Maddness And (The lack Of) Civilization

In light of the Harvey Weinstein mess, more and more Hollywood people are starting to fall.

What’s most fascinating to me is that the left is feigning complete shock. Setting aside whether or not many of them knew (I tend to think most of Hollywood, and likely half the political establishment knew) there’s the question of worldview.

The left’s world view seems to be distinctly Foucauldian (perhaps Nietzschean but honestly it’s a distinction without a difference in many ways.) Hence the rip off of one of his book titles for this post. Oversimplifying quite a bit: the left sees the world as a set of power imbalances abused by those who have the power against those who don’t. This is basically the fundamental basis for the ideas of “patriarchy” and “white privilege” et al.

Now I don’t intend to dispute these points in this post. As @kaijubushi is often saying “People are garbage” so there may be more truth to the worldview than we want to admit. (Or as I’m fond of saying “Nietzsche got a lot of “is” right but screwed up 100% of the ought.”)

If one considers Hollywood, even only in the abstract, it’s pretty clear that it fits pretty squarely in their worldview though. A few super-powerful people (namely the big name producers and directors) and a ton of people with basically less than 0 power (i.e. your stereotypical starving actor/actress.) If even only a fraction of the stories coming out now that the damn has cracks are true it would seem the powerful have no qualms at all about leveraging their power.

And yet, there are no cries from the left to go in and break up this cabal of monsters. Sure we still hear about an “excess of masculinty” or “systematic sexism” but I don’t seen anyone suggesting any massive goverment intervention (the left’s standard go to play) to balance the power disparity. The criticism of Hollywood’s culture itself is fairly muted, instead focusing on the more general patriarchy complaints. It’s to those of us who have always felt that that Hollywood was the worst of both Sodom and Gomorrah to continue to rail against it. Much of this has to do with the fact that the powerful in Hollywood are fellow travelers with the left (at least insofar as their checkbooks travel.) And no one wants to slay their golden goose.

Hollywood has doused itself in gasoline, and handed us a book of matches to play with. I suggest now might be the time to start striking them.

As it goes, I know boycotts tend not to gather steam, especially ones that require giving up what little entertainment there is in this world. I can abide by such a boycott myself, so I wouldn’t suggest one. Nevertheless, I think there’s room to crack this nut as it were. The investigation into who covered up what, when is a good start. I hope people don’t stop digging. Now would also be an opportune time to axe whatever incentives Hollywood is getting from any governments (state, local or federal). Hollywood Accounting makes it look like Enron had standards, so it’s probably time to start looking into that too.

These things alone would probably cause a lot of cockroaches to go scurrying.