(dramatic electronic music) - So, April 27, 2017 was the greatest day in the history of twitter.com.net.gov. I realize that to you
children, Twitter is an app. But to us MILFs, it remains a website. We have to dial in. (dial-up modem chirping) Hello operator. Connect me to hell. This was the day that Fyre Festival, a "luxury music event" hosted by Ja Rule and some charlatan was scheduled
to begin on private island in the Bahamas. There was a lot of hype. Kendall Jenner and Bella
Hadid endorsed the festival on Instagram, there was a promo
video full of supermodels, tickets were selling for
thousands of dollars. One Twitter thread
summarized the marketing as, "Exclusivity, conspicuous
consumption, & many, many promises of excellent selfies for your already-insufferable Instagram." So, when the day arrived,
and the advertised "best in food, art, music
and adventure" turned out to be two slices of pallid
American cheese languishing over sliced bread in an atmosphere that can only be described as
muddy third-world shantytown- I mean if you weren't on Twitter that day, I don't think you can
even imagine the revelry. - [Twitter User 1] Just
learned about @fyrefestival aka Ja Rule's Concentration
Camp for Instagram models and rich white kids. - [Twitter User 2] Yuppie
hunger games hosted by ja-rule. - [Twitter User 3] Finish your food, there's starving millennial influencers in #fyrefestival. - [Twitter User 4]
Instagram entitled rich kids meet Lord of the Flies. - [Twitter User 5] Let them eat salad. - It was a shuddering climax
of pent-up class rage. You know, maybe Millennials couldn't get Bernie Sanders elected, but at least those
sandwiches were garbage! (dramatic music) Jameela Jamil is an English actress who is just extremely pretty. Imagine looking like this. Imagine being perfect. Why are you doing this to me Jameela? Why are you doing this to women? One day on Instagram, an ordinary peasant told the Queen Jameela, "Your
skin is so perfect uwu." And Jameela replied, - [Jameela] "My skin is
currently clear because: A, privileged people have more access to good quality nutrition
and also our lives are significantly less
stressful than those with less privilege. I also get to sleep more because of this. All of these things keep
my hormones in balance and I'm able to address
food intolerances easily. B, I believe that trans
rights are human rights. C, I exfoliate twice a week." - Oh boy. Jameela they're gonna
cut your head off, gorg. I'll protect you queen! - [Twitter User 1] Could
she be more annoying? - Someone wondered on
Twitter, to 77,000 likes. - [Twitter User 2] This trend
of fake self awareness legit makes me wanna rip my hair out. - Now look, to be fair,
everything Jameela said is true. Being privileged does make
it easier to spend time and money on cosmetics. But Jameela's acknowledging
this, this recitation of all the complex socioeconomic factors that account for why
she's prettier than you, doesn't take any of the sting
out of inequality, does it? And that's is kind of at odds with what activists used to say, which is that you should
check your privilege. A suggestion which privileged people seem to have taken to heart, since the rich and famous now go around delivering these orations on how fortunate they
are compared to rabble. And this of course, turns out to be far more annoying than when they acted oblivious to it. "I don't have any beauty secrets, I guess I just drink lots of water." Take me, mother! A similar scandal occurred
when Kim Kardashian tweeted about her birthday
party at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. - [Kim] 40 and feeling
so humbled and blessed. There is not a single day
that I take for granted, especially during these times when we are all reminded of
the things that truly matter. After two weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest
inner circle with a trip to a private island where
we could pretend things were normal for just a
brief moment in time, I realize that for most
people, this is something that is so far out of reach right now, so in moments like these,
I am humbly reminded of how privileged my life is. #thisis40. Tag me, bitch. So like Jameela, Kim is attempting some kind of privilege-checking
maneuver, and once again, it has not gone well. - [Twitter User 1] You
are the Marie Antoinette of the 21st century, bragging about being "humble"
and letting us eat cake. - [Twitter User 2] Millions of
Americans sick and suffering, standing for hours in food
lines and being evicted as you flaunt your wealth and privilege. Your tweet made 10
times worse by #ToneDeaf "humbled and blessed" line. #gross. - [Twitter User 3] Happy birthday. I hope someone got you an
alphabet book as a gift, so you can learn to
read the motherf*ckin-" - So the response on Twitter
resembles moral outrage. But what people were upset about is not that she had the party, I mean, wouldn't you escape to a private island if
you had that MILF money? The problem was more that
she tweeted about it, and that the tweet was, maybe just maybe, a little bit yikesy. But if having the party wasn't wrong, then why was tweeting about it wrong? "This isn't a good look," we say. "Bad optics." "Not relatable." Relatable. Relatability is not a moral category. This is public relations, it's not ethics. And it definitely isn't socialism. Like I'm pretty sure Karl Marx never said- - [Karl] "The problem with the bourgeoisie is they're not relatable. They can't read the room,
and it isn't a good look. This should have stayed in the drafts. #ToneDeaf. - Isn't the issue that when Kim tweeted this most people were
trapped in quarantine. We didn't get to have birthday parties. Some people couldn't even travel to visit their dying relatives. So watching Kim get to travel and celebrate her birthday
like normal was, painful. "Pain at the good fortune of others" is how Aristotle defined envy. And I think it's interesting that whenever social media erupts in outrage over luxury music festivals,
or Kim K's birthday party, or Jameela Jamil's... privileged pores? -no one ever uses the word "envy." It's like we're averting our
eyes, avoiding confrontation with this dark aspect
of our own psychology. So in this video I wanna take
a long hard look at envy. What is it, where does it come from, and seriously, what is Jameela
Jamil's skincare routine? Drop it in the comments, bestie! Okay, so what is envy? "Pain at the good fortune of
others" is not a bad start, but there's more to it than that. Envy is a syndrome, a
complex of poisonous thoughts and feelings about people who have what we want but cannot get. It's not simply wanting
what another person has. That's greed, which is a
much more wholesome sin. Because wanting what
someone has can inspire us, it can fuel our own ambition,
it can even motivate us to improve ourselves. And sometimes people call that envy, but it's not really envy. It's emulation, or admiration. At worst it's what the
Bible calls "coveting." He covets! Envy is something darker, it's not just wanting what someone has, it's begrudging them what they have. You might even hate the person you envy, and want them to lose what they have, to be humiliated and destroyed, even if their downfall doesn't
benefit you in any way. Like Satan, who was willing to lose heaven just to spite God, according to the poet John Milfton. It's gonna be 90 minutes
of MILF jokes, kids, so strap in. So envy is malicious. It's a force of destruction. For an example of the distinction between envy and emulation, think about incels,
"involuntary celibates", these men who can't get girlfriends and are bitter about it online. It was incels who contributed
to our culture the concept of "Chads", that is, beautiful,
wealthy, masculine men. For incels, "taking the
red pill" means buying into this ideology which
says that women only want to date Chads, or else they
want to marry beta cucks just to take their beta buxx. Gaskeep, gateboss, girllight. So if you're an incel you can either go to the gym and become
a Chad-that's emulation, the aspiration to attain
what another person has. Or, and this is the more popular option, you can "take the black
pill" which means believing that Chadhood is genetically
determined at birth, there is no hope, no
woman will ever want you, and therefore happiness is impossible, you may as well lie down and rot. This mindset of resentment has inspired so many mass murders that there's an entire
Wikipedia timeline dedicated to tracking them. And the essential motivation
for this violence is envy. The incel's failed ambition
and sense of incurable, predestined inferiority turns venomous. The logic behind the violence is, if I can't get a girlfriend,
if I can't get what I want, then no one can. In the words a murderer- - [Murderer] "The Day of Retribution is my attempt to destroy
everything I cannot have." - But most incels aren't murderers. Most of the time, envy is most harmful to the person who envies. The philosopher Max Scheler called it "a self-poisoning of the mind." There's a Christian saying that "envy is the only sin
that gives no pleasure." Because the other sins are fun, right? Greed, gluttony, lust, that's what I call a good time. But envy is misery. Though I wouldn't go so far as
to say it gives no pleasure. - [Twitter User 1] FyreFestival
is an art installation where mediocre people
realize what their lives would be like without rich parents. Yaaas. - [Twitter User 2] Rich refugee crisis. - We're living in a moment
of growing inequality and resentment. Look around you. We've got the guillotine memes, the edgy teens tweeting "eat the rich." And none of this is new. The slogan "Eat the
rich" actually originates with the philosopher of
the French Revolution, Zsa Zsa Gabor, who supposedly said, - [Jean-Jacques] When the people
shall have no more to eat, they will eat the rich! - And fair enough. That's a good source of protein. But take it from me kids, cannibalism is one of those tricky things.
It's hard to do just once. You develop a taste for it. It's like they say at NA meetings, once you vore you just want more. Also who counts as the rich? Am I the rich? I certainly hope so. 'Cause I want you eat meee. Shhh, stop it. This is why I quit academia, if I was a professor I'd
have to behave myself. And I don't wanna behave myself. I want to be bad. Do you wanna be bad with me? Let's be bad. (dramatic electronic music)
(remix of Mozart's Lacrimosa) So you might think that envy is simply the
product of inequality, and that societies that have
more inequality have more envy. I used to assume that too, but the more I think about
it the more I realize that might not true. Envy is a basic part of human nature, it exists in all societies
and all economic systems, and it begins any time two or more people start comparing themselves. "Part 2, The Desire for Mommy's Milk." According to Sigmund Freud,
or as I call him, Daddy- Zaddy! -the first stage of human
development is the oral stage, in which the primary concern
is oral gratification, which is of course
provided by mommy milkies. Am I doing too much? I'll tone it down. Just a little bit. So look, I get that a lot of people are skeptical about Freud, and it's true he was a bit of a crackpot cokefiend who
had a lot of zany ideas. Like "p*nis envy." Maybe there's transgender
men who experience that but I don't think it's a basic fact of the female condition. As for castration anxiety, is that a dare? Because I take that personally. I'm giving it very serious
consideration, Doctor. But I feel like even when Freud is wrong, he's often at least onto something. Like, with the Oedipus complex, It's not that you literally
desire your mother, right, that would be weird. It's more that you desire
an archetype, Mother. Right? Mommy. You guys get it. Gen Z TikTok lesbians get it, they're the ones who got me
started on this MILF shit. I'm a reverse Socrates, I've
been corrupted by the young. My innocent and delicate
nature has been defiled. So, Freud says that in the first two years of life, libido is primarily
focused on mommy's milk. And it's also in this stage
that envy first emerges. So I was the oldest child in my family, and I was less than two years
old when my brother was born. So I don't remember this,
because I was one year old, but my family tells me that
when my brother was born, I was just insanely jealous. Oh, I guess now's a good time to discuss the difference
between jealousy and envy. Scholars agree that there is a difference, and usually they (tongue-tied babbling) and usually they describe the
difference in one of two ways. The first is that jealousy is defensive, it's a kind of protectiveness
over what is rightfully yours; whereas envy is offensive, it's resentment over what
someone else has that you lack. The second difference is that
envy is between two people, the envier and the envied; whereas jealousy typically
involves three people, as in romantic jealousy
where you have the subject, the romantic object, and then the rival. And the subject is jealous of the rival because they're protective
of their relationship with the romantic object. And that's also the
dynamic of sibling rivalry, just substituting the
romantic object for mommy. Of course in ordinary English, people are always gonna say
jealousy when they mean envy, probably because envy has
more negative connotations. And I think it's pointless
to try to fight that, like don't go around "correcting" people, but just keep in mind that
there is a difference. So sibling rivalry, is
that envy or jealousy? I think it's both, because
initially you're defensive of your privileged only-child relationship with your parents. But a new baby often gets more attention, at least in your paranoid toddler brain, and you might be envious of that. And in romantic jealousy,
you may also envy the rival, if she has qualities
that you wish you had. You know, young kids are little egotists who are very sensitive
to when another child might be getting preferential treatment. One of the favorite phrases
tiny babies is "it's not fair." It's not fair, ehhh. Tell me about it, bambino. And I've got bad news, life is not getting any
more fair than this. According to the Bible,
one of the first events in human history is story of Caín y Abel. Los dos hermanos. I don't know why I said it in Spanish, I guess I just thought
it would sound cool. Was I wrong? ¡Caín! It just sounds so much better than "Cain." Cain and Abel. Cain and Abel! God tells Cain and Abel to
each to make a sacrifice, and then God prefers Abel's, you know, 'cause God loves meat. Then, in an act of
malicious envy toward Abel and spite towards God the father, Caín kills his younger brother. In my earliest memories of my brother I already loved him and I
don't even remember the envy. So I guess I wasn't a Cain. ¡Caín! So I must have somehow worked through this without resorting to murder. Hmm. Freud says the older
sibling's envy of the younger leads to a recognition of impotence. Because at first you selfishly want to be the special most-loved child. But you see that your
parents love your sibling just as much as you, and you're powerless to do anything about it. So your ambition to superiority fails. And so you have to repress
your aspiration to superiority, as well as your envy. And the result of that repression is what's called herd
instinct, solidarity, this feeling of identifying with a group, the equal siblings. And as you get older the herd instinct evolves into our feelings
about justice, duty, community, and equality. But Freud thought these feelings retain a vestige of repressed envy. "If I can't be the favorite, if I can't have special
privileges, then no one can!" From these observations Freud
made the generalization: - [Sigmund] Social justice means that we deny ourselves many things so that others may have to
do without them as well. - Okay, so we don't want other people to have anything we can't
have, so we enviously insist on equality as a defense against the greater prosperity of others. I don't completely agree with that, Like I think Freud is
definitely onto something here, but don't some community
feelings also come from a place of genuine
care for other people? (sighing) I cared about someone once. Rosebud. (glass shattering) Well, we'll come back to that later. Let's put a pin in me for
now, a pin in it for now. Freud, I mean. Let's put a pin in Freud. In a 1966 book titled "Envy:
A Theory of Social Behavior", the sociologist Helmut Schoeck argued that rather than being- That's very German name. Helmut Schoeck. It's putting me in a German mood, sweetie. Hallo meine Lieben. Heute gibts ein neues Video! I just get worse at German every year. Schoeck argued that rather
than being the result of social or economic inequality, envy is a universal experience
across all human societies, including very egalitarian ones. For example, in tribal
and village cultures around the world, there's often a concept of black magic or witchcraft, which are thought used by envious people to bewitch the ones they envy. You're probably familiar with
the concept of the evil eye, which originates in Ancient Greece or maybe even earlier than that. Cultures all over the world
today understand the evil eye as kind of curse cast
by the malignant gaze of an envious person. Now you might be thinking
that sounds superstitious, but I think the concept of the evil eye reveals a more sophisticated
awareness of envy and of the social danger that it poses. You've probably seen these amulets around, there's an emoji for them
now, which are supposed to protect against the evil eye. It's called a nazar, which
comes from the Arabic word for sight or surveillance,
similar to the origin of the English word "envy,"
which is the Latin "invidia," which just means to look at. So there's agreement across
cultures that envy is related to sight, the malevolent
gaze, the evil eye. And these amulets show
that a lot of people are afraid of being envied and
want to protect themselves. I was just watching this
Turkish YouTube channel with an episode on the evil eye, and the host explains that for Muslims- - [Narrator] It's customary to say- - Mashallah. - [Narrator] Or god has willed it, when admiring a person or object. You know, to avoid
unintentionally cursing them. - I love that. It's like "no envy!" Like no homo, but no envy! Mashallah! The top comment on that video says, - [Marie] You want to protect yourself from the evil green eye monster? Well, don't tell others about
your ideas, goals, or wishes. Don't be flaunting your
accomplishments on social media or posting pictures of your children, that's how you avoid being jinxed. - See this is where Kim
Kardashian went wrong with her birthday post. Clearly, no one in the
Kardashian cinematic universe has ever heard of the evil eye. Wait, I thought these
people were Armenians. Why haven't they heard of the evil- oh. Okay, nevermind. Every piece of media they've ever produced is about flaunting an enviable lifestyle. This is a particularly American thing. Most Americans have no concept of the fear of envy. Like there's advertisements
here that literally promise, "If you buy this exclusive luxury vibrator you'll be the envy of all your friends!" As if it's a good thing to be envied. Oh but it is not. If people envy you, they gossip about you, they seethe over your successes and celebrate your misfortunes. Being envied is basically
the opposite of being loved. So why would anyone want to be enviable? Well it's a contradiction of human nature. On the one hand, we need to be loved, but then there's this other drive in us, this like Homeric
striving for fame and glory and riches, which is kind of in conflict with our need to be loved. In a past gilded age there were stories like "Citizen Kane" and "Sunset Boulevard" which warned what a sad and lonely thing success can become. In ancient democratic Athens, there was a practice called Ostrakismos, which is the origin of the
English word ostracism. Ostracism was a procedure
where the Athenians would assemble and each
person would write the name of a person they wanted to ostracize on a pottery shard called an ostrakon. And whoever got the most
votes would simply be banished from the city for 10
years, no questions asked. (laughing) I love the ancient world. Things were so direct. Often this was used to remove someone who was becoming too
prominent or too arrogant, or just annoying. According to Plutarch, I'm
just gonna read from Wikipedia: "In one anecdote about Aristides, known as 'Aristides the Just,' who was ostracized in 482,
an illiterate citizen, not recognizing him, came up to ask him to write the name
Aristides on his ostrakon. When Aristides asked why,
the man replied it was because he was sick of hearing
him being called 'The Just'." It's good. It's so good! See this is why the idea of
"cancel culture" is absurd. This has been going on since
the dawn of civilization. People in most cultures, not all, but most cultures
understand that being envied is a massive social liability, so it's best not draw too
much attention to yourself. According to a Tamil saying, "The tree that bears
fruit will be stoned." This is sometimes called
"tall poppy syndrome," because the tallest poppies
in the garden will be cut. Schoeck argues that the fear of envy is a major inhibiting
force in many societies. - [Helmut] In Haiti, GE
Simpson found that a peasant will seek to disguise his
true economic position by purchasing several smaller fields rather than one larger piece of land. For the same reason he
will not wear good clothes. He does this intentionally
to protect himself against the envious black
magic of his neighbors. - Now this kind of thing is
not unheard of in America. Like I've known people from
seriously wealthy families who move to the city and
they dress like gutter punks. Like they're trying pass as poor. But in general Americans
don't openly acknowledge fear of envy the way many other cultures do, and I don't think that's an accident. We're a nation of show-offs. And so the taboo against
discussing envy is related to our whole national
ethos of shoving our wealth in everyone's face. But though the fear of envy
isn't widely talked about or admitted here, it's
definitely still there, only repressed; confined to
the realm of dreams and art. (dramatic orchestral music) In the movie "Black Swan", Nina is a perfection-obsessed ballerina who achieves her dream
of getting the lead role in "Swan Lake", after which her life and mind are totally
unraveled by fear of envy. Black magic, black swan. At first we see how Nina's success comes at the very real cost of being envied: by her ex-ballerina
mother, by the other girls in the company, and by
the former lead ballerina she's replaced. - Did you suck his (beep)? - Not all of us have to. - I love Winona Ryder so much. I love Natalie Portman so much. I love Mila Kunis so much. I just like women. Where's my shock wand? Stop it! Stop stanning! But reasonable fear of
envy becomes paranoia as Nina begins hallucinating
Black Swan doppelgangers and is seduced by
bisexual demon Mila Kunis who's trying to steal her role. You gotta watch out for
those bisexual demons. They'll getcha! - Did you have some sort of
lezzie wet dream about me? - Stop it. - You could argue that Nina
is actually suffering a kind of self-envy, where she
envies the disinhibited, sexually liberated,
corrupted part of herself that's capable of adult eroticism and also of dancing the black swan. So she imagines that part of herself as an envious rival who's
trying to replace her. It's like her mind is
split between two impulses, there's her dominant White Swan impulse which we could call the
Squidward personality: perfectionistic and orderly,
but reserved, priggish, stiff. And then there's her
repressed Black Swan impulse, which we could call the
Spongebob personality: intuitive, chaotic, ecstatic. In "Spongebob Squarepants",
the character Squidward is fundamentally a figure of envy, stemming from failed ambition. - Hello, you've reached the
house of unrecognized talent. - [Natalie] Squidward aspires
to artistic achievement but remains a mediocrity, partly
because of his overly dry, doctrinaire attitude towards art. Spongebob is Squidward's social equal, they're literally neighbors, and they both work the
same fast-food service job for the same exploitative capitalist. But Spongebob is a
Mozartean intuitive genius who's able to transform the most mundane
activities-blowing bubbles, flipping burgers-into a
kind of aesthetic rapture. Squidward intensely envies
Spongebob's uninhibited joy and intuitive creativity, but he can't admit that envy to himself. So he convinces himself that
what he's really feeling is contempt, snobbish disdain for Spongebob's childish behavior. - What the people want is culture, not dancing bubbles. - Though deep down Squidward really wants what Spongebob has. - It's beautiful! I mean, uh- - Which we see when he can't help himself from blowing bubbles,
or when he trades away all of his possessions for
the chewing gum wrapper that in Spongebob's hands was a source of infinite entertainment. A lot of people my age
who watched Spongebob as a kid rewatch it now and are horrified to discover that they
identify with Squidward, whereas as children they
identified with Spongebob. Well, you either die a Spongebob
or you live long enough to see yourself become the Squidward. - Future! - And there's a pain in
becoming the Squidward, which is usually explained as
"the disappointing drudgery of adult life," or
simply loss of childhood. I would argue the envy of childhood is the distinctive Squidwardian emotion. Squidwardian? Are we saying that word? Are we really saying this word out loud, to an audience of millions? Okay. It's basically the same
dynamic as Salieri's envy of Mozart in "Amadeus." Oh my god, the evil eye killed Mozart! You gotta watch out for that one kids. If a mysterious stranger
shows up on your doorstep at midnight asking you
to compose a requiem mass for your own father, just say no. So in Spongemadeus Mozartpants we have the diligent though stuffy wannabe envying the effortless playfulness of the spontaneous genius. (Spongebob and Mozart laughing) [Squidward grumbling] -Grazie signore. [Church Bell] -So Squidward's envy of Spongebob is, well, it's Apollo's envy of Dionysus. Look if we were to view
"Spongebob Squarepants" through the philosophy
of Friedrich Nietzsche- stay with me ladies, I have an angle here- we could say that Squidward represents what Nietzsche called
the Apollonian impulse, while Spongebob represents the Dionysian. Nietzsche thought there are
two conflicting artistic drives in the human personality. The Apollonian, named
after the Greek god Apollo, is the drive toward self-control,
order, logic, morality. And the Dionysian, named after Dionysus, is the drive toward intoxication, frenzy, passion, intuition. Both Spongebob and Amadeus
present these two drives in conflict, with the Apollonian
envying the Dionysian. Of course this is a
misrepresentation of how art is actually created, because
Nietzsche's whole point is that you need a
balance of the two drives. In reality you cannot have
a pure Dionysian artist like Spongebob, because
creating good art requires at least some level of
discipline and ordering. - See? It is all in the technique! - Otherwise you're just some
drunk idiot with a guitar. Get off the stage! So "Black Swan" is in a way
actually more realistic. In order to give the perfect
performance, Nina has to unify her fragmented
personality and dance both swans, resolving the envious rivalry between her two artistic impulses. - It was perfect. (grand orchestral music) - Another movie about fear of envious ballerina
doppelgangers-can you guess it? -is Jordan Peele's 2019 horror film "Us", which dramatizes the
repressed economic guilt and fear of the American middle class. We meet the Wilsons, a
moderately affluent family with a vacation house and a
boat, along with the Tylers, a slightly better-off white
family whom the Wilsons envy. You saw their new car, right? He had to do it. He just had to get that
thing to f*ck with me too. - One night the Wilson's
vacation home is invaded by a family of their own
monstrous doppelgangers. Red, the only doppelganger who can speak, explains that her family
is metaphysically tethered to the Wilsons, living
wretched and destitute versions of their lives in a liminal
backrooms underworld. It's super fucking liminal. I'm on Ambien in an AA meeting. Not again! - Once upon a time, there was a girl and the girl had a shadow. The two were connected, tethered together. When the girl ate, her food was
given to her warm and tasty. But when the shadow was hungry, she had to eat rabbit raw and bloody. - We later find out that all over the US- Oh US spells "Us"... Hey that's the title of the movie! Ohhh. The tethered have risen up to kill their privileged doppelgangers and to link arms across the
country in a dark parody of the real-world 1986 homelessness fundraiser Hands Across America. So my reading of "Us" is
that it's an expression of middle-class guilt about
privilege, and fear of envy. It's not a movie about the working class. If it was about the working class, then the working class would be able to speak human languages, and would not be scary
monsters who make animal sounds (growling) and stagger around like zombies. This is a movie about the
anxious middle class's nightmare of the working class. "Us" represents in a self-aware way what other home invasion
movies represent unconsciously: the fear of the envious
poor, of revolution, of slave revolt. - Tell me you did not just
reference "Home Alone." - But "Us" diverges from
other home invasion movies by not just being fearful
about the underclass, but also guilty. The idea of the tethered
underclass represents life as a zero-sum game where every moment of your happiness is bought
with someone else's suffering. It's an incredibly guilty
fantasy, an internalization of the black-magic logic of people who blame their own misfortunes
on the people they envy. As Schoeck puts it, "My neighbor's harvest can only have turned out better than mine because he has some how
succeeded in reducing mine by black magic." So the fear of envy, and
the guilt of success, are repressed in American culture, but they still find expression in movies. Jordan Peele is kind of
like the Charles Dickens of the 21st century. "Us" actually reminds me
of "A Christmas Carol", a story about the guilt of the
rich if ever there was one. You know Scrooge is visited by ghosts who show him how wretched
and sad the lives of his employees are,
and how he'll die alone and hated by everyone, and
his funeral is only attended by businessmen on the condition
that lunch is provided. Dickens was truly the master
of scaring the rich straight. So maybe fear of envy can serve a softly regulatory function
by motivating charity and generosity in the rich. But in general I'm suspicious of envy as a motivation for politics. 'Cause remember, the
basic logic of envy is, "if I can't have it, no one can" which is a purely negative,
destructive style of thinking. It's taking privileges away
not for the material benefit of the underprivileged but merely for the psychological satisfaction
of the envious person. And it's even worse when you consider that envy is subjective. It doesn't necessarily target
objective power and privilege. So envy in politics is
not by any means relegated to the left. Conservative politics
is brimming with envy. Like this debate about
forgiving student loan debt, you often hear people say, "I had to pay my student
loans, so they should too. Debt forgiveness is not fair!" The logic here is, "Since I didn't get my
student debt forgiven, no one should." It's intergenerational envy,
which is a pretty common thing. Usually older generations
envying the young. "Kids these days have it so easy, when I was young we
ate nails for breakfast and sent text messages
on the Pony Express." The feeling is basically, it's not fair that kids these days don't
have to suffer like I suffered. Or think about the concept
of a "welfare queen" which openly reeks of
envy and white resentment. Or the way conservatives
talk about immigration, it's all this envious suspicion about illegal immigrants sneaking in and getting government handouts without having to pay taxes. "I had to work hard for my money so why should these
people get a free ride?" Not that's what being an illegal
immigrant is actually like, except in the imagination
of people who envy them. Envy is felt more intensely
by prideful people, so it's especially sharp
when it targets people who are "supposed to be beneath you." The Jewish radical feminist
Andrea Dworkin made what I think is a pretty
compelling argument that both anti-Semitism and misogyny are partly rooted in envy. She quotes a bigoted argument made by the wife-killing
protagonist of Tolstoy's story "The Kreutzer Sonata",
who resents that women and Jews find a kind of paradoxical power in their own oppression. - [Leo] Just like the
Jews: as they pay us back for their oppression by
financial domination, so it is with women. "Ah, you want us to be
traders only, all right, as traders we will dominate you," say the Jews. "Ah, you want us to be merely objects of sensuality, all right, as objects of sensuality we will enslave you." - [Natalie] Dworkin explains- - [Andrea] This dominance of men by women is experienced by the men
as real, emotionally real, sexually real, psychologically
real; it emerges as the reason for the
wrath of the misogynist. The woman appears to control sex. The man needs it. This causes his rage at her
perceived power over him." - Women control access to what men want, which gives women a kind of indirect power that some men envy. They envy the sexual power of women. It doesn't matter to the
misogynist that, especially at the time Tolstoy was writing, women objectively have less
power in society than men. He envies women because
they "have" what he desires. Likewise, it didn't matter
to Weimar anti-Semites that Jewish people were
a marginalized minority. Anti-Semitism is often rooted
in an envious obsession with the disproportionate influence and affluence of Jewish people. - [Helmut] It is not
the absolute differences between men which feed envy,
but subjective perception, the optics of envy. (dramatic orchestral music) - Magic mirror on the wall,
who is the c*ntest of them all? - Thou art c*nt my queen. But hold, a lovely maid I see. - Oh yes, it's me. - What? - In a way, I'm kind of
just in the beginning of this whole transition, you know, like a young little girl going through all these things. Having a sleepover with the girls. What do we do on a sleepover? Do we have like pillow
fights and all that stuff? - Alas, she is more c*nt than thee. - My pussystunting on the
gram has come to nothing! Ugh. (dramatic orchestral music) The classic 1937 Disney movie "Snow White and the Wicked MILF" is the story of a quote
"vain and wicked" queen who obsessively envies the
beauty of her own stepdaughter. Are you sure this was for children? Every day the MILF Queen asks the mirror, who is the fairest one of all? And the mirror responds that
the queen is the fairest, till one day it says the
stepdaughter Snow White is the fairest, which sends the queen into an envious fury resulting in a series of bizarre murder attempts. So first of all, can we
talk plot holes ding? (triangle ringing) Are we really supposed to believe that this is more beautiful than this? Uh, ding! Isn't Snow White like 12 years old? What's goin' on, Walt? Why don't you take a seat? Maybe she's not 12, I don't know, it's hard to tell 'cause she's constantly surrounded by manlets. But she's just so boring! And the queen is such a baddie. Step on my throat, mother. This is a horny video. Well, yeah, 'cause I quit
riding that brown tiger. I can feel the pulse back in my veins. So despite the injustice
it does to its lead MILF, "Snow White" does illustrate some interesting things about envy. Once again we have black
magic and witchcraft as an expression of envy. We have the age difference,
intergenerational envy, the envy of youth. It kind of reminds me of
those Millennial women who hit 30 and suddenly feel
a need to rage against GenZ. Pretty counterproductive, since if you're worried about seeming old, complaining about the youths is probably not helping your case, gorg. You might wonder if there's
also jealousy involved with the evil queen, like is she worried the King is gonna fall in love with his own daughter? Well, I don't think so, because
we never even see the king. The queen doesn't mention
him, it's not about the king. So there's no romantic jealousy involved, it's just one woman
envying another over beauty for its own sake. We stan a Bechdel-test-passing movie about women hating each other. Gatekeep, gas...girl,
gategirl, gaskeep, lightboss. In fact in the original
Brother's Grimm version, the queen first tries killing Snow White with beauty accessories, poisoning a comb and lacing her to death with a corset. I wish I could die that way. What's really striking is
the pure kamikaze malignity of it all. This queen who we know
is obsessed with her look is willing to transform
herself with witchcraft into an ugly old hag
just to give Snow White the poisoned apple. And the queen disguising herself as an old hag parallels
Satan disguising himself as a serpent. You could actually argue that the queen is simply a persona of Satan, it's "Paradise Lost" all over again, which also happens to be
the title of my memoir. The queen is incredibly petty
because even according to the, again, wrong and tasteless-mirror, the Queen is still the
second most beautiful woman in the world. How could someone so close
to the top of the hierarchy still be consumed by envy? Well, basically because
that's how envy works. It's petty, it's subjective,
and it's indifferent to the magnitude of inequality or to the absolute position
on the overall hierarchy. So you can be the second best in the world and still be obsessively envious of the one person who may
barely even be above you. In fact there's studies showing that Olympic silver medalists are actually less
satisfied with their prize than bronze medalists. Probably because the bronze
medalist is just happy to be on the podium at all,
while the silver medalist is so close to first they can't
help but wonder "what if?" Humans form our sense of
identity and self-worth not by comparing ourselves
to any absolute standard but by comparing ourselves to each other. And we're more likely to compare ourselves to the people around us, than
we are to people far away. We could call this the
proximity effect of envy. We're more likely to envy
people who are close to us or similar to us, especially people we're in competition with. That's why social media
is such a nightmare. It's an incubator of envy. Because it puts everyone
next to everyone else, so we're all being compared,
all in competition. And it can destroy your self-esteem because you're comparing your actual life to these idealized images.
And it turns public figures into lighting rods for envy, because of the numeric visibility
of popularity and success. It's also perverse consequence
of the proximity effect that envy within an oppressed class is often more venomous
and obsessive than envy for the oppressor. So for example, in "Snow White" and "Black Swan", you have women envying other women,
because women are often in competition with other women. And I know it's kind of
a misogynistic trope, in media there's constant
portrayals of vain envious women, jealous bitches fighting over
men, over youth, over beauty. It's like drag queen femininity, "Death Becomes Her" femininity. - En garde, Bitch! - So yeah, it's kind of
a misogynistic trope, but, how do I put this delicately, sometimes reality is misogynistic, like when my eyelash won't stay glued on. The patriarchy's machinations
are clearly to blame. In her 1976 essay "Trashing:
The Dark Side of Sisterhood", feminist Jo Freeman
wrote about her ostracism from within the women's movement. - [Jo] I have been watching for
years with increasing dismay as the Movement
consciously destroys anyone within it who stands out in any way. - [Natalie] She quotes a speech by fellow feminist Anselma Dell'Olio. - [Anselma] And who do they attack? Achievement or accomplishment
of any kind would seem to be the worst crime: do anything that every
other woman secretly or otherwise feels she
could do just as well and you're in for it. You are immediately labeled
a thrill-seeking opportunist, a ruthless mercenary, out to make her fame and fortune over the dead
bodies of selfless sisters who have buried their abilities and sacrificed their ambitions
for the greater glory of feminism. - [Natalie] Freeman speculates- - [Jo] The primary reason
there have been so few great women blank, is
not merely that greatness has been undeveloped or unrecognized, but that women exhibiting potential for achievement are punished
by both women and men. The "fear of success" is
quite rational when one knows that the consequence of
achievement is hostility and not praise. - So at no point in this
essay does Jo Freeman use the word envy, but as usual, envy is right below the surface
causing all the trouble. (dramatic orchestral music) So Freeman is describing how people from marginalized
groups whose ambition raises them above the typical
limits of marginalization are often ostracized from
their own communities. But she has no causal
explanation for why this happens. I have an explanation. The explanation is envy. And woman are more likely
to envy other women. Trans women are more likely
to envy other trans women. Oh God, am I really gonna go there? If we did this topic justice, this video would be nine centuries long. - En garde, Bitch! - A lot of people assume that
trans women envy cis women. And there is some truth to that. There definitely was a time in my life when I used to envy cis
women for being cis women, but now I kind of just
don't even allow myself to have the thought "what
if I were a cis woman?" So in a way, because becoming
a cis woman is impossible, it's unattainable, I
actually envy cis women less. So trans women are more likely
to envy other trans women. Because of the proximity effect, and because another trans woman represents an actual possibility of
what I, a trans woman, could become. She is a standard to which I
can plausibly compare myself. Here's a post someone made
on my own fan subreddit. - [Poster] Am I the only
one who finds it hard to watch trans creators? Before I realized I was a trans woman I fucking loved people like
ContraPoints, NyxFears, and other trans creators. But ever since I realized I was trans, I just get this angry
resentful feeling in the pit of my stomach whenever
I get recommended any of these videos. I seriously loved ContraPoints, but whenever I try to
watch any of her videos, I just want to scream. I have this feeling towards
passing trans people in general. I feel such a hatred for
them, and I don't know why. Am I just a toxic person? (sighing) - Well sweetie, you're not a toxic person. At least not any worse than anyone else. It's just that human
nature is a toxic person. And that "angry resentful
feeling in the pit of your stomach" that
"makes you want to scream" and "feel such a hatred" has a name. And the name is envy. I actually admire the
person who wrote this post because they're doing the
best any of us can do really, which is noticing the feeling
without endorsing the feeling. I wish more people could
feel things without rushing to a "rational" defense of the feeling. And isn't rationality
often simply the attempt to make our feelings contagious? Sometimes people have no
self-awareness about it at all. For example, there's a certain kind of, uh, boomer transsexual who complains that, "When I transitioned I had to go through rigorous medical gatekeeping,
but kids these days just waltz on in and
walk out with hormones." It's intergenerational
envy, trans edition. "It was hard for me so it
should be hard for everyone." Like the student debt debate. If I can't have it, no one can. And look, I do have
sympathy and admiration for older trans people, like being trans in 2021 is already the maximum level of adversity that I can handle. I cannot image how hard it
was to do this in the '80s. However, the pain of envy
is not a valid argument. Envy is not sacred rage. And the malignant
demands of envious people should be ignored. God, this community. The constant competition,
the envy, the cringing. It makes it really hard to get along with other trans people. Oh, speaking of which. Gay tangent, everybody, gay tangent! Envy presents kind of a unique problem to same-sex attracted people, because of the increased risk of envying the very people
you're attracted to. - [Lil Nas X] I wanna
(beep) the ones I envy, I envy. It's the classic, "do I want you or do I
want to be you" problem. I've heard feminine queer women say they could never date another femme because they're worried they'd
just end up envying her. So dating masculine women
solves that problem. Because having separate
roles, separate aesthetics, separate categories, helps to avert proximity
envy between partners. Unfortunately, I am not that smart. Basically I am attracted to femininity, but I also want to embody a kind of feminine archetype
myself. I'm not masculine and I don't want to be. You know, I used to think
I'd only want to date another trans woman because
of the mutual understanding but I've kinda realized that at this point it may actually be more
psychologically healthy for me to open up to dating cis women. I used to not want to do that because I was afraid it would
make me feel like a man, but at this point,
honestly, just be a man. Whatever, it's fine. As a drag queen once said, "I'm more of a man than you'll ever be, and more of a woman
than you'll ever have." Yes gawd. Can we get the tequila
out of the frame please? I think at a distance it's okay to indulge the
attraction/emulation ambiguity, but if you want to actually
have a relationship with someone you have to make up your mind that you desire this woman
and you do not want to be her. Because think about it
from the other perspective. What could be less attractive than someone who literally wants to be you? "Teacher, make her stop copying me." Like as much as I joke in every episode about how Buffalo Bill is
an iconique trans legend, you don't want to date that bitch. Imagine trying to date
Eve from "All About Eve." Pass. Hard pass. So if you're a queer woman,
or a queer anything, honestly, and you find yourself
envying your partner, my advice is, stop
overthinking a good situation. An enviable woman wanted to be with you. So sit back, relax, and enjoy the clout. I get it though, it's complicated. You know we're all
supposed to proudly affirm what we truly desire, but how do you know what you truly desire? Do I want mommy, or do
I wanna be the mommy? Yes. Just yes. Anyway, let's go back to
talking about Sigmund Freud. - The mother half took over completely. (dramatic electronic music) - Do I look okay? Is my head on straight? So we keep running into this
avoidance of the word "envy." People especially cannot seem to notice when they themselves are feeling envious. Like that person who puzzled over the "angry resentful
feeling in the pit of their stomach" without
being able to name what they were feeling. There's two reasons why people are usually in denial about their own envy: one is guilt and the other is shame. Shame! Shame because admitting to yourself that you envy someone implies
that you feel inferior to them, which is shameful. It wounds the ego. And guilt because envy is malicious. If you envy someone you may feel angry and miserable about their
success and good fortune, and you may wish to see
them ruined or brought down. That's cruel and anti-social,
it goes against most ideas of morality, and it's a thought that's usually not socially
acceptable to admit. So envy is shameful, guilty,
and socially unacceptable. And we deal with that by
suppressing it from our awareness. But it is still there, and in order to maintain the denial, we
have to convince ourselves that this angry resentful feeling in the pit of our stomach
is actually something else. Think about how in Spongebob, Squidward shows contempt for
Spongebob's childishness, for blowing bubbles,
for having fun at work. When in fact, Squidward envies
Spongebob's uninhibited joy and intuitive creativity. But he can't allow himself
to have the thought that he envies Spongebob, because that would mean recognizing the intolerably shameful truth that he feels inferior to Spongebob. So what he does instead
is convince himself that what he really is is
a refined sophisticate, scoffing at this childish fool. - How did I ever get surrounded
by such loser neighbors. (tuneless clarinet music) - We could call this
envy-to-contempt sublimation. Sublimation is a
psychoanalytic term which means that you transform an ego-wounding feeling or socially unacceptable longing into something more ego-flattering
or socially acceptable. So the classic example used by Freud is the transformation of sexual urges, of erotic energy, into
creative expression. It's like the founder of the
no-fap movement, Lady Gaga, once said, "I have this weird thing that if I sleep with someone they're going to take my creativity from
me through my (beep)." So, according to Freud, the
vast majority of erotic longings can never actually be fulfilled.
Tell me about it Sigmund. Ugh, misery. But there's a positive side to this, supposedly, which is
that you can sublimate your erotic longings into a more socially
acceptable productivity. So, instead of flicking the bean, maybe you write novels
about thirsty vampires, or for that matter philosophical treatises about the will to power. Oh we'll to get to you. Freud thought that
civilization itself is built at the cost of our instincts, most of which we have to
sacrifice to live in a society. So like erotic impulses, I think envy can be sublimated, which
is what's happening when it becomes contempt. Another example is the
blog McMansion Hell, which makes fun of the
tasteless architecture of suburban ostentatious trash. I would argue that part
of the fun of this blog, is the pleasure and relief
of looking down at the rich. Because looking enviously
up at the rich is painful. It makes you feel inferior. And a way to alleviate that
pain is to sublimate envy, and pretend that you're an
aristocratic aesthete scoffing at the vulgar taste of the arriviste. "These flying buttresses are
in extremely poor taste." Another example is, oh,
shit-talking plastic surgery. I once heard a trans woman say, "At least I don't look
like a botched sex doll!" The subtext is, there's a certain kind of trans woman influencer who lives in LA and has had a lot of cosmetic surgery to achieve a doll-like aesthetic. But it costs a lot of
money to look like this. And a lot of trans women
can't afford surgeries that they want. And one way to deal with frustrated desire is to convince yourself that the thing that's out of reach is
not worth having anyway. See also the discourse on Twitter about how "Passing is transphobic". There's an ancient Greek fable where a fox wants some grapes but
he can't reach the vine, so he walks away bitterly and says, "well the grapes
are transphobic anyway." The cisgender version of this is maybe the "not like other girls" meme, which is classic
envy-to-contempt sublimation. The trope is usually that
other girls are popular and slutty, they have
fake tans and fake nails, they like partying and makeup
and stupid music for idiots. But I'm quirky and real,
I listen to Pink Floyd and read books and eat lots
of pizza late at night alone and sad. There's usually a subtext of
anxiety about inferiority, the "other girls" being
more socially accepted, feminine, and put together. A lot of times, "the other
girls" don't even exist, right, they're a media construct
of idealized womanhood. Right, like where are these "other girls" who've never eaten pizza
and enjoy wearing makeup at nine a.m. on a Saturday morning? Are they between the sofa cushions? Did you put them in
with the other laundry? Are the other girls in the
room with us right now? The feeling of inferiority toward "the other girls" is reframed as kind of contemptuous
hipster superiority, which is really just an
ego-defensive persona of resentment. Like Janis in "Mean Girls." She's not even really a lesbian. She's Lebanese. - Lebanese. - Regina got confused. And then she dances with a boy at the end and is
readmitted into girlhood. Thank you for that Tina Fey. That's very helpful. (bitter gay sighing) Great. Another way we can reframe feelings of envious inferiority
is by transforming them into moral superiority. Moral superiority often being the refuge of people with nothing better
to feel superior about. We don't have to feel
guilty or ashamed of envy if we convince ourselves that what we're actually experiencing is "justified" "legitimate" hatred. So for example think of the
morality around sexuality. Part 69: Sluts Yeah what are you gonna do about it? Cancel me? - En Garde, Bitch! - Why does everyone hate sluts so much? Sluts never did nothing wrong to nobody. Open sexual promiscuity is in
a way analogous to opulence. You're conspicuously enjoying something that other people want, and
might not be able to get. Many cultures have norms about modesty, for example expecting women
to cover their hair in public. This is usually explained as
prophylaxis against male lust, but I wonder if it also serves to prevent a more generalized envy, which female beauty has
a way of attracting. Men often slut-shame because they want to control female sexuality. And by female sexuality,
I do mean male sexuality. Because often what
they're really struggling to control is their own desire. But slut-shaming is also
done pretty viciously by women to each other. And that's a complicated thing,
it's more than just envy. Sometimes it comes from
a sense that a woman who's having casual sex with a lot men is compromising the collective
sex-withholding power of the group, almost like
she's crossing a picket line. But there's also sometimes a resentment that a woman who's showing
skin is using her body to get "unearned" attention. And that smells like envy to me. "I don't use my body to get
attention, so no one should!" The repressed feeling is
"maybe I'm a little jealous that she's getting all this attention by posting thirst traps." But you don't think that,
you think: I am above this. Because I am chaste, I have
class, I am a feminist. I would also suggest accusing her of "pandering to the male gaze", that's of course the feminist way of calling someone a lowdown hoebag skank. So again we have
envy-to-contempt sublimation, and often the contempt
is "moral" "virtuous". The psychological need to
convince ourselves that envy is morality can become so strong that we actually start inventing things to be outraged about. Take for instance the tendency to imagine that the wealthy and powerful are enjoying wild Satanic orgies, and indulging all the
forbidden salacious pleasures that we ourselves are denied. Like QAnon, these conspiracy
theorists who want us to imagine Hillary Clinton reclining in a garden of early delights sampling the pleasures of ephebes. Live laugh love that for her. Envy is very imaginative when it comes to the hedonistic
extravagance of the envied. Let's talk about Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France who was
guillotined by the Revolution. If you know one thing
about Marie Antoinette, it's probably that when
she heard about a famine where the people had no bread, she infamously responded
"Let them eat cake." What an evil bitch. How could she say that? Well, she didn't. She never said it. It's a lie. The phrase "let them eat cake", originally "let them eat
brioches" first appeared in Rousseau's Confessions, written in 1765 when Marie Antoinette was nine years old. Rousseau attributed the line to "a great princess." Probably, no one ever said this. It's kind of like how the most
famous photo of Paris Hilton is the one where she's wearing
a "Stop Being Poor" T-shirt. What an evil bitch. How could she wear that? Well, she didn't. It's photoshopped. The actual shirt said
"Stop Being Desperate." Envy likes to fabricate
the diabolical crimes of its enemies, I assume to complement their
hedonistic extravagance. I mean what is a Disney villain if not an opulent homosexual
seen through the eyes of the envious. - See how I glitter. - I'm gonna try lowering the ISO 'cause it's so (beep) bright in here now. Okay, well that's a much lower ISO. What if I get another light over here? That's what this channel's really about, One biological female's
quest to create a harmonious color story. In the years leading up to and
during the French revolution, Marie Antoinette was constantly defamed in these sleazy tabloids called Libelles. It's the same root as
the English word libel. The often pornographic
Libelles depicted the queen as a bisexual demon, who was constantly having drunken orgies and sexually manipulating
everyone around her. All of which is very interesting,
but none of which is true. The historian Robert Darnton called it an "avalanche of defamation"
that "has no parallel in the history of vilification." This woman took the
blame, the moral blame, for the structural failings
of a broken economic system. And by the time she was brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal in 1793, the actual person Marie Antoinette had long ago been overshadowed by the libelous caricature of her. Now there was maybe one good reason for executing the former queen, which is that the legitimacy
of your new republic is a little more secure when you don't have living
monarchs hanging around. Someone better tell the English. But the problem with that
reasoning is it has nothing to do with whether the
Queen "deserved" to die. And beheading a recently
widowed mother of two in front of a jeering crowd for political expediency
might weigh a little heavy on the conscience. So the Revolution had
to convince themselves that the former queen "deserved it," which was pretty easy
after decades of again, false and defamatory gossip. In her biography of Marie Antoinette, Antonia Fraser describes
how the prison guards separated Marie from
her eight-year-old son, who they plied with alcohol and groomed into accusing his own
mother of incestuous abuse. To justify killing Marie
Antoinette they had to destroy the idea of
this woman as a mother. So she was convicted of what may as well have been crimes against ethics in games journalism and
sent to the guillotine, where her last words were
sorry to the executioner for stepping on his foot. Uh, women stop apologizing challenge! This is what a girl
boss winning looks like. So, Marie Antoinette
literally did nothing wrong. Hey how are you. An innocent MILF was killed that day. And I, for one, won't stand for it. So look, we have a psychological
incentive to believe that people whom we envy
are immoral monsters. Because then we get to label our hatred and violence towards them "justice." Cruelty generally cannot
conceptualize itself as cruelty. And part of the reason for
that is calling cruelty what it is takes the fun out of it. It reminds me of the second
best day in the history of Twitter: October 1st, 2020,
the day that Trump got COVID. And I'm gonna be honest, I have never felt more
schadenfreude in my entire life. (cork popping) Well well well, if it isn't the leopards eating people's faces party having their faces eaten by leopards. (dramatic orchestral music) Let them eat cake. Like Dan Savage said, it felt
like Ronald Reagan got AIDS. The next day I tweeted:
"These last 24 hours have been the first time I've genuinely enjoyed Twitter in years. Because this website is
good for one thing only. Reveling in the cruelest
of human impulses." And someone responded to that saying - [Twitter User] Oh my God, could you even be a bigger killjoy? - But why was I being a killjoy? The tweet was about how
much I was enjoying it! Well, for most people, I guess not me, but for normal people, for other girls, cruelty is only pleasurable as long as they're able
to convince themselves it's something other than cruelty. "Justice served" So again "reason" "rationality" are often the attempt
to publicly communicate, to evangelize our private feelings. And morality, ethics, and
justice are often put forward as the respectable public
face of private envy, vindictiveness, and hatred. But is this a corruption of morality, or have we stumbled onto something darker. What if morality itself
is simply the expression of some kind of sadomasochistic urge? It's too early for this. It's literally seven
a.m. where I'm filming. I don't know how this
keeps happening to me. My head gets cut off one afternoon, puts me in a philosophical mood. Next morning, I've stayed up all night and I'm still talking
about the philosophes. (light orchestral music) Meow meow! Hello again kittens. Let's talk about justice uwu. I look like a Supreme Court Justice. Sonyaa Sotomeowyor. It would actually be fierce
if I wasn't, you know, if I wasn't being Nyatalie. Look, I've been seeing a lot
of comments about me lately along the lines of "Natalie used to do serious academic arguments. Now she only cares about makeup." (chuckling) All right you little shits. You want book-learnin'? I'm gonna learn you so hard, I'm gonna learn you so hard you're gonna have a goddamn
headache in the morning. Friedrich Nietzsche. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Do you mind if I call you Fred? Frederick was a German
philosopher who had a lot to say about envy and morality. But before we get into that, I want to say a little about his life, because it's just very funny. Nietzsche is famous for his
concept of the Ubermensch, but Frederick, sweet
beautiful little Frederick, he was not what most people
think of as an Ubermensch. Frederick was a chronically
ill, chronically in pain, nearly blind incel who probably
slept with a prostitute once and got syphilis and died. Life is funny. Sad, but funny. Ehhh. In the Introduction to
"Beyond Good and Evil", the editor says, "Though he prided himself
on being comfortable with women, he does not seem
to have been very successful in establishing emotionally
satisfying relationships with them, which is hardly surprising" Aaa! I love it when the introduction to a book is just a brutal roast of the author. Who wrote this? Rolf-Peter Horstmann. You're killing it Rolf. You're a savage. I adore. Frederick's books sold a
"dismal number of copies" in his lifetime. "What emerges is a picture of a totally isolated,
highly neurotic man who had to try hard to avoid thinking of himself as a complete failure." Aw. He we also doing huge
doses of opium, relatable, and writing himself
prescriptions for sleeping pills and signing them "Dr. Nietzsche" Dr. Nietzsche! Pretty sure I got an Xanax prescription from that guy once. Behind a Dairy Queen. Nietzsche was also a failed
musician and was in love with the composer Richard Wagner's wife. Ohhh. The virgin Nietzsche
contra the Chad Wagner. You beta cuck. Why did I do that? Can we all agree that cat-girl Nietzsche is by far the most cursed
thing I've ever done? I just wanna mom this guy, honestly. I don't even care that he's a misogynist, his misogyny is simply
too sad to be offended by. You know I think it's
interesting that a person this pathetic can also
be a genius whose name will never die. He's someone who had a lot
of reason to be envious and self-pitying, but his philosophy couldn't be more against that. And, as a person of
pathetic experience myself, that is unironically
kind of inspiring to me. So let's go in. In his book "On the
Genealogy of Morality", Frederick wants to explain
the origin of the concepts of good and evil. "Under what conditions did man invent the value judgments good and evil? And what value do they themselves have? Have they up to now obstructed or promoted human flourishing?" Hang on, my food's here. That's right, you're
getting a mukbang, sweetie. Did you think I was gonna
sit at this giant table and not be eating something? This video's been going
on more than an hour, so I assume you guys are drunk by now and we're just kind of
hanging out at this point. You guys can't even see. Well, here, I've got a bunch of sushi and it's my mission to eat all of this while summarizing the entire life and work of Friedrich Nietzsche. Trisha Paytas, Nikocado, consider this a challenge. So, Friedrich argues
that "good" and "bad", not yet good and evil, that's different we'll get to that, but good and bad were originally the self-affirming values of people with power. So to be good meant to
be powerful, strong, beautiful, healthy, and to
be bad meant to be weak, sick, common, ugly. I wanna eat one like a cat. And Frederick supports this
speculation with etymology. So in a lot of languages the
word that means morally good or spiritually noble,
originally meant noble in the sense of aristocratic,
the propertied class. Like in Buddhism the arya
satyani, that's Sanskrit for Noble Truths. Arya means noble, and arya is used to
mean spiritually noble, but earlier it meant the
aristocracy, the rich, and originally it was just
the name that a culture in Northern India gave
themselves, the Aryans. I'm really working not to
get soy sauce on this lace. This was later misunderstood by Europeans who wrongly thought
that "Aryan" was a race. Oops. Goddammit. Goddammit, kids. Can we not? Frederick traces the origin
of the German word "gut" or English "good" to
the name of the Goths, no not those Goths,
the Scandinavian people who invaded Europe. Frederick calls them, "the
blond beasts of prey." I like to stalk my prey in
the small hours of the night, nyaa. The German word "schlecht"
which means bad is related to "schlicht" which means "plain, simple," originally "common, low"
not aristocratic, not noble. So "good" and "bad" were
originally the values of warrior aristocrats who were like Homeric heroes
celebrating themselves. And Frederick calls their
value system master morality: this glorification of combat,
feasting, athleticism, sexual conquest, beauty: these
things were called "good." And their opposites:
weakness, impotence, ugliness, were called bad. The ancient nobles worshiped noble gods who acted like them and
shared their values. I mean if I created a personal goddess, I think you all know what
animal that would be. Me and the ancient
Egyptians, on the same page. So for example Roman
warriors could worship Mars, the god of war. And it was like they were
worshiping themselves. They were dumb jocks
worshiping dumb jock gods. Well good for them. But what about the people
who got shoved into lockers? Well, Friedrich's example, and this is gonna create
some misunderstandings later, but his example is the Jews,
who were colonized by the Romans in Judea. And it's certainly not that
the Jews didn't try to revolt, oh they did. Multiple times. But for several centuries the
Romans were just too powerful, no one could stop them. So the question is what
happens psychologically to people who are oppressed
and who lack the power to overthrow the oppressor? Well in that case frustrated
vindictiveness builds over time to become this deep bitterness that Nietzsche gives the
French name, Ressentiment. Resentment in English. Oui. Eh... eh... Oui. Absolutement. Naturellement. I don't speak French. I just enjoy making vaguely french noises. Ment, bas, quatre, eh, eh oui. I don't like the English but
I like the French even less. Because they're always dressed so well, and they speak a sexier language than me. Stop it! This is your final
warning comprendez-vous? Good wine though. I'll give them that. So there's German word,
Neid, which mean means envy. So why is Frederick using this
French term, ressentiment? What's going on Frederick? Why are you speaking French? Are you nervous? Are you trying to impress me? Nietzsche must have said ressentiment because he thought it was
something different than envy. I think the difference is resentment, and I'm just gonna use the English word so I don't sound like an asshole, resentment is born not just of wanting what someone has, but of a permanent frustration
of the desire for revenge. It's born of weakness,
inability to get revenge. Now revenge itself implies weakness, at least a temporary weakness. We say "Revenge is best
served cold", but actually, revenge is only served cold. If it's served hot, if someone slaps you and you slap them back immediately, that's retaliation, not revenge. - You brought this on yourself. - Revenge is only a possibility when you can't retaliate immediately, so you become vindictive, you
start plotting and scheming. But if you're too weak, too
impotent to have any hope of revenge then you become resentful. So Nietzsche's argument is that a person who's too weak to get material revenge can instead get psychological revenge by creating a new morality. In Frederick's words, "The
beginning of the slaves' revolt in morality occurs
when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values". This is a little high concept
for a mukbang, isn't it? What are you doing, Frederick? So while master morality
says that "good" is power, riches, health, strength; and "bad" is the opposite-slave morality, the morality of resentment
says, "blessed are the poor, the meek, the sick, the powerless." This is the "good" of slave morality, and its opposite is not the
"bad" but a new concept, the "evil." And what is evil? Well, everything that master
morality says is good. Power. Wealth. Conquest. Sexual satisfaction. (light playful music) He's talking about Christianity here, he's not talking about Judaism. But Frederick thinks of Christianity as the spiritual revenge of
the Jews against the Romans, an inversion of the Empire's values. But, he thinks that slave morality is fundamentally dishonest. It's like the fox and the grapes. "Not-being-able-to-take-revenge is called not-wanting-to-take-revenge, it might even be forgiveness". Slave morality says that
weakness is righteous. Submission to people you
hate is called "obedience," having to wait is called "patience." Inability to satisfy sexual
desire is called "chastity", "purity" and so on. And while master morality
is born of saying yes to yourself, as a powerful.
noble beast of prey; slave morality is born
of saying no the master and everything he has that you can't. I like to have my belly rubbed. Scratch my back above my tail, please. I'm gonna put the rest of the fish away because it's getting warm and I'm full. This has not been a successful mukbang. It turns out that it's
actually very difficult to do a mukbang while talking. I should've thought this
through a little harder. So slave morality is born
of a repressed desire for revenge, but that desire for revenge never completely disappears. It's there for example
in the Christian idea of the last judgment. (Wilhelm scream) No need to take revenge
against wicked, my sheep. God will do that for us. And in the meantime, being
weak is good actually. I find this book thrilling to read, honestly, and I am not
easily thrilled, especially not by philosophers. I think this book in
particular gets me because especially if you were raised Christian, this is so the opposite of
everything we were ever taught to believe that it
almost feels like, dirty. Like should I be reading this? Is this allowed? 'Cause even if you're
not religious, most of us still agree with a lot
of Christian morality. Like yeah Jesus was a good guy,
blessed are the meek, sure. But then Frederick comes along
and he's like, mmm morality is just a cope for
frustrated vindictiveness. And you're like, I need to lie down, where's my smelling salts? (dramatic orchestral music) (glass clattering)
(objects clattering) (Natalie laughing) But wait, there's more! This gets even darker. Nietzsche thinks that over
the last two millennia of European history, slave
morality has triumphed. St. Paul made Christianity marketable. The Emperor Constantine converted, and by the Middle Ages even kings and aristocrats were kneeling down not to powerful warrior gods
made in their own image, but to a god that was weak, suffering, victimized, oppressed. Eeeeh. So by the 19th century slave morality had become the only morality. And it's not just Christians
either, the secular version of these values became
socialism, anarchism. About freethinkers and atheists,
Nietzsche has this to say. "We loathe Church, not its
poison, apart from the Church, we too love the poison." Okay the poison, what is "the poison"? Well Frederick thinks
resentment poisons the mind and turns humans against
our own natural instincts. Not just against aggression,
but against sexuality, against ambition, against
power, against life itself. And there's two possible outcomes of this. One is that resentment
becomes a political movement, "the conspiracy of those who suffer," the tyranny of the herd, the
revolution that eats itself. "'Only we are good and
just' is what they say, as though health, success, strength, pride and the feeling of power were in themselves depravities
for which penance, bitter penance will one day be exacted. Among them we find plenty
of vengeance-seekers disguised as judges, with
the word justice continually in their mouth like poisonous spittle." So you get the mentality of a hyper-moralistic resentment mob, which I'm sure we'll all familiar with. The other outcome is that
this moralism turns inward, and attacks the individual conscience, producing asceticism, self-denial, guilt. Because slave morality condemns
not just the external beasts of prey who are oppressing
us, but also the beast of prey within, our animal instincts, what Christianity calls "sin." So Frederick thinks modern
humans have become sick: we hate ourselves, we hate our own nature, we hate life itself. I mean, is he wrong? You see a girlboss winning, I only see the will to power. Frederick thinks of modern
men as once-proud wildcats who've become domesticated house pets at the cost of everything
great in the human spirit. That's very valid Frederick. That's super hecking valid. Look I've been pretty positive
about Nietzsche so far, but I do have a couple
critiques I want to say. One is that Friedrich's
associating slave morality with the Jews is very irresponsible. Even though he didn't
intend to be anti-Semitic and even though he was
outspoken against anti-Semitism in his own time, when you keep referring
to the Christian values that you're critiquing as "Jewish hatred" and "Jewish revenge," some
people might get the wrong idea. And some people did, Frederick. Like your dumbass sister
Elizabeth Nietzsche, who became a literal alternative-ethno-identitarian-goddamn
it Liz. Kind of goth goals though? Yes that kind of goth,
you're right this time. My other critique is that it doesn't seem to have occurred to Frederick
that genuinely caring about other people is an option. Like not because you're repressing
your true selfish nature, but just because caring about other people is part of your nature. And isn't it? Isn't caring about other
people also in our nature? I do think that most
of what Nietzsche says about resentment accurately
describes a very real thing. But it's not the only thing. There is genuine care
and love in this world, I've been told, I've heard rumors. And I'm even gonna go so far
as to say #NotAllChristians. Christ I'm defending the Christians, what has this channel come to. There are Christians, maybe
not most, but still some, for whom love and forgiveness
are genuine experiences, and not just some kind
of twisted, impotent, passive-aggressive vengeance. Where I agree with
Nietzsche, and with Freud, is I do think a lot of
the emotional foundation of "justice" and "morality"
is retribution, envy, or some combination the two. But maybe it doesn't have to be that way. There's a famous Martin Luther King quote responding to Nietzsche: - [MLK] What is needed is a realization that
power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best, power
at its best is love implementing the demands
of justice, and justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love." - So Reverend King concedes to Nietzsche that to simply call power
evil is a sickness-"anemic." But there still needs to
be some kind of emotional or spiritual force that keeps humanity from tearing itself apart. And maybe something
like this Christian idea of love for humanity is the missing piece. Because without something like
that, I just see retribution and envy snowballing into
human self-destruction. And I hate that for us. It's not very sliving of us. Do you guys know about sliving? Do you even subscribe to Paris
Hilton's YouTube channel? She doesn't have as many
subscribers as I do, but, you know, I try to support smaller creators. - Sliving is basically slaying
and living our best life into one word. It's the new "That's hot." (sighing) - Maybe I'll do a video about love, when I'm in a better mood. So for now, well, let's put it this way: God is dead and we have killed him, nyaa. Sliving! (light playful music) (singing in German) okay, I'm moisturized, I'm primed. I've proven my academic credentials, now it's time to do my makeup. That's right, children, I'm
going full Bailey Sarian. I'm going full suspish. So, I guess I should say something about the political
implications of all this, since I guess this
channel is about politics? Sometimes I have to read
my own Wikipedia article to remember what I'm doing with my life. So this morality of
resentment, of impotence and permanently frustrated revenge, judges that power is evil. I don't use foundation,
I just use concealer. I know that's like not how
you're supposed to do makeup, but I don't need to be
good at makeup, okay, I have a million subscribers on YouTube. I don't need to be good. There was a New York Times article about young women's attitudes
toward political ambition, and one of the women who
was interviewed said, "As a white woman, I know
I have unearned privilege, so am I the best person
to be in leadership?" Yes. Yes you are. Because we need leaders like you who are capable of questioning the legitimacy of their own authority. Otherwise we're gonna be stuck with another blond beast of prey. Of course it's good to be
aware of your privilege, especially as a leader. But, let's not be so self-effacing that we efface ourselves
off the face of the earth. This is the self-sabotage
of resentment values. If you think that power is
evil, then you've given up on the ambition to acquire any power. Which virtually guarantees
your political irrelevance, since, like MLK said, you have to at least have some power to implement
the demands of justice. Remember what incels call
"taking the black pill", this conviction that the reason you don't have a girlfriend is just that you're genetically undesirable. There's nothing you can do to change it, and I guess women are just too shallow to be attracted to all the amazing hatred and spite that festers in your heart. For a lot of blackpilled incels it seems like there is only one thing
left in life that they enjoy, which is simply the
pleasure of complaining, of moaning in pain. It reminds me of a
comment from Dostoevsky's second-most horrible protagonist. - [Fyodor] Even in toothache there is enjoyment, in that case, of course, people are not
spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans,
they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point." - The moan is a protest
against the meaninglessness of pain. And part of the satisfaction of moaning is inflicting your pain on other people. This malignant moaning, it's
kind of the opposite of music. Because a lot of music, like
blues, is benevolent moaning that transforms pain into pleasure. That's what blues is all about. My woman don't love me no more,
but I know her sister will. You know, optimism. I think a lot of incel discourse is really just Dostoevskyan moaning. It's not an attempt to
diagnose or solve any problem, it's just a contagious
expression of misery. A moan of pain that masquerades
as a political agenda. "Sexual Marxism" they call it. The redistribution of sex. State-mandated GFs. That's very valid. Of course they don't actually
expect any of this to happen. That's not the point. So, incels are kind of a
universal punching bag online, it's very easy to point and laugh at them. But what's harder is to look in the mirror and notice how these exact
same tendencies are rampant in our own communities. So the incel Blackpill
is just one instance of what I call an "ideology
of resentment", a discourse that outwardly appears like
moral or political critique, but which on examination is
mainly just a resentful moan. The goal of resentment politics is not to improve conditions. In fact, the resentful
ideologue is full of contempt for any "morally compromised sellouts" who are trying to enact plausible reforms. They don't want victory,
they don't want power, they want to endlessly "critique" power. Because for them "critique" is a psychological defense
against feeling impotent. Scheler described it this way. - [Max] It is peculiar to
"ressentiment criticism" that it does not seriously desire that its demands be fulfilled. It does not want to cure the evil: the evil is merely a
pretext for the criticism. - What am I gonna do with my eyes? I think a pink kind of look. We've been doing a lot of pink looks? I just love that hay fever look. As a general rule, the more radical a political
community claims to be, the more likely it is to be
a community of resentment. Self-styled radicals will tell you, "Superficial surface
reforms do not interest us. The problem must be
critiqued at its root." And the root turns out
to be this universal, all-encompassing evil, right? Society itself, the system, the machine. A resentment ideologue always
imagines himself engaged in a kind of Satanic revolt
against an omnipotent, omnipresent enemy. Okay, I just need to
do makeup for a second. It's harder than it looks
to be a makeup vlogger. It's hard to talk while doing this. And nothing short of total
revolution counts as any sort of victory whatsoever. "We have to dismantle the entire system! Burn it all down!" I guess it's pedestrian to point out that this is the revolutionary
utopian equivalent of Christians awaiting the last judgment. Our Kingdom is coming comrades! Often the appeal of utopian
ideology is similar to religion. It's not about healthcare, higher wages, relief from police violence:
those are actual goals that could be demanded,
worked for, and achieved. Utopian ideology instead promises relief from some general malaise, "alienation." And so ironically it can
have the same opiate effect that Marx ascribed to religion. But release from the general
anguish of human existence is not a political goal. There's been many revolutions
in last few centuries and so far zero utopias. Resentment, envy, and
hunger for that matter are not satiated by the
downfall of the old regime. When the people have no
bread they eat the rich. And when the rich are
gone they eat each other. And because of the proximity effect, envy may actually increase
after the revolution. You may be more envious
of a favored comrade, a successful citoyent, oui,
a kulak, than you ever were of the aristocrats. So envy gets paranoid and imaginative in revolutionary moments,
it's sublimated into morality and the accusations start flying. That citizen is conspiring
against the revolution! That peasant is hoarding grain! So the guillotine starts
slicing thousands of heads off, the gulags fill up. Or an authoritarian strongman takes over only to announce another
revolution two decades later. The things people will
do to stay relevant, honestly. And for what? What long-term egalitarian utopia results? Socialism with Chinese characteristics? (singing in Chinese) So look, I do understand that sometimes you just have to do a revolution. And if I'd been there in 1789 I'm sure I'd be storming
the Bastille myself. But I just wish we could stop
being so doe-eyed about it. Revolution is a bloody
nightmare that happens because society is collapsing
and people are desperate. At worst, revolution is nothing more than a "day of retribution" and at best it lays the groundwork for future incremental progress. But it will never usher in utopia, nor is it the antidote to
a vague sense of unease, which, I'm sorry to report,
is simply the resting state of an unsedated human mind. Now I'm not saying, like
some conservatives do, that all leftist or all
egalitarian politics is born of envy. No, this is a specific subtype. There are plenty of reasons
other than envy or fear of envy, to oppose an economic distribution where some people have billions of dollars while others are dying because
they can't afford insulin. Objectively that is not an
efficient use of resources to promote human wellbeing. And personally, I just don't
want to live in a country where people are dying because
they can't afford medicine, and I'm willing to pay
however many taxes it takes for that not to happen. So, while I'm putting
down straw-man versions of my argument I'm also not saying "oh let's all just stop being envious," no, that's impossible. I think envy is like
libido, it's a basic force of human nature that's
more or less unstoppable. But with the right leadership I think envy can
potentially be sublimated, or redirected into
something more constructive. Because raw envy is a very bad basis for egalitarian politics. It often targets the wrong people, like millionaires instead of billionaires, and eventually it turns the
revolution against itself and you get the circular firing
squad, the self-cannibalism. The problem I see on
the left today is that without any genuine political outlet, resentment mostly manifests as morality, morality itself being a way
to vent envious aggression and vindictiveness. On the left we claim to
be so impersonal, right, we're all about structural analysis, the material conditions, systems of power, intersectional identity hierarchies. But if you look at what people actually spend their time doing here, it's all this obsessive moral policing. I wonder if because leftists can't seem to win on any major political stage, we feel disempowered, and
so this moral fanaticism is a psychological substitute. Like with Marie Antoinette, it's easier to blame people than systems. Also, structural analysis is very boring, and destroying people with
gossip is extremely entertaining. This obsessive moral policing
also gets turned inward, and becomes leftist guilt. This useless, internalized scolding. I think I'm done with the makeup. What do we think? Leave a comment. I'm always hesitant to do
anything about skin care, since last time I did
skin care, I was critiqued by Hyram. So I am gonna spray my face a couple times with this Tatcha Skin Mist,
if that's okay with Hyram. It feels good to finally address
this feud, clear the air. (laughing) I look a lot better with makeup. I don't wanna say that I
don't have natural beauty. It's just that it's very
much enhanced by painting like a different face on top of my face. (laughing) But hey, at least this way, I've kind of earned it, you know? Because it's my skill. There's a podcast called "Guilty Feminist" that's been running for years. I haven't listened in a while but in the early episodes they'd bring on these women who'd
confess their feminist sins. You know, "Hi my name
is Amber, I'm a feminist but I enjoy being choked in bed." It's hard being a woman. Not only are you being choked, you also feel guilty about it. The same moral hand-wringing
happens with body positivity. When you make loving your
body into a moral imperative, not only are you still
gonna hate your body, but now you're also going to feel guilty about hating your body, because it means you're a bad feminist. So there was one problem,
and now there's two problems. Thanks morality, that's very helpful. Now I want to take a moment to acknowledge that a lot of conservatives
have made some version of the argument that
I'm making in this video For example Jordan Peterson
and Camille Paglia have argued that academic postmodernists
are motivated by resentment. The argument is that
deconstructionist literary theory is a kind of envious
vengeance against the beauty and virtuosity of canonical Great Art. And yeah there's probably
some truth to that, a lot of academics are failed artists- but I was even more manque than that. I've noticed that working-class
socialists do tend to be more productive
and more self-advancing, involving unionizing and organizing. Whereas, it's usually
people who went to college- - I went to college! (screaming) - Presumably because they
had middle-class ambitions at some point, but whose middle
class ambitions have failed, who become the great
"critiquers" of capital. I can tell you from experience that when I was eating Chef Boyardee over my master's degree
that's when I was most likely to say things like, "According to Antonio
Gramsci, in the logic of late-stage capitalism the culturally hegemonic neoliberal ideology manufactures the
consent of the subaltern." So point taken. But some conservatives take
this argument way too far and try to argue that the entire left is nothing but a coalition of resentment. Like there's a video on YouTube
of the philosophy professor Stephen Hicks doing a
version of the postmodernism is resentment argument, and in the comments
section there's a bunch of people saying, "This
describes Black Lives Matter, Antifa, and the democrats." Does it though? I mean any political
movement is gonna have people in it who have resentment poisoning, but Black Lives Matter at
its core is about the right not to be murdered by police. The slogan "Black Lives
Matter" is an affirmation of the value of Black life. So that seems like something even Nietzsche would approve of. Huey Newton, the co-founder
of the Black Panther Party was inspired by Nietzsche
to create the slogan "All Power to the People." - [Huey] When we coined the expression "All power to the people", we had in mind emphasizing
the word "power" for we recognize that the will to power is the basic drive of man. But it is incorrect to
seek power over people. We have been subjected
to the dehumanizing power of exploitation and racism
for hundreds of years; and the Black community
has its will to power also. What we seek, however,
is not power over people, but the power of control
of our own destiny. - That to me is a role model for how to do "identity politics"
without centering resentment. It's instead an affirmation
of self-determination and self-respect. Like Nietzsche would say,
it's saying yes to yourself. Whereas if your whole
political project is defined in the negative, then you allow yourself to be defined by your enemy. I find feminism is prone
to this, where even and in fact especially
the most radical feminists cannot seem to shake this
resentful consciousness of being the second sex, and defining themselves against men. Earlier I mentioned Andrea
Dworkin a positive way. She's the most radical
of radical feminists and my first impulse is
actually to defend her because she's very widely hated, and most of the people who
hate her hate a caricature. Like in that Stephen Hicks video, Hicks summarizes Dworkin as- - [Stephen] Calling all
heterosexual males r*pists. - Literally in the preface
to her most famous book, Dworkin says- - [Andrea] If one's sexual
experience has always and without exception
been based on dominance, how could one understand that this book does not say that all men are r*pists or that all intercourse is r*pe? - Listen Hicks, I get
you're a full professor and I'm just a makeup
vlogger, but my gut feeling on this one is before criticizing a book, maybe read the book. Just a thought. Get it together prof. You're being owned online
by a makeup vlogger. I mean, there's no shame in that. It happens to me all the time. That being said, I do think that Hicks is coincidentally "correct" that Dworkin is a theorist of resentment. What Dworkin does say in this book is arguably even more bleak than what is falsely attributed to her. The book is called "Intercourse." She wrote a book called "Intercourse." Imagine writing a book
called "Intercourse." I can actually easily imagine that. Nevermind. So this is an argument
about the meaning of sex; Penetration to be specific. Dworkin argues that penetration
expresses domination, invasion, occupation, possession,
contempt, degradation. So it's against the Freudian
male castration anxiety interpretation, where it's
a fear of being devoured by the woman. Imagine being afraid of that. Imagine being afraid of that. I'm gonna get a facelift some day and I'm gonna look like this. (grand orchestral music) I'm perfect. I certainly don't agree
with everything she says but isn't Dworkin closer
to the truth here? Closer than Freud anyway. Think about what men typically
say to women during the act. Do they say, "Help, I'm being devoured!" Never heard that one. Have you? No, usually it's more along the lines of "You like that don't you
you little..." et cetera. And of course you can
eroticize being subjugated and degraded, and you can enjoy it. And I think Dworkin would
argue that most woman do eroticize subjugation
because they're taught to. But enjoying it, she'd have to say, doesn't change the meaning
of what's happening. So I think Dworkin says some
things that are very true and some things that are
off the fucking rails. Where she loses me is where
she starts getting blackpilled. And this book, this is
the feminist blackpill. It's 250 pages of
hopeless misery and rage. She says- - [Andrea] Male-dominant
gender hierarchy, seems immune to reform. This may be because intercourse itself is immune to reform. - Okay, so women will never
be free until men stop putting the P in the V. We can dream Andrea, we can dream. Like most ideology of resentment, this book is totally dismissive of any plausible reforms that might actually improve the situation of women. Instead preferring to wallow
in the endless violence, filth, and abjection of it all. I also think it's also symptomatic
that Dworkin identifies as a lesbian, but in that
second-wave "political" way. Quoting from the foreward,
"To Dworkin it was a badge of rebellion against the patriarchy. In 30-plus years of knowing
her, I've never heard of a single romance
with a woman, not one." This is not surprising
to me, from the author of 250 page book about sex that not once pauses to even imagine the possibility of intimacy between women. Because it's not a lesbianism
about saying yes to women, it's lesbianism about saying no to men. You know people think that lesbians are the biggest man-haters. But I don't think that's true. I think lesbians just don't
think about men that much. The only men I think
about are Fred Nietzsche and uh... Oedipus the King. It's straight women who are
usually the real man-haters. Cause they're stuck with this. And love is closer to
hatred than neutrality. So what does Andrea Dworkin actually want? What would she say yes to,
if she said yes to anything? Sometimes women have trouble
saying what they want, because no one ever told them they could. Romance. That's what Joan Didion
said was the real desire of the women's movement. Joan Didion of course
being not like other girls. Dworkin offers occasional
glimpses of a positive desire. - [Andrea] Despite all efforts to socialize women to want intercourse, women still want a more
diffuse and tender sensuality that involves the whole body
and a polymorphous tenderness. - That does sound nice. I'm so lonely. I think it's kind of bold to
speak for all women though. Like, there are absolutely women who, uh, they don't make love, Anastasia. They (beep). Hard. I'm really sleepy, and
this bed right behind me just looks so nice. Get in here right now. What if I just go to sleep and then wake up and then just
record the rest of the video after I wake up? I don't wanna do it now. I'll get Pikachu. That'll make this easier. Isn't it better for me to have a friend? Pikachu is the most adorable Pokemon. Why? Because he's the yellowest. Name one thing more yellow than Pikachu. You can't name any. You can't name anything. So if diffuse and tender sensuality is what you want then just say that. Is that what you want, Pikachu? I bet it is. And Dworkin did get married, to a gay man. So I guess she found what she wanted. Lucky. Envying Andrea Dworkin. Is that really what we've
sunk to around here? You know, I've been
noticing the poison creeping into my own brain lately. I know this isn't very
original but I had a bad year. You know I fell in love with
my best friend like a gay idiot , got my heart comprehensively broken, and then COVID hit and
gave me a year of solitude to spiral deeper into a
hell of my own making. I stopped saying yes to
life, and started saying yes to chasing the dragon, by which I mean playing
"Spyro the Dragon", one of the greatest appropriate for all ages video games of all time. Look at him goooooo. I'm taking my hair clips out. I catch myself having
bitter spinster thoughts. It's because I'm trans. It's because I'm gay. That's why I'll die alone. Yeah that's the reason I'm alone. Definitely not because
I don't leave the house. See, I am not immune to
incel-tier brain poisoning. And you really can use political
theorizing as an excuse not to fix your own life. Society did this to me. A transphobic society made me hate myself. Well, yeah, that's true. But, at a certain point, you
have to take responsibility for your own mind, and decide
to stop being an accomplice in your own annihilation. Since we keep referencing "Paradise Lost", "The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of
hell, a hell of heaven." Yes gawd. So, I ask myself, what kind
of mind do I want to be? Do I want to obsess over what I lack, concede society's judgment
of my inferiority, become a self-pitying,
self-hating, envious, resentful little nothing? Or do I want to get off the goddamn floor, stop chasing the dragon,
and say yes to life? The answer of course,
is that I long to return to the sweet womb of my dark mother. But we're not gonna do
that, because there's plenty of time to numb the pain after you die. The sweet embrace of death
is the darkest mother of all. Also nothing is less
attractive than an envious, resentful, self-pitying person. It's beyond a personality flaw, it's a personality deformity that can ruin whatever chance at happiness you have. So in the short time you're
alive, you have to discover that which is noble in
yourself, and say yes to it. Don't say no to getting older. Say yes to being a MILF. Yes, yes! What I'm really trying to say here is, Spongebob Squarepants is the Ubermench. Spongebob says yes to
life and so should we. Yes to ourselves, yes to
art, yes to sensuality, yes to the world. Yes, yes, eh, oui! Is this really how we're ending the video? I guess. Okay bye! (Hawaiian music) So what if my fantasies make no sense. You wanna talk about things
that don't make sense? Heterosexuality. Let's put that under the microscope, hmmm? You want me to believe
that a straight woman who knows the difference
between magenta and mauve is gonna date a straight man who thinks it's gay to wash his underwear and that's just gonna work out fine. You think it's safe to raise a child in that environment? I don't think so. Not on my watch. See, I think straight men
should date each other. They can sit on the couch all day playing Xbox and then (beep) each other. And then straight women can pair off, decoupage some shit
and eat each other out. Isn't that better? Isn't that more rational? I wish I could wiggle these cat ears. Like I wish I had
anatomical control of them. Hello? Yes, Dr. Spiegel? Yes, it's me again. I have a suggestion. What do we even have here? We've got tuna, salmon, some squid, mackerel, shrimp, I think it's yellowtail, clam, some rolls. I've never been much into rolls. I'm a cat, you know, I like fish. You start adding too much
avocado and rice into things, it's an affront to my feline nature. (dramatic electronic music) (dramatic electronic music) Doctor, I think if a breeze
comes into the window, I could die.
You can all discuss the video here https://discord.gg/contrapoints
Only Natalie would use Black Swan, Amadeus, and Spongebob Squarepants (in the same breath) to drive her point home. Love ittt
I heard Peppermint! The video can now officially be decreed as burp FASHION.
Will there ever be a more cursed "Nyatalie" moment than her eating out of the cat bowl?
I love how anti-blackpill this video is. content like this is so helpful to someone like me who was environmentally blackpilled in college. and by that i mean: mother nature is reclaiming the earth and there's nothing to be done about it b/c companies own politicians who won't pass laws to slow climate change. like, even if wallowing in self-pity is a natural response to facing an issue so much larger then yourself.... it isn't a helpful or productive defense and can become dangerous if left unexamined. it's healthy to understand your enemy, but not to the point that it depresses you into inaction.
haven't watched it yet but i've already decided this is the best thing i've ever seen
honestly never imagined that she'd reference spongebob squarepants in a video
Of course it drops the one moment I can't watch it! Very excited, though.
Insightful? Check.
Cinematic? Check.
Hilarious? Check.