April 26, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
07:36
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| So, I just saw that Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for a movie called The Father, and I'm gonna throw a couple of spoilers in here, but you should watch the movie anyway, it's really, really good. | |
| He's an acting powerhouse, even though he's got a lot of tells by this time in his career, but I could watch the man chop lettuce and feel moved. | |
| So it's an interesting film. | |
| A couple of points about it, though, I think that are well worth mentioning. | |
| First of all, if everybody knows that the old man is losing his mind, why is everyone shocked and surprised and appalled every time he forgets something or seems confused by something? | |
| That just seemed kind of unnecessarily dramatic, if that makes any sense, and got a little bit annoying. | |
| The second thing is that he's got increasing dementia over the course of the movie, and at the end of it he is sobbing back to a childlike state, And this wonderfully kind, | |
| beautiful, tender nurse is holding him and says, oh, it's okay, you know, we'll go for a walk in the park, just you and me, and then we'll have a nice little lunch, and then we'll have, you'll have a nap, and then we'll have another walk in the park, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, that's not how old-age homes run, just, you know, I guess unless you're spending a million dollars a day or something, but that's really not how old-age homes run. | |
| But what it is, is kind of a, you know, there's a lot of people who have a lot of guilt about putting old people into old-age homes, right? | |
| I mean, it's a difficult decision, it's an unpleasant decision, of course, harsh on the heart. | |
| And the generation that is making that decision now is the generation that was raised In daycare, right? | |
| So that's the way that life works. | |
| Your parents put you in daycare, and then when they get old, you put them in an old age home. | |
| And that is the horrible, empty, vacuous barbell of life. | |
| The idea that this old, difficult, aggressive, cantankerous man would have this loving, wonderful, tender nurse who's going to take him for walks in the park and he's just going to get one-on-one care, it's not. | |
| I mean, come on, you dump your parents in an old age home, it's going to be rough and they're probably not going to be treated. | |
| Well, they're certainly not going to be treated as well as the fantasy is. | |
| But you see, the woman in the movie, the woman, she looks to be in her late 40s, maybe early 50s, the woman who is putting the, Anthony is the name of the Anthony Hopkins character, the woman who's putting him in the old age home, this is the other fantasy. | |
| And you've got to watch these fantasies. | |
| They're really, really toxic in these kinds of movies. | |
| So the other fantasy is that this woman in her early 50s, well, don't you know, she works, right? | |
| She's got a job. She works all the time. | |
| She doesn't have any kids, right? | |
| So the tragedy is about the end of the line. | |
| You know, it's always white people, you know, and there's no more kids in these movies, probably because they can't really legally have kids around most Hollywood directors anymore. | |
| But she is... | |
| Given this carrot, so why is she not able to care for her aging father? | |
| Well, because, you see, this relatively young, hot guy just wants her to come and move to Paris and be with him in this city of love and light, and it's going to be wonderful and all of that. | |
| So, here are the two fantasies. | |
| One, there's going to be this wonderful tender nurse to take care of your father at his old age, who's just going to love him and be there for him and make his life as good as possible. | |
| And secondly, don't you know, you know, hot guys in their mid-40s just love nothing better than to take... | |
| Barren women in their 50s to Paris to have romance and love and brioche and baguettes and so on. | |
| I mean, that's just not how things work. | |
| Hot guys in their 40s are dating women in their late 20s. | |
| Hot, successful, rich guys in general. | |
| They're not married, right? They're dating women who are younger, so this is kind of two fantasies. | |
| And you can see, of course, here as well that the woman doesn't have any kids and she has a career. | |
| It's unspecified if I remember rightly in the movie, but she's had a career. | |
| And he also had a career. | |
| There's no mention of the mother that I can recall. | |
| Maybe it was in passing. So the Anthony Hopkins character, the old guy, had a career as an engineer. | |
| The young woman had a career, and she never bothered to have any children. | |
| And that's the end of the line. | |
| This is what makes the movie so fundamentally tragic to me. | |
| is he raised a woman who I guess he was very distant from or didn't spend much time with because she then became a workaholic and didn't have any kids but don't you know again in her early 50s there's just this wonderful wonderful guy who sweeps her off her feet and just takes her to the city of love where she lives and loves and I mean that's just the desperate fantasy element of these movies I mean Lord of the Rings is much more believable at least when Aragorn kicks a helmet he hurts his toe for real But all of this stuff is really, | |
| really sad. So it is really horrible that the intergenerational deal, which is I take care of you when you're young, you take care of me when I'm old, that that deal has been completely and totally broken by convincing women to dump their kids into daycare and rush off to usually boring, without much future, unsatisfying, unsuccessful careers. | |
| It's really, really sad. | |
| And what this has done, of course, is it has made having children much less appealing. | |
| I mean, I've been a stay-at-home dad for 12 and a half years now, and being a parent is the most amazing and wonderful thing in the world. | |
| Everything else I've done pales by comparison. | |
| But when you have your kids, you dump them in daycare, and you don't really spend much time with them, and you've got to get up early, you've got to hurry them out of the house, you've got to get them to the daycare, you've got to hurry back from work, you've got to pick them up, and you've got to make dinner, and it's just everything is stressed and harried, and your life just whirls around like... | |
| You know, a piece of strawberry seed in a blender. | |
| It's just wretched. And then, of course, you get older, and your kids go to school, and they bond with their peers, and they don't have much contact with you, and then you drop them off at school, or they get picked up by the bus, you go to work, and then you've got to hurry home to be with them, and then they've got You've got to fight with them about homework, and then there's dinner to make and bills to pay. | |
| It's just a wretched, wretched life. | |
| It's a wretched life. You know, the average medieval serf worked like, what, a day or two a week, and here we are running around like chickens with our heads cut off. | |
| Everybody used to be like a university professor now. | |
| We're all Protestant-laced, absinthe-blooded workaholics, and it's really sad. | |
| And putting your kids in daycare is probably going to mean the end of your line within a generation or two, because your kids look at you and say, well, man, parenting wasn't really much fun at all, so why on earth would I bother? | |
| And then you get these fantasy movies. | |
| Oh, you don't have to give kids because a hot, successful guy is just going to sweep you off your feet in your 50s and take you to Paris. | |
| And your dad's going to be in this wonderful old age home where they love him and care about him. | |
| Come on. It's really sad. | |
| It's really... It's kind of pathetic in a way. |
Export Selection