Rick and Morty: The World Hates Smart People

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👍︎︎ 9 👤︎︎ u/_Mangata_ 📅︎︎ Aug 01 2021 🗫︎ replies

This reminds me how GameStop Twitter ends some tweets with “-SMRT”

👍︎︎ 4 👤︎︎ u/MoneyNoob69 📅︎︎ Aug 01 2021 🗫︎ replies

To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty

👍︎︎ 2 👤︎︎ u/MajoraThor 📅︎︎ Aug 02 2021 🗫︎ replies

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

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/beachn-it 📅︎︎ Aug 01 2021 🗫︎ replies

How does this help us? We need a video about the problems of being retarded.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Kraftykuts007 📅︎︎ Aug 02 2021 🗫︎ replies
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“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 to you by NordVPN, the safest virtual private network out there. NordVPN offers military-grade encryption for added security and anonymity online. Just click the link in the description below, NordVPN.com/thetake to get 70% off a three-year plan. And as part of their special Black Friday deal, you can enter the code 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 to you by Nord VPN, the world's leader In cyber security. With Nord VPN, you know your privacy is protected online. They have a no data logging policy, double data encryption, and an automatic kill switch. Plus they're always looking for ways to get even stronger. Nord VPN is moving to 100% owned servers introducing a bug bounty program to catch potential vulnerabilities and conducting a full-scale independent audit to assess their hardware software and code. No other VPN has implemented security measures this substantial. Right now they're offering a limited time deal to our viewers. Click the link in the description below NordVPN.com/thetake to get 70% off a three-year plan and enter the code THETAKE to get an extra two months of Nord VPN for free.
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Channel: The Take
Views: 1,562,961
Rating: 4.8319926 out of 5
Keywords: rick and morty, rick and morty season 4, rick and morty season 4 episode 1, rick and morty explained, rick and morty analysis, dan harmon, justin roiland, morty smith, rick sanchez, rick and morty beth, rick and morty jerry, pickle rick
Id: 7g5ZdXNIjeA
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 20min 17sec (1217 seconds)
Published: Thu Nov 14 2019
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