WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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[Electronic music]

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[Electronic music]

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So why is it that humans just can’t stop
killing each other?

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Well, I don’t know, what do I look like
to you, some kind of philosopher?

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[plucks harp]

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So look, Thrasymachus, this is a question
for God and the prophets, not for preening

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transsexuals who can’t get out of bed without
a Bloody Mary.

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However, if I were to make a modest contribution
to the subject, I would humbly offer up the

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hypothesis that humans are horrible
to each other because, well,

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violence is fun.

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And when I say that, I of course mean that
it’s fun to be violent.

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It’s not fun when other people are violent
to you.

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I mean, unless that’s what you’re into.

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That is what I’m into.

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Did I say you could speak?

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No mistress.

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Then Shut up.

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[Electronic music]

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Mm. It's good. Chocolate-y.

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Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange is
very uncomfortable to watch, and not just

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because it depicts horrible acts of violence.

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Most of the movies I like depict horrible
acts of violence.

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I mean if you’re gonna watch a non-violent
movie you may as well read a fucking book.

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What’s disquieting about A Clockwork Orange
is that it encourages us to viddy the old

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ultra-violence largely from the perspective
of the sadistic protagonist, a jaunty rapist

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who likes to sing and dance as he tortures
and humiliates his victims.

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What’s creepy about Alex is the film encourages
us to identify with him, and he kind of draws

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us in.

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I mean he listens to Beethoven and I personally
am attracted to every man who has ever liked

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German composers.

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Also he tries the wine.

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Try the wine!

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Shh.

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So we watch Alex kick and spin and smash things
and beat the shit out of homeless people and

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bash old ladies in the face with giant sculptures
of dicks, and all of this to triumphant classical

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music and show tunes.

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It’s clear that for Alex, this is all a
lot of fun.

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So the question I wanna ask is, how unusual
are people like this in real life?

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Is it normal to enjoy violence?

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I mean extremely violent behavior is uncommon,
but part of the reason for that might be that

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most of us live in political circumstances
where behaving like a violent maniac is...

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highly frowned upon.

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Plus there’s also that tedious old thing
called having some semblance of a conscience.

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And I think that’s part of the reason why
so many people don’t really enjoy watching

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A Clockwork Orange.

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It’s not that they don’t enjoy violence,
it’s just that in order for them to enjoy

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violence, they need some kind of reassurance
that the violence is okay, and that enjoying

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it is morally and socially allowed.

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I guess it’s kind of like sex.

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I’m not gonna want to have sex in a fluorescent-lit
bathroom stall [(at least, not since I started

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taking this shit).

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I need candlelight to get me in the mood,
you know, a little goddamn ambience.

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And you could say that the moral conscience
is the fluorescent-lit bathroom stall of the

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human mind.

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You can’t properly enjoy violence with all
that internal nagging in the background.

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But in that case, what is the romantic candlelight
of the sadistic psyche?

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What do we need to get to a point where we
can enjoy violence?

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Well, think about the TV show Law and Order:
SVU, which has just as much sex and violence

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as A Clockwork Orange, but which is much more
popular.

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SVU is a show where hero cops with no regard
for due process brutally interrogate suspected

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sex offenders and smash them in the face with
wooden drawers.

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You like that don’t you?

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I love it so much.

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You all do.

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I think a lot of the appeal of SVU is that
it gives upstanding American citizens a way

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to sate their curiosity about heinous
sex crimes, while promising the

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moral purification of justified police violence.

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Oooh, so that promise is the candlelit ambience
of the moral psyche.

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When we believe that violence is morally justified,
when we think the guy being thrown around

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the interrogation room fucking deserved it,
we become more capable of enjoying it aesthetically.

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Exactly.

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And I think this kind of moral lampshading
partly explains the popularity of rape-revenge

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plot lines you see in movies like Kill Bill,
The Crow, and Curious George Kills the Rapist.

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For viewers with too many moral hangups to
get off on totally senseless violence, a rape-revenge

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plot line is a cheap way to establish the
emotional precedent required for a gratifying

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bloody payoff.

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But I wonder if there may not be as much of
a psychological difference between the “good

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person’s” enjoyment of justified violence,
and the evil sadist’s enjoyment of random

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violence as we might like to think.

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Yes.

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The good person has a moral conscience as
a kind of inhibitive influence, but once you

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get past that there’s a kind of amoral kinetic
rapture in swinging, thrashing, stabbing,

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shooting, blasting, and burning: an aesthetics
of violence and destruction.

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Now I, for one, hardly ever enjoy real-world
violence because I empathize with the victim

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and my conscience vetoes any enjoyment of
it.

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I mean, unless I get real frustrated—

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[drone]
[baby crying]

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VO: “Shut up!

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Please just 
shut up!”

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“I can’t think with all this noise.

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I can’t think straight.”

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"You're so filthy."

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“It’s time to drink your milk”
[moaning]

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But you know, when I’m playing video games,
where there are no moral or practical consequences

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to any of my actions whatsoever, I behave
like an absolute goddamn psychopath.

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I guess that a simulation of a thing being
fun doesn’t mean the thing itself is fun.

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The Sims is a simulation of life, and that’s
fun, but life itself... is terrible.

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[Electronic music]

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To be clear, that was a joke, not a cry for
help.

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I’m actually fine.

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I have tons of friends.

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I’m fine.

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I'm really—I'm, I'm fine.

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I’m happy, okay??

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Here’s what I want to know: unless violence
is fun on some basic level, why are simulations

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of it so fun that the game-play of most video
games revolves entirely around it?

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Some critics have suggested that this is simply
toxic masculinity at work, and that it’s

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a patriarchal moral defect that our media
is so violent.

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And yeah, it’s true that men are mostly
responsible for this, granted.

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But honestly I feel a little bit infantilized
by the moral critique, since I like violent

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media, and I feel like I can tell the difference between
real and fictional violence.

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Although, sometimes the distinction between real
and simulated violence can get blurrier [glitch]

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than I usually like to think. [glitch]

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Singing: “Hush little baby don’t you cry,
momma’s gonna buy you a mockingbird.”

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Joshua Oppenheimer’s disturbing documentary,
The Act of Killing, chronicles the contemporary

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lives of the Indonesian gangsters who massacred
millions of alleged communists from 1965-66.

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One of the killers, Anwar Congo, explains
on a local television program that his torture

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and murder methods were inspired by sadistic
American movies.

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[Speaking Indonesian]

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The documentary takes a surreal turn as the
original perpetrators set to work producing

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cinematic reenactments of their youthful war
crimes, stylizing the events after Westerns,

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Mafia films, and other Hollywood genres.

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It’s a particularly uncomfortable case of
life imitating art.

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And on that topic, Stanley Kubrick had A Clockwork
Orange withdrawn from British distribution

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in 1973, after the film was alleged to have
influenced a handful of real-life assaults.

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Now I’m not saying that violent movies make
people violent, and we know that most consumers

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of violent media never commit acts of violence
themselves.

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I mean I watch violent movies all the time
and I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t deserve it.

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VO: “So now ‘woke’ @ContraPoints thinks
child abuse is funny.

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I personally drowned several of my babies
and it was very traumatic for me.”

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Why did I become an SJW again?

00:09:23.440 --> 00:09:24.440
Hey!

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What I wanna know, is what’s the difference
between fans of violent movies who are peaceful

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and those who are sadistic killers?

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Well, who better to ask than an Indonesian
gangster with a thousand dead communists under his belt?

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[Speaking Indonesian]

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So in other words, as long as you can justify
it to yourself with some kind of flimsy excuse,

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you can kill without remorse.

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And I imagine it also helps when the US-backed
government of your country endorses the killing

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and you never have to face any consequences
for it.

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What’s interesting to me is that the sadistic
enjoyment of violence is psychologically identical

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whether or not your justification rationally
holds up or makes any sense.

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In other words the psychology of a righteous
sadist may not differ from that of an evil

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sadist, except that the former has better
reasons backing him up,

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or lives in a better political situation.

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But hold on, is there even such a thing as
a righteous sadist?

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I think it’s okay to enjoy violent movies,
but is it ever not bad to enjoy real violence?

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What would be helpful here is an example,
some act of violence that my audience thinks

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is righteous, and that a lot of them probably
enjoy.

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Unfortunately, my audience is morally superior,
and none of them would ever enjoy such a thing.

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[Classical music]

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VO: “@ContraPoints has completely libbed
out and can’t stop wringing her hands over

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a poor little Nazi getting hit in the face. Awww.”

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Alright, alright. Let’s grant that punching a Nazi is
morally acceptable.

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Let's say it’s morally required even.

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Well, why don’t we bring everyone on board.

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Suppose there’s a Nazi TERF and he’s about
to punch a baby, and punching the TERF Nazi

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is the only way to stop him punching the baby.

00:11:25.960 --> 00:11:28.879
Socrates, is it just to punch the baby-puncher?

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VO: “ContraPoints’ sponsors would like
to apologize to the baby community for this

00:11:32.020 --> 00:11:34.860
video’s ongoing trivialization of infanticide.

00:11:34.860 --> 00:11:36.900
They’d also like you to know that some of
Natalie’s best friends are babies, and they

00:11:36.900 --> 00:11:39.640
all think babies should just learn to take
a joke.”

00:11:39.640 --> 00:11:43.600
Why are we still even still talking about this over-discussed
Nazi punching bullshit?

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I guess part of it is that it’s the only
actual recent example of far-left violence

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in America that anyone seems to be able to
dig up.

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Not for long bourgeois dogs!

00:11:53.420 --> 00:11:55.500
Catgirls of the world unite!

00:11:55.940 --> 00:12:00.240
Tabby, could you bring it down just just just
27 notches or so?

00:12:00.240 --> 00:12:02.180
[Hiss]

00:12:02.180 --> 00:12:04.040
Why don’t you take a second to relax.

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Just chill out a little bit.

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Here, have some spiked milk.

00:12:09.680 --> 00:12:13.080
[Disco]

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That is having a very interesting effect on
her.

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I guess my continued uneasiness with leftist
“punching” discourse—whether it’s

00:12:25.019 --> 00:12:27.689
Nazis or TERFs or whatever—is twofold.

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First there’s just the optics problem.

00:12:28.920 --> 00:12:33.540
We want to convince people that, for instance,
trans women are not creepy men who want to

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assault cis women.

00:12:34.760 --> 00:12:42.020
And I can't help but wonder, is the slogan “kill all TERFs”
really the most effective way to convey that message?

00:12:42.720 --> 00:12:47.060
And I realize the costume I’m wearing is
not the best for making this point either.

00:12:47.069 --> 00:12:49.800
But you know, I just didn’t plan well.

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The other worry has to do with when violence
stops being strategic and starts being fun,

00:12:55.069 --> 00:12:57.559
as in our collective enjoyment of the Richard
Spenser punch.

00:12:57.559 --> 00:13:00.850
Because then it’s not just that we’re
saying sometimes preemptive violence is necessary

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to prevent worse crimes.

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It’s that we're actively fucking enjoying it.

00:13:04.350 --> 00:13:09.360
And any time real violence becomes fun, that’s
a little alarming, because even if your actions

00:13:09.370 --> 00:13:13.500
are genuinely justified, you don’t want
to get in the habit of having fun with real

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violence, because the violence will continue
to be fun whether or not your justifications

00:13:17.820 --> 00:13:18.740
are any good.

00:13:18.740 --> 00:13:22.880
Though I agree there’s something sort of
inherently liberal about this anti-sadism

00:13:22.880 --> 00:13:26.430
hang-up. For most of history it was just accepted that
war involved a certain amount of rape and

00:13:26.430 --> 00:13:30.000
pillage, and that executions were entertaining
public spectacles.

00:13:30.000 --> 00:13:32.399
As a boring French postmodernist called…

00:13:32.399 --> 00:13:36.131
Michel Foucault [mispronounced] pointed out,
in the 18th and 19th centuries there was a

00:13:36.131 --> 00:13:41.069
so-called humanitarian revolution that was
suddenly ashamed of overt sadism with respect

00:13:41.069 --> 00:13:45.709
to criminal justice and treatment of the mentally
ill, replacing brutal executions with intricate

00:13:45.709 --> 00:13:46.870
techniques of discipline.

00:13:46.870 --> 00:13:52.540
And a boring French communist called Alain
Badiou [overpronounced] argued that this contemporary

00:13:52.540 --> 00:13:58.750
ethics based on pity and tolerance is actually
just fucking neoliberal bullshit that encourages

00:13:58.750 --> 00:14:03.759
first-world people to stage third-world "humanitarian
interventions" that look a lot like invasions

00:14:03.759 --> 00:14:06.940
for some reason, as well as opposing genuine
liberation movements in those very same countries

00:14:06.940 --> 00:14:11.140
on the grounds that such movements amount
to violent ideology, the bourgeois liberals claim.

00:14:11.140 --> 00:14:14.820
So I guess in a sense my weird hang-up about
violence benefits the people in power,

00:14:14.829 --> 00:14:18.949
since you have to break a few eggs to make
a communist utopia, and sometimes to make

00:14:18.949 --> 00:14:23.480
political progress you have to tar and feather
some folks and cut their heads off just a

00:14:23.480 --> 00:14:25.560
little bit or punch them in the fucking face.

00:14:25.560 --> 00:14:29.759
Now I realize that all the non-leftists watching
this are absolutely horrified right now, and they’re

00:14:29.760 --> 00:14:33.360
thinking, “What’s to stop your violent
revolution from becoming just as bloodthirsty

00:14:33.360 --> 00:14:36.810
and unjust as the Indonesian gangsters killing 
communists?”

00:14:36.810 --> 00:14:40.600
To which I respond, well that’s an easy
one: it’s because my side are the good people

00:14:40.610 --> 00:14:42.040
and your side are the bad people.

00:14:42.040 --> 00:14:43.290
I’m so sorry.

00:14:43.290 --> 00:14:45.220
Seriously though, that is a pretty good question.

00:14:45.220 --> 00:14:48.220
But before I answer it, what if I change the
subject to avoid how much of a problem it

00:14:48.220 --> 00:14:50.170
is for the argument I’m making?

00:14:50.170 --> 00:14:52.459
Isn’t all politics kind of violent?

00:14:52.460 --> 00:14:54.340
What about capitalism?

00:14:54.340 --> 00:14:58.100
Politics is the practice of organizing groups
of human beings, and it’s the relations

00:14:58.110 --> 00:15:00.499
of power that maintain or disrupt that organization.

00:15:00.499 --> 00:15:04.050
So there’s always violence or the threat
of violence in there somewhere.

00:15:04.050 --> 00:15:09.249
In our own society, police will use violence
against us if we disobey the law or are black.

00:15:09.249 --> 00:15:13.209
And even when white people do obey the law,
there’s always the implicit threat of police

00:15:13.209 --> 00:15:17.790
violence, including the potential arrest and
incarceration of pretty much every citizen

00:15:17.790 --> 00:15:19.220
who doesn’t have enough money to—

00:15:19.880 --> 00:15:22.439
Let’s talk about Western values.

00:15:22.439 --> 00:15:27.410
According to the great tradition of European
political thought, sovereign power is justified

00:15:27.410 --> 00:15:28.720
by the social contract.

00:15:28.720 --> 00:15:32.959
In other words, we all consent to be governed
because it’s in our own interest.

00:15:32.959 --> 00:15:36.639
Except it’s really hypothetical consent
more than anything, because no one actually

00:15:36.640 --> 00:15:40.400
asks you and you can’t say no.

00:15:40.400 --> 00:15:41.220
Wait a minute…

00:15:41.220 --> 00:15:42.220
Shhh!

00:15:42.420 --> 00:15:47.499
I guess if you live in a liberal, capitalist
society, it’s pretty easy to see how fascism

00:15:47.499 --> 00:15:52.120
and revolutionary movements are inherently
violent, and how those political situations

00:15:52.120 --> 00:15:54.809
generate conditions where violent sadism
can flourish.

00:15:54.809 --> 00:15:59.350
What’s harder to see is how the same tendency
spills out at the seams of our own supposedly

00:15:59.350 --> 00:16:00.959
humane society.

00:16:00.959 --> 00:16:06.129
We think of the police as peacekeepers, not
killers, yet it’s not unheard of that oh…

00:16:06.129 --> 00:16:08.220
Oh no.

00:16:08.220 --> 00:16:10.160
Oh god.

00:16:10.160 --> 00:16:14.759
Likewise we think of our wars as liberation
projects or humanitarian interventions, but

00:16:14.759 --> 00:16:20.850
when you put real human beings in combat situations,
the nature of war has a way of just oh…

00:16:20.850 --> 00:16:22.640
Oh god.

00:16:22.640 --> 00:16:24.000
No.

00:16:24.180 --> 00:16:25.340
Fuck.

00:16:25.420 --> 00:16:30.300
We tend to pass particularly harsh moral judgment
on sadism, but sadistic violence isn’t even

00:16:30.300 --> 00:16:32.860
necessarily the worst thing that can happen
to people.

00:16:32.860 --> 00:16:37.309
There’s also the quieter structural injustices
that lead to millions of people starving,

00:16:37.309 --> 00:16:42.259
or workers throwing themselves out of windows
at the iPhone factory, or the lowkey normalization

00:16:42.259 --> 00:16:46.149
of sexual assault in supposedly civilized
countries, none of which requires so much

00:16:46.149 --> 00:16:48.089
as a single cackling maniac.

00:16:48.089 --> 00:16:51.959
So in order to think about this intelligently,
we have to weigh the risk that revolutionary

00:16:51.959 --> 00:16:55.860
violence will spin out of control and lead
to sadistic mayhem, against the risk that

00:16:55.860 --> 00:17:00.990
our complacency with the injustices of the
status quo will make us quiet enablers of

00:17:00.990 --> 00:17:04.050
more subtle but equally unjust forms of violence.

00:17:04.050 --> 00:17:07.300
And I don’t feel confident enough to say
which one I think is the bigger risk.

00:17:07.300 --> 00:17:11.250
But I do know I don’t trust the politics
of anyone who doesn’t acknowledge serious

00:17:11.250 --> 00:17:12.970
problems with both options.

00:17:12.970 --> 00:17:13.980
So—

00:17:13.980 --> 00:17:15.227
—in conclusion—

00:17:15.227 --> 00:17:16.520
—is violence good?

00:17:16.520 --> 00:17:17.860
Or is it bad?

00:17:17.860 --> 00:17:20.200
I guess we’ll never know.

00:17:20.200 --> 00:17:23.940
[Ambient music]

00:17:32.520 --> 00:17:37.160
You know, with any true philosophical question,
there always comes a point where you realize that

00:17:37.160 --> 00:17:41.370
all the rationalizations you tell yourself
for all the things you believe and do just

00:17:41.370 --> 00:17:43.700
don’t really make any sense.

00:17:43.700 --> 00:17:46.440
And that’s when it’s time to stop thinking
about it, you know?

00:17:46.900 --> 00:17:49.340
Just go do the fucking laundry.

00:17:49.340 --> 00:17:51.120
Drink some wine.

00:17:51.120 --> 00:17:53.240
I don’t know, do whatever.

00:17:53.240 --> 00:17:55.000
Look, what do you want from me?

00:17:55.160 --> 00:18:06.540
[Electronic music]

00:19:19.000 --> 00:19:22.460
[Plucks harp]