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March 8, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:19
Why Artists Tend to Be Leftists...
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One supposed rather inevitable hobby of mine is looking at the pressing questions on the internet and answering them.
And one of the biggest ones is why are so many artists left leaning or medium to far left as a whole?
The answer to that lies in understanding the causality of observation.
Now, think about a lion and a zebra.
Does the lion pay more attention to the zebra on the whole, or does the zebra pay more attention to the lion?
We understand that as long as the lion is not hungry, the lion pays no attention to the zebra whatsoever, because the zebra is not a threat to the lion.
Of course, when the lion is hungry, he pays a lot of attention to the zebra, but on the average overall, the zebra always has one eye on the lion, whereas the lion ignores the zebra until the lion is hungry.
Now, as a result of this, does the lion know more about the zebra, or does the zebra know more about the lion?
Well, given that observation brings knowledge, we absolutely can know.
This is not even...
Inferred, this is direct, right?
We can know for sure that the zebra knows a lot more about the lion than the lion knows about the zebra.
The lion knows the zebra will run, the lion knows that he's got to creep up, the lion knows the zebra can kick, and the lion knows that the zebra is tasty.
And that's about it. So, when you are prey, you study the predator extraordinarily deeply.
What is the one central thing that separates a good artist from a bad artist?
It is the accuracy, specificity and detail of the observation.
Of personality types, of motivations, of characteristics.
We've all seen these sort of one-dimensional wooden characters, just this causeless evil guy and the noble heroic empty guy and all of that.
But when you have a great deal of...
Specificity and detail in the observation of human nature.
Obviously, think of Shakespeare, think of Dickens, you could think of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams as a past master at noticing specific details and summoning them.
Ernest Hemingway, less so.
And I would say F. Scott Fitzgerald, less so.
But the greatest artists tend to be those who have the most detail and specificity in their observation.
Of human nature, of human personality.
To construct an accurate personality means that you have to have had a habit, whether conscious or unconscious, you have to have had a habit of observing, obsessively observing human beings over the course of your life.
And I can still remember when I was a kid, I was photographing in my brain everyone all the time And coming to conclusions and coming to judgments and evaluating personality and figuring out who was the good guy, who was the bad guy, who was trustworthy, who was not trusty, who was volatile, who was placid.
I still remember being, I don't know, maybe 12 years old and heading down to my job in a bookstore.
And A guy, a tall guy, probably about 20, with blonde hair, came sort of jumping into the subway car with a big smile, but it was kind of a, I've arrived, let the party begin kind of smile, and it always struck me as a kind of desperation behind that.
I could literally go on and on for days about all the people that I've, everything that I've noticed and so on.
So why was I, and I could say obsessively, but it's not obsessive when you think about the cause and effect, but why was I so focused on trying to figure out what make human beings tick?
Well... Because I was prey.
Because I was a zebra in the world of lions.
Because I was prey, I studied everyone around me to figure out who was a predator, who was neutral, and who was fellow prey.
I didn't have a huge amount to worry about from fellow prey, other than they would betray me to appease the predators.
The neutral people...
I viewed them as cowardly, as abstracted, and unimportant as a whole.
There was some resentment for their failure to act to protect me, but I doubted they were going to attack me.
Again, they would not necessarily collude with the predator, but they would not oppose the predator.
They would stand by and let the predator do his ugly work.
And when I read back on my writing, my creative writing, I mean, just about every sentence has some fairly deep and pithy observation about human nature.
I just read the first, I don't know, 13 or 14 minutes of my novel, The Present.
And you could spend a day on every sentence in terms of unpacking it.
So if you understand that artists become good artists through observation of human nature, and not just observation like a camera, but coming to particular conclusions about human nature.
This is how you get believable characters, people who you meet in a book that you could absolutely imagine or see meeting in real life.
Now, I'm not talking about the sort of modern, or I mean, it's always been the case to some degree or another, the propagandists.
I'm not talking about the people who create cardboard cutout, repetitive, boring characters in order to further the goals of revolution.
I'm talking about the real artists, not the propagandists, but the real artists.
Observe very deeply.
Now, the propagandists observe human beings very deeply, but what they do is they observe the emotional preferences of an NPC audience so that they can plug the right plugs into the right receptacle, so to speak. So they study how to manipulate people.
Through predictable symbols, Marvel movies and woke stuff and all of that.
So those people, they study people as prey, in a sense.
And they themselves are the predators, right?
But they're predators who are weak, in a sense, right?
So they have to manipulate. They're predators like a mosquito.
He's a predator, so to speak, right?
So I'm talking about the real artists.
And if you look at the childhoods of most of the artists, they have some sort of trauma and fairly significant even outside the times.
And so when you are abused as a child, you grow up feeling like prey.
Why? Because you are prey. You are prey.
You are hunted. You are hunted.
You know, if you've had a mean parent or the parent's in a bad mood, they just stalk around looking for something to criticize, looking for something to get mad at.
And they just...
You're prey.
You feel like prey. And so you study.
The predators you study.
And not just the predators, but you have to study for potential allies as well.
To study for potential allies as well.
And it can be really heartbreaking, of course, when you think you might have an ally.
Like, there were a lot of people in my childhood, I thought, you know, and I understood this.
I've talked about this on the show, but...
I understood that, you know, it's pretty tough to do something about a kid who's being abused.
I mean, the whole system is kind of set up that way, obviously.
So it's pretty tough to do something about a kid who's being abused.
But I thought maybe as an adult, when I had been honest about what had happened to me as a child, that they would Say, yeah, you know, it broke our hearts at the time.
There really wasn't anything we can do.
I'm so glad you're doing better.
You know, tell me more. That kind of stuff, right?
But no, no, even people who I thought were allies would, many years later, after I had been pretty honest about what had happened, oh, how's your poor mother doing?
How's your dear mother doing? Blah, blah, blah, right?
It's kind of bone-crushing when that stuff happens, and it's a real black pill.
To recognize how blind people are to immorality and how much they collude and how sentimentality is a seed planted by the corrupt in order to enslave the morally gullible.
So you grow up feeling like prey, because you are prey, and so you obsessively study.
I mean, have you ever had this?
When I worked in the woods, and even now when I walk through the woods sometimes, you scan the environment and Four, escape routes are weaponry, right?
So if you're walking in the woods, and I used to do more shows in the woods, it's not the season for it now, but I used to do more shows in the woods, and you walk around, every now and then you'd hear a sound that would be very unusual in the woods.
And you would immediately scan around for, is there a tree to climb?
Is there a stick I can use as a weapon?
Is there a place to run? And so on, right?
Is there a place to dodge or hide behind or whatever?
Hiding behind with the smell probably doesn't really help that much.
But you scan the environment for places to run to, places to hide, things to climb, weapons to grab, that kind of stuff, right?
So you're scanning the environment for allies, for escape routes, you know, situational awareness.
This is the way that your brain works on a fairly continual basis.
I mean, it's much less now.
I mean, my childhood was 40 years ago, so, you know, things have cooled off considerably.
But, again, and part of it is nothing to do with childhood.
Part of it is just that human beings were prey species to wolves, tigers, lions, bears, you know, that kind of stuff, right?
So, saber-toothed tigers and whatever, right?
So, human beings were prey species and, of course, human beings were prey species in particular to other human beings, right?
To predators and so on.
So, when you grow up abused...
You end up scanning your environment, and in particular scanning for people, for safety, signals.
Situational awareness becomes a constant habit.
I mean, you think of a soldier, or a spy in particular, or somebody, a cop who's working undercover.
I mean, they have to be alert and aware the whole time.
It's life and death in many ways.
So when you're abused, you grow up as prey.
And as prey, you obsessively study those around you.
And obsession is the wrong word, but I'll just use it to indicate how intense it is.
You study those around you, and you end up being able to very quickly evaluate other prey, the neutrals, and the predators.
And you will form alliances with other prey, with the knowledge that if a predator comes along, betrayal is going to occur.
You are somewhat wary, but don't really take much into account the neutrals.
In this case, you know, in school, it's after the teachers, if you're being bullied or whatever, they're neutral.
And you steer clear of the predators, right?
I mean... When I got into a tangle with a kid and then his older brother was going to, quote, kill me.
Obviously, he wasn't going to kill me, but, you know, beat me up or whatever.
And I was like 12 and this guy was like 17, so I had no particular chance.
Well, I just became hypervigilant at school.
I scanned and I avoided.
I constantly checked the hallways and so on, right?
And that worked out fine.
I was very proud of the way I handled that situation, right?
Because, you know, this idea, well, I'm going to just beat him up and get a 2x4, it's all nonsense, right?
I mean, it's just going to get you injured and, you know, you fall down a flight of stairs or get punched in the head or, you know, you're going to get some sort of terrible injury and so on, right?
And if you're smart, you have...
More to lose from head injuries than other people.
So I was very, very proud of the way that I handled that.
I certainly wasn't going to get any help from the adults in the environment, and so I did what smart prey does, is you hide until the predator moves on, and then you resume your life uninjured and all of that.
And all of the stuff that's just set up to humiliate you, that you've got to stand up and, you know, Back to the future, punch the bully and so on.
It's like, yeah, that's great.
Yeah, that works out super well.
Maybe in the past it could have for sure.
But that's not the case anymore.
So you feel like prey, you study and you absorb and you store up massive amounts of accurate observations about human nature.
You have to learn what makes people tick.
You have to go past their defenses to what's actually going on.
There's a movie California with David Duchovny and Brad Pitt and Brad Pitt paints a serial killer and David Duchovny is out studying serial killers and gives this guy a ride and they're in a bar and Violence is coming, and the serial killer Brad Pitt guy is like, you can't stop it, violence is coming, and so on, right?
So he studies, he knows.
Now, of course, he's a predator, not a prey species, but he was a prey species in order to become a predator, so he knows when the violence is coming.
Now, part of his own nature is that he's going to, in a sense, welcome the violence, because that's what he's good at, but you can see this kind of stuff, right?
Be aware of the situational awareness.
Keep your head on a swivel, as Dan Bongino would say.
So you build up a mountain of accurate and astute observations, not about people's, just their surface behaviors, but how they tick and what makes them tick deep down.
You build up these archetypes, you build up these characters, and they're pretty real.
The more deeply you observe human nature, the more you realize that people can, in general, if they're not individuated, if they don't think for themselves, and most people don't, they can be categorized into various archetypes.
So you grow up feeling like prey.
And you also grow up without particular skills that can help you succeed, right?
I mean, you grow up without the capacity to negotiate because you're just dominated.
You grow up without the capacity to reason.
You grow up without the capacity to stand up for yourself because standing up for yourself can kind of get you killed or abandoned, or at least that's the fear, right?
You grow up with people using violence against you or manipulation or bullying rather than respecting you and listening to you and reasoning with you.
And so you grow up kind of crippled, right?
And when you think about zebras versus lions, I mean, they're both quadrupeds, they're both mammals, they both have teeth, whatever, it's a hoof versus claws or whatever.
But the zebra is just kind of crippled relative to the lion when it comes to fighting.
They can hoof and kick and so on, right?
But, you know, a couple of lions can even take down an elephant, right?
So you feel like prey.
And you are kind of crippled for the free market, right?
So when you grow up feeling like prey and you are kind of crippled regarding the free market, one of the things you can do is you can sell your accumulated observations, right?
You can sell your accumulated observations, right?
And that's art. Art is monetizing trauma.
Art is monetizing the accuracy of observation that results from feeling like prey for most of your life.
It's cashing in on the clout, being clouted, being hit, being beaten.
It's forging destruction into dollars.
It's monetizing trauma.
And you are going to feel a sympathy and view the world as predator and prey.
Again, all the same species, but, you know, they're still aggressors and victims, right?
And so you're going to view, like if you see a conflict between, say, management and workers, you immediately think of parents and children, as I sort of talked about before.
And so you see the managers as the parents and the workers as the children.
And because you couldn't negotiate, they can't negotiate the workers.
Because your parents were mean, the boss is inevitably going to be mean.
Because your parents exploited you, you can only think of the boss as exploiting you.
You're going to naturally sympathize because you were prey.
So you're going to identify the workers as prey and you are going to identify with the prey and take out your anger at the predator, at the boss, right?
And by doing this, Particularly with the propaganda stuff that goes on now.
By doing this, what you do is you rouse people's anger against the boss.
In other words, you are trying to find allies to oppose your parents in your head right now.
Of course, the workers are adults and they've made choices and the managers probably work very hard and have taken a lot of risks to be where they are.
But you can't view the world objectively because you're viewing it through a lens of unresolved childhood trauma.
You can't view the world as people.
If you think that workers are like children, right?
And you see this all the time in the leftist stuff, right?
The marginalized, the vulnerable, the blah, blah, blah, right?
Well, they just talk about their own childhoods.
They talk about children in the communities that they know, that they grew up in.
And, you know, this society needs to move to protect the marginalized and the vulnerable.
It's like, well, yeah, let's talk about children.
Let's talk about not drugging them.
Let's talk about getting them into decent schools.
Let's talk about not hitting them.
Let's talk about, you know, but you can't.
No, no, no. You can't talk about that, right?
So they're trying to really rouse up allies, in a sense, to attack their parents.
Because, I mean, you get enough of this propaganda and You know, the business owners and the managers, the entrepreneurs, they end up being attacked or discriminated against and so on, right?
So yeah, if you want to know why artists tend to be leftists, because they were raised with all the observational obsessive detail gathering that comes from feeling like prey and being prey.
And they then take this worldview and project it onto economics.
And the government becomes the ultimate ally that is going to protect them from the predators, which of course the government is happy to pretend it is, when in fact it is generally the greatest predator.
So yeah, that's why artists participate in the market system by monetizing their trauma while attacking the market system, because they want to monetize their trauma, because they want to maximize the resources that they have gathered inadvertently, this observational detail about human beings.
But they take their childhood and project it onto the abstract free market and provoke rage against their proxy parents in the form of entrepreneurs.
So, yeah, I hope that helps. Thanks so much for listening and supporting.
I need your help.
Please, please. I would really, really appreciate it.
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