HBO's Chernobyl & Personal Responsibility | Philosophy Tube

in 1987 Margaret Thatcher said there is no such thing as society there are individual men and women and there are families this short phrase proved to be one of the most infamous quotes of her career - Thatcher's critics it was an expression of a callousness and cold-heartedness typify dat time as Prime Minister and this view became so closely entwined with her image and the image of the Conservative Party generally that when David Cameron became party leader almost 20 years later he felt compelled to revise it saying there is such a thing as society it's just not the same thing as the state the quote itself however is often taken out of context it was actually an off-the-cuff remark the Thatcher gave during an interview - woman's own magazine the full extract reads I think we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand I have a problem it is the government's job to cope with it or I have a problem I will go and get a grant to cope with it I am homeless the government must house me and so they are casting their problems on society and who is Society there is no such thing there are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first it is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbor and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations because there is no such thing as an entitlement unless someone has first met an obligation there is no such thing as society there is a living tapestry of men and women and people and the beauty of that tapestry and the quality of our lives will depend on how much each of us is prepared to take responsibility for ourselves and each of us is prepared to turn round and help by our own efforts those who are unfortunate [Music] [Music] Chernobyl was a TV miniseries produced by HBO and sky and created by Craig Mazin it added the first half of 2019 and was really good it starred Jared Harris Emily Watson and stellan skarsgård and was nominated for several Emmys which i think is some kind of award for old media the show dramatizes a set of real-life events from 1986 which happened in Germany I think it was Germany it wasn't really paying attention and it's some kind of accident at a factory I don't really remember but based on the way they were dressed I I think they were all supposed to be bakers yeah yeah bakers and that you have to bake some very important cookies or something so the oven where these German bakers are baking the cookies explodes and that's very bad because the cookie dough goes everywhere and eating raw cookie dough can make you sick so if it spreads across Europe everybody could get food poisoning and all the German scientists and bakers have to figure out what they're gonna do about it and a lot of the people who are in a position to do something deny the problem you'd think that a nuclear reactor exploding would be pretty hard to miss but they say no it was just a hydrogen tank going pop the radiation levels are safe it's nothing to worry about they don't want to face the facts because that might mean that they are responsible the Soviets kind of had their own version of fake news they called it alarmism and a lot of the people who say no look the reactor has clearly exploded there's radiation spewing out if we don't do something about it all of Europe is gonna end up only inhabitable they get dismissed as alarmist look that's graphite on the roof the whole buildings being blown open the cause exposed I can't see how you can tell that from here look at that glow that's radiation ionizing the like we can't see we're not dog nor mother it's just the Northern Lights the protagonist of the series professor Valeri leg Asaf is portrayed as being the one sane man trying to contain the disaster before it's too late as the old saying goes in the land of the blind the one-eyed man is called the virtue signaler and a sight cook in terms of who gets the most bad guy coded screen time the show seems to be leading us towards suspecting this dude Anatoly Dyatlov as being the main culprit he was in charge on the night and he made a bunch of very dangerous decisions which created the conditions for the accident and according to both the show and several distinguished historians he was also a massive [ __ ] [ __ ] shut the [ __ ] up and do your job what did you do did you get this job she comes up to me and she's all like hey I did that dude I'm like in water although the show also demonstrates that it's not entirely the outlives fault in real life they were running a safety test when Chernobyl exploded so a lot of the usual fail-safes have been turned off as part of it and Dyatlov was under pressure from his bosses to just get it done so they could all get promoted but it had to be delayed and then there was a shift change so the new guys coming in didn't really know what they were doing there was also a crucial design flaw with the reactor that caused it to explode when they pushed the emergency shutdown button and even though a lot of scientists actually knew about that design floor four years beforehand it had been covered up by the government depending on how you read it you could also say that the show blames socialism a little bit creator Craig Mazin has said that he wanted to tell a story about lies which he says is relevant to contemporary America as much as it is a Soviet Russia but some commentators have jumped at the chance to read a more partisan message into it especially since usually about once per episode some character all but turns the camera and goes did you know the Soviet Union was bad I'm a nuclear physicist before you a deputy secretary you worked in a shoe factory yes I worked in a shoe factory and now I'm in charge to the workers of the world and that is the outlook expires when Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn poses some interesting philosophical questions about responsibility and people's relationships to the societies they live in and in case you think this is just like a one-time event that can teach as much now there are a lot of parallels between the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and say the American aids crisis of the 1980s it's another scenario where scientists were fighting against an invisible enemy and the government didn't want to listen so people died or cut up an obvious parallel I guess climate change something a little closer to home for me though the grenfell fire in 2017 at our Block in Kensington caught fire and 72 people died Kensington's a pretty posh bit of London but the tower was mainly social housing so there's a lot of people from low-income families on a lot of people of color it was later discovered that the outside of the tower was covered in flammable cladding that allowed the flames to spread way beyond what the interior was designed to cope with that cladding had been installed the year before and the reason they went with a flammable one is the local council had out sourced management of its social housing to another body who decided that the flammable stuff was cheaper despite being warned that it was dangerous and despite the residents of the tower saying for years that the fire safety measures were inadequate all of that occurred against the background of conservative and Liberal Democrat governments cutting public spending in response to the 2008 financial crash a group of policies known as austerity some of the survivors were reluctant to speak up for fear of being deported which exists against the background of my country haven't gotten very hostile to migrants in the last few years and as of April this year some survivors still hadn't been rehoused and some towers still have that flammable cladding on just like the Chernobyl disaster was in the mind of some people a symbol of the late Soviet Union the Grenfell fire became a kind of symbol of contemporary Britain's really the way it all works an uninformed arbitrary decision that will cost who knows how many lies made by some apparatchik some career party man also just as a side note this doesn't really have anything to do with the philosophy but the acting in this show is really good especially the physical acting a lot of people think acting for camera just happens in shots like this from the shoulders up or sometimes close up and extreme closeup because that shows you what we in the acting industry called the face technical term but really acting takes your whole body look at this scene here even with the audio removed you can tell so much about the characters just from their body language and this great cute little moment where professor lagarza doesn't know where to stand the actress had a dedicated movement coach Imogen Knight and she did so Bing good oh you know what else is excellent the casting look at this quick scene while the gossip is buying cigarettes and he meets a character who we've never seen before and who we never see again this guy this guy right here he's only in this series for like four seconds he has no lines just this one shot but you only have to look at him and you know he's a KGB agent he has the most KGB ass face of any [ __ ] I've ever seen I looked him up his name a similar story discuss seminars mate you think nay of it or some one last thing I promised the direction there are a lot of shots in this way it looks like they didn't use a tripod like I think these shots are handheld you can see how the frame moves around in this scene Emily Watson's character Alanna communic is trying to convince professor lagarza ah've to do something dangerous where they don't know what the outcome will be the characters are emotionally unsteady and visually unsteady within the frame whereas here at the end when the Gaza man shebeen are more secure in their friendship and at peace with what's gonna happen to them the shots are locked off it's the little details like this that really make the show worth watching does it make sense to say that the Chernobyl disaster was the fault of Soviet society or that the grenfell fire was the fault of this one one of the potential problems with saying that is that it might let people who are more guilty off the hook like isn't Dyatlov obviously more responsible for Chernobyl than society if we start believing in collective responsibility then how can we ever say that one person is better or worse than anybody else we've lost the whole basis of moral judgment that's actually the question posed by very famous scene in the film judgment at Nuremburg responsible for it was Germany it is an easy thing to condemn one man in the dark it is easy to condemn the German people to speak of the basic flaw in the German character that allowed him to rise to power at the same time the Russian science chaning said he's guilty if he is and stannous guilt it's the world's good and so isn't the only answer to keep the blame with individuals yes Dyatlov was under pressure but isn't he an adult with free will not just a cog in a machine just one year after the real Nuremberg trials the Philosopher's HD Lewis wrote if there are no such distinctions if the questions we ask about them are without substance then the greater part of ethical controversy has been a peculiarly vain pursuit of a will of the wisp I love the flair for the dramatic that a lot of those early 20th century British philosophers had in their writing that's just such a oh just a nice little sentence although maybe collective responsibility isn't as weird as it seems the philosopher freed Abdul more points out that people say stuff like we won the war we put a man on the moon we beat Tottenham one-nil when actually as individuals we didn't have anything to do with it and if we can take pride in our nation or our team's accomplishments why not also take responsibility for their failures the psychologist Daniel Kahneman pointed out we do something kind of similar with companies as well if you have a bad experience where a representative of say Ryanair is rude to you people will often say Ryanair was really rude to me we hold the whole collective responsible but is that the same thing just because we can feel proud or ashamed of a group doesn't mean that we take on their moral responsibility Lewis says even if you practically agree to answer for somebody else's actions like a parent might take responsibility for their child you can't actually take on somebody else's moral guilt unless you're Jesus and even then it's a massive pain in the ass although we may be proud or ashamed of others we are not a cubit to our stature neither do we shrink through our association with them except in the measure that we ourselves change under their influence you can almost smell the pipe smoke and tweed on that dark academia that said there are some more modern examples where being strictly individualist about responsibility gets kind of tricky like with so-called self-driving cars let's say that you are driving along and a kid runs out in front of you and you swerve to avoid them and you hit somebody else you can be taken to court to answer for that decision it might turn out that you haven't done anything wrong but you can still be held accountable but now let's say you weren't driving let's say that it was a self-driving car in that case the decision to swerve wasn't made in a moment it was made months ago by whoever programmed it to perceive objects and have goals in the way that it does so called autonomous systems still do what they are told to do they aren't really autonomous they're just unsupervised a person still has to tell it what its goal is and how to gather and interpret the data that they use to achieve it so if you get hit by a self-driving car can you take the car company to court cuz if not then that company has just been given the unaccountable power of life and death over everybody who encounters their product so we're sort of stuck because it isn't clear that there is an individual responsible there but at the same time saying that seems to let somebody somewhere off the hook Alain Herzberg was hit and killed by one of OOOs unsupervised vehicles in 2018 some human being is responsible for this woman's death whether that amounts to criminal responsibility we now can't know because her family settled of uber out of court but the companies that make these systems whether for cars military whatever have a very strong incentive to tell you that they're autonomous because that conceals the fact that really they are responsible for what their machines do and there are some other scenarios where being strictly individualist about responsibility gets tricky as well something that comes up a lot in the philosophical literature is do people alive now have any kind of responsibility for historical crimes like do white people owe reparations for slavery the official woke sjw party line on this is that if you are benefiting from a historical injustice you have a responsibility to set it right even if you didn't personally do the bad thing but the philosopher Janna Thompson asks why why does benefiting from it make me responsible liable what for a crime that I didn't commit something I noticed reading more conservative philosophers is a lot of them worried about punishment Jan nervous on is an anarcho-capitalist who says that any talking about group benefit or oppression is gonna wind up with somebody getting punished for a crime they didn't commit I've seen people in my comment section get quite heated if they suspect that they're being blamed or told to feel guilty for being white one of the things about being white in a country like mine is you don't often have to think about it because race isn't usually made a problem for us so when we do get invited to think about it a lot of us jump to that very defensive position of trying to avoid blame first and fix the problem second omaree they did everything right something strangers individuals who we believe are accountable this phenomenon even has a name white fragility and name seemingly designed to annoy the very people most in need of understanding it but Thompson points out that a lot of the time when people talk about historical crimes and the responsibility for setting them right it's not really about individual blame and punishment it's about the redistribution of resources so no wonder so many people are suspicious of the question not only is there a high potential for misinterpreting it as a personal attack but the real issue it's actually deeply political so everything is my fault I'm not here to blame you I'm here to find out what happened this is bound up with what she calls intergenerational collective responsibility sounds really complicated don't worry it isn't you know the so-called golden rule of morality do unto others as you would have them do to you this is kind of like that but it's stretched out over time someday I will be an old man who can't take care of himself anymore and I expect that future people will help me so I work now and I pay my taxes for instance to do the same thing for people who need help now because I recognize that their needs and my future needs come from the same place and personally I'd quite like this approach it comes from a place not of patriotic strength and duty to the nation but a recognition that we all get sick we all need education if we are wronged we all need justice if not now then definitely some day these intergenerational responsibilities she says continue even if the state itself totally changes or collapses whether there's a United Kingdom in 20 73 or not and frankly at the moment who the hell knows I will be an 80 year old man and I will need some help because we live in a society and I think she's hit on something quite interesting here because it sounds like we're not even talking about moral responsibility anymore it sounds like we're talking about conservatives like Margaret Thatcher will sometimes talk about personal responsibility like in that interview we open with she says she wants more people to be able to buy property because you buy a house you get invested in it you come to respect other people's property rights and you become a responsible citizen she's actually not saying that people should just be thrown to the Wolves even if that was the effect of a lot of her policies she's saying that if you are freeloading off society you're really freeloading off other people so you need to work hard and pull your weight and there are some big problems with this view some of which we will get to but it does have a kind of internal harmony to it and I can see why some people like it Canadian author and psychologist Jordan Peterson also talks about the importance of personal responsibility saying that it gives the life meaning and that we shouldn't languish in our own victimhood a theme that content creator stefan molyneux also explores stefan hates talking about things like racism and sexism because he thinks they make you a victim people who fail at life blame the system they get stuck in the narrative of their own victimization and they tell you there's no way you can succeed it's impossible because they resent the people that do when really if you take responsibility for your own life there's nothing standing in your way and to give the devil his due I think that Stefan canna has a point when he says that sometimes some people can get a little bit stuck in the victim role certainly the abusers I've known have they refused to take responsibility for their actions the real Anatoly Dyatlov maintained to his dying day that he was the victim of a conspiracy and that what happened at Chernobyl was not his fault I've also been in some online leftist spaces where people are hurting and in the absence of somewhere to work through that pain will pour it out into any available container that's not a uniquely leftist thing of courses just a human thing so it seems like these thinkers are saying that we should be individualist because it's motivating and maybe that's why so many people find their work useful self-confidence can be massively helpful if I put on a suit and the Jordan Peterson stand up straight with the shoulders back thing it works or at least it changes how people respond to me but I do have a big question about all this and in order to tease it out I want to give just one more example Fred Hess works for a right-wing think-tank called the American Enterprise Institute and he wrote this article about education saying that students need to take some personal responsibility for their learning you can't expect the school to do everything for you and he's surprised that people sometimes pushback at him on that and yeah I can kind of see where it's coming from like if you're running a school it doesn't seem unreasonable to expect the students to take responsibility for turning up on time and doing the homework with allowances for extenuating circumstances but yeah where I get curious though is what about expecting them to take responsibility for behaving professionally or dressing professionally or being a team player these are all things that sound like reasonable expectations but who gets to decide what those mean and how do they decide if a black woman puts on a suit and does the Jordan Peterson dance she might get read as bossy or uppity in a way that I simply never would and that's the kicker you think that individual responsibility is how we motivate people to succeed and find meaning okay cool succeed at what though meaningful how responsible for what exactly what are your criteria who gets to decide them and are they just Thatcher's criterion for responsibility was owning property and the problem there is that is a thing that is mathematically impossible for everyone to do at the same time you cannot have a housing market and no homeless people because if everybody has secured housing you cannot sell them housing so even if everybody is maximally personally responsible and aspirational and striving and all the other Instagram Tory buzzwords in a competitive system some of us still have to fail through no fault of our own which again is the exact problem that individual responsibility is supposed to solve it might also be worth noting that individualism isn't the only motivating force during the Chernobyl disaster a lot of people did incredibly brave and dangerous things to fight the radiation often knowingly shortening their own lives out of a sense of what Craig Mazin calls Soviet civic duty the reactor fuel is going to sink into the ground and poison the water from Kiev to the Black Sea all of it forever they say they want you to stop that from happening how are we supposed to do that couldn't tell me because I don't need to know do you need to know or have you heard enough you'll do it there's nobody else cat if you don't millions will die if you tell me that's not enough I won't believe you so it's sort of stuck again but it's the interesting kind of stuck this time rather than the frustrating kind the philosopher Deborah Tollefson says that what it means to hold somebody morally responsible is just to have certain feelings about them like resentment and pride or disappointment and so on it's not really about the logical relations of responsibility in personhood it's more like telling a story about our feelings and our demands about how other people should be treated philosophers call this expressive ism Tollefson says that moral responsibility talk isn't really trying to be rigorous philosophy it's a kind of storytelling when people say that Chernobyl or grenfell is society's fault what they're really saying is I think we should change society and the opposite when people say we should focus on individuals and personal responsibility only is kind of like saying no I don't think we should change society so maybe the main lesson of trouble is that you should always be nice to people because if things do go south I'll find it a lot easier to blame you if they already think you're a [ __ ] absolutely word comes up he's like he told you don't think that would explain why discussions about historical reparations can get so fraught it would explain why your jordan Peterson's and you Stefan small and you talk about personal responsibility without really digging into the philosophical depth it would explain how the Daily Express somehow managed to blame the Chernobyl disaster on Jeremy Corbyn Marxist ideologue the true death toll of Chernobyl is not only unknown but unknowable the radiation spread across Europe and of everybody who's died of cancer since 1986 there's no answer to the question how many might have lived her the reactor that exploded if we can't even calculate the damage how can we assign a responsibility all we have is the story and insofar as grenfell is a symbol of austerity in my country there's no way of knowing how many people were killed by those policies how many thousands died after having their disability benefits withdrawn how many people killed themselves through poverty and desperation or whose lives was shortened by yes many of us now know what some experts warned at the time that austerity was harmful and ultimately pointless but many of the policies are still in place and many of the people who designed and implemented them are walking around freely at time of recording and it's even harder to tell stories about that because it's so spread out the stories that we have told about austerity tend to focus on individuals and make them the symbol for us all like in the incredible 2016 film i Daniel Blake but will there ever be a memorial for the victims of austerity the way that there is for Chernobyl whether you think somebody responsible or whether then need to be responsible for it depends on what sort of story you want to tell interestingly Chernobyl reflects on storytelling and responsibility in the ways it departs from history unlike most of the other people debated Emily Watson's character Ljubljana commute was not a real historical figure she was written to represent the dozens of other scientists that helped contain the disaster because having one person to praise makes for a more understandable story and the ending reflects it too in the final episode lagarza has to decide whether to reveal to the scientific community that the fault in the reactor design was covered up there are multiple other reactors in the Soviet Union all with the same floor each another potential Chernobyl but embarrassing the government could be even worse for his health than the radiation in a dramatic final speech lagarza tells the story of what happened at Chernobyl and unveils the conspiracy and then as punishment the KGB cancels him and forces him to delete his twitter account your testimony today will not be accepted by the state it will not be disseminated in the press no one will talk to you no more listen to you no friends other men lesser men will receive credit for the things you this also never happened lagarith wasn't even at the trial and contrary to the show's portrayal of a scientific community hungry for the truth and the KGB trying to repress it in reality Ella gossips fellow scientists ostracized him and knowingly participated in the cover-up but having a clearly identifiable hero-villain and timeline of events helps tell about a story and better motivates people to learn the lessons the show's creators want us to learn what is the cost of Lies it's not that we'll mistake them for the truth the real danger is that if we hear enough lies then we no longer recognize the truth at all what can we do then what else is left but to abandon even the hope of truth and content ourselves instead with stories in these stories it doesn't matter who the heroes are all we want to know is [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] good lord what is happening in there karora borealis aurora borealis at this time of year at this time of day in this part of the country localized entirely within your kitchen yes mash it No

Channel: Philosophy Tube

Views: 930,394

Rating: 4.9194455 out of 5

Keywords: chernobyl, HBO, Stellan Skarsgård, USSR, nuclear energy, austerity, grenfell, philosophy, philosophy tube, oliver thorn, grenfell fire

Id: oENI8NnTx0w

Length: 33min 31sec (2011 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Dani171K]

It says "we live in a society" in Russian, nice

[u/Yalnix]

Another absolute banger from Olly.

I really loved the direction the philosophy took. Responsiblity is super interesting. Especially the bit about autonomous vehicles especially as I want to work in that field.

I'm interested, would the company be to blame in a scenario like this? Or the Programming team? Or no one and I've completely missed the point. Need a rewatch.

[u/[deleted]]

deleted ^{What is this?}

[u/StupidFuckingDick]

YES FINALLY

[u/BadDiet2]

Whenever neo-liberals talk about the idea of rolling back social programs as incentive to get people to stop relying on the state and start taking personal responsibility I'm reminded of this African proverb; "The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth". Many neo-liberals these days come from wealthy, stable and supportive families and could potentially survive or even thrive without government assistance. They simply don't have the perspective that some people actually depend on government intervention and assistance to achieve the basic necessities of life. (I'm not saying that government dependence is an ideal end-state). We are all family on this planet and we are all one village. The children we don't embrace will find it hard to love us and they are not to blame. We can't neglect this wisdom that has already been learnt by one of humanity's oldest societies.

[u/Branwolf]

Nice one Olly, another fun vid, im still a bit worn out from footy earlier, so will need to watch it again a few times to properly absorbed what is being said.

[u/NegativeClub]

Did anybody else expect Oliver to bring up Hannah Arendt? Just me...?

[u/scrawledfilefish]

Hahahahaha oh my god that ending, I did not expect that. Best use of that meme EVER. (I'm intentionally being cryptic so as not to spoil it -- stay till after the credits, folks, it's great!)

[u/ArgieGrit01]

Fuck yeah russian synthwave