Parasite: what’s it about?
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Poor Korean Family: what are they like?
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Affluent Family: what they are like.
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Methods employed by Kims.
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Park Family Situation.
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Attempts at justification.
o
By Ms. Kim.
o
By Audience.
o
By Postmodern Philosophy.
o
Reasons:
§ History:
· Morality
Plays, their history.
o
Enlightenment Era.
o
Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
o
Disney’s Aladdin.
§ Characterization
based upon charm and good will.
· All “Good”
characters: comely appearance.
§ Lack of
sympathy for Jasmine. (Resultant of the Sultan.)
§ Aspirations
to attain.
· Heart
matters more.
· Ambitions
backfire.
· Character
triumphs via “Character”.
§ Difficulty in
marketing Morality to Adults.
· They retain
the prejudices of youth.
· They lose
faith in the values they inherited.
o
Nietzsche: Genealogy of Morals.
o
Foucault’s influence upon Ideology.
§ Outcome:
(Synthesis.)
· A play that
inspires sympathy for poor people while surrendering moral discernment.
· Result:
extreme alienation from compassion for the Rich.
-
Reasons the Kims were Wrong.
o
Betraying fellow Workers, Friends, and their Hosts.
o
Lying, cheating, and stealing.
§ The Parks
are robbed of a chance to defend their own honour. Hence Ms. Kim’s claims
remain prejudicial and unsubstantiated.
o
Violence as a first resort.
o
Envy as motive.
-
Reconstructing Morality: Alasdair MacIntyre.
o
Impersonal Nature of Ethics. (Kierkegaard, etc.)
o
Sympathy as a weak emotion and appeal.
§ Even
Nietzsche regards pity as a power attitude.
§ Nietzsche’s
concept of Ressentiment.
§ Nietzsche’s
denunciation of Judgements upon the Soul.
· Judging by
Class: “it’s easy for them to be Good.”
o
Judgement by Soul.
o
Analogy: the Joker.
· Judging by
Character: “they ARE Good, especially TO US.”
o
Judgement by Action.
o
Unprejudicial.
"It is a fundamental truth of human nature
that man is incapable of remaining permanently on the heights, of continuing to
admire anything. Human nature needs variety. Even in the most enthusiastic ages
people have always liked to joke enviously about their superiors. That is
perfectly in order and is entirely justifiable so long as after having laughed
at the great they can once more look upon them with admiration; otherwise the game
is not worth the candle. In that way ressentiment finds an outlet even in an
enthusiastic age. And as long as an age, even though less enthusiastic, has the
strength to give ressentiment its proper character and has made up its mind what its
expression signifies, ressentiment has its own, though dangerous importance. ….
the more reflection gets the upper hand and thus makes people indolent, the
more dangerous ressentiment becomes, because it no longer has sufficient character
to make it conscious of its significance. Bereft of that character reflection
is a cowardly and vacillating, and according to circumstances interprets the
same thing in a variety of way. It tries to treat it as a joke, and if that
fails, to regard it as an insult, and when that fails, to dismiss it as nothing
at all; or else it will treat the thing as a witticism, and if that fails then
say that it was meant as a moral satire deserving attention, and if that does
not succeed, add that it was not worth bothering about. …. ressentiment becomes the
constituent principle of want of character, which from utter wretchedness tries
to sneak itself a position, all the time safeguarding itself by conceding that
it is less than nothing. The ressentiment which results from want of character can never
understand that eminent distinction really is distinction. Neither does it
understand itself by recognizing distinction negatively (as in the case of
ostracism) but wants to drag it down, wants to belittle it so that it really
ceases to be distinguished. And ressentiment not only defends itself against all existing forms of
distinction but against that which is still to come. …. The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new
things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective
and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action;
it levels. Leveling is a silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which
shuns upheavals. In a burst of momentary enthusiasm people might, in their
despondency, even long for a misfortune in order to feel the powers of life,
but the apathy which follows is no more helped by a disturbance than an
engineer leveling a piece of land. At its most violent a rebellion is like a
volcanic eruption and drowns every other sound. At its maximum the leveling
process is a deathly silence in which one can hear one’s own heart beat, a
silence which nothing can pierce, in which everything is engulfed, powerless to
resist. One man can be at the head a rebellion, but no one can be at the head
of the leveling process alone, for in that case he would be leader and would thus
escape being leveled. Each individual within his own little circle can
co-operate in the leveling, but it is an abstract power, and the leveling
process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The leveling process
in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. ... It must
be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process
lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category ‘generation’ over the category ‘individuality’."
S. Kierkegaard.
Criticism of Nietzsche:
-
By eliminating Morality, he actually made the process
of Ressentiment that much more deadly, all the while eliminating the necessity
for reflection.
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Kierkegaard’s Advantages:
o
Maintains Morality.
o
Maintains Reflection.
o
Resists Leveling.
-
Proto-Fascism: allows individuals to feel powerful
in acts of parasitic manipulation. Individuals conspire against their
benefactors, pretending towards power which is not Strength of Character,
ensuring their self-destruction.
In Summary:
if my one failure was trusting you,
do you not confess that you are untrustworthy? If, by trusting you, I made
available for you the possibility of treachery, was I not employing my own
power to social uses? How can you claim to have been the powerful one? If my
one error was an error of accommodation, were you not the one requiring accommodation?
Why should I compromise the value of teamwork on behalf of a charlatan?
RESPONSES:
“Ressentiment is a reassignment of
the pain that accompanies a sense of one's own inferiority/failure onto an
external scapegoat. The ego creates the illusion of an enemy, a cause that can
be "blamed" for one's own inferiority/failure. Thus, one was thwarted
not by a failure in oneself, but rather by an external "evil."”
The people afflicted with envy become
external enemies, objectively. There is only ever reason to resist when there
is an external evil to be overcome; all else is vanity.
“The ego creates an enemy in order
to insulate itself from culpability.”
There is no culpability without an
external Morality.
There are
no true “failures” except for failures of Character. Outside of Moral Systems,
individuals hardly have any ground to judge success apart from “failure”, and
all attempts to attain one by avoidance of the other are contingent upon that
sort of narcissistic self-commodification which was established to be weakness of both will
AND character.
[({Dm.A.A.)}]
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