liberty, the displacement of coercive exploitation with voluntary relationships, the replacement of theft with charity, the replacement of Fiat currency with true money.
The replacement of endless festering laws with productive and voluntary social engagements.
The replacement of state control Of schools with parental and child control of schools, the replacement of state control of neighborhoods with voluntary and productive communities where people look out for each other and don't just hide at home and think that the vague machinery of the state is marching up and down the streets making everything better.
The fact that we used to engage with each other in our communities, we used to solve problems together, we used to meet, we used to have dinner parties, we used to congregate, we used to And now we hide and binge watch and imagine that the government is solving all these problems when it's in fact just making those problems worse.
The King of Wakanda brings his technology to a neighborhood defined by what?
What is the ghetto defined as?
What is it defined by?
It is defined by the state.
The single mothers are paid by the state.
The housing is constructed and maintained by the state.
The roads are constructed and maintained by the state.
The drug war is maintained and supported by the state.
The education of the children is inflicted and enacted by the state.
The destruction of what used to be called neighborhoods.
And now it's just proximate isolation, is the state.
There is no greater example of what the state does to communities than the communities where the state has the most power and the most influence, which is the inner cities, the ghettos.
What needs to be brought to the benighted countries around the world is freedom.
Voluntarism, small government, big market, voluntary transactions, voluntary interactions.
The welfare state is destroying the West just as it destroyed ancient Rome.
If we can find ways to approach each other voluntarily with negotiation rather than running to the government to inflict our whims through force and through debt-slavement, On the hearts and minds of others, we have a chance as a society.
If we continue to allow the state to divide us by taking money from one group and giving it to another group by force, by debt, by enslavement, from blacks to whites, from whites to blacks, from men to women, from women to men, from one religion to another, from that religion back, the state is constantly playing favorites, which means playing us against each other.
We don't need a spaceship powered by magical meteorite dust.
We need true equality under the law.
We need a law that favors neither gender nor race nor religion.
We don't need CGI magic for us to get along and live in peace and prosperity.
We need the technology that is not talked about in the movie, which I constantly talk about and beg you to consider.
