“This family
has a clean start. I don't know if
adventures fit into my son's life.” “I'm fine. Get
off Rick's back.” Rick and Morty sends
the message that, in our society, it
doesn’t pay to be smart. Season 4 opens with
a chastened Rick facing a reduced
status in the Smith family. “Uhh..” “Dad? There's a
way we do this now.” “Morty, would you
please accompany me to Forbodulon Prime
for death crystals?” And once again he’s
stuck having to explain himself to Jerry. “Real nice.” “Eat my [BLEEP] Jerry.” This follows from Season 3’s
ending of Rick losing his family’s allegiance to his
utterly mediocre son-in-law. As the embodiment of
stupidity triumphs over the smartest guy
in the universe, symbolically this moment
is saying that intelligence can't escape, or even
necessarily win against brainlessness. “You win, Jerry! You win! No amount of genius can stop your dumb mediocre
vacuous roots from digging into everything and
everyone around you and draining
them of any ability to fend you off.” The common assumption
is that brains will help you get ahead
in modern life — and it is true that narrow,
applied intelligence produces material success. But when it comes to deep,
general intelligence — cosmic perspective and
wisdom, rigorous honesty, and complex insight
into the nature of reality, Rick and Morty suggests
these things are not rewarded in our society. “Because the world is
full of idiots that don't understand what's important, and they'll tear
us apart, Morty!” Instead, thinking too
much is a liability that leads to emotional
suffering and being viewed as a villain. “Morty, do you know
what ‘wubba lubba dub dub’ means?” "I am in great pain. Please help me.” So, is being brilliant just
the curse of becoming aware of everything
that’s wrong without having any power
to change it? Like waking up in
the Matrix but not being able to unhook your
body from the machine? What is the value of
smarts in a society that kind of hates
smart people? “As you know,
Morty, I've got a lot of enemies
in the universe that consider my
genius a threat.” Of course, Rick
is guilty of a lot of bad behavior, “If God exists,
it's [bleep] me." and his family doesn’t
turn on him just because he’s smart —
but his flaws are related to his
agile mind. And there’s a lot in
our current world to support this
idea that society discourages
general intelligence. “Nobody Iikes people
who know everything.” “So I've discovered in my Iife.” The anti-smart bias
should matter to all of us, wherever our particular
brains happen to fall on the Rick vs.
Jerry spectrum. Because as the challenges
facing life on earth get more complex and dire,
future society will need its smartest
people more than ever. “Break the cycle,
Morty. Rise above. Focus on science." This video is brought
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THETAKE to get an extra two months
of NordVPN for free. The therapist Rick goes
to great lengths not to see correctly diagnoses
his split feelings about his mental aptitude: “You seem to
alternate between viewing your own
mind as an unstoppable force and as an
inescapable curse.” Sure, he gets to
go on wild and crazy adventures, watch
interdimensional cable, and live outside the
confines of social propriety. But Rick and Morty
also captures the numerous downsides
to being smart. Most of the time this
scientist is miserable, blacking out drunk. Almost nobody gets him,
and the more they know him, the more they
think he’s a prick. “You wanna be like Rick?! Congratulations! You're just as arrogant and
just as irresponsible!” Intelligence is lonely. Speaking truth won’t
make most people like you, because
the truth is often cruel. “The universe is filled
with stupidity, and you’re the smartest person in it,
then you’re always going to be the most cruel. You’re all alone
in your intellect.” Intelligent people
are more likely to consume alcohol “Well, it’s official, I had too
much to drink last night” and more prone
to depression. [Singing] The show underlines
that being smart most certainly makes it
harder to be content. This is explored
symbolically through Beth’s fear that
she’s a clone. “Beth, you know,
when smart people get happy, they stop
recognizing themselves.” Intelligence doesn’t actually
help with a lot of the tasks that make up
our everyday — and it can even
be a disadvantage. Jerry’s dim-wittedness
makes loving his family life simple and easy
for him, whereas it’s not for Rick and the
daughter who takes after him. “This isn't the woman
you married, Jerry, because this
woman loves you.” The episode Pickle Rick
illustrates the contradictions of Rick’s own strengths
and weaknesses. He can stunningly defeat
an international network of bad guys while
being a pickle, but he won’t just go
somewhere to talk about his feelings. He balks at small
obstacles whose very challenge is their
mundanity and boredom. “I have no doubt that
you would be bored senseless by therapy,
the same way I'm bored when I brush my
teeth and wipe my ass.” In The ABC’s of Beth,
Beth fears that her nice, normal mom persona
is just a fake cover for the repressed psychopath
that’s the real her. “Am I evil?” “Worse, smart.” Society can
understand evil. But to be smart is to be
constantly misunderstood — to appear callous and
cold whenever you dare to be honest. Imagine having a vocabulary
of around 40,000 words in the ballpark of
what an average US adult is thought
to have but being forced to converse
daily with people who understand
only 10 words. You wouldn’t have
a prayer of conveying your views with
the slightest accuracy. So while being smart
isn’t a predisposition toward evil, it might make
you appear, kind of, evil. Rick’s take is that being
smart frees you from feeling bound by the false
constructs that read to most of humanity as good. “All you have to do is
know the difference between good and bad,
and root for good” “Rick says good and bad
are artificial constructs.” “Yeah, well, I get
the feeling...he kind of needs that
to be the case.” His rethinking on these
topics has a lot in common with the ideas of
Nietzsche, author of the aptly named,
Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche writes, “There is no such
thing as moral phenomena, but only a moral
interpretation of phenomena.” After he says it’s worse
to be smart than to be evil, Rick launches into a rant
about what it’s like to be smart. Let’s unpack this monologue. First, he implies that if
you’re smart, you’ve come to the conclusion
that nothing matters. “Worse. Smart. When
you know nothing matters, the universe is yours.” The nature of this
statement tells us he believes that true
intelligence includes thinking deeply about
the nature of reality. That’s not necessarily
what passes for brains in our specialized
expertise-driven, jargon-happy society. “We got to scale up
if we're going to handle that kind of traffic.” But in Rick’s view,
if you’re ignoring the greater human
condition, then you’re not really that smart. His statement assumes
that intelligence leads to nihilism. Because Rick knows
so much, he sees how insignificant our
lives are from a cosmic
perspective. “Nothing you think
matters matters.” We don’t have to be
aware of the multiverse to have thought about
this problem ourselves. Just paying attention
to the passage of time and how short life is can
get us pretty freaked out about our tiny,
fragile existence. “There's no afterlife. Everything just goes black.” So according to Rick,
if you’re truly smart, you aren’t able to overlook
that nothing matters. This puts you in control, “The universe is yours” but it also puts you
in conflict with reality, which wants you to
just mindlessly fall in line. “I've never met a
universe that was into it.” Apparently, in Rick's
experience, not just our universe but all
the universes are hostile to smart people. He says most people are
just food for a brutal cosmos, like the children Tommy
fathers in Froopyland just so he can eat
them for sustenance. “The universe is
basically an animal. It grazes on the ordinary. It creates infinite idiots just to eat them, not unlike
your friend Timmy.” “Tommy.” Tommy’s devouring his
offspring calls back to Cronus of Greek
mythology who ate his children to prevent
being overthrown, symbolically fighting time
and the inevitable victory of the future
over the past. Here, Rick explicitly
connects the image of eating offspring
to the inherent tragedy of our existence. We’re born only to be
promptly eaten up by time, and most of us, like
Tommy’s offspring, don’t ever question it. “Eat of my flesh
so you may survive.” But smart people are
not content to be dumb meat that’s pointlessly
consumed by the universe. When your eyes are
open, you want more — you want to be
master of your reality. “You know, smart people
get a chance to climb on top, take reality for a ride.” So we can see in
the picture he paints that Rick believes in
two tiers of people — the smart ones,
masters of reality, and everyone else,
dumb universe meat. This view sounds strikingly
like Nietzsche’s writings about Master Morality
versus Slave Morality. In Nietzsche’s view,
master-morality values strength and honor. “Well, let me check my list
of powers and weaknesses: ability to do anything,
but only whenever I want.” Meanwhile, slave morality,
Nietzsche wrote, is based on inverting the master morality’s
values of power and nobility. So it vilifies strength
and glorifies weakness. Nietzsche’s contempt for
slave morality’s worship of weakness and subversive
attack on the strong sounds exactly like Rick’s
disdain for Jerry: “She felt sorry for you. You act like prey, but
you're a predator! You use pity to lure
in your victims!” According to Nietzsche,
the master morality and slave morality mindsets
can both be present “within one soul.” And this is the conflict
we see in Beth’s choice between her father
and her husband. Does she want to subscribe
to Rick’s Master-Morality view that the powerful
get to do what they want? “What's next, Morty? What if I want you to jump off the Empire
State Building? I have to ask?” “Yes?” “And you seriously
don't see how that's a slippery slope?” That to constrain herself
is to submit to stupidity’s attack on greatness
through a subversive campaign of false,
limiting values? “Dad, I'm out of excuses
to not be who I am.” Or does she believe
in Jerry’s weak, tame slave morality style
goodness, which paints Rick as, to some
degree, evil? We can see Rick’s sense
of superiority in intelligent characters in other
stories, too. "A lion doesn't concern
himself with the opinions of the sheep.” Those with the lion’s
share of brains, success and riches
often feel that they’re on another level
than most people. “Details of your incompetence
do not interest me.” It's hard to categorically
dismiss some of these people's exceptionalism. Maybe they are smarter,
more accomplished, better than most. And does this not entitle
them to some degree of preeminence
and special treatment? As William Blake wrote, “One law for the lion
and ox is oppression.” Yet Rick’s conclusion
in his speech about smarts is that, no matter
how much of a genius you are, eventually
reality will defeat you. “But it'll never stop
trying to throw you. And, eventually, it will. There's no other way off.” This Rickest of Ricks
is so much more knowledgeable and
thus powerful than other people that he
almost feels like a God. “Jesus! He's not
a [bleep] god!” “You don't know
what I am! And you don't know
what I can do!” “Jesus! It's It's
cool, Rick!” “I'm Doctor Who
in this [bleep]” He likes to think he’s free
while everyone else is mentally enslaved, but
he's a slave to reality, too, just as we all are. “Because the thing
about repairing, maintaining, and cleaning
is it's not an adventure… It's just work.” Ultimately the lions can't
escape the norms and value systems of
the oxen around them. Sooner or later, they’re
held to the same laws as everyone else — just
as Rick can’t be rid of Jerry. We should take a minute
to think about why Rick hates Jerry so much. “If I wanted to watch
someone throw their life away, I'd hang out with
Jerry all day.” Rick sees Jerry’s
mindset as a threat. He fears Jerry’s
small-mindedness will close the rest of
his family off to reality, turning them into sleepwalking,
unthinking universe-meat. And however much Rick
repeats that “nothing matters,” it seems to really matter
to him that his family is awake and enlightened, to
the extent that they can be. He shows his love for
Morty by not sparing him any truth,
not protecting him. “No more Dad, Morty. He threatened to turn me into the government
so I made him and the government go away.” Rick doesn’t believe that
knowing “nothing matters” means you should just
give up and check out. Nietzsche’s writings
are strongly associated with nihilism — as he
diagnosed the problem of struggling to find
meaning in the world, after the “Death of God”
in Western thought. “My life has been a lie! God is dead!” But the philosopher didn’t
advocate giving up on meaning. He, like other thinkers
of existentialism, wrote of creating your
own meaning, which is a dynamic,
liberating act. Rick, too, is an active
guy, constantly up to big plans that are like
icebergs we only glimpse a tiny portion of. “Because I invent,
transform, create, and destroy for a living,
and when I don't like something about
the world, I change it.” Rick sees Jerry’s
passiveness as a failure to live —
because to Rick, being alive means
exercising agency and confronting danger. “To live is to risk it all. Otherwise, you're just an inert chunk of randomly
assembled molecules drifting wherever
the universe blows you. Oh, I'm sorry. Jerry, I
didn't see you there.” He justifies his aversion
to therapy with the idea that getting “comfortable”
is a bad thing: “I think it's helped a lot
of people get comfortable and stop panicking,
which is a state of mind we value in the animals
we eat, but not something I want for myself. I'm not a cow. I'm a pickle when
I feel like it.” If you’re awake to reality,
you should be uncomfortable— because our existence
is precarious and terrifying. So refusing to be suckered
in by comforting falsehoods puts you at odds with
a society and a universe that incessantly encourages
us to be universe-meat. In light of all this,
is it even worth going to the trouble of thinking
deeply about existence, and trying to cultivate
a well-rounded intelligence? What makes Rick tick? “Sometimes, science is more
art than science, Morty.” Maybe there’s very little
reward for general intelligence — but understanding
yields intrinsic rewards. And really, to a Rick,
there isn’t even a choice. Once you get hooked
on seeing the truth, the mind can’t go
back to sleep. “My advice, take off. Put a saddle on your universe, let it
kick itself out.” Plus being a genius
might help you create a supply of self-clones
in order to evade death. And even if Rick’s intelligence
may not always help him, it is valuable to
the wider world. We need independent,
unconventional thinkers if we don't want to become
a society of sheep. “Think for yourselves. Don't be sheep.” The show makes this
point by using Rick’s relationship with the Smiths
as a microcosm of a smart person's influence
on the world. He disrupts their peace,
makes them angry and uncomfortable, and strikes
them as cold and arrogant. But he also challenges them,
opens them up to many other dimensions, and
gives them perspective “Dad, Pluto isn't a planet. It's shrinking because
of corporations.” so that over time they
become strikingly deeper, more interesting people. The positive effects of
Rick’s genius come through most in his
protege and partner Morty. When the series starts,
Morty is just a regular kid who’s believed to have
below-average intelligence. “You know fully well that
Morty is the last child that needs to be
missing classes.” “I-I-I don't know what
you mean by that. Can can can you be
a little bit more specific?” “Oh, for crying out
loud he's got some kind of disability
or something.” But as the series goes
on, Morty grows into a very smart young adult,
mature beyond his years and stunningly competent
under pressure. “You guys hit the baskets, I'll
disarm the drunkenly-improvised neutrino bomb. There's a 40
percent chance it's a dud, but y-you should
still stay back.” “Morty, how many of these ?”
“Too many, Rick! Too many!” Rick’s unorthodox
teaching style — forcing this kid to step up
against real, urgent dangers — unlocks the potential
that Morty’s rigid, traditional-minded society
would have left dormant. “But I’ll tell somethi—
tell you how how I feel about school, Jerry. It’s a waste of time. It’s not a place for
smart people, Jerry.” Rick is the mentor
this teen needs to give him the freedom
to step out on his own, while helping him synthesize
and learn from his experiences. “I think you have to think
ahead and live in the moment.” In Season 3, Beth comes to
realize she's just like her dad. “And you are very smart because
you're very much my daughter.” “Oh God” She's exceptionally smart
and maybe not that nice. “I feel like I've spent my
life pretending you're a great guy and
trying to be like you. And the ugly truth
has always been, that I'm not that great a guy
and you're exactly like me.” But is there really any
inherent link between being smart
and antisocial? Does unmatched
intelligence lead to being an unfeeling
sociopath? “Listen, I’m not the nicest
guy in the Universe because I’m the smartest. And
being nice is something stupid people do to
hedge their bets.” Evil Morty appears
to be far more intelligent than other Mortys. You can even argue
that only smart people can be evil, if you assume
that evil implies awareness of the consequences
of your acts and people of low
intelligence lack that. “Let me ask you
a question real quick. Does evil exist? And if so, can one
detect and measure it?” “Umm…” “Rhetorical question,
Morty. The answer is yes, you just have to
be a genius.” Ultimately, though,
Rick and Morty — and the evidence
in our world — don’t back up any
connection between being smart
and uncaring. In fact, studies have
shown a positive correlation between
smarts and empathy. If you’re intelligent,
you’re more likely to engage in
prosocial behavior. As the children of smart
Rick-like Beth and dumb but sweet Jerry,
Morty and Summer are a union of
smarts and feeling. The two kids are
an optimistic take on how intelligence and
empathy can go together. Rick uses the mantra
that “nothing matters” like a shrug that comes
off as defensive, a denial of the complementary
truth that however insignificant they
may be to the universe, certain things matter
very much to human beings, and even to Rick himself. “I want you and your
sister to come home.” “Oh, but don't don't you
have infinite versions of me and my sister?” “You don't have to kick
me while I'm down, Morty. Look, there's no replacing
either of you without an amount of work
that would ultimately defeat the purpose.” To quote Nietzsche,
“What is done from love always takes place
beyond good and evil.” And while there may
be a lot of disagreement around the concepts
of good and evil, even Rick can’t deny that
love makes his world turn — however irrational
that may be. “If nothing matters, why
would you do that for me?” “I don’t know. Maybe you
matter so little that I like you. Or maybe, it makes you
matter. Maybe, I love you.” This video is brought
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r/IamVerySmart
This reminds me how GameStop Twitter ends some tweets with “-SMRT”
To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty
Love the show just as much as I love the stonk
Ironically I’ve been called an asshole when somebody mentions they don’t find Rick and Morty funny, because I mentioned that they probably aren’t smart enough to get it…. They were salty about it
How does this help us? We need a video about the problems of being retarded.