SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
Just got back from the midnight show.
Really is just a big budget remake of District 9 but without prawns and higher profile actors.
Not bad, but was expecting more.
Funny thing: I actively went out of my way to avoid spoilers and plot details...just to have it ruined 5 mins before the movie started with a pre-movie featurette. The audience was groaning when it ended.
Stop it Hollywood. Just stop.
I wonder how long it will take for Fox News to vociferously denounce the film as "communist propaganda"? Is it not an ignominy that the "hard-earned" property of the affluent was pillaged and plunder by the hordes of indigent animals who deserved to die of their maladies and privations? The rich earned their right to be on Elysium only through industry, thrift and the preponderant superiority of their personal integrity to that of the less well off who have no right to even stand within breathing distance of them! How dare they lay their filthy paws on what rightfully belongs to the legitimate members of the highest socioeconomic echelons of society!? And what is it with this notion that if corporations are to be allowed to behave in a manner they do today, our planet will become severely overpopulated, rife with lethal epidemics and plummeting standards of living!? Free-market is the way to go, it is the way to do what you want, when you want and how you want it: it is the key to maximal freedom for all!
I'm an aspiring rich person. I am taking their side, because I aspire to be there some day.
You're not going to get there just by talking about it. Start developing connections with the investors, financiers and the associates of big businesses, but that alone won't enable you to achieve your goal. To be one of them, you must cultivate the dispositions of character that empower them to sustain a lifestyle you covet. So, if you ever experience naive sentiments of wishing to help the underprivileged or that those who are not well off may deserve a second chance, you must comprehensively expurgate those insidiously noxious thoughts from your worldview. The difference between an accomplished individual and one who merely dreams of becoming accomplished is that the latter is willing to make the sacrifices that are needed for success. If you want to be a professional basketball player, you better expect to radically revise your worldview to get where you need to be, so don't expect to have it any easier if you want to be among the prosperous. Your chances of getting there with the type middle-class mentality are nearly zero, so begin undergoing intense ideological training and if you are not a psychopath, attempt to emulate their behavioral repertoire in every walk of life.
(there didn't seem to be a reason for their scarcity other than a tiring "RICH PEOPLE ARE MEAN BOOHOO" cliche)
It is quite realistic that if our transnational corporations continue to depredate the natural environment at the rate they do now and the population continues to increase at its current rate, our planet will be heavily overpopulated, drained of natural resources and rife with lethal epidemics. Rich people are not "meaner" than members of other socioeconomic groups, considerable empirical evidence exists to suggest that it is merely natural for most people to act in the interest of the socioeconomic group that they belong to. Had the poor been in the dominant position, they would have oppressed the rich just as much and that is why Aristotle argued that the middle class should be in the position of power. A government that represents the middle-class is less likely to launch a systematic attack on the upper class than the dispossessed socioeconomic class, but they are also more likely to grant the lower class significant opportunities to achieve upward mobility than the upper class.
The Elysium was a critique of not only the American politico-economic regime, but the regime of any country where the upper class is in the position of power. Because the film concludes with the transference of power from the elites to the impecunious plebeians, it is conceivable that it advocates a revolution from below where the highly underprivileged seize political control. Indeed, the meek did inherit the Earth in Elysium, but not in the way Jesus seems to have promised, but the similarity between the proposed end-results of Communism and Christianity are remarkably similar. In other words, there are serious issues with politico-economic regimes that vest the nearly absolute power in the hands of the elites as that is where we end up in the Elysium situation, but they are no less serious than those of regimes where such power is conferred upon the most underprivileged. How long do you think the utopia of the Elysian revolution would have lasted had the plot been taken to its logical conclusion? It would take less than a decade for a populist demagogue to exploit the anarchic political environment to set up a regime very reminiscent of a communist dictatorship. To the best of my knowledge, there has never been a revolution "from below" that led to a different result: the solution to the problem that the regime of "government by the rich" poses is not an armed insurrection, but piecemeal social engineering that will gradually transfer the power from the elites to the middle-class. Admittedly, this solution may take generations or even epochs, but it constitutes a far more promising strategy of social reform than the militaristic revolutions from below.