Artists & Fandoms | Philosophy Tube

star wars episode 8 the last Jedi was written and directed by Rian Johnson and came out in 2017 - generally positive reviews a small but vocal minority of fans expressed criticism of some of the plot points and the film's portrayal of several of the main characters and some of that criticism shaded into racist and sexist abuse of kelly marie tran who played the role of rose Tico when episode 9 the rise of skywalker came out in 2019 it had a new director and writer in JJ Abrams and although reviews were generally positive it wasn't as well received criticism focused on the poorest storytelling and attempts by Abrams to retcon some of the more controversial things from the previous film which included relegating rose to a very minor role and the perception among some was that Abrams was trying too hard to give the fans what they wanted in an interview with radio calm Rian Johnson said I think approaching any creative process with making fandoms happy would be a mistake that would lead to probably the exact opposite result even my experience as a fan you know if I'm coming into something even if it's something that I think I want if I see exactly what I think I want on the screen it's like oh okay it might make me smile and make me feel neutral about the thing and I won't really think about it afterwards but that's not really going to satisfy me I want to be shocked I want to be surprised I want to be thrown off guard I want to have things recontextualized I want to be challenged as a fan when I sit down in the theater this is Shakespeare's Globe one of the most famous theaters in the world funnily enough Shakespearean theatre kind of had its own Star Wars moment a few years ago a woman named Emma Rice was made artistic director here in 2016 and then just a few months later the board suddenly announced she was stepping down a theatre critic called Richard Morrison wrote an article in The Times that year titled the globe has been a success story and Emma rice is wrecking it strong words which he followed with the words perversity incongruity and disrespect what made Rice's shows so controversial is they use the microphones and artificial lighting which previously at the globe wasn't done it's an open-air theatre and they like to keep things traditional Rice's predecessor a guy named Dominic Dromgoole said we don't want directors who put their own signatures on the place when that happens the audience might go off I've paid money to see Shakespeare not somebody messing around with him I actually saw the Emma rice production of A Midsummer Night's Dream here and for what it's worth I really enjoyed it they gender bent some of the roles so had girls playing boys and vice versa which is pretty common in the rest of the industry it can help you realize things about the text that maybe you didn't notice before but again at the globe that just wasn't done Shakespeare is often a lightning rod for issues like this because it's Shakespeare it's undeniably some of the best writing in the English language and a lot of people have a sense that there's a correct way of doing it a lot of young actors when they start out even if they're not English do the Shakespeare accent where they're like her I come not to praise Caesar but to bury him and some people get really angry if Shakespeare isn't done the correct way there's another theater critic called Dominic Cavendish who wrote an article just a couple of weeks ago titled the woke brigade are close to canceling Shakespeare in which he says that if you choose to take offense there's a lot of stuff in Shakespeare that might be triggering so the woke brigade whoever they are are probably going to cut the whole thing and all these racially diverse casts and gender-bending a threatening England's national poet nobody tell Dominic Cavendish that I once played Romeo across a transwoman as Juliet he'll freak out Cavendish and others seem to be assuming that there's an authentic version of Shakespeare that audiences are entitled to but this point can't really be grounded in history because Shakespeare has changed so much four hundred years ago women weren't allowed on stage at all people's accents and acting styles have changed even the script might not be identical Shakespeare only gave each actor his part and it wasn't until after he died that a bunch of his lads got together and decided to compile the plays from old bits of script and whatever they could remember but a stronger version of this argument might be that it's not about historical accuracy it's about giving the people what they want and this is pretty common in the rest of the acting industry the accents in Downton Abbey aren't historically accurate but it is what a lot of people expect folks of that area to sound like this accent which they teach in British drama schools is called general American and it's not accurate if you're from the United States you can probably tell but it is what a British person needs to hear to understand that the character speaking is American and when it comes to the globe for better or worse this is the place to find Shakespeare if you're in London famous for having some of the best theatre in the world and you want to see some of the best writing in the world for just five pounds this is probably where you're going to come audiences have expectations which prompts the question what should artists do about it should they give the people what they want or should art try and do something more what is odds of us actually [Music] hey welcome to the party making this show is an interesting challenge ostensibly the point is to teach people philosophy and yet there is plenty about the channel that isn't strictly education a lot of my theatrics are here for entertainment or because they fulfill some deep creative need in me but trying to find the balance between the fun the education and the personal expression is a tricky thing to make sense of and what do we do when we can't make sense of things we lie on the kitchen floor and cry no of course not we read philosophy the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was a pretty weird guy he lived in Germany at the end of the 19th century when a lot of people were going off organized religion this guy called Charles Darwin had written a book about how everybody is secretly monkeys or something and nobody was created by God at all guttered and this came as a shock some people thought it was a disaster some people thought it was the best news ever a lot of folks had to reevaluate their whole lives what is the point of the universe what are we even doing here why are all the best tick-tocks filmed in bathrooms and nietzsche said it's art that holds the answers that's what separates us from the animals life isn't like a philosophical theory with neat little premises and conclusions my friend life is like art meaningless expensive and mostly rubbish life must be seen as constantly and inevitably wicked because life is something essentially a moral existence and the world appeared justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon Nietzsche sets up a distinction between two opposing forces the Apollonian named after Apollo god of light logic and reason and the Dionysian named after the god of wine irrationality chaos and actors he says the history of art and culture can be explained as the struggle between these two forces and that we've been pretty Apollonian for a while now so it's time to bring back a little more Dionysus to give you a peek behind the curtain here this move by Nietzsche is what philosophers call doing a Jordan Peterson you invent two categories seemingly out of nowhere you don't explain what they mean but you say everything in the world is these two things no I will not be taking questions at this time he thought that the ancient Greeks knew how to balance the Apollonian and Dionysian when they were writing their tragedies at least until philosophers came along and ruined everything ah Socrates such an Apollo the only art he thought measured up to the ancient Greeks in terms of getting a balance right with the opera's of Richard Wagner who you've definitely heard before because he did ride of the valkyries and the bridal March so Nietzsche thought that art and artists held a really important place in society art is the battleground between Apollo and Dionysus that reflects the whole culture and he also thought it was great news that a genius like Varga had finally come along to revive the Dionysian spirit it probably meant great things for German society just around the corner Reich I mean right and Nietzsche may have been madder than a box of frogs but if you've ever seen literally any art you can probably understand why he would want artists to try and do something for their audience this is maybe a controversial opinion especially on YouTube where the self confessional monologue is kind of an established format but if your art is all about expressing your deeply held emotions that doesn't necessarily mean that it's good art how many times have we seen sad movies or plays or songs or especially slam poems by sad white guys about oh I'm very sad and my pain is real and there's a hidden darkness inside nobody understands it and I'm joke but it's like Joker it's like society is Joker but what I'm saying is like I'm like the Joker though what is more important to our culture than the Joker as one of my old drama school teachers used to say yeah he's boring I mean if you're gonna do a self confessional youtube monologue at least put some costume changes in it the ancient Greeks also thought that artists have a higher calling even though Plato said most of them are rubbish at it in his book the Republic he tries to design at the perfect society and he says democracy sounds good doesn't work terrible idea instead we should be educating our rulers from birth to do the job he thought that some theatre might be able to educate audiences if it was about very specific things but he wanted to ban almost all of it because it's not like artists know anything about teaching people good ideas hello that's what philosophers are for in another work of Plato's called laws he talks about where a society should get its rules from and tellingly he includes a discussion about the rules of theater he says that in the old days there was a strict separation of genres everybody knew what they were watching you sat there in silence and you paid attention and the end educated judges decided which play was best the authority which determined and gave judgment and punished the disobedient was not expressed in a hiss nor in the most unmusical of shouts of the multitude as in our days nor in applause and clapping of hands but the directors of Public Instruction insisted that the spectators should listen in silence to the end and boys and their tutors and the multitude in general were kept quiet by a hint from a stick but then the playwright's tore up the rules and created all kinds of popular nonsense mingling lamentations with hymns and pans with Diffie Rams imitating the sounds of the flute on the lyre into making one general confusion ignorantly affirming that music has no truth and whether good or bad can only be judged of rightly by the pleasure of the hearer and by composing such licentiousness licentiousness with lawlessness and boldness Plato thought that the theatre would cause audiences to feel all kinds of emotions that they shouldn't be feeling but his student Aristotle said no better to feel those feelings and purge yourself of them in a controlled environment like the theatre the Greek word he uses is catharsis catharsis isn't just about getting the feelings out though if it was then it'd be pretty obvious that Aristotle's theory doesn't work you can lie on the kitchen floor and listen to as much tragic music as you like it won't stop you feeling sad the sadness goes on forever so another meaning of the Greek word is purification this is maybe just a personal taste thing but I find when I'm really down listening to sad music doesn't really help even though that is what I want to do if the music is really beautiful then maybe I can be like Oh beauty is still possible even in ugly times but what really helps me feel purified is a good tragedy I've seen the musical Hades town twice and I wept both times when Andre DeShields says it's a tragedy but we sing it anyway I'm like ah yes Andre it hurts so good it's not just sadness it's the fact that it's contained within a story that gives it a structure and gives kind of a feeling of closure the Greeks may have started a lot of Western theatrical traditions but the Romans took their own approach in Greek drama all the killing and death and stuff happens offstage but the Roman playwrights brought it on maybe because Roman audiences didn't go to the theater out of a sense of civic duty like the Greeks team they wanted to be entertained they were like hey yo it's ancient Rome over here somebody killed something I'm falling asleep why would I go to the theater when I can go down to the forum and see a naked slave writhing in human blood it's I don't know why my ancient Roman italian-american just sounds like Bernie Sanders it's not fair that 99% of 99% of Roman kids have never even seen a crucifixion while these billionaires said it as a tempura stood in their golden palaces have an orgy so all throughout history there been philosophers and priests and authority figures saying that artists should try to make the audience better but is there anybody out there with a different take is there anybody out there who just wants to have some if you want to know the value of art and live theater in particular then what better place to come than here New York City a few years ago I saw a play here off-broadway by a famous writer called David Mamet who has a pretty interesting outlook when it comes to theater because he says it has absolutely nothing to do with theme ideas or cultural value the job of theater the only job is to make sure the audience have a good time this idea is pretty well reflected in Mamet's writing the play I saw here was called race it's about a wealthy white guy called Charles who was accused of doing some pretty unspeakable things to a young black woman the story takes place in the office of his lawyers as they try to come up with a defense the case hinges on the fact that the old lady in the hotel room next door heard some noises and racial slurs being shouted and the defense they come up with is that it was consensual the girl was into it and she's lying to get Charles's money yeah MANET specializes in writing some pretty slimy characters and at the start it looks like Charles is guilty as hell but then some details emerge that make it seem like maybe that is what's actually happening and that's the kind of story ma'am it does really well the kind that keeps you guessing when I first saw it I was like sixteen and it was electric I was so gripped that I actually did a monologue from it at my drama school audition so it's a big part of why I became a professional actor but you might well wonder is it responsible to write stories like that some people might come out of that show if they can get the real victims in society are wealthy white men which obviously isn't true so is that the sort of thing artists should bear in mind when they create one man no my job is to entertain if you're saying they're fuming about how problematic the play is planning your tweets for the interval and it's probably not a very good play ditto if he's sitting there agreeing with it the whole point he says is to shortcut the bit of your brain that intellectualize this stuff and just write a dramatic story the only judge of whether the play is good is the audience who paid to see it that their laugh do they cry did they tell their friends does the box-office sell more tickets that is the free market and that is the same thing as democracy right moment has been working in theatre a long time and he says a lot of people want to make hi art but the problem is rent rent as in what you pay to a landlord not rent the musical real estate prices here in Manhattan have gone up a huge amount in the last few decades so running a theater is pretty expensive and ticket prices have gone up when I first saw Hades town at the National Theatre in London it cost me 15 pounds then it transferred to Broadway and I want a whole bunch of Tony's and now it's like $200 a ticket the target audience these days is wealthy tourists and MANET says they just want to be entertained they want to see a spectacle that justifies the ticket price so they can tell the folks back home that they saw it so forget about art kid this is a business the product is entertainment and that's just the way the world is and there's nothing that will teach you that lesson faster than becoming a professional actor diary of a workaday actor dear diary today I sent 400 emails to acting agents seeking representation no one has responded but I'm sure that eventually somebody will my friend Jessica from drama school has an audition for a play at the most famous theater in London I'm so happy for her dear diary somebody new came to work in the pub today he's a part-time assistant to a famous agent he told me that all the big agents and casting directors in London work 60 hour weeks and can't actually spare the time to see anyone knew he didn't confirm it but I suspect the email address listed on their web site for submissions never actually gets read Jessica was weirdly quiet about her audition but she said she got the role dear diary I'm applying for so many of the jobs listed on casting websites and going to auditions but I can't help but notice that the most prestigious theatres and TV shows never advertise I always see the same actors in the big theatres I assume their auditions are invitation only oh diary it's so difficult not to be bitter or upset when the odds are stacked against me but I always remember what they told me at drama school never express any negativity or nobody will ever work with you dear diary I had an audition today for a commercial they offered me 300 pounds with no buyout fee I'm surprised the major brand is paying so little barely a week's rent but I can't turn down the work I'll be wearing a giant banana costume and dancing around not exactly the romantic leads I was promised but one step at a time I guess Jessica has started rehearsing for her show but when I asked her about it she doesn't want to talk dear diary Jessica broke down today and told me what happened at rehearsal the director has been saying some really inappropriate things to her but she doesn't want to speak up because it's such a great opportunity he's in his 40s and she's age and when he tried to touch her backstage she told him no then during the scene he shouted at her in front of the whole cast I know this job is making her sick with stress but she says if she takes any time off they'll recast and she'll miss her chance they're only paying a minimum wage so when she's not in the theater she's always working in the pub I have to go now diary I have a new job as an uber driver there's a line in Hades town where mr. Hermes the narrator says that Orpheus was a poor boy but he had a gift to give he could make you see how the world could be inspired of the way that it is and maybe art is about that not holding up the values of the perfect society but trying to point the way to a better one a lot of black American theatre of the last two centuries has been about experiences that are alien to white middle class theatre goers a lot of contemporary theatre around London right now is about gentrification and poverty through empathy and imagination these works could open our eyes to new possibilities and maybe get us thinking about new ideas they might even contain what American writer WAB Du Bois called beauty to set the world right but if that's the case and so what you know what else can open your eyes to new possibilities drugs and encyclopedia depression you wouldn't think it was possible for a man to lie on the floor of his kitchen for an entire afternoon completely unable to function but when I did it they gave me the Turner Prize so maybe new possibilities is part of it but not the whole thing in her book duty-free art German filmmaker Hite Estelle talks about art as alternative currency something that has value but no central authority to determine that value so instead the value of a work of art is in how it brings together a network of people who understand and appreciated in similar ways a good example of this would be the plague bug by Toronto playwright Yolanda Bonnell which made headlines recently when the creative team said they're only looking for reviews from indigenous black and people of color apparently they had a white reviewer in who didn't really get what the show was about and said some ignorant things and I don't really want to waste everyone's time with that again they're deliberately pitching the show not at the predominantly white mainstream theater world but are trying to create a kind of alternate art world it's the woke Brigade they've struck again those 19th and 20th century playwrights weren't just putting new ideas out there if they were they'd have written manifestos not plays they were workshopping their ideas with audiences identifying and responding to their needs by creating art so it is about showcasing new ideas but it's also about bringing people together to share them if you've seen my video on Steve Bannon and populism which I think some of you have then you'll remember that the public doesn't just exist publics plural are constructed and so are audiences depending on what you make you'll attract different sorts of people and here we need to talk about Paris social relationships Paris social is a term from the 50s used to describe the relationship between audiences and certain kinds of performers a relationship that gives the illusion of a real face-to-face connection the phrase that sometimes used is intimacy at a distance unlike a normal social relationship a parasocial relationship is one-sided controlled by the performer doesn't have as much opportunity for mutual development there is a lot of research on them out there but the only reason anyone on YouTube knows the term this thanks to the work of a creator called Shannon's true Qi whose YouTube videos I really enjoy and who is therefore my best friend a lot of people have expressed concern that parasocial relationships could be deliberately cynically fostered for financial gain or even mass control be honest put your hand up if the way you voted in your country's last election was in any way influenced by your assessment of the candidates personal characters I will never meet any of these people it does not matter whether they would be fun to go out drinking with what matters is their policies but he just he seems like such a nice guy personally I don't think parasocial relationships are always bad I think a little bit can be okay if your media savvy I will happily stick on a podcast while I'm cooking and it feels like having a friend over which can be great if I'm too tired to see a real one a lot of youtubers facilitate parasocial relationships with their audience because if you have a channel where you explain how to fix an engine people who need to fix their engine will watch the bit they need and then go but if you can make a personal connection that's what keeps an audience coming back you know how every online recipe has like five paragraphs of useless crap about oh I got this recipe for my grandmother and every time I make my organic vegan kombucha I think of Graham Graham that's why that stuff is there my channel definitely does it a lot of my best received videos have been intensely personal I do live streams where I open fan mail I tell stories from my life I started out making pretty dry educational content and to be honest I got a little bored of it but now that I do whatever this is my audience is a lot bigger more international more enthusiastic more gender diverse and if the fan mail is anything to go by the show is really helped a lot of people which is great I deliberately tried to create an inclusive welcoming place where people can make a personal connection if they want to and it has really worked but sometimes it works a little ladies gentlemen and distinguished non-binary members of the Royal parasocial Society welcome the vast vast majority of audience members in this para social environment are wonderful lovely and very very much appreciated but every ecosystem has its nasties and today I'd like to present six unusual and fascinating species first the advice guys advice guys and the less common but no less unusual advice girls message me requesting very specific advice on issues about which I cannot possibly be expected to know anything most notable was a guy who once emailed me asking whether as a philosopher I thought it would be ethical for him to leave his wife and move to Thailand with another woman I never did find out what happened him after that if you're out there good luck to you Thai wife guy next the debate champions and almost entirely male species this irritating but usually harmless fella demands that I spend my time and attention curing him of his pedantry basically which is usually a thankless and impossible task and I don't recommend that anyone tries it number three the therapy leaders I've done a few videos about mental health and very often people write to me saying that they've been helped by those videos or even occasionally that those videos saved their life which is an awesome and and humbling thing for someone to tell you but some people will message me their entire medical history often detailing their mental trauma at great length in rambling unstructured prose like a ulysses of suffering and obviously some people need therapy and tears okay God knows I do but when I get messages like that feel kind of weird cuz their need is genuine and it's sad that they're in pain but they've fallen too deep into a parasocial relationship to the point where they are begging for help from an unqualified stranger one of the consequences of cuts to public mental health care is that people in pain will reach out to anyone that they can reach number for a particularly dangerous species the stalkers and I've had a few the classic image of a stalker is a man in a trench coat calling you at 3 a.m. to breathe heavily because he wants power over you and I have had a couple a bit like that but to be honest the majority of my stalkers and certainly the most serious ones are women who fall too deep into that parasocial relationship and think that I'm their friend so they don't even realize that it's weird to send me hundreds of messages to volunteer to do jobs for me without being paid to ask detailed questions about my sex life to request pictures of my body or buy me clothes that I didn't ask for all of those are things that a real friend or partner might do but again these people do not know me they only know the scripted and edited version of me and it's pretty wild but that's just become part of my life now when I do live events I have to request additional security and it's bizarre how fast you adjust to that honestly number 5 the horny people and I've wanted to talk about this on the show for a while obviously I do make stuff that is pretty horny sometimes with the costumes and the jokes and the props it's actually a surprisingly good way of getting people to engage with the educational stuff I get a lot of messages like ah that was a really sexy costume also like here's what I think about the philosophy we were talking about also it is fun and I enjoy being desired so I do get a lot of horny messages from fans and other creators and a lot of very positive comments about my appearance the vast vast majority of which is totally fine and ok but I do just want to highlight some of the bits that are less than okay first of all I'm a man I'm six foot one and I'm pretty big that doesn't mean that I'm invincible and I have been assaulted before but if somebody's being horny towards me it's likely to be a situation that I can control and if I report a problem unlikely to be believed unlike a lot of my YouTube and acting colleagues who are women if someone sexualizes me it doesn't usually come with a risk to my physical safety which is why I'm okay with the vast majority of thirst that comes my way what does make me a little uncomfortable though is when people get too deep into a parasocial relationship and start asking me to abuse it I'm not talking about the people who comment philosophize me daddy as a joke I'm talking about the people who send me explicit lengthy fantasies of the violent sexual things they want me to do to them I'm talking about people who out of nowhere send me their dating profiles or their nude photos which by the way I delete without opening I'm talking about the people who pretend not to know who I am on dating apps so that they could meet me I'm talking about the people who turn up to my live theater shows in skimpy outfits get into the changing rooms and solicit me for sex and I suspect that some guys will be sitting there thinking oh wow life must be really hard for you oh the tears of the chair that I wish I had your problems buddy and if that's you then that's a little creepy because you're essentially wishing that you had more opportunities to take advantage of people these are consenting adults and they are pursuing me but they are making themselves vulnerable on the basis of a relationship that is not real and I would not feel morally comfortable going there and to be honest it makes it pretty hard to date like it's hard enough to meet people but also I can't use dating apps because people just lie and then it becomes very very obvious that they're lying and you know what it's like with the dating app you get a match and you get your hopes up and then it's just like disappointment a lot of attention is rightly being paid at the moment to mail predators in all kinds of industries so honestly I feel a little weird even talking about this because it's sort of the inverse it's a man in a position of power being uncomfortably pursued rather than doing the pursuing it doesn't really fit inside the discourse but all of those things have really happened to me because one or two members of my audience formed unhealthy expectations and speaking of unhealthy expectations the sixth and final species the hate mobs there have been a few of these but one in recent memory stands out in autumn of last year I voiced the line in another YouTube video that a friend of mine made a real friend somebody I actually know in real life and when the video came out I liked it so I shared it on Twitter about 48 hours later I started getting death threats into my business inbox all mentioning my endorsement of some guy I'd never heard of and I get death threats occasionally that's also passaglia just a part of my life I had other things to focus on I figured somebody had a wire crossed somewhere so I just sort of tuned it out but they kept on coming I got death threats I got encouragement so suicide I was accused of various crimes and perversions my personal life was speculated on my loved ones were insulted at one point my personal information was just posted publicly some people even went through my mental health videos to find the specific words that would hurt me the most which points for effort at least a lot of this was going on on Twitter I have been targeted in the past by three hate mobs neo-nazis transphobes and this one and this one was unquestionably the most venomous yet a lot of these messages were coming from anonymous people with cartoon animal avatars weirdly so for about a week straight I was in this bizarre situation where I was just constantly being told to kill myself by the cast of Disney's Robin Hood after a few days I couldn't do now anymore so I set aside some time to sit down read through the lot and try and figure out where I was coming from and it turned out that when I voiced the line in my friends video she had also gotten someone else to voice a line in it somebody who has in the past without going into details said some less than informed things about non-binary people and a lot of folks were really pissed off that I had endorsed his ideas by appearing in the same video to make matters worse when I shared it I made a little joke that got misunderstood and people thought I was making fun of the fact they were pissed off even though at the time I didn't even know about it so if you keeping score at home I was getting threats because I've voiced a line that I didn't write in a video that I didn't make with a man I'd never heard of who had in the past said some negative things that had nothing to do with the content of that video and if that seems like kind of an unusual situation then you obviously haven't spent much time on Twitter well then that's a really healthy way to live your life amongst the threats and abuse and classic Disney characters were several sets of contradictory demands some people demanded that I publicly denounce my friend some people demanded that I publicly denounced the guy I'd never heard of some people demanded that I argue against the ideas he'd expressed even though I have in the past actually already done that and all of these groups also demanded that I didn't do what the others were saying and it grew and grew and grew to the point where not only was it just like really bad for my mental health and my life but I also lost hundreds and hundreds of dollars of support from my patreon page the thing that I used to pay my rent and make this show it turns out that when people have a parasocial relationship with you if they perceive you as doing something that they perceive as a betrayal of that relationship it hurts them as seriously as a real betrayal by a real friend would and just like you might do if a real friend betrayed you they got angry some of them lashed out and they demanded that I do the work to fix the friendship even though again I'm a stranger and I had nothing to do with the decision to include this guy and this was one of those situations where I had to ask myself do I give my audience what they want or am i trying to do something more here and it turned out it was a pretty easy decision when I first made this channel I made a promise to myself that I would never use it to single out any one person and make them feel bad and I hope I've mostly stuck to that when I do make videos about individuals like Jordan Peterson or Ben Shapiro I try to focus on their ideas rather than go after them personally and if I'm that cautious about strangers with whom I have big disagreements I obviously wasn't gonna publicly turn on my friend somebody who I know and love at its peak it wasn't just me and her getting it in the neck but everybody who voiced the line in the video and even one or two people who didn't so if I had said anything all of their inboxes would immediately get flooded with another wave of crap from all the people who wanted me to say something different and all the people who just wanted to punish my friend by isolating her from the people who care about her a tactic that obviously wasn't gonna work and I'm not here to say Oh boohoo everyone feels sorry for me this is my job I love what I do sometimes it makes me sick that's why I have a therapist the point is that at the time I tried to say as little as possible because making aggressive call outs like a lot of people wanted me to construct the kind of audience who expect that there are some right wing youtubers who've made their careers for a long time stirring up hate mobs and I think the attitude that some of them have is it's just jokes it's just memes why taking it so seriously but whenever something like the Christchurch shooting happens or another right-wing terror attack one or two of those youtubers always go oh god I've got blood on my hands and they start messaging me in secret you would be surprised which big name right-wing youtubers contact me and others behind the scenes trying to get out of the game only to realize that their careers and their family's livelihoods now depend on them feeding the mob another piece of meat every week and I really do not want to end up like that I think something similar might have happened with Star Wars and maybe even Shakespeare's Globe they constructed really passionate audiences who cared about the brand and he bought tickets but who also had strong expectations about how the art should be and that's a double-edged sword on the one hand it's great to have a keen audience on the other it can be hard to break out and do something new and creative if you've cultivated a die-hard fandom especially if they have strong expectations about who else should be included in the fandom so the point of cataloging all these bizarre interactions is that as a creator I don't feel I can go it's all just for entertainment there's no doubt but the stuff I make shapes my audience and their responses even though the ones who go too far bear the blame for their own actions for what it's worth I don't think that my art could ever live up to the standard that Plato sets I'd never be so arrogant as to assume that I know what the perfect society should be a lot of journalists and audience members though seem to think that what I and my YouTube friends make has the potential to make the world a better place especially when it comes to D radicalizing people away from extremist right-wing ideas whenever I do live events I get people coming up to me saying your videos helped make me a better person I especially get a lot of young guys coming up to me saying you showed me a model of masculinity which I felt was wholesome and not toxic and I mean I did a live event last week and three separate people came actually said that and I just kind of smile and look down because that that's like it's kind of a big thing to tell someone I am making things that can just be viewed for entertainment and I think that's okay but I hope that they also reward the people who treat them as art as alternative currency and I hope that I will always bear in mind the enormous responsibility that having [Music] pretty [Music] diamonds [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] getting dressed and placing in recession best in [ __ ] get out school cash hocus-pocus Board of Tory go jogging [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] every Renaissance Italian deserves access to marble statuary where you can see the finger indentations carved in the naked lady's ass and if you want to join our movement go to Bernini for president calm

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 1,038,864

Rating: 4.9217033 out of 5

Keywords: theatre, theater, art, shakespeare, star wars, philosophy, nietzsche, plato, aristotle, olly thorn, philosophy tube

Id: 3IG0Y63LkDM

Length: 45min 8sec (2708 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 18 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

You know how every work of art is somehow political in someway, even if the artist goes out of their way to not have a political message?

I think every youtube video is somehow about The Last Jedi, even if the creator goes out of their way to not mention it a single time.

[u/Unexcused_andDead]

sounds like it's creating a false dichotomy...?

[u/Spanktank35]

You're a monster or a pushover

You're responsible or irresponsible

Or useful or useless

[u/hakel93]

The same goes for many foucauldian or derridean concepts imo. But of course Foucault and Derrida at least attempted to describe the concepts they invented so one could assess their validity on his or her own. Peterson doesn't even reach this level of rigour, sparse though it is.

[u/sirkowski]

You see, in this world there's two kinds of people, my friend: Those with loaded guns and those who dig. You dig.