It's a trap!!!

While watching The Incredibles, I root for the heroes and rail against those that won't let them be incredible. But looking outside of the movie, I struggle to think of any specific instances where society is holding greatness back and building up mediocrity. So, if the point of the movie was supposed to be transferred to our reality where superheroism isn't illegal, I fail to get it.

I disagree with the second article about Rataouille. My argument mirrors someone else's in the comments. It was the rat's superior sense of smell and innate cooking ability that allowed him to succeed. Regardless of the hard work required, a normal rat would not have been to elevate itself. So, Bird hasn't really changed.

I had the same thought. I mostly loved The Incredibles because of their cool John Barry-esque soundtrack and retro-60's styling.

I reckon that any objectivist leanings in The Incredibles arose due to the demands of making an interesting and resonant movie rather than Brad Bird actually believing that a purely Objectivist society would work in the real world.

After all, the fact that the film pretty strongly suggests that had Mr Incredible been less of an arse towards Incrediboy then Syndrome wouldn't have been created at all. A truly objectivist work wouldn't have had that detail, but have made Syndrome grow naturally out of a general resentment in the normal population towards the supers rather than because of the arrogance of one of the chosen few that Rand believed should be allowed to be all they can be.

This does lead to a general point which is addressed by Watchmen, The Incredibles and The Dark Knight Returns, which is that superpowered vigilantes with their own agenda are a headache for a government, and they would naturally want to control or neuter them in some way. Unless you really want to see the supers beating each other up and the one left standing being President of the World/Universe.

Excellent example. My wife had the opportunity to graduate from high school two years early, but the school system she was stuck in refused to allow it.

Or how society allows people with the mediocre skills of moneymaking and political savvy to succeed, whilst not recognizing the deeper value of people with skill in maths, spelling and embedded real-time C++, and fiscally compensating them better for their contribution?

I was thinking about monopoly laws, myself. They're basically the government stepping and saying, "Whoa there, you're too good at business, we're going to have to shut you down."

But... but... no child left behind!

It may be a flaw in me, who as a rule doesn't buy into conspiracies...but I really can't buy this. In this day and age, especially...well, who cares about where greatness comes from or "keeping down the middle class"? Seriously.

In recent years people of low birth have been Prime Minister of the UK and President of the US.

Silicon Valley and biotech and other fields have injected huge numbers of rich people into the system who grew up poor or middle class. You might say, "See, that's why they want to put a stop to it" -- but I'd like a pointer to some first-hand sources that someone in real power has actually plotted with this in mind.

At best, if such conspiracies exist, they've sure failed to do much. (However, if they can take down Oprah, I'll send in my check to the conspiracy!)

Bah, I say. This sort of individual vs. crowd discussion predates Rand. Nietzsche at least acknowledged that the way groups of weak individuals can defend themselves against a strong individual is, in itself, a manifestation of the will to power. He didn't like it, he despised it, but he recognized it as a form of the will to power.

If a particular superhero gets ground down by the mass of ordinary individuals, that just means that the group of low-powered folks used better strategy. Example: when peasants figured out they could defeat a knight using the pike square formation was not an immoral restriction of the Knights innate superiority by the jealous masses, it was a bunch of crafty motherf*ckers figuring out how how to exert MORE power than the would-be ubermench who wants to enthrall them.

All objectivism does is put a moral filter on basic RTS strategy. One side puts all of its resources into building a kick-arse hero character. The other side chooses to do a zerg rush. Is the lone hero morally superior to the masses of weaklings? A consistent reading of objectivism says the answer is "only if he wins". If the zerg rush wins, it is because they exercised more power, or exercised their power more efficiently than the lone individual. If one is going to choose "strong" and "weak" as the most distinction in society, results can be the only thing that counts. Winners are "strong", losers are "weak", so if the crowd overwhelms the individual, the individual wasn't "strong" enough.

In reality, if you want to be super, be super. Just don't whine to me if you aren't super enough to overcome anti-super tactics enacted by a group working together. If the group overcomes the individual, it is because the group has more power. Nietzsche was smart/honest/consistent enough to take account of this. He ended up basing his preference for the Teutonic version of the ubermench over communitarian approaches on anti-semitism. He preferred to be Siegfried rather than a despised Jew. In the end, it was only a preference.

My point is that objectivists and devotees of the individual's will to power claim that communitarian tactics are immoral restraints on individual power. I find an internal contradiction here. They want to revel in the moral neutrality of power: i.e., a person should be free to exercise as much power as he or she can muster. To restrict this power is a moral offense. What they don't see is that this restriction of power is just another form of exerting power. If power truly is morally neutral, than the individual has no grounds to complain when other individuals are smart enough to find a tactic that kicks their arse. Really, complaining about unfair uses of power is employing the tactics of the weak masses, not the honest and straightforward tactics of the uber-mensch. The proper Objectivist or will-to-power response is to kick the zerg rush's arse. Anything else is just weakness disguised as morality, a crime in Rand and Nietzsche'e eyes.

I don't think Rand saw it as a zero-sum game, though. The core story of her two cinder-block novels was of groups as well as individuals trying to take things from others and control them (economic influences didn't count as controlling in her eyes, but persuasive at best). The heroic acts in those bricks of tree pulp were when characters refused to be controlled by others or control others (except in controlling others through the capitalist system, in which, again, she didn't see as anyone lacking volition).

From that point of view, being the knight wasn't any good either, unless there was some semblance of morality in the knight's derivation of power and some semblance of volition on the part of the serfs. For example: If the knight was somehow seen as having earned his lands, and the peasants had some ostensible choice in where to live (and thus of different tax systems and who to owe service to), then perhaps Rand would have seen the system as just. If the system were along the lines of the historical example of divine rights of the nobility, I'm quite certain she would have taken issue. This is not, of course, to declare which side she'd take on the matter of Robin Hood.

If The Incredibles was truly sympathetic to objectivism, then the superheroes would not perform good deeds for others and Syndrome would be an elected official of the government enacting the will of the lesser masses. The blogger confuses Brad Bird's philosophy with the villain's, and he does so consistently through out the article. I'm not sure how I feel about that. It's an interesting philosophical exercise to look for your own meaning in complex art, but if you get the director's message 180 degrees wrong and then criticize him for it...

In some ways, that's the classic mistake of great villains. Wasn't Lucifer almost equal to God, except for the sin of pride/ego? In my favorite tales the hero and villain are almost friends, close in every regard, except the villain was a seriously twisted and incorrect view of the world. I would almost call it a "glass half full/glass half empty" dichotomy, but the whole point of morality tales is to understand the right and wrong, not mix them up.

You can't just drop the raccoon balls on us and then that in the same thread! Dang, man, that ain't etiquette.

The thing about reading morality into these stories, intentional or otherwise, is that you're banking on the author presenting a set of circumstances that are true to the real world. Otherwise the wisdom attempting to be imparted holds no authority, because it's only as applicable as the authenticity of the narrative. Biggest problem here being that even if the author is honestly attempting to encapsulate their message in as authentic a story as possible, they can't reproduce circumstance with the same unbiased hand as reality without resorting to semi-autobiographical stories.

Not that I see any problem with discussing the possibility underlying messages in these stories. They provide interesting dialogue, particularly Oso's take on it, I thought. But I can't help but wonder what the intent of the author is. Does he want us to take the message at face value, and incorporate it into our outlook the same way we would our own experiences; or is the message presented to us as merely a potential valuable outlook, to question and incorporate as we see fit, and to goad us into thinking a little bit deeper about the events going on around us?

With Rand's work I definitely get the impression that it's intended that the reader take the moral for what it is, and swallow it wholesale. Could be wrong there. With Brad Bird I can't quite tell, and Levine's already stated that the way this blogger is reading into it is just one of many and he's just fine with any interpretation.

I can't shake the feeling that if the author does mean to impress upon us a moral by fiction directly, that is an inherently dishonest act, even if the moral is right. At the same time I have to acknowledge that this method of getting your point across, wrapping it in Romanticism, is an exceedingly effective method at transforming a three year old neanderthal into an civilized young adult. Even now I can feel Aesop guiding my every day decisions, including the questioning the morality infused children's stories like his fables. Have I been duped?

Also, he's blogged again since the original post, where the original link just goes to his overall blog and not the posts in question. Here's the Ratatouille one, and here's the Incredibles/Bioshock one.

I disagree here. I think the blogger prefers the villain's notion that everyone can be super through hard work, etc. The problem the blogger sees is that, by making that the viewpoint of the "evil" character, Bird makes the viewpoint seem evil.

In the realm of literary analysis, however, a superhero movie is an open and glaring invitation to analyze as a treatise on the nature and ethics of power/inequality, with especial regard to Nietzschean übermensch and untermench archetypes.

There's a lot of big words and high falutin' idears floatin' around in this bitch. All I know is when Dash ran across water I was all like "PRAISE JEEEEEEEESUS!"

This makes Rand sound much more palatable to me. I read Fountainhead while in high school. I read it a couple of times because it troubled me and I wanted to understand it, not so much because I liked it. I've never felt the urge to revisit Rand, perhaps I've been unfair in assuming her thought is summarized in Anthem and the rest best avoided unless one enjoy's her prose style.

Still, this quote cited in the Bioshock/Incredibles post:

makes me wonder. Does Rand define Happiness or Productive Achievement with any specificity? Most philosophers of freedom run into trouble when they either don't try or fail to put freedom in a context. When pressed, Sartre admitted that his commitment-based justification for life would work just as well for a committed Nazi. In and of itself, his existentialism did not provide a way to determine whether a particular commitment was good/evil. From my admittedly basic understanding of Rand, I don't see a way within Objectivism to evaluate differing versions of happiness or productive achievement.

Thus Fountaine's parasites, from a certain perspective within the bounds of objectivism, can be seen to be pursuing their happiness and productive achievement by working together. Ryan's society had limited room at the top, as Pinky noted: someone has to do the dirty work. For those who found only drudgery in rapture, working together in Fountaine's workhouse proved an avenue to "happiness" denied them in Ryan's system. (Happiness being defined as money/power, as so many seem to choose.)

Given what we now know about different learning styles, modes of intelligence, personality styles, that the most important factor in someone pursuing their happiness and productivity is whether they scored an I (for introvert) or and E (for extrovert) on the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Extroverts will use influence and social skills to achieve productive achievement, rather than the isolated introverted hero-type.