We Don't Talk About Elliot Rodger: A Response to Stefan Molyneux | Big Joel

in his 1972 book ways of seeing john berger spends a few pages talking about the historical and critical reception of one painting by artist franz halls the painting titled regents of the old men's alms house is a striking one produced in the final years of hals's life he was by this point old and destitute living off of public charity he was now commissioned to paint the administrators of such a charity there's a certain cynicism that we can feel as we look at this painting the subjects appear uncaring and spacey this man stares off into the distance with a totally apathetic look on his face this one seems numb as though he may be drunk so berger presents this painting and then goes on to introduce what an art historian says about it according to this expert there is no evidence that hall's painted this image with a spirit of bitterness the composition is beautiful and harmonic this man isn't drunk the regents would have found the painting unacceptable if one of them was shown to be drunk and besides there's good medical reason to think that this subject suffers from facial paralysis that that's the reason he looks the way he does so john berger looks at this historian's account and his reaction is like doesn't this kinda suck from his perspective it's silly to use this set of esoteric historical facts to distance us from the very way that we connect with and understand this painting looking at this image we can see something we can see a gesture toward darkness a feeling that all is not well in this picture as berger puts it halls was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism and why would we let some historian who knows some medical thing take that moment of interpretation away from us anyway berger calls this practice cultural mystification the process of explaining away what might otherwise be evident and when i think about elliot roger and the way his story was treated cultural mystification is what i think [Music] of elliot roger was a murderer on may 23 2014 he killed six people near the university of california santa barbara as well as himself and when i look at his crimes what i see is a story about terrible beliefs taken to an awful conclusion elliot roger wrote a manifesto called my twisted world made a series of youtube videos where he put forth extremely misogynistic views to him women were sub-human incapable of choosing mates properly deserving of extreme violence because they didn't want to have sex with him he was also a white supremacist he hated black people and saw himself as superior because he was half white descended from british aristocracy he was also obsessed with class and money to him it was his breeding and his material possessions that set him apart from these less deserving men he was the supreme gentleman with a nice car and expensive sunglasses punctuating all of these elements though is a sharp sense of elliot roger's feelings of inadequacy sure he thought girls were the worst but he didn't know why they weren't interested in him sure he was half white but he was half asian too sure he had some nice stuff but he needed more he was obsessed with winning the lottery and to me this is most of what eliot roger is a man with a complicated and awful ideological perspective who committed a crime that aligned with that perspective and looking at him what i'd want to ask is what does he tell us his writings his beliefs his actions his politics what do they say on may 26 2013 only three days after the massacre stefan molyneux made a video called the truth about elliot roger and right off the bat he has a real bone to pick with those kinds of questions in the first moments of his video he tells us there are all sorts of people out there who are going to try to read into elliot roger to make this about some big political issue feminism or whatever and this act to stefan is disrespectful and opportunistic a lot of people tragically attempt to climb over the bodies of the victims of these kinds of shooters and unfurl whatever particular political or socio-economic flag they wish to unfurl which i consider highly disrespectful to the victims they're not tools to be used in a political agenda whether it's feminism anti-misogyny or gun rights or you name it so instead of doing that he wants to approach this tragedy specifically look at the nitty-gritty of elliot roger's life look at the events he describes in his manifesto and come to various evidenced conclusions on why and how these murders happened these victims deserve as much understanding and analysis rational analysis that we can bring to the problem in the hopes of preventing recurrence so on first blush it kind of feels like stefan molyneux's agenda is just a lot better than mine is i mean look the most important thing about elliot roger is not that he was a misogynist or a white supremacist or anything like that it's that he murdered people if he didn't do that i wouldn't even know who the guy was so it only stands to reason that our best our only way of looking at this person should work to explain his crime that is how we can learn from this awful tragedy and prevent such things from happening in the future big joel's lucy goosey political power hour be damned well i don't agree with that i don't think stefan molyneux's paradigm works and to show you why i want to talk about his video so broadly speaking the truth about elliot roger is a story about collecting straws and i mean that kind kinda literally stefan says that phrase just so many times not blaming video games and hundreds of millions of video game players around the world they don't become shooters but again we're looking at the straws on the camel's back it's all over the la scene that uh beautiful women go there to milk money and status out of their beauty so again this is part of the culture that he lived in again i'm not saying it's causal but it is another one of the straws on the camel's back now i'm not even remotely of course trying to suggest that divorce causes mass murder because there are hundreds of millions of children of divorce around the world and very few of them will ever become mass murderers but we're looking at the number of straws on the camel's back most of the video is spent going through elliot rogers manifesto and finding various things in his life that probably at least according to steph contributed to his murdering people not claiming that any one of these were the proximate cause of the murders but that all of them contributed in some way and there are a legitimately shocking number of these reasons video games his parents divorcing his first experience with masturbation his going to different schools violent movies his father being too ambitious and the list goes on and on now all this does make for a strikingly repetitive and monotonous video just reading a few lines of the manifesto and blandly adding another straw to the camel's back ad nauseum i then started to notice that all the cool kids were interested in skateboarding i had never even ridden on a skateboard before but if i wanted to be cool i had to become a skateboarder this was the start of an obsession to copy everything that the supposed cool kids were doing this cool element is a an absolutely leprous cancer in the heart of society and was responsible for massive amounts of bullying and suicidality and rage and violence cool is not virtuous but it's not hard to see why the video is this way if you're only looking for the path that leads elliott roger to becoming elliot roger and if you want to avoid a systemic critique as much as possible it only makes sense to go scattershot to explore every possible avenue of meaning to figure out what exactly went wrong here and although that seems kind of reasonable we can see how this line of reasoning might lead us into a bit of an ethical trap specifically the inability to figure out which actions we want to judge see even as we want to prevent mass murderers from coming into existence this desire can't meaningfully permeate all of the things we do in our day-to-day lives for instance did every woman who chose not to have sex with elliot roger contribute to his decision to murder people i mean come on i'm not saying i know that's related to why he committed his crimes but it might be another straw on the camel's back right well no that's repulsive i felt gross just saying it and i wouldn't have said it except it comes up later we can't allow our fear of potential eliot rogers to hold us hostage to make us arrange our lives and our societies in ways that we know to be unacceptable and at the very least the tiny risk that some unhappy version will start killing people will always be too small and too unimportant to trump our fundamental desire to use our bodies the way we want to so looking at the life and manifesto of elliott roger we can't just point to every event that happened to him and say don't do that cause just look what happened it's far too narrow instead we can only judge and advise against those actions that are themselves harmful that do or transparently lead to obvious damage but here's the thing stefan molyneux actually sidesteps this problem and he does so by implicitly claiming one of the strangest things imaginable what if basically everything that ever happened to elliot roger was bad what if all of his experiences deserve judgment because they are all harmful or maladaptive or wrong particularly those things related to his upbringing like look at how stefan talks about elliot's first experience going to school so elliot goes on to say i was forced to wear a uniform which i hated because i had to wear uncomfortable socks up to my knees i was very nervous and cried on my first day there i didn't like school at dorset house very much now reading this part of the manifesto i might say sure that's hard and when i was a kid i cried the first time i went to school and wanted to see my mom again but that's normal right the difficulty of growing up but to stefan no you should listen to your child and to do otherwise is appalling parenting so this is important there's a certain ethic or approach to parenting which goes along the lines of well i know what's best for you and therefore i don't have to listen to what you don't like i consider this appalling parenting appalling parenting you listen to the child if the child is crying and doesn't want to go to a way to school then that is something you need to take into account doesn't mean you have to indulge your child to every whim it's not sort of one extreme to the other but these are important things to listen to with regards to your children and sure he goes out of his way to say that he's not claiming we should indulge our child's every whim but it's hard to see another takeaway from his position here i mean all elliot wrote was that he had to go to a school he didn't like the reactions of his parents to this information aren't even mentioned so what did these people do wrong not be compassionate enough not take their kids out of this school i don't know stefan doesn't tell us but it's something right they acted poorly in some way or later on stefan looks at a place in eliot's manifesto where he discusses masturbating and having sexual fantasies that he didn't talk about with his parents in fact i didn't talk to my parents at all about my sexual development i felt too guilty and embarrassed about it whenever they probed me i lied to them telling them that i had no sex drive my mother once caught me looking at pictures of girls online and i frantically had to convince her that i stumbled on those pictures by accident and of course when i read this i'm like yeah of course he had those fantasies of course he lied about them to his parents and i'm not saying we should shame sexual desire among teenagers but that doesn't mean you have to talk about that stuff with your mom it can be embarrassing and weird and i know i acted that way with my mother and continue that wonderful tradition to this very day but to stefan this is evidence of some big pattern of isolation you can't start talking with your kids when they're 15 you have to have the conversation i started chatting with my daughter when she was still in her mother's womb for heaven's sakes you have to have conversations that go on for years before you can talk about the difficult things you need to talk about the easy things you can't just jump in the deep end without having that connection with your children you have to talk to your kids start off early with the easy stuff so that later on you can get to the somehow desirable point where you're exchanging sexual fantasies with the people who birthed you again this passage of the manifesto somehow works as evidence that there was bad behavior on the part of these parents and these examples get even more ridiculous and threadbare somehow elliot's mother making him attend camp at 11 years old he writes i was enjoying a lovely summer but suddenly my mother said that i had to go to summer camp i didn't like this one bit it was a last minute decision one moment i was relaxing and enjoying my summer break the next my mother is waking me up early to take me to my first day of camp stefan assumes that she did this with no warning another example of elliott's parents not preparing him in the ways that they should have and again we see this can't trust can't relax can't is not prepared for things it's not aware of what's coming down the road everything is bam you know bam just comes in out of nowhere but for one there is no textual evidence that their sending him to this camp was this sudden sure he says it was a bit last minute but he makes it clear that his parents explained their rationale for this decision before the day he had to wake up early this was a decision she made with my father because they thought it would be healthy for me what an awful mom both his stepmother and his mother are very attractive women and are cold and cruel at least the stepmother is by his report he doesn't say much about his mother but his mother did just wake up wake him up out of nowhere and say you're going to camp but more importantly elliott writes about enjoying his time at the camps he went to in both of the other two sections where he talks about camp he describes being unhappy at first but then growing to enjoy it playing games watching movies making friends and what sets this particular camp experience apart is specifically that he had his first bad experience with a girl so why are we judging these parents for sending their kid to a place that they knew him to enjoy it's ridiculous on the face of it his stepmom having some tasteful nudes online i'm not going to reproduce the pictures here but on the father's on peter rogers website there are endless pictures of his naked wife's butt remember when i was saying our claim to our bodies and our sexualities must be seen as a moral priority well stefan has no such compunction you know your father's name you go on and look at pictures and then you can basically see your mother's butt and half a vagina hanging out and that is i think fairly disturbing and indicates i mean what kind of woman would allow for that to to happen listen to his tone how disgusted he is at this woman recently pamela anderson who has been a professional sexpot revealed a history of sexual abuse could that be the case with uh sumaira it's hard to know but it certainly would fit how he assumes that elliott was disturbed by this even though he never once talked about it in his tell-all manifesto about his sexual anxiety who cares about any of that stefan has decreed that it's bad to have artsy nudes and stepchildren at the same time so let's pop another straw on that back and i could give you more examples of this i promise i could but i think you see the point and honestly looking at stefan's gesture here his desire to explain the nightmare of elliot roger with a series of moral failings i do feel some sympathy i mean who doesn't feel the temptation to solve this puzzle to find a solution and understand step by step how this event occurred and how we might prevent it from occurring again but the cost is too high and too absurd to treat every mundane and normal event as something worthy of our condemnation to locate evil in every moment of eliot's life is to pathologize life itself to render all of our actions disgusting and immoral that is the only way to explain this tragedy and even if we took this raw deal accepted that all of the events in elliot roger's life even the seemingly average ones were secretly terrible and harmful is this a meaningful explanation of his crimes have we gotten our answers here that we want so badly i don't think so to me it just obfuscates any sense of agency that eliot roger had in all of this see the thing about a camel and the straw that breaks its back is that the output of the situation is a necessary function of the input camels can only bear so much weight and if you keep adding more and more straws that camel's eventually gonna pop and while that might be unfortunate it is predictable a natural property of straws and camel's backs can we say the same thing about elliot roger were his murders the natural output of his love of world of warcraft his father's ambition his parents not preparing him for camp his stepmom having some crunchy nudes on the internet do these events even count as straws well in one sense maybe i mean who knows if we have free will who knows what those words even mean and perhaps elliot was just a function of his experiences bound to murder those people in the same way that i'm bound to make this video but come on we can't live like this we must be able to be decent to live moral lives and no matter what elliot experienced good or bad we must be able to look at his crimes and say that was wrong you had no good reason for doing that and it wasn't the straws that did it it was you and look i'm not saying that there is no use for stefan's form of investigation while i do think stephon molyneux is a pseudo-scientific quack with mommy issues who's totally incapable of producing anything of meaning this sort of highly specific psychological perspective can be interesting and telling but such an analysis can't be the end to this story and any attempt we make to draw some elaborate causal map of elliot roger's life to understand why he did what he did in some perfectly determined way will never be successful or adequate at the end of the day elliot roger may have been the victim of something if not his parents or the world around him than of the machinations of his own mind but we don't need to feel pity for him or to try to explain his actions with a million meaningless straws because he was a monster and he is dead and nothing remains of him that is except for one thing his beliefs his politics his art and don't kid yourself elliot rogers art is vital i don't think we have to argue against him like he's espousing some coherent political ideology i'd actually recommend not doing that but we should recognize that we can see his ideas reflected back at us in a million places most obviously we have the incel community even during elliot rogers life this community started gaining traction on forums like pua hate but it's only grown since then and these guys idolize eliot roger fundamentally think he made a lot of good points they seem to share elliot's political cognitive dissonance concerning women as they simultaneously recognize them of people depriving them of the greatest pleasure known to man sex and love and as robotic and opportunistic sub-humans femoids what's more we can see elliot's work in the actions of these guys since elliot rogers manifesto and massacre there have been four more mass murderers who literally cited him as an inspiration a body count of 42 more people and we don't even have to go to incels to see elliot rogers ideology in our culture no we can just look at the guy who's talking to us stefan molyneux like elliot stefan is a white supremacist first of all i've always been skeptical of the ideas of white nationalism of identitarianism and white identity however i am an empiricist and i could not help but notice that i could have peaceful free easy civilized and safe discussions in what is essentially an all-white country like elliott he thinks that women are often incapable of choosing their partners properly he thinks that because of the modern dysfunctional structure of society they're now incentivized to choose the poor aggressive men instead of the richer nicer kinder ones and it really wasn't until the free market that nice guys got the edge and then nice guys were getting the edge competent guys were getting the edge decent guys were getting the edge and then the [ __ ] said okay well let's just swarm to the state get a welfare state and now we're back on top now women can go for jerks and aggressive people and so on because the guy who's really good at getting resources in a primitive society usually ends up you know broke poor or in jail in a free society and like elliot he thinks that women have to be held accountable in some way all the cold-hearted jerks who run the world came out of the vaginas of women who married [ __ ] and i don't know how to make the world a better place without holding women accountable for choosing [ __ ] your dad was an [ __ ] because your mother chose him because it works on so many women now i'm not saying that stefan is pro-mass murder or something like that but his political connection with eliot roger is undeniable he fundamentally agrees with him on a wide variety of topics in fact their similarity is probably the reason why stefan didn't want to talk about this stuff in the first place after all he feels no compunction politicizing these murders when he can somehow paint elliot's crime as an example of racism against white people but his hatred was for blonde white girls and that is as much a racial crime as it is a gender crime the gender is the result of him being heterosexual and rejected by women but the racial element is very specific and if you can imagine if a half if a half white guy had targeted only black women then this would be a racial hate crime or when he claims that leftist politics were another straw on his back leftism egalitarianism liberalism socialism communism all of the evening out ideologies may perhaps play a role a small role to be fair in this idea that violence is perfectly acceptable in redistributing the goods of this world but when it comes to this being a crime of misogyny and white supremacy actually being reflective of ideologies that real people have and disseminate to their massive audiences nope let's avoid politics there and everything eliot roger represents and writes about just spraying forth out of the ether the random garblings of a madman with family problems impossible to connect to anything in the real world just forget about that stuff it's irrelevant distasteful so stefan molyneux looks at this picture by elliott roger my twisted world and he tries to explain the picture with a series of esoteric facts eliot rogers disgusting beliefs and actions can be understood just by looking at his life at his parents forcing him to do things at world of warcraft and violent video games at stepmoms and their butts and i understand why anyone might want to do this because once we have all this supposed information the picture and its meanings can be determined fixed down this work doesn't mean what you think it means honestly it doesn't mean much of anything the manifesto is just the result of a bunch of tiny failures that added up and that's all there is to it but it's not these little moral tidbits that we see when we look at elliot roger it's not some collection of esoteric historical trivia no what we see is something meaningful a person his crimes his ideology his art so what does all that say to you [Music] hey everybody uh thank you so much for watching my videos i know this was a dark and kind of serious one and i appreciate you staying with me until the end and all that uh thank you so much to my patrons and now it's time for my patreon question of the video little lighten mood time uh brett dibble asks what is the most outlandish thing that you enjoy as a topping on pizza what i don't enjoy any weird look what could i possibly say to that a snickers bar yeah that's what i love i love a big a big snickers the peanut melts into the cheese what i don't know leave me alone i regret doing this anyway bye

Channel: Big Joel

Views: 856,449

Rating: 4.8002195 out of 5

Keywords: 8-11-19

Id: KkMfKihy33w

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Polandgod75]

The only difference bewteen Molyneux and Elliot roger is age and how went they do mass shooting on groups they hate the most.

[u/[deleted]]

Oh my god Stefan stop fucking validating and excusing this tool's behavior.

[u/Maharbal217]

Is it just me, or has Stefan Molyneux (and tbh the rest of the “intellectual darkweb”...ugh) started to go more masks-off in the last few weeks than they usually do. Molyneux used to at least try to hide his shitty, misogynist/racist views, but he’s basically just given up the ghost on twitter in the last 20 days or so. It’s just stormfront level bigotry...

[u/ironglaciers]

I need to type this out for my own sanity:

Fuck Stefan Molyneux.

Thanks for reading.

[u/WellDressedLoser]

Big Joel’s drift to breadtuber has been a wonderful viewing experience for me

[u/camycamera]

I had no idea about Elliot Rodger or this shooting in 2014 and its relation to the incel community. This is fucking sad.

[u/cyvaris]

Am I the only one who just realized that Molyneux's videos are literally just a fucking Powerpoint? Like I recognize the template he used here because the little red flag in the corner is an absolute fucking pain to deal with and eats up valuable space on the slide.

[u/pekkala245]

Ways of Seeing - the official book of breadtube

[u/[deleted]]

OMG is it me or does this guy looks like the kid from Spy Kids?