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Dec. 23, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:56
Twitter Thoughts: JK Rowling vs Cancel Culture
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So here's an interesting idea.
I've thought about it over the years.
I thought I'd give it a shot. So in the mornings, of course, I check my Twitter feed and do some tweets.
And I guess plumbing the depths of how interesting I can be, I thought it would be kind of cool to let you know my thoughts about the tweets that I'm seeing.
Because maybe you don't follow me on Twitter.
Maybe you prefer things on a video or audio format.
So... I'm going to do that.
It's going to be a little morning chat about the tweets, and this is going to be sort of in addition.
I'm going to spend the time anyway. I might as well do it this way.
So, by the way, Merry Almost Christmas to everyone.
I hope you're having a wonderful time with friends and family and enjoying all of the wonderful, beautiful, great things that society has to offer, because while we are, of course, engaged in a rather desperate battle to save the West, it is really, really important to To refuel and recharge with good food, good conversation. I had a wonderful day yesterday with some friends and their family.
You've got to recharge that kind of stuff.
So I hope that you will. So Merry, Merry Christmas to you.
If you want to help out what it is that I'm doing, gratefully, gratefully appreciated.
FreeDomain.com forward slash donate.
So, JK Rowling.
She got into trouble recently.
About tweeting her sympathy for a woman who got fired for saying that there were two sexes.
And now, this is somebody named Jack Montgomery, who did the, you know, nobody, colon, and then to make it look like you're initiating something that's not part of a conversation.
It's not a bad meme.
So nobody, colon, and then J.K. Rowling said, Voldemort was pro-Brexit.
Would Lord Voldemort have voted for Brexit?
J.K. Rowling reveals Harry Potter's nemesis is a nationalist and says novels deal with With racism.
And, well, I mean, she got pretty hit by the woke mob for her recent tweet.
And so, yeah, this, somebody wrote back, Dumbledore was gay and Hermione was black.
Okay. Believing in two genders is free speech.
Nice flex, I guess. Voldemort was a goddamn nationalist.
And then cry, cry, cry.
And somebody, a half-atheist, wrote back and said, Rowling, trying ever so much to paint Harry Potter as some sort of woke storyline relevant to current affairs when really it is just a fantasy wizard story.
Why, oh why, can't she just leave it at that?
Well, that's a big question.
It's a big question, and the answer to that is fame, the fame monster.
Fame, I think Sharon Stone said, you think it's feeding you, but it's eating you.
You think it's a buffet, but it's actually a vampire taking you down.
See, okay, there's a funny thing about happiness, right?
We adjust to everything.
If you're in constant pursuit of happiness, you are in pursuit of a questing beast you will never, ever be able to capture.
There are things you can do to fundamentally affect your happiness.
Live with integrity. Live with courage.
Make sure you're surrounded by people you love and support and who love and support you.
Do something meaningful with your life to advance good ideas, good arguments, and virtuous behavior in the world.
These are all things that are going to give you a gradual sort of increase.
I mean, I remember many years ago, sort of a big turning point in my life.
I was in a long-term relationship with a woman, an Indian woman, and we had a lot in common, but we just couldn't quite get that rhythm of life down, and there were conflicts that just seemed sort of pointless.
And of course, when you're young, all conflicts seem important, and when you get older, you take your credit card to the cocaine of your conflict, so to speak, and you divide them.
Into things that matter and things that don't matter.
And you realize, of course, when you have faced down really important things in life, maybe you faced down infertility, maybe the death of a parent, maybe like I had cancer five or six years ago.
And then you look at that and it gives you this wonderful clarity about how unimportant most conflicts are.
But of course when you're young, a lot of conflicts are sort of all important and all-consuming.
And I got a ring.
And I proposed to this woman.
And that's because you kind of feel like you're on this conveyor belt when you don't have free will and you don't have people challenging you and waking you up to your life.
You feel like you're kind of on this conveyor belt.
You know, oh, will we date? Will we get along?
Okay, well, let's become boyfriend and girlfriend.
Maybe let's move in together. Let's get engaged.
You just feel like you're on this conveyor belt of inevitability.
And it's a terrible thing.
It's a terrible, terrible thing. It leads to massive life disasters and almost did for me.
So... I realized that it was actually funny because it was a chance comment that a friend of mine's wife made.
This just shows you just little things that can be enough to alter the course of your life.
A friend of mine's wife said in passing, you'd think someone who's going to get married would be happier.
And it was just that comment.
Pretty wild. It unraveled the whole thing.
I thought about it. I came to the recognition.
I broke off the engagement.
I moved out and I went from a nice place to living in a room in two gay guys' apartment.
And it changed everything.
It changed the entire course of my life and really was like diving out of a car, heading off a cliff, Thelma and Louise style.
And realizing how much I had to bootstrap up my own disaster aversion mechanics was really wildly eye-opening because I looked at all the people around me who were just watching me sleepwalk into a disaster and I was like, okay, well, what does this mean?
What does this mean that this is occurring in my life that people are not...
Telling me what is dangerous for me, what is not going to work.
There's only really two possibilities.
Either A, they're so unwise that they don't know an obvious disaster when it's coming.
Which I, even from the perspective of insight, was able to strip mine out of a chance comment in passing by a friend of mine's wife, who I'm still forever grateful to.
But either they're so unwise they don't know an incipient disaster when it's arriving, or they are wise, they do see that disaster coming, but they don't care enough about me to sit down and go through the case with me and say, you know, marriage is a big deal, you know, your parents got divorced, you don't want to go down the same path, here are the issues that I've seen with your fiancé and you, and like there was no...
There wasn't that. And so either I'm surrounded by unwise people or wise people who don't care for me enough to have a 20-minute conversation to avert a disaster.
That's a really chilling thing to be aware of.
And so you have to just surround yourself with better people.
And I had to just completely reinvent my entire life.
And that formed the basis of the current happiness and productivity and Although, you know, this show can be quite a rollercoaster at times, to put it mildly, but the foundational happiness was...
It was built on that, right?
Like, in order to build a house up, or a skyscraper up, you have to dig down first.
You have to have a solid base.
You go the opposite direction of what you think.
To be ambitious, to achieve the right things in the world, you need to dig down into your history, into your existing relationships.
That's where you build the foundation, and only then can you build up.
So, happiness, outside of, you know, these sort of deep foundational Steps that you can take to ensure that you're surrounded by quality people.
Because you can only really be as happy and wise as the least happy and wise person in your immediate circle.
It's just one of these fundamental truths that takes a long time to sort of sort out.
But we adjust.
We adjust. So when you have bad news, you're upset.
And then you adjust. And you kind of like go back to...
Water level, right? It's like if you do this in a bath, right, you want to make more bubbles or you want to check the temperature, you go in and you switch your hand back and forth in the bath.
And if you look at that in slow motion, right, the bath water goes up when you switch your hand past, and then on the other side, the trough, it goes down, and then what does it do?
It returns back to its natural level.
You disturb something, and it's happiness in general, right?
And this is A blessing and a curse, as many of these things are.
So the reason it's a blessing, of course, is that we're not satisfied with incremental improvements.
We didn't sit there back in the day, back in the caveman days.
We didn't sit there and say, wow, we figured out fire.
We don't need to do anything after this.
This is about as good as it gets.
This is perfect. I never need to invent anything else.
We're like, oh, fire, great.
Wow, that's really nice.
Let's enjoy that for a couple of days.
Now fire sucks. Or I'm indifferent to fire.
I take fire for granted. So now we need to figure out clothing.
And now we need to figure out domesticating animals.
And now we need to figure out agriculture.
And now we need to figure out fences.
The whole step. We adjust, right?
You get something great.
You adjust to it. The water goes back to its normal level.
And you have to reach for the next thing. It's why we're the apex predators.
Why we are top of the food chain.
Why we have this incredible civilization.
You know, you'd think when the phone was invented, people are like, wow, that's like being able to instantaneously talk with anyone in the world?
That's like the greatest thing ever.
We never need to work on human communications anymore.
And now it's like, what do you mean I can't live stream in 4K from the top of the Andes Mountains?
It's fundamentally broken, right?
What do you mean the Wi-Fi on an airplane is too slow?
This is enraging. Like, we just adjust, and that's life.
So that's the plus side, right?
Which makes us ambitious, makes us want to achieve better things.
The downside of all of that, of course...
I don't think I even did my hair.
The downside of all of that...
It's that when we get great news, we adjust to that too.
Hey, you got a big raise and you're happy for like a day or two, and then your natural level of happiness reasserts itself.
So it's the same thing with fame.
So you think of someone like J.K. Rowling, right?
So J.K. Rowling was, I think, a welfare mom, a single mom, and she would, you know, write in a cafe with, like, rocking her kids back and forth.
And Many, many publishers, like the Fountainhead style, many publishers rejected her books.
and then she went on to become, outside of the moral pedophilic horror scape of Fifty Shades of Grey, she became one of the greatest or best-selling writers in history.
And the first couple of Harry Potter books were really good, very clever plots, and a realistic world, and characters you cared about.
It all got very silly after that, but that's generally the case.
I mean, if there were, I don't know, what, half a dozen or more Lord of the Rings books, it probably would have diminished as well.
So she achieved a level of fame that, I mean...
it's staggering.
And of course, most writers would think, my gosh, I mean, if I even achieved 1% of the success of J.K. Rowling, my life would be perfect, I'd be perfectly happy.
But here's the reality. The reality is, so she made, what, I don't know, a billion dollars, I don't know, even the movies and all, like, it all combined, the theme parks, the books, like, I mean...
It was truly nuts how much money she made and, you know, the best-selling books and big movies with famous actors.
And you'd think, well, that's, boy, you know, that's about as happy as you can be.
But the reality is, I bet you, fundamentally, she's no happier than when she was sitting in the cafe writing the books.
And, in fact, of course, When you hit that kind of peak, what happens afterwards?
Well, you know, the guys who write the hit song, well, they have to worry about their next song after the high of the hit song wears off.
And trying to maintain that is really, really tough.
Trying to stay relevant. And with all that money and all that influence comes isolation.
You can't just sit down and have a chat with the friends you grew up with when you've made a billion dollars or however much she made, right?
So what happens is, with fame, you get to a certain crest or a certain level Of income, of notoriety, of whatever, right?
And then what happens is you're terrified of losing it.
And that's why fame becomes a prison.
Fame is, to a large degree, other-directed, right?
I mean, it relies upon other people.
And so what happens is When you become that famous, when you become...
Your ego then is tied into...
Your sense of value, your sense of virtue is tied into your fame.
And then you become preternaturally terrified of being rejected.
And that is probably something that...
I don't think that would have existed way back in the day.
You know, if you're obscure, which means that you are famous to the people in your life, but not outside of that...
Then you don't fear societal rejection.
You don't fear the loss of all that, right?
Because she's achieved such a high level of fame and cultural influence and notoriety and all of that kind of stuff that if she were to lose that, I bet you that would be absolutely catastrophic for her and no amount of money would make up for that, right?
That's the problem with fame. You then become dependent upon other people's good opinion of you in a way that you weren't even before.
And if she'd been less of a famous writer, that would be less of an issue.
So now, you know, she writes a book, she's going to get it greenlit, she wants to make a movie, she's going to get it greenlit and so on.
But if the woke mob succeeds in shredding her reputation, then she's going to be tossed out like yesterday's Kleenex, and she's going to face a life of material wealth.
They can't take away her money, but she's going to face a life of rejection.
That's, of course, the calculation.
Is it worth doing this tweet if it means these massive negative repercussions?
I can't make a movie again. This is how these people operate.
This is the censorship that is going on at the moment.
It's really quite alarming.
You can have the legal right but not the practical right to speak your mind.
This is very, very significant.
The woke mob, the new witch burners, the new Salem, where you are convicted based upon superstition without any objective data, I mean, they are aiming to undo the rights that you have in theory, in practice, right? I mean, they're aiming to censor you or have you self-censor because of negative repercussions.
And it is all a communal net of cowardice that is allowing this to all happen.
It's a communal net of cowardice, which is, you know, if you say something that the woke mob doesn't like, they find out where you work, they try and get you fired, well, of course, your bosses should say, well, you're free to post whatever you want, right?
But they're afraid that it's going to sort of spread, that there's going to be this giant mob movement, this, you know, you're going to be strapped down, Lilliputian-style, and, you know, the army of soldier ants Are gonna, you know, strip your flesh from your bones and it's gonna be just too awful for words, you know, like that woman who tweeted something not very funny about AIDS in Africa got on a plane and by the time she got off the plane The woke mob had discovered her and her life was destroyed.
Just one little tweet that was not particularly funny.
It wasn't horribly offensive or anything like that, but that's held up.
It doesn't take a lot of severed heads around the town to get everyone to worry about losing their own.
So what's she doing?
Well, she's afraid that she's going to lose everything that she has achieved in terms of, not the money again, but You know, going to the A-list parties and getting her projects greenlit and having all of her famous friends and so on.
Because this leper pariah stuff that's going on where you just get tarred with something and then people don't want to have anything to do with you.
I mean, that really goes to the heart of our social mechanics as social animals, right?
I mean, as I said before to show it a million times, Social ostracism triggers the same neural pathways in the brain as physical torture does, because we can't survive without each other.
We're a social species, mainly based upon our own infirmities, the vulnerabilities of sleeping, and the fact that we need other people's resources when we have children, particularly, of course, if we're women, because we have this crazy long, like whatever ends up the most complex takes the longest to develop, and our babies just take forever to be able to do anything, quote, useful, right?
She's afraid. She's afraid of losing all that she has worked so hard to gain.
And that makes her, sadly, open to being controlled now.
This is one thing that's really interesting.
So when they had gatekeepers, like they had publishers, they had newspaper editors and all of this, who would be the gatekeepers between you and being able to speak to the world, those gatekeepers have fallen down with the internet, right?
Which is why the internet is...
In many ways, the free speech of the internet is so hated by the elites.
Why? Because the elites can no longer dangle ostracism over you, at least nearly as easily, if you're on the internet.
They can't...
Because, you know, people like me, we don't sit there and say, well, I really need a movie house or a publishing house to greenlight my next project, or I'm going to fade into irrelevance and self-contempt.
I can just put out another video, right?
I can suppress it, they can do it, but, you know, people can find it still, right?
What that means is that you then have influence, you have a voice in the world without being subject to the controlling Geppetto puppet strings of will give or take away your fame.
Actual free speech, right?
It's like the actual vote for Donald Trump or the actual vote for Boris Johnson or the actual vote for Bolsonaro.
I mean, they don't like it when the voting actually goes against what they want and they don't like it when people have influence without being able to be controlled by the threat of taking away the green light for your projects, invitations to parties.
I mean, I don't go to any A-list parties.
I don't have any Outside of the internet, celebrity friends and so on, so they can't threaten to take away things.
I'm not looking for people to greenlight my next project.
People say, oh, he's self-published.
It's like, well, my books are downloaded 100,000 times a month.
I mean, that's pretty important.
5,000 books in Canada is considered a bestseller.
But as they say self-published, like, that's a bad thing.
But self-published means I'm not reliant upon, and therefore vulnerable to, a publisher.
And it's the same thing with these kinds of conversations.
So the fact that J.K. Rowling is so susceptible to this kind of pressure, and that she is backwards changing the sexual...
Preferences and even gender identity of major characters, well, that's because she's now adjusted to this level of fame.
And for now, I believe, I genuinely, I don't know her obviously, I just imagine, right, that when someone achieves that level of fame, having that level of fame taken away from you would probably be somewhat equivalent to being turfed out and being homeless when you're poor.
It's really hard. And that's why every sane and sensible person avoids fame like the plague.
And, I mean, I certainly don't want to be famous because it lends you to be open to that kind of control.
So, anyway, I hope this helps.
I can do a couple of these chats.
Let me know what you think about this new format.
I find it interesting, and I ruminate on this stuff anyway, so might as well chat with you about it.
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