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Accidentally Conservative
Serenity was written by a flaming hippie. Yet the ultimate conflict is pitch perfect for tyrannical governments trying to remake human nature. Sure, the film is blemished by a preacher who doesn’t care about God, but there’s a nugget of good sense even in that scene.
“You don’t know what it’s like to work in the private sector. They expect results.” This was from a star of Saturday Night Live, for crying out loud! If you don’t recognize the quote, I will forgive you … eventually.
Monty Python, those poor souls! It’s jaw-dropping that a group of comedians could so perfectly and consistently satirize the Left’s nonsense without recognizing it in their own politics.
As for novelists, perhaps some gothic tales like Frankenstein qualify. What are some better examples?
What might we learn from this strange phenomenon? How is it possible for artists to unwittingly parody their own beliefs so keenly?
Published in Entertainment
When I began homeschooling, someone at a lecture asked about restricting children to Christian literature. The answer from the consultant was, of course not. Restrict them to good literature and the Truth and wisdom will be in there.
I love that show, probably my favorite on TV right now. Not sure I’d agree it’s conservative though, accidentally or otherwise. Why do you say it is?
It’s certainly libertarian-capitalist…
It has some conservative teachings, too, about friendship, trust, & what people call socializing. Damning the sycophancy & conformism of Progress in tech while suggesting people need to learn how to treat each other like human beings–that’s certainly conservative.
It’s also another Mike Judge joint.
Of course, his defense of capitalism is very much qualified: Remember Idiocracy: Corporations & consumerism are indulging the grabbiest kind of behavior while removing from people’s attention any human things…
And yet, in the movie the human race has survived and (arguably) prospered for 500 years in relative happiness and comfort. It looks like a dystopia from our point-of-view, but from the point-of-view of the people who live in that society it’s a pretty good life. It could be argued that the moral of the story is to not worry about the dumbing down of society quite so much. The people in Idiocracy may be dumb, but they’re still more-or-less free.
On the other hand, we never see what happened to the rest of the planet.
Maybe the rest of the planet is a super-intelligent utopia, and the USA is like a nature preserve for stupid people.
Or maybe the rest of world tore itself to shreds fighting the Islamists, and the US only survived by shutting down its borders super-tight.
Funny as all that is, having the people live by porn is not utopia-
Is it, though? The show satirizes (with painful accuracy) the excesses and absurdities of both a large corporation with a narcisistic egomaniac CEO (Hooli) as well as startups riding the gravy chain and wasting money on frivolities. It depicts (spoiler alert) a would-be VC renting out Alcatraz and wasting $1 million on a party solely to rub his (fleeting) success in the faces of his rivals.
A socialist could just as easily view all this as an indictment of the corruption and inefficiencies of capitalism. I think it’s just straight-ahead satire, whether you see it as leading to progressive or libertarian policies reflects more on the preconceptions of the viewer than the content of the show.
I never argued that the Idiocracy is utopia. I only argue that’s not as dystopic as critics like to say.
After all, in the Idiocracy even “tarded” people can find high-paying jobs!
I disagree: I’m talking about what a man with a head on his shoulders is supposed to understand from this. That depends on two things. 1. Following the stories. 2. Understanding comedy.
The irresponsible stuff is to an extent comic & to an extent a show of the confusions into which American freedom falls. But the show does not deny the basic fact, that in Silicon Valley people invent both useful things & incredibly intelligent things. Even the ugliness of the Google-stand in corporation & the crazy stuff of the American future are shown to make sense in a market economy.
Whoever thinks the Marx Bros. all belong in jail for assault & battery is not playing with a full deck…
Yabbut, even if these companies tear themselves apart through their foolishness they’re still creating value for society through their products, right? It’s a fable about creative destruction and getting bad people to do good things.
It’s a contrast to the stereotypical Wall Street movie where the bad people simply suck money away from good people and provide no value in return. Those movies are about parasitic destruction, rather than creative destruction.
In the real world, Atari burned itself out with its excesses, but it also helped launch entire industries. Shall we say the world would be better off if Atari had never existed?
Mr. Judge does not take ‘creating value’ in the way libertarians or free-market types do, but there’s good there & the crazy stuff makes sense against this background. He shows time & again what business sense means & what good management has in common with good writing, as well as the essentially conspiratorial character of founding businesses. Much of what he says–including that mental retards might be great founders because they’re the only non-conformists left–seems to come straight out of Mr. Peter Thiel’s speeches & book.
One could argue that the problem with the people of Idiocracy is not so much that they’re dumb, but that they’re all conformists. Nobody ever questions or rebels agains the norms in which they live.
For example, it’s not really a problem that “Ow, my balls!” is a popular show. The problem is that EVERYBODY enjoys “Ow, my balls!” There’s no competition between stupid shows.
In other words, the problem isn’t really that every product/service/institution in Idiocracy is of poor quality, but rather that every product/service/institution enjoys a monopoly, and nobody ever thinks to demand anything different.
It’s not that everybody eats fast food. It’s that everybody eats at ONE fast food restaurant. How did Carl’s Jr achieve that monopoly?
The people in Idiocracy are all stupid in the same way. They do not choose between competing stupid things. That’s the real problem with the society.
This is the merest sophism. A society in which there is nothing but fast food & the equivalent of it by way of spectacles is inhuman.
I’m not arguing that show is pushing a progressive/liberal agenda like the stereotypical Wall Street movie does, I’m just not convinced it’s pushing a conservative/libertarian agenda, either. Is the absence of a left-wing agenda sufficient to label a show “conservative?”
Ah, but if different garbage has to compete with other garbage, by order of elimination some garbage will have to be better than the other garbage. Eventually, after x number of iterations, the competition allows a product/service/institution to transcend “garbageness”.
The only way that such garbage can possible attain such monopoly status is through lack of competition. It’s the lack of competition that creates the Idiocracy, not the Idiocracy that creates the lack of competition.
The only way the society of Idiocracy can turn out the way it does in the movie is if it’s planned that way, with the corporations’ monopoly powers granted and enforced by government. Brawndo cannot be the only drink available because the people prefer it, but because the government gave the Brawndo Corporation the sole contract to provide the nation with liquid sustenance.
If the movie had been written by a true Left-winger, they would have written it so that the idiots have too much choice, not too little. It would have been a society dominated by too many fast food options, and too many different big box stores, and too many different competing hospitals, and too many different competing sports drinks, etc.
In today’s media environment?
Yes.
Simply refusing to demonize a corporation as genuinely evil qualifies as conservative.
I’m not sure you’re following what he’s suggesting with the story. The government monopolies are the last, not the first step. The real causes are to do with democracy. People feel entitled–that’s what they understand rights to mean, angry shouting about what they should have coming to them–& at the same time, they feel the same. This is what corporations feed, without quite realizing it, not least because the people running them take a ‘value equals irrational preference’ atittude to business, which they learn from free market theory, if not their own prejudices.
To believe competition creates anything but garbage you have to know in advance, independently of competition, what not-garbage really is, & come up with some way in which the preference for non-garbage can succeed. There is no reason to believe it just does.
And yet, if competition is supposed to create the absolute worst results due to the dumbing-down of the society, shouldn’t the fast food monopoly be held by the lowest-quality fast food chain available (say, White Castle or Arby’s) rather than one of the higher-quality ones, like Carl’s Jr.? Shouldn’t the coffee & handjob monopoly be held by the lowest-quality chain (say, Dunkin Donuts) rather than a higher-quality ones like Starbucks? Shouldn’t the megamart monopoly be held by one of the lowest-quality chains, like Dollar Tree, rather than one of the higher-quality ones like Costco?
Also…
… whoa, whoa, whoa. Let’s not write things we can’t take back!
I’m not sure that competition is supposed to end up with the worst possible or the worst of available opportunities. The way he seems to have thought it out, competition has encouraged dirt because there is something wrong with latter-day American democracy. Previously, asking for one’s rights was not reducible to fast food & porn. Maybe gradually the welfare state tends there–also an outgrowth of the American demand for their rights. The implication seems to be that the way of equality levels down, not up. So one reason it’s important to have an average joe in the picture is, he’s aware he’s not the best–he has some sense that there are higher things than what he possesses. The question is whether average joes are going to do better or are instead going to turn to something Americans have hitherto never had to face: Gross materialism, disgusting desires.
I’m not sure why the guy picked the stuff he picked; you’re right that he did not go with the lowest class alternatives available. I think you can tell that Starbucks is about humiliating liberals. It may be worthwhile to think through these choices, but you have to give me more to work with than social class–not that that’s not helpful.
Also, corporations may be feeding the worst in people as a kind of equivalent of the welfare state.
Depends on your definition of “better.” Market competition gives companies the incentive to produce more supply of whatever is in demand. There was apparently a lot of demand for shows starring Honey Boo Boo, so the entertainment industry met that demand. This doesn’t mean that Here Comes Honey Boo Boo is a better TV show than e.g. Silicon Valley, unless you think more popular automatically means better.
Isn’t that the point of Idiocracy? If your market audience consists entirely of idiots, the market will cater to them and give them what they want — which isn’t necessarily what they need, or what would ennoble and improve them so that they could lead richer, more humane lives.
“Go away! Batin’!”
Individuals seeking freedom and liberty make for good stories. Does anyone have an example of a leftist type story where the government or bureaucracy is the hero? Does that even make a good story? I suppose environmentalist type movies like Erin Brokovich count as that sort of up-with-government type story.
So I’ve a few more thoughts about Idiocracy.
The monopolies also seem meant to suggest that too much sameness inevitably dulls the mind; variety is tied up not only with choice, but also with curiosity. Both seem somehow tied up American freedom. The corporations in Idiocracy end up making things worse for people who are already in a bad way.
But corporations did not create the catastrophe; it seems like they cater so much to a foolish materialism that what happens is, everything else withers. In the end, there’s garbage & advertised garbage. So the question is, what could stand in the way of such a foolish materialism? What can appeal to democracy & not debase it?
The only stories I can think of where the government is the hero is when it’s either the military, the police, an intelligence service, or some combination of all three being ordered around by the President. They aren’t usually “leftist type stories” though, unless you count all of the quips that writers sneak in on whatever the current Law and Order is.
But aside from that, yeah, I don’t know of any. Unless you count Parks and Recreation, where the protagonists all work for a government bureaucracy but it’s a total farce.
There’s a discussion in this podcast that explains how Star Wars is the quintessential conservative movie that was made by one of the biggest leftist in Hollywood.
Woody Allen .
His personal views may be screwy but he is the preeminent critic of the NYT left.
Manhattan, sure. But surely not everything!