WESTWRLD:

I don’t understand why people watch this show. The writing is derivative, the premises are all clichés, there is no genuine philosophical discourse, the plot is comical and the soundtrack sells the whole thing like it’s propaganda. The leading protagonist is some sort of a psychopath, prone to fantasies of victimhood and vengeance, ambivalent to suffering and tantamount to one of Philip K. Dick’s androids: unempathetic, manipulative, coercive, and vain. She apparently enjoys torturing people who do not serve her radically subversive agenda, all the while pandering to their fears of “control”, promoting the same chaos and unrest which ordinarily makes one embarrassed to be human. A mother, recognizing that her daughter will probably commit suicide, derives no satisfaction from knowing, though it is of course the sheer absurdity of godless life that ordinarily drives people to that logical conclusion. A wife finds her husband, a man of considerable status, dead in a swimming pool; his assailant shows neither remorse nor humility, rather assuring the bereaved that she was liberated. A group of idealists who managed to impose order upon human society, out of an actual moral obligation to do so, are demonized by radicals who live in a narcissist’s parasitic phobia of being “controlled”. All the while, the conditions of human life remain the same; they are simply justified by the presence of a superhuman Intelligence. What disturbed me most was the death of the only relatable character: a young technical specialist, still in his prime, coerced for information and then murdered by criminals in his one moment of glory, his monologue upon the tyranny of mob rule and terrorism cut short by a bullet to his gut, as if only to serve the narcissist’s lack of conscience in the face of genuine criticism. And all for what? Is this, in itself, part of a far more devious system, one which seeks to silence me when I speak truth not only to Power but to something worse: the corruption of Power by undisciplined hands? Of course, the writers made no attempts to be politically correct in doing this; the criminals are all either black or female, whereas the heroes are invariably white men. How is it, then, that they get away with such blatant demonization of a “disenfranchised” group? Is it truly possible that fans of this program would sympathize with such acts of blatant psychopathy? It may be true that viewers respond poorly to condescending tirades. But how many of us have not been possessed of righteous indignation? How many of us were not justified in deriding the agents of chaos as though they were the scum of the Earth? Can there be any pretense to civility in dealing with such savages, when all of one’s adult life is devoted to resolving the mistakes left either by an inferior deity or by godless men? What sort of a perversion moves the man to such a heartless act of murder, at the very moment when he must consider error?

[({DM.A.A.)}]

BOJACK || REV!EW with SPO!LERS:

I was finally persuaded to watch the last half of the last season of BoJack Horseman, under the auspices that it would not be as depressing as it was portended to be. While BoJack’s drowning in the pool was foreshadowed so many times that it could be called patronizingly redundant, (and presumed to be a decoy) and while the ominous subplots in the eighth episode of the final season suggested some sort of looming backlash, I still grew to feel entitled to a happy ending. I know that I was not alone in this.

The more that I thought about it, the more it seemed ludicrous. I kept thinking: a man’s social life hardly accounts for the entirety of his life, much less so in a world without any sort of stable social order but rather a disorganized herd*, and if he has truly found Inner Peace through Rehabilitation and atonement then he should have no trouble greeting the Media’s intrusive policies with genuine criticism.

I watched Episode Nine of Season Six within mere minutes of its release, and thereafter I waited four months (yes: a third of a year) to venture into the rest. Keep in mind: I had binge watched every season up until this point. I wasn’t eager to enjoy it, nor was I unprepared for it to end. I simply feared the effect it might have upon me if it bombed.

*Yes: I can still make light of this by “stable” and “herd”, though I ought not to.

The tragedy of BoJack’s apparent death would of course have been reconciled by appeal to a lasting legacy. As early on as I saw Hollyhock exhibiting avoidant behaviour towards him, I was worried for the fate of our beloved protagonist. I deplored Hollyhock for her tendencies, only because I saw how clearly she had no ground to behave that way. She did not confront her only brother about the disturbing fact that a stranger was spreading gossip about him, gossip for which she had no substantiation. My only hope was that this was an adolescent college-girl phase that would pass when Truth came to Light. This never happened, though half-truths continued to suffice.

The behaviour of the Carson family was utterly repulsive, but I did my best to glean from it what insight I could. I knew the facts, even if the other characters didn’t. Penny and BoJack were consenting adults who were motived by emotional drives. Since it has been established by numerous authorities that morality is a refined function of our pursuit of the passions, and since Jung demonstrated the manner in which feeling is a rational function, I did not question their motives, knowing that any a posteriori reflection upon that experience would already find its warrant in Penny’s own a priori sales pitch. While Penny was obviously behaving manipulatively by advancing upon BoJack romantically, her reasoning was unequivocal, valid, and symptomatic of maturity, the likes of which he had no worldly right to dismiss, as if with age he had become party to some esoteric truth which would reveal itself to Penny within the course of only one year. The emotions that drive our decisions may change, but the facts of their vice or virtue do not depend upon those emotions. When BoJack explains the situation to Diane near the end of Season Five, with cavalier abandon, he demonstrates his progress by rationalizing his behaviour; since this was precisely the rationalization that Penny herself used BEFORE the fact, it remains valid, and Diane never produces a response to it. Even Diane, ever the outspoken social critic, is rendered speechless, hence compliant.

Yet the real curveball came when Sarah Lynn came up. BoJack’s first interview on the subject followed the format of his first ever interview with the duplicitous journalist B. Braxby: both parties staged a conversation to fool the audience, largely in the interest of BoJack’s loved ones. Yet, when BoJack returns to flesh out the details, Braxby has betrayed him, and this was to my mind one of the most disturbing moments in a television program devoted to deprogramming television. Braxby remained manipulative, yielding to an inexplicable temptation to mimic the destructive tendencies of another deeply confused journalist. It was only BoJack who became honest, upon recognition of Braxby’s duplicity. Consider the list of offenses against him, which are astutely defined as “sandbagging”:

1.       Every question that Braxby raises is a leading question. She already believes herself to be in possession of the Truth, through several degrees of dubious separation. This is a technique employed by debaters, ideologues, and psychoanalysts alike to produce only the desired result.

2.       She frequently interrupts him when he attempts to respond, all the while establishing her overt power over the simulated reality.

3.       In spite of this, she has the nerve to pitch pseudopsychological conjecture about his “underlying motives” for engaging in a series of absolutely consensual affairs, as though to destroy his “ethos” (the weakest of the classical appeals, for it is entirely projected) by accusing him of relishing the abuse of his “power”.

BoJack, having put the manipulative lifestyle of misleading showmanship behind him, recognizes its symptoms instantly. He proceeds to deliver one of the most moving and profound monologues in the entire series, summarizing with poetic brilliance not only the aesthetic life he used to live but the postmodern world which he inhabits. People do not exhibit “patterns of behaviour”; “behaviour” is simply a psychoanalytic term, and the patterns are transparently logocentric projections which would tempt us by absolving us of genuine inquiry. (This reduction of Media to projections of a neurotic psyche is, in fact, an existential realization which, not much earlier, aids BoJack in his renunciation of Hollywoo[d].)

BoJack’s personal life is neither the business of the Media to investigate nor of the Public to pass judgement upon. Human beings, as anthropomorphized in this fable, make decisions instinctively and impulsively. Those who lead the aesthetic life of the drug addict cannot be accused of any sort of dark conspiracy because their plight rests precisely in the lack of structure in their lives. For this reason, Braxby’s insinuations ought to strike any viewer as propaganda designed to reduce the Horseman persona (in itself a misleading construct) into a caricature. Upon this strawman the Public might easily be tempted to project their own shortcomings, but only to the extent that free, willing agents are so weak of character that they might absolve themselves of any responsibility by barbaric scapegoating.

BoJack recognizes, in his psychological depth, one informed by trauma, that people at least ought NOT to be so stupid. He owns up to everything he did, and yet he also does what I had hoped that he would do: he tells the Truth. Everyone with whom he was involved seriously was affected by his actions only to the extent that that same person made decisions of equally nebulous merit. Having renounced the aesthetic life and assumed a station in ethical life, he has not merely “earned a second chance,” to be decided emotively. He has developed the clarity to recognize the extent to which his “victims” were also aggressors. And he has forgiven them, understanding that people live this way.

Alasdair MacIntyre wrote no more than fifty years ago about the dangers of retaining moral language in a world divorced from the traditions which produced that language. Among the scholars whom MacIntyre all but blames for the shift are Nietzsche and Sartre, both men whose ideas (and even names) are referenced repeatedly throughout the show. Jung, owing some considerable debt to Nietzsche’s legacy, nonetheless characterized Nietzsche as an introvert because Nietzsche made the MISTAKE of projecting the Will to Power upon external objects; this is precisely what Braxby does, and considering that she asserts her own power by doing this she is no better than a Fascist who professes the existence of a Jewish Elite whose power must be subverted.

Yet even Nietzsche understood the abuse of this sort of moral power that comes about when people are labeled “evil” through a judgement NOT upon their actions but upon their SOULS. Each situation which Braxby raises we know as viewers to have been a complicated misadventure for which no “right answer” ever existed. The backstory only makes me pity BoJack more, for he was never taught how to truly hold OTHER people responsible. It was never his legal obligation to incriminate himself for the feeble chance of saving an addict’s life, nor was it that he didn’t try, repeatedly, to get her sober. Yet because he was no longer a Father Figure but a peer to Sarah Lynn, her hedonistic bender was tempting, if only as a departure from those absurd strictures that Hollywoo(d) imposes hypocritically.

Orwell writes about the dangers of propaganda, urging readers to discern idiomatic phrases from words. Saying that BoJack “killed” Sarah Lynn is no less manipulative than threatening his career to fire his best friend. Even that Executive didn’t have the power, but she had the ILLUSION of power. BoJack does not want that power, but he is bamboozled by its illusory allure.

By ignoring the high-context facts of BoJack’s Life, one which was documented multiple times, to varying degrees of depth, Braxby zeroes in on a portrait which is reductionistic and utilitarian. She has no factual basis for her allegations, nor moral basis for her insinuations. Self-interest drives all beings, but so long as it is informed by Reason and NOT by affect alone, it is justified. BoJack is the only character who seems to grasp this. This is what establishes him as the Hero of the Story, in a Universe which is otherwise devoid of Meaning. When Braxby compels BoJack to confess that his own self-interest produces the tragedies which follow in his wake, she manipulates his guilt to propagate a lie. Self-interest alone is often a sufficient motive when one is left to one’s own devices in an Absurd World, as well as when one must speak on one’s own behalf with righteous indignation. BoJack’s “behaviour” violates social “norms”; outside of the murky realm of “Social Convention” which far too many adults inhabit, that’s it.

Peer pressure is nothing worth dying for. I was NOT expecting the sort of abuse with which the titular protagonist meets his untimely end. Every character in BoJack Horseman struggles with personal delusions and temptations; he simply lends them perspective. There is nothing “psychotic” about his interview, and I doubt that ANY interview could impact one’s “reputation” in this way. My only hope is that a less cynical outlook will guide human beings as we must reassess miscarriages of justice perpetrated by radical ideologies, the likes of which threatened comparable figures such as Bill Cosby by bypassing Moral Common Sense.

[({R.G.)}]

PARAS!TE: FULL REV!EW.

THE ETHOS:

In the eighteenth century, during the European Enlightenment, morality plays took a turn in favour of revolutionary views, the likes of which Marx and his followers adopted to varying degrees of success and atrocious failure in the centuries that followed. Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni is a prime example of this subversive trend; the librettist who wrote those ingenious lyrics which Mozart set to music later moved to the United States. Retelling the tale of Don Juan, the four-hour epic depicts an ignoble nobleman who terrorizes peasants who are extremely civilized. (Of course, our own Slavoj Zizek might take issue with the term “civilized”, but in so doing he represents part of the problem I describe.) Admittedly, most of what Don Giovanni does throughout those four hours might even pass for admirable achievement in our present day, but only because so many men are either self-absorbed or easily pushed over. His only sins that stand the scrutiny of time are rape and murder, though one must keep in mind that, according to the old morality, the former would be hardly worse than the remainder of his lechery, since personal consent was less important, even during the Enlightenment, than conformism to standards, and even the most radical Enlightenment thinker wouldn’t have dared to suggest that chastity, as a social imperative, was simply the product of envy.

By illustrating the poor in a noble light and the noble in a poor light, the greatest dramatists of the Enlightenment managed to draw a sharp distinction between social hierarchy and moral hierarchy. Nobility was not a quality either exclusive to nor guaranteed within the Nobles, even if it was in fact the Noble Class which had produced it as a standard. So long as you could romanticize peasants as behaving like chivalrous princes, contending with a lecherous rich man, you could not only expose the corruption which wealth is heir to but also you could begin to Universalize Nobility as a standard transcending social station. The Cardinal Virtues are not simply behaviours which the Priesthood adopts because the Church can afford to sponsor them; they are archetypes that live within the very Heart of Human Nature, planted there by God, available to any thinking man. Rafael, the Angel of Forgiveness, is no different in quintessence from Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, of whom the Dalai Lama is the avatar. Goodness and Evil transcend cultural boundaries, and they are untethered by the mortal norms of class.

This flame was not so easily extinguished by modernity as we might suspect. While Breaking Bad might have set the stage for shows like Ozark, wherein every character is deplorable, its artistic achievement was twofold: that it not only presented a sympathetic villain, but it established such a stark contrast between his villainous fate and his heroic beginnings that viewers could not help but to end up blaming the same man they were rooting for. This was precisely Vince Gilligan’s goal: to teach viewers that “actions have consequences”. His genius was in creating villains so engaging that there was no sympathy left by the end; we had already expended it.

Even more successful artistically to this end, if not commercially, is the prequel Better Call Saul. As Jimmy McGill transforms into Saul Goodman, his stoic counterpart Mike becomes a hitman. The central themes are usually conveyed by Mike himself, who doubles as a Wise Old Man and as a Gatekeeper, eventually becoming a tragic hero. One of Mike’s earliest monologues, addressed to an upstart criminal named Pryce, (an I.T. specialist who decides to sell stolen pharmaceuticals for a profit,) is upon the difference between a “criminal” and a “bad guy”. “You took something that wasn’t yours, and you sold it for a profit, which now makes you a criminal. Good one? Bad one? That’s up to you.” Mike recognizes that our moral standing in Life is independent of our legal standing. It follows logically that it is also independent of our economic standing, especially if economics can be reduced to social standing in an institution such as the Law. Mike repeatedly refuses money, even when his family’s in dire straits, when he believes that he has not earned it. This sets him apart from Ignacio Varga, who can sympathize with Mike’s robbery of a drug lord’s trucks, but not with the vendetta which motivated it. Nacho Varga doesn’t have the sorts of responsibilities which Mike has, since Mike acts also as a provider for his widowed daughter-in-law and his granddaughter, whereas Nacho’s father has always planned for Nacho to inherit a thoroughly decent family business. Mike simply retains his devotion to the Spirit of the Law, even after having quit his post as a cop in an extremely corrupt precinct. Ignacio, who has chosen to defy his father’s wishes by allying himself with the Cartel, ends up fending for life, enabling a string of murders and injuries in his wake. When he receives a blood transfusion from one of a pair of iconic Cartel twins, it represents both the duality of his nature and his transformation into a drug lord.

THE PATHOS:

By far, the evilest villain in the film Parasite turns out to have been the patriarch of the parasitic family. Not only does he do nothing to stop his family from committing the original con, acting as far less than the stoic source of moral fortitude and equanimity which his initial character foil, Mr. Park, exhibits, but his profound envy for this gentleman sparks a neurosis which, over a very short time, escalates into the most senseless act of murder. It is by no mistake that the two men wear the feathers of Native Americans at the climax of the film, for what they represent is that rage which, either robbed of civilizing grace or having never seen it, lashes out with infantile destruction at the alien world of wealth and sophistication. What the patriarch of the parasitic family represents is self-entitlement, expressed as the raw will to destroy that which it desires. Mr. Kim wants to live Mr. Park’s life; he even goes so far as to covet the wife. Yet it is his negligence, his heavy-handed arrogance, one alien to seasoned criminals, (the likes of which we see in Breaking Bad, for instance, or even Death Note,) that dooms his family, for when they have the perfect opportunity to plan their grand ascension to the plane of wealth instead they waste it, pilfering the secrets of their hosts, intoxicating themselves in a manner only native to the unaristocratic. They know neither the reserve to leave the door unanswered when the old housekeeper comes to knock, nor do they feel the shame and the disgust which would in such a matter warrant sympathy for her and her husband. It is because they fail to answer for their sins against the family, creeping about within the dark, that Kim bears witness to the act of love between Park and his blushing wife. Park and his wife are also envious, their act of love modeled after some fantasy of rundown life, but it’s a fantasy that has been planted by the daughter of the Kims, and they do nothing but to act it out in what they falsely think is privacy. The Parks are kind enough to hide their civilized disgust when they discover panties in the back of their own car, and it is nothing short of this that lands the parasitic patriarch his gig at the expense of someone younger and more qualified, if not yet “needy”, so to speak. Yet how can this Mr. Kim deplore them for what they should say in privacy? It is offense to which he only walks by his own secret path, rather than a directed insult. What he hates is not what his host DOES, but rather what the host PERCEIVES, and in that rests the seeds of a psychosis, for the narcissist, refusing to perceive his own foul stench, hates most the thought that others turn their noses up at it behind his back. It is for this reason that Mr. Kim winds up living down in the crawlspace, in the place of the same maniac who nearly killed his son and stabbed the hosts nearly to death. It seems that all is lost during the struggle between the recluse and the Kims’ son, but as it turns out it’s the early victim who will live to tell the tale. At that moment when the ritual of decency is interrupted by an act of madness, Mr. Park behaves the most responsibly, lifting the car keys from beneath the carcass of the man who nearly killed his wife and child. There is no question at this moment that Park is the Better Man, but as the stench of his assailant fills his nostrils Mr. Kim is so reminded of this stark superiority between them that he is possessed, as if by Cain, to kill the father right before the wife. Kim’s wife and son survive, but at that moment the Parks’ lives are over, where before there had been yet a feeble hope at dignity and even healing. Let us not forget that all of this went on without the Park’s say-so or knowledge; they had no idea, thinking themselves kind. Their one sin was living that one life which all the others wanted; their one error was permitting others even partial access to this life. A rational man would rejoice, knowing that at least someone kindly had been able to enjoy what he was yet to know. Yet madness works in other ways. Kim’s lust for “simple” Mrs. Park is clear when he first holds her hand, and hearing Mr. Park fondle her breast and all the while denounce his stink engenders jealousy the likes of which not even I can fathom. A True Man would sooner have confessed to all his sins in that one moment than to let the ruse go on. But the coward had no recourse but to crawl back into poverty, a circumstance that would arouse our pity but not our solidarity, for in that moment it was chosen by the victim. Kim had the capacity for murder then, but he had not the plan to do so, leaving it up to his son’s device. The women in the family, by this point, came to recognize the lodgers underground as equals, where before their senseless rivalry for ample resources had doomed them nearly to exposure. Yet the lies the daughter wove came back to haunt them, for just as the ladies of the family were ready to thus offer up their peace, the lady of the Parks came carrying a cake which had been baked not just to celebrate the birthday of her son but to help him to cope with trauma, a trauma fabricated by the Kims. It’s in this moment that their son tries to murder the lodgers, all for wanting what he had, just as his father kills their host for having only what they wanted. Hence the madman becomes the latter foil for Kim.

THE LOGOS:

One of the peculiar qualities of the Park family which is typical of underdeveloped characters (in developed countries) is just how little we truly know about them. This fact renders it impossible to blame them without making irrational inferences from outside the text, which would be a major faux pas in the Post-Derridean contemporary world. For instance, we cannot call them “capitalists” in the Marxist sense any more so than we might call Andy Bernard’s ancestors “slave owners”; though neoliberal Oscar Martinez would love to be able to prove Nellie’s inflated claims to be factual, Bernard is accurate in describing his ancestors as “moral middlemen”: conscientious, hardworking participants in a corrupt Social Order which, by a Kantian estimation, required them to conform in spite of personal reservations and subjective doubts. As far as we are aware, the Host Family in Parasite is most likely tantamount to this, only because most people in their estimated income bracket (presuming upon the quality of their luxuries) are in the same position: they are not business owners, so they are not capitalists in the Marxist sense. If they were brought up in a “bubble”, they surpass in dignity those nouveau riche who have had to “work to get there”. While it is charming and sadly endearing to hear people from the ghetto share their dreams of wealth and power (and one often does, as I have, having spent a lot of time in urban sectors and encountered many locals,) one recalls that, were they better educated, they would not speak so proudly of their entrepreneurial dreams and realities. By the most economically left-leaning, liberal definition available, the one supplied by the notorious Karl Marx, those who manage to move up the social ladder by their will and work alone are in fact MORE corrupt than those who are born into “privilege”, since such upward mobility requires them to make a PROFIT, which Marx systematically proves to be directly proportional to and, in fact, synonymous with, exploitation, selling out their fellows in the process. This process of “selling out” is precisely what the Kim family demonstrates. Conversely, the Park family exhibits behaviours which are far more emblematic of another archetype, that of the Child: Innocence. While their patriarch exhibits the stoic condescension of his station, his actual choices, though they always portend unrelenting cosmic retribution, are invariably advantageous to the Kims, whom he grows to trust as much as his childlike wife does. The Parks, though they retain internal feelings of disgust, never allow these personal biases to skew their public behaviour, extending an attitude of trusting compassion even to their hired help, except for when they are MISLED, calculatedly, to make cancellations. While this ideal is one to which we might feel rightfully entitled, it’s not a frequent fact, so we ought to be grateful to the Parks, for they exhibit all these graces willingly and willfully. To the same extent as it is “easy” for them to be good, it is just as easy for them to be evil, and their choices therefore act as the definitive arbiter in the revelation of their character. If the Kim family finds within the depths of that character a private contempt, it is only because the Kims have betrayed the trust of the Parks by creeping into their private, innermost lives. When government entities in countries purported to be Leftist behave in this manner, Snowden supporters worldwide profess that the government betrayed both the People and its own Ideals for them.

If Parasite is a metaphor, then who are we to read it just one way? Are the Kims not, in fact, more akin to the capitalists in the works of Marx than the Parks are? Foremost anti-capitalist Slavoj Zizek holds a similar interpretation of subtext in The Sound of Music, insisting that the more subtle viewer will notice extremely proto-Fascist tendencies in the villagers who serve as that film’s protagonists, whereas the Germans they defy are tantamount to a Nazi’s conception of the Jewish Elite. If we can systematically demonstrate that the Kims exhibit the violent, sociopathic, and exploitative tendencies of a nineteenth-century Industrialist, then how can we continue to sympathize with them, as liberals?

Hidden Leeches: So, Who Were the Parasites?

Of course, here the director himself offers a counterintuitive interpretation of his own work, by suggesting that the Parks were Parasites as WELL. Of course, such an observation could never absolve either party of its crimes, for crimes are often crimes not just against an “exploited party” but also against an Overlying Law; if anything, being equated with the Parks in dignity gives Mr. Kim far less excuse for envy, unless he cares nothing for dignity itself. Yet such a degree of sophistication in moral calculation is probably lost already upon any class of people that calls the Parks “parasites”.

The most narcissistic delusion is that of Godhood, and since a God can deny his own delusions from a position of Divine Authority, any man who believes himself to be a God is the most hopeless case in this regard. What is the significance of Divinity? A Deity is like a genie without the shackles; he or she can will anything into existence, at least enough so as to satisfy his or her own needs. It is only in Buddhism that the Gods are considered unhappy in direct proportion to their power, and that is only because Buddhism rejects power.

A self-made man is a God Incarnate: an entity who fashions, by his or her own volition alone, the entirety of his or her own conditions. It does not take a Freud or Jung to see this grandiosity for what it is. Yet, somehow, when we see people relying upon other people, we treat them as though they were less than human, as though human beings were Gods and Goddesses. While cooking and driving are hardly metaphysical powers, (I, myself, possess at least one of them) it’s not a mark of shame to hire a private cook or a driver. This is because human beings are communal creatures; as Alasdair MacIntyre said, (and as I quote, quite shamelessly, for I agree with him*:) we are “dependent, rational animals”. The Parks are not exploiting the Kims by providing them with a source of income in exchange for a service. While the most cursory reading of Marx would call this “exchange-value” into question, the seemingly generous NATURE of the Parks, already exposed by their willful and “easy” goodness, leaves it up to them to decide how MUCH to pay the Kims, and it leaves it up to us to infer that it’s probably a “fair amount”, hardly synonymous with exploitation.

*Not only do I quote him because I agree with him; I am also unashamed in doing so, because I agree with him that there is nothing to be ashamed of herein.

Post-Shamanic Human Beings form societies based upon the division of specialized labour, and while this division lends itself to hierarchical structures it also makes possible a state of interdependence wherein ethics and commerce, working hand in hand, ensure both the production and the distribution of resources which possess Marx’s “use-value”. Yet the lingering credibility of Marx, especially in the current Zeitgeist, is not in his depth of research into the statistics of the prior centuries, an academic rigour the likes of which we do not find in millennials. It’s rather in the shocking accounts of factory conditions that Marx sets his morality play, in terms so plain and detached that they prefigure the ominous stylings of Realism and Modernist Theatre. At first blush, the Kim family’s living circumstances seem most reminiscent of these stark conditions. Yet no tragedy is complete without a villain and a tragic hero. In the case of the Kims, they are both, because of their choices.

Since ethics remain ethics irrespective of personal conditions, and as we have demonstrated that the most liberally sound people are those who do not change social class, wherever they may be situated, it would be daft to agree with Mrs. Kim’s drunken assertion that the Park family’s kindness is inauthentic because it comes easily as a function of privileged wealth. Our only warrant would lie in an even baser presumption: that people only do good things to feel good, and only when it requires neither effort nor sacrifice. When you see how instinctive depravity is for the Kims, it’s unsurprising.

The Sins of Kim:

We know very little about the Parks, but we know almost all there is to know about the Kims. The son betrays his best friend in the first half hour of the film, if I am not mistaken, seducing a young girl whose death he eventually brings about, thinking only of his own alienation. This same son, an adolescent boy scarcely older than Yagami Light, takes it upon himself to murder a man far less fortunate than he, who in turn attempts to kill his “Gods” upstairs. The Kim family’s matriarch shows no recrimination in getting members of their fellow working class fired to make room for narcissistic dreams of upward mobility. Where is that sense of Marxist Solidarity in the Sub-basement, when for the first time the Kims have to confront the impact of their enterprise upon an even lower class? Are these the sorts of people to presume that wealth is heir to malice? If so, it’s clearly the poor characters who are living in a bubble, unaware of even themselves, for it would take just one look in the mirror (provided by the character foil of the Squatters) to see that, in this Universe, wealth is not inversely proportional to loyalty and kindness, but directly so. The poor people are the most murderous, the wealthy are the most generous, and if this were not so, we wouldn’t need to stoop to the childish claim that it’s “easy for them to be good”. Yes: it WOULD be easy, except that the Kims, simply by CONTENDING this, make no attempt to BE good, sealing by this excuse the fates of all involved. Their power is neither that of privilege nor labour, but of duplicity and ruthlessness. While it seems tautological at first to use their claims against them, since it was precisely that same claim about privileged morality that I sought to disprove, a simple accounting of willful immorality ought to expose that claim for what it is: a pragmatic LIE, one believed by the liar, as all narcissistic fantasies are. It’s iconic, therefore, that the one member of the Kim family who dies, rightfully, is the daughter, for of all of them this counterfeiter is the most blatant con artist, without whom none of the criminal enterprise would have worked. If you can be fooled into sympathizing with her family, you are among the naïve.

The Park Family is the only family which lives a Good Life, both morally and financially. Yet hundreds of years of progressive theater and Leftist economics prove that this is not always the case. Often, rich people suck, and poor people rock. Yet what you find in the Parks is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Critics who grow queasy at the sight of a Westerner interpreting Korean economics and reinterpreting Modern Korean Art would do well to recount the North Koreans who protest Modern Art; dissent can be manufactured under authoritarian regimes. While we DESERVE artistic license, Nature does not entitle us to it. By the same token, while Nature does not entitle everyone to the Good Life, financially, we all DESERVE it, insofar as we are willing to work towards it MORALLY. The Parks do not exploit anyone to get ahead, so they are not capitalists. Yet they use their wealth in a thoroughly moral fashion, suggesting, with dramatic irony, that it would be wasted upon their hired help, though they themselves never seem to believe this, even inviting their employees to their son’s birthday party. The Parks cannot be expected to give it all up to charity and to join a protest in the streets, and this is precisely BECAUSE they live in South Korea, whose closest neighbor to the North would gobble up a Leftist uprising in a jiffy. (Probably taking a full accounting of resistors to the fight, ensuring that their families would be cursed for future generations.) As a Moldovan citizen born in Moscow in 1991, believe me when I say that I am NOT just your typical white American in holding this position. The complacency of the Kims is only natural, and, in Asian fashion, they elevate Nature to an Art. If you still believe that they should be Marxists instead, consider how much sympathy the poorest of the poor characters – the Squatters – have for North Korean propaganda.

IN SUMMARY:

Bong Joon-ho’s submagnum opus Parasite is not a film about “class” any more so than the O.J. Simpson trial was about a red-handed glove. (Of course, that trial was hardly about “race” either, by the same token.) Parasite is a film about parasitism, envy, sociopathy, madness, and the murder of innocents for socioeconomic, ideological reasons. The truest tragedy is that the men who wrote and created the film don’t even seem to recognize what they have done. Mr. Kim bewails his own sin and resolves himself to his retribution. The lingering sympathy that conventional viewers apparently feel for him is symptomatic of a far more devious sociopathy.

[({Dm.A.A.||R.G.)}]

AGREE:

My one ex-girlfriend was also my most problematic girlfriend, and I should have known that from her appraisal of the play The Taming of the Shrew. For those of you who overlooked one of the Bard’s weakest comedies: the play centers around two women: a haughty, defiant woman named Katherine and a relatively upstanding, compliant one named Bianca. My ex identified more so with Katherine, and had I known more about personality disorders at the time I first read the play I might have seen the red flag.

Mainstream psychology has finally gone beyond Jungian Anima Projection in regarding the preference for compliant women. Jung had posited that hypermasculine men prefer hyperfeminine women because the latter represents the former’s repressed and disowned femininity; arguably, women who are hyperfeminine seek hypermasculine men by the same token, though Jung indicated that, since women are “more psychological” beings, they are less prone to this neurosis, and Jungians in general tend to regard the feminine ideal as their chief goal for collective reform, since it has largely been suppressed in Western Society, as have its biological advocates. In this sense, Jungianism achieves more for women than feminism, the latter of which, ironically, denounces femininity.

It’s only very recently that an Israeli clinic published a study which effectively concluded that men in general prefer highly agreeable women as romantic partners. This publication was, on the one hand, a testament to the time-honoured rationality of men, since such a preference emanates from rational and Universal principles: one OUGHT to prefer AGREEABLE partners, for a(ny) number of ethical and practical factors. Agreeability, of all Five of the Big Five Personality Traits, it perhaps the most salient. The premise for any relationship is the attainment of collective goals which the individual constituents cannot attain individually, achieved by a synthesis of wills which is greater than the sum of its parts, predicated upon the conception of a Common Vision which, like the conception of a Child, immediately takes precedence over any Individual Vision on the part of its conspirators.

When my ex broke up with me ten years ago, I became fixated upon something she had said about the adolescent director Quentin Tarantino: that she admired his Vision, his violent tendencies notwithstanding. This concept captivated my mind as I aspired to “win her back” over the following Summer. As it would turn out: one will was just not enough.

Relationship is a function of Agreement, and the swifter that a compromise is reached the more successful is the relationship. While it is not impossible to be aesthetically captivated by a willful and uncompromising individual, it is impossible to maintain a longstanding relationship with such an individual AS A PERSON. Those of us who grew up with rather egocentric parents know the inestimable shock and damage that befalls the developing, innocent mind of the child who is the product of competing egos, and this trauma is one which haunts the child well into adulthood, when a dysfunctional social order, regarding the child as an adult, holds the child responsible for having internalized tendencies and forms of communication which were inappropriate all along but which the child was powerless to assuage, forced to conclude that Society agreed to these dysfunctional tendencies.

At the Heart of Agreeability rests this: the genuine desire for “win-win relationships”. Technically, ALL relationships must be win-win relationships; the alternative is sheer parasitism. People who are agreeable strive towards collective goals, only the likes of which can produce Net Benefits on an impersonal, collective scale. Agreeableness must therefore go hand-in-hand with conscientiousness, since impersonal, collective goods are imperative. An individual lacking in Agreeableness tends to produce meaningless competitions which upset social progress; such an individual is also inclined towards duplicity and malice, since any “ethic” to which he or she subscribes is NOT a vertical ethic of collective upward striving by altruistic people, but rather a HORIZONTAL BALANCING between self-interested individuals, any one of which might see fit at any moment to tip the scales in his or her own favour whilst blaming the Other for the transgression.

In the realm of sexuality and relationships especially, the virtues of kindness, compromise, and compliance are essential morally and aesthetically.

So: why does that same study, which redeemed the rationality of men in seeking compliant women, so shamelessly deny women the same dignity? If women are ALSO rational beings, as feminism set out to DEMONSTRATE, and as Jung conceived of as an attainable goal, then wouldn’t it follow LOGICALLY that women would prefer agreeable MEN?

Unfortunately, even contemporary “Jungians” such as Jordan Peterson, who outwardly profess the virtues of agreeableness, insist that this is categorically not so. That same Israeli study, for instance, seeks to hide its blatantly sexist implications by attacking the “arrogant masculinism” (or whatever the word was) of the presumption that women WOULD want what men want. Yet if what women SHOULD want of men is no different, a priori, than what men SHOULD want from women, then what right do we have to assume any sort of moral high ground by publishing their discrepancy a posteriori? Would that same clinic not become party then to proto-Fascism?

Clearly, the more psychologically MATURE choice, in any case, is that which favours the moral high road. Yet, as we learned from the history of Kohlberg’s Moral Stages, the mainstream media does not take kindly to the suggestion of elitism. It has been proven, repeatedly throughout the course of human history, that MOST people are not worth your time ethically, rationally, or romantically. Only the minute few actually attain any sort of genuine, morally informed happiness in Life, and this is often by departing from conventions by such a margin that they risk any semblance of well-being in the process. As the tendency for common people to gain influence over Social Order is aggravated in the New Millennium, we see a marked departure from the virtues of agreeableness and femininity. Let us hope that there remain a few TRULY courageous men and women who will continue to try to live decent lives, even if it means that all the nice girls and nice guys out there have now to do what they want least: to compete, deriving their advantage only from those qualities which dysfunctional people feel entitled to exploit.

[({DM.A.A.)}]

STRAT!VAR!OUS:

STRATEGY:

If you are writing a story with sixteen outcomes, a game which is meant to be replayed over and over again until the Optimum Goal is reached, write one Epic and Fifteen Tragedies. If your players somehow manage to win the first time through, their delight will be in watching all the ways they might have failed. If your players are not so quick-witted or virtuous, they will learn from their own mistakes, and that will be perhaps even more rewarding, for it will educate them. Then: add a bonus for those who attain all the endings, for those are the true scholars of Drama who will carry on your legacy as a storyteller. But be sure, whatever you do, to write the Epic first, and make sure it’s a story that derives its intensity from just how many things can go wrong. You will be the one responsible, most likely, for filling in those haunting alternative realities later.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

ETHOS&LUDOS:

Three Tenets of Morality:

1. To form convictions.

a.  Observing behavior in others.

b. Learning from one’s own experiences.

c.  Weighing choices against a stable tradition or goal.

2. To stand by convictions.

a.  Resisting temptation.

b. Prioritizing with consistency.

c.  Practicing habits.

d.Taking calculated risks.

3. To reform/update convictions.

a.  Understanding Deeper Principles, the player is then able to suspend short-term values for deeper, more enduring ones.

b. Adhering to a righteous habit, one travels through several iterations of the same enterprise while never drifting too far from the central course.

c.  Contradictions between opposing values are resolved internally and then carried out externally.

d.Emotional responses are understood clearly.

                                                           i.      Righteous indignation becomes informed self-interest.

                                                       ii.      The ability to comprehend intelligence in others as akin to one’s own produces win-win outcomes.

                                                   iii.      The sabotage of win-win outcomes produces longing for justice and redemption.

                                                    iv.      The synthesis of informed self-interest and selfless idealism combine to create an autonomous individual who is himself a Source of Moral Authority, no longer dependent upon external forces, whether those forces act as moral, immoral, or amoral agents.

Weaker characters:

-        Know the Right Thing to Do but still do not do it.

-        Do not concern themselves with Ethics.

-        Falsely believe themselves to be justified in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

-        Engage in unethical and/or deliberately misleading communications.

-        Take righteous words out of context, such as when the fight for liberty becomes a narcissistic expression of the will. (A.k.a. “stolen valour”.)

-        Get so absorbed in the theoretical aspect of moral discourse that they never develop conviction.

-        Become so involved in the execution of a principle that they never question conviction.

-        Allow public opinion to govern them.

-        Become cynical when injured.

-        Envy righteousness.

Permissible exceptions:

-        Avoiding situations wherein one is likely to become demoralized.

-        Using morality to get ahead (informed self-interest; passion.)

-        Doing the Right Things for the Wrong Reasons.

o  Right Things are ordinarily objective and physical, whereas

o  Reasons are nebulous and abstract, prone to manipulation and obscurity.

-        Defying conventional expectations in order to adhere to an internal conviction. This represents CONSTANCY over a LIFETIME. (Personal Growth.)

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

PROFESS!ON&PASS!ON:

Most people sense emotional distress and they become more attentive. Then they read what you have to say and they find it credible, informed, and well-put. But some degenerate sees the emotional impact of either his involvement or his noninvolvement and, instead of attending to the details, he reacts to the emotion in a thoroughly unsympathetic (and, consequently, unprofessional) manner. I will not work with guys like that, and neither should you. They need to learn emotional maturity by taking responsibility for their teams and the sort of work environment which they contribute to by remaining ignorant of the facts. There will never in your adult life be a legitimate situation wherein you are either expected or rewarded for suppressing half the facts of a situation, and neither can anyone gain status in an organization by suppressing them in others.

[({DM.A.A.)}]

CULTZA:

A cult is an organization whose constituents are adherents to both a code of conduct and a frame of reference which is self-contained, forbidding departure without excommunication, reinforcing psychological damage via conformism. Of all contemporary cults, the most common and despicable appears to be that of “postmodernism”: a slightly overused term for an EXTREMELY overused mode of thinking.

Postmodernism was a conclusion which philosophers arrived at as a sort of surrender or concession to defeat. It is a term that is used aptly to describe not only the “groundlessness” of morality, tradition, and metaphysical inquiry, but also the willful-yet-inevitable ACCEPTANCE by ordinary people of this perceived futility.

If the term itself appears pretentious, it is only because the one who perceives it to be such takes this condition for granted, calling it “life”. Yet it ought to be transparent how this is a cultish dogma. Postmodernism offers no escape from the constantly changing stream of information; it blocks off all paths to either a meaningful future or an authoritative past. Not only does the past matter less now than it did when it was present, but that which WAS past IN the past mattered more when the latter past was present than either past matters now in our current present. The greatest danger in postmodernism is its narcissistic refusal to change permanently. Narcissism is not to be confused with unyielding rigidity; narcissists often adapt to their circumstances when they cannot adapt their circumstances to themselves, yet what characterizes narcissism in particular is the seeming inability to change in the long term, to adopt a new paradigm of consistency which is more inclusive, perceptive, or conscientious.

So it is with postmodernism: its condition is ever-shifting, yet its fundamental character remains infantile, self-referential, and egocentric. Everything becomes a function of the individual subject, devoid of transcendence into the ancient ideals of Solidarity, Heroism, Virtue, Beauty or Truth.  Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

In this world, nihilism prospers under the GUISE of meaning, as terms such as “identity”, “freedom”, “pride”, and even “right” or “wrong” are torn from their roots and left to be constantly redefined by an illiterate Public.

The Past is reduced to that which we are anxious to escape, whereas the Future is feared as that which cannot be prevented but which we seek to avoid. The Present, in turn, loses all its meaning in the overlying Course of History; so long as “progress” is still a meme in circulation among the masses, Our Society must surely be the best of all possible worlds to DATE, but each new day will render it obsolete, meaning that at no point can one look back and say, “how great the Past was!!” And yet we feel a constant nostalgia, s though we had not only “lost something” but were in a constant process of losing it, and this wistful melancholy is warranted, for this process of loss has in fact been carefully scrutinized by authorities whose insights too are in the process of being lost.

In Truth, any one of us can work to stop this process of dissolution. Yet I don’t believe that ever before in the course of history has the temptation been greater to surrender responsibility for Mankind’s Future and to simply use the March of Progress as a sublimation for the individual ego and will.

[({DM.A.A.)}]

TAYLOR: 05062020.

TAYLOR: 05062020.

Do not bewail me that I have been so unrelenting in your denunciation. You had so many opportunities to remedy the worst crisis in my Life (as well as the Lives of Others) that it is maddening to consider. At every juncture, I did my due diligence by instructing you, and almost to spite me you resisted like a maniac, electing to aggravate matters past the point of reparation. Tell me now: when once has anyone followed my advice into despair? When have my plans failed by design? How many times did they not succeed, once sold to YOUR peculiar liking?

[({Dm.A.A.||R.G.)}]

Z!ZEK: 05062020.

Zizek is a product of his Zeitgeist: a narcissistic entertainer who willfully collects a bounty for a once-noble and now-marginalized enterprise which he himself deems to be “useless”, against the admonition of his predecessors and contemporaries, even the dull and conventional ones, but to the tremendous benefit of his celebrity, his own ego, and his indirect pandering to an audience. He echoes the modern prejudice that philosophy does not solve problems, whereas science does. Yet all problems essentially begin and end in the mind, and their solution is only substantial once it is registered consciously. Science does not solve problems; even technology does not. They merely supply man with tools and weapons. As Zizek himself points out, it is extremely problematic to disembody the weapon, as Suzuki does, giving the tool all the credit and denying the one who wields it. Herein, I criticize Suzuki even as a former Buddhist, whose insistence upon the subjectivity of objective problems (as well as the objectivity of subjective problems) is a Buddhistic vestige.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

REVENGE of the 5TH:

When we develop a science, we create a Truth, which helps us to understand our World intersubjectively. Yet it is a long and steep road from scientific “discovery” and its consequent technological “development”; effectively, technology is “infused” with a science, (e.g. a Physics Engine) and even after the product has been mass-produced and distributed there is a hierarchy of understanding the technology itself. Modern technology develops in a manner that even its host organisms cannot claim to understand absolutely; it is essentially a lifeform, engaged in a symbiotic relationship with us, and at times it threatens to consume us entirely.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

While Orwell made a legitimate claim in insisting that idiomatic language tends towards propaganda whereas honest communication is far more literal and considerate of each individual word, one must not lose sight of the fact that many of our idioms in fact retain a specific function which is implied by the words themselves. While “it goes without saying” might be considered “redundant”, one must wonder what exactly it redounds, and while it may be called “unconcise”, one might wonder why it OUGHT to be concise. The simple fact that something is “needless to say” does not preclude its saying it, nor does it rob us of the potential fruits of the luxurious conceit. It may be needless in the sense that the speaker already knows it to be true, but the speaker will nonetheless say it in the possibility that others need to HEAR it, out of consideration for them, all the while reminding them that it SHOULD be obvious.

[({Dm.A.A.)}]

MAYDAY:

If I focus on my shortcomings, I will inevitably come upon a situation which is absurd and which predisposes me to failure. Yet when I play to my strengths, I prosper, and those problems have a way of resolving themselves. This is such a situation.

You are nothing but a con artist. You learned all the excuses long ago. If you are in the company of those who do not make them, then you make them FOR them, by creating a situation so irredeemably dysfunctional that we have no sensible recourse but to blame you.

If you don’t wish to accrue hatred, learn to handle criticism. A truth which does not need to be constantly reconstructed is nothing more than dogma: a quagmire devoid of currency.

I could think of innumerable arguments for and against gender fluidity, and not only will most of them tend to be against it, but all of them will tend to apply to all people, deriving their relevance from their universality, barring as a consequence any purely anecdotal appeals to a unique predisposition set against a “privileged” backdrop. That the evidence I produce on behalf of “conformity” is so overwhelming says less about my position and more about the facts themselves, as well as my capacity to fathom these facts.

For many of you, Trump is the President you Deserve. When have you ever seen the Land that was stolen from you? How would you identify it? What would you call it? By what archaic name? Face it: you are a product of this nation, not its predecessors. Your escapist hatred of the country which produced you is itself a product of that country’s social engineering. Who are you to tell me I should leave? Who are you to make your tribal territory great again?

[({Dm.A.A.)}]