The Political Philosophy of George R.R. Martin (House of the Dragon, Game of Thrones, ASOIAF)

in the year 2022 we're talking about the phenomenon of a song of ice and fire george r martin's corpus of written work as a whole in three very separate categories one of which may remain open-ended for centuries to come okay one category is the book as it was first planned and first written okay so version one of a song of ice and fire again this is not lost without a trace to some extent version one of the story that george was writing it is still implicit in inheriting the text of a game of thrones you could argue the first couple of books first couple short stories uh connected to the same universe also right and these vestiges of the earlier plan the earlier version of what the book was supposed to be and we have a lot of documentary evidence of earlier drafts that have leaked the initial proposal that he sent to the publishers outlining what the books were going to be when it was planned to be just a trilogy a much shorter series of books much more concise storyline okay so this is one category another category is the commercialized adaptation of a game of thrones of the new spin-off hbo was promoting in the year 2022 of perhaps many more spin-offs to come many of you are aware of the kind of legal details of the the deal with the devil frankly george r martin made with hbo that's why he was in no position to negotiate no position to change anything as the first tv adaptation progressively got worse and worse and worse over a period of at least eight years i think it was more like nine years if you measure it month to month beginning to if you go from the pilot episode to that terrible conclusion of the final season of the tv show so it's a long time and if he had a different deal with a different uh filmmaking outfit whatever you want to say you know if it had been adapted for cinema some other situation with some other network broadcaster or what have you possibly he could have changed the showrunners could have changed the director could have negotiated a new direction at some point well that was not his situation at all and it is not a situation at all now and it's not going to be a situation in the future and that that goes on and on and then the third category is the question of what remains to be written what remains to be disclosed in the books themselves i don't want to estimate the body weight of george rr martin i don't want to estimate the state of his circulatory system his cardiovascular health it is a very real possibility that we will never see the conclusion in writing of his books that we will be left for centuries to come to wonder what the books would have been should have been could have been if he had finished writing all right and obviously right now last few days of 2021 and as the year 2022 unfolds obviously that is an area of speculation and these three things are linked right our appreciation of the books as they exist and of the conclusion of the books that's yet to be written or yet to be revealed yet to be published all right our understanding of that is inextricable from our understanding and analysis of the pop culture phenomenon of the adaptation and exploitation of it by hbo corporation making up television shows television shows video games collectible figurines uh board games trading cards i think you know i know they're interwoven each is interlinked with the other you think you think george himself isn't influenced by it he is it's not just the audience it's impossible you know i don't know if you've seen it there's film footage of george he has his own collection of the figurines holding up the figurines based on the characters in his show and he's aware of the differences between the different versions of them and so on you know he's wrapped up in it in it too and yeah both of those categories are understanding and analysis of them it's inextricably indissolubly linked to the notion originally of what the books were supposed to be version zero draft zero as i say it's still there in game of thrones the first volume of the text and it's still there in the proposal that was sent to the uh sent to the publisher so on and so forth um okay so what is the political philosophy of george rr martin and i'm not going to ask you why does it matter i'm going to assert that if there weren't a political philosophy at the center of this cultural phenomenon it would be of no interest at all it would be no of no significance at all now you know um george r martin has written many short stories and novels outside of uh the game of thrones universe some some consist of george rr martin reflecting on and regretting the breakup of his first marriage there's nothing wrong with that it's a perfectly meaningful form of literature and i'm sure some people really care about those stories he wrote some of them seem to be him reflecting on how awful it is to be you know a 400 pound creepy man like really there's there's some that are kind of talking about his obesity and his frankly his body image issues there's nothing wrong with that you can write a story you know you can write a story about what it's like to be you know uh silver white and so forth all right the stories he wrote the books he created that had no political philosophy within them all right i've got to tell you something they are never going to matter in the history of the world the way a songwriting fire games of their own game of thrones etc the way this phenomenon already has mattered and i believe the way it will continue to matter it could matter much more in the future now i said this in a video a little over two years ago but just say it again if you think the political ideas in game of thrones are slightly provocative slightly interesting from a western democratic perspective how do you think they translate into arabic it is translated there back it is being read in arabic it is the movies and tv shows etc the video games they're all being seen in the arabic speaking world you know how do you think this translates into chinese what are the impacts for chinese culture civilization the the meditation on the past present future of democracy and of feudalism and of dictatorship and all all of these themes so yeah it matters it already has mattered for for more than ten years it's reasonable to suppose it's going to matter more in future and let me ask you to reflect if there were no political philosophy in the books of the tv show the song of ice and fire phenomena if it were just a series of romances if this were just about the question of who jamie lannister is going to fall in love with next will jamie lannister you know end up happily ever after you know if george r martin were writing a kind of gene austin romantic literature here would any of you care you know and again you may not consciously think you chose these books you care about these books or you chose the tv show or care about the tv show for expressly political reasons but i'm i'm making the assertion here that the reason why this is so much more interesting and so much more significant than 10 000 other movies that featured dragons and knights riding on horseback i mean do you want to look at the list i mean look at the you know the the the recycling of these tropes you know most most of them go back to actually french and german uh fables for children some some of it yes fine king arthur some of it goes back to english tradition but actually i think this stuff is more french and german than people want to admit it is themselves but any case kind of western european uh fables about the the dark ages for a better term you know okay even now so here we are 2022. do you really care what happens next in jamie lannister's sex life look i have some curiosity i admit but that's not for me what makes it compelling what makes me uh look forward to it i don't think in the long term uh reflecting on it that's that's what's going to matter why uh this cultural phenomenon matters so much now george rr martin's political and religious philosophy has been consistent for decades he has been fascinated by the idea that human beings could achieve immortality through what is called in science fiction meeting a hive mind if you don't know the term hive mind what does it mean why does it matter well the idea that somehow the open-ended process of evolution might result in some species somewhere if not on planet earth on some other planet some species gaining the ability to pool together the memories and experiences of all the members of that species and in this way by depositing your consciousness by downloading your consciousness uh into this so-called high mind into this shared consciousness you know that we would achieve immortality now let's just pause and reflect does that sound like an interesting idea to you because it really doesn't to me it's it's really not very interesting oh hey you know there's this alien planet where the whole species they eat with separate mouths but then they digest and poo with the same stomach organ like wouldn't that be a fascinating idea a species where the esophaguses of all the species somehow mystically merged together so that when one member of the species eats they always that's really not interesting to me at all um i do think of the brain as a biological organ in your body i i think that you know consciousness in the absence of a brain is just as ridiculous as talking about you know digestion in the absence of entrails you know what is digestion digestion isn't one thing there's a whole bunch of chemicals and conditions and structures coming together and working in a kind of synergy you know yeah there's stomach acid involved and there's the long intestine and the small intestine yeah you put it all together and that's the process of digestion well yeah you put all this stuff together and you have the the process of mentation and it's not so different for a monkey and it's not so different for a dolphin it's not so different for a cow you know i mean it's not you know but the idea that this can be merged and that that would be tremendously meaningful or matter i think that's a very shallow very silly childlike delusion now i'm going to talk in a minute about the george r martin's work outside of song whisperer uh stories like a song for leah and so on um the original plan version one or version zero of a song by fire game of thrones if you're aware of this recurring theme that george martin has written about four decades prior to and leading up to uh game house the original plan can be summarized very simply and it was it was a much simpler work with three volumes it was a simpler storyline okay there is a magical boy born with innate superpowers um in a in a castle right and he goes on a mystical visionary quest to discover or rediscover that uh his ancient ancestors or some of them had this better way of life because they had a hive mind right then this hive mind thing has come up in slightly different forms in one george r martin story after another one novel afternoon so it's not that surprising he goes up to the far north beyond the wall yes in the context of this war blah blah blah a civil war i suppose you could say that's going on but he and his mother originally it was the the injured boy and his mother escaped north of the wall very closely parallel to the structure of the the dune novels where the mother and son escape out into the desert and then he goes on a magical mystical vision quest then discovers his superpowers and discovers that he's the messiah-like anointed magical leader of the next phase of a civilization so the the first book there are actually many many palpable uh borrowings from dune oh how else to put it um including you know throughout the books you can find specific sentences specific lines of text that are quoting or cribbing from doing so dune was a significant influence on georgetown right but whereas in dune the spiritual discovery is a hallucinogenic drug you know spice as it's called that and that spice connects to i mean is it even worth summarizing the spiritual spirituality and supernatural elements of of dune but you know um the author of dune was interested in the idea that like our our genetic code carries the memories of events from many centuries earlier that you can you can remember things from the different distant past again to what extent this is mystical or biological so you had a different set of thematic fascinations that by the way connected to a very uh different set of uh uh various different set of political uh tropes and concerns t-man in the audience says ha i was going to say that game of thrones is the dune of the fantasy world yeah yeah yeah yeah well there's a real cause and effect uh relationship between them and anyway sorry i i could i could digress here you know you may or may not know this t-man but george rr martin wrote one particular short story that very much influenced the third star wars movie it influenced the the planet of the ewoks and also the initial invention of chewbacca so the original plan for the star wars movies was that they would travel to chewbacca's homeworld sorry it's the the planet of the wookies whatever the hell it's called maybe wookie stan [Laughter] um you know and uh the tropes from this one particular story by george r martin seven times never kill man that was what that was adapted from including there were several particular illustrations of the furry characters with carrying guns and a gun belt over the shoulder there they are exactly what chewbacca was based on now i assume it's because people got tired of hearing the moaning noise chewbacca made and if you haven't seen the star wars christmas special you are missing out geez that's that's a whole crowded room full of chewbacca-like characters you know wookies remember to be all moaning at each other well yeah believe it or not all of that that whole bundle so so anyway the plan was adapted and instead they go to this other planet called endor which is covered by the ewoks not by the wookiee but believe it or not this whole thing uh is derivative of a particular story by george rr martin so you know that intersected with his life i mean having your ideas uh influence a massive cultural event like the star wars the initial star wars trilogy or something i just say someone like george r martin had many different opportunities to develop a different fascination or a different direction it is interesting that as an old man i'm sorry has no offense but you know he wasn't as a young man that he got into writing these works that are really based on dune it's as an old man that he's going back to dune you know book that had been famous and influential in his youth so he uh i would presume that in the years leading up to or maybe the months leading up to writing the first game of thrones book he went back and reread doom that he looked at it again for one way or another got inspired about it again because i wouldn't say if you look at his career as a whole if you look at what he wrote before game of thrones nobody would say that he was derivative of dune like in general over his whole career but definitely um game of thrones and the the beginning of the song of ice and fire phenomenon it is very very directly a derivative of it inspired by dune the dune books not the dune uh movies i should say okay um so version 0 of the text which is to some extent still extant in the text to some extent we know it from the proposal to the publishing company etc the outline of what the text is going to be this was a story of a boy who discovers or rediscovers that there was this ancient prehistoric culture that had a magical hive mind had the ability to magically merge together people's consciousness so they share each other's thoughts and that this provided people with a real and palpable form of immortality there was a sense in which you would never die because your memories would be shared by other people your experiences we share with other people as opposed to disappearing so this fantasy appears in george rr martin's writing again and again and again and very often as in the story a song for leah the song for leah is the most narrowly focused on just this one issue if you don't find this one fantasy interesting you'll find that story completely boring because that's all it's about a song for leah is holding up this idea of a biologically real immortality achieved through a science fiction hive mind achieved through sharing consciousness etc it's holding it up and contrasting it to um the promises made by religion in the real world religion like catholicism or religion like islam that they just tell you to pray and you're going to have immortality after you after you die uh you know i could say a few other things i guess it might be interesting to note that a song for leah talks about other types of happiness that come from this hive mind joint consciousness experience that interestingly game of thrones does not game of thrones is a song for us of song of fire etc um it very much deals with sex it deals with isolation and loneliness it deals with happiness sensuality like kind of what is the meaning of happiness and then once you know this mystical happiness of being merged into you know the conjoined memories and experiences of others of what significance is your own evidence now admittedly it's just at the end of the extant books as we have them the books that have already been published as of this date in december 2021 at the at the very end of this uh the text we have to to work from um bran he is already becoming acclimatized to the hive mind but it doesn't satisfy him in this way this is a big contrast to a song for leah and i think again we could talk about many of the other books including uh seven times never kill man sometimes never call man it's a meditation on the same issues from a different angle um you could make a list of the books and short stories of george r barnes and ask yourself which ones do and which ones don't deal with the high fight many many many of the science fiction stories that involve this one way or another sometimes even if it's just negatively so if it's just talking about for example the problem of overpopulation and selfishness because of the absence of a hive mind is things to deal with from different uh different perspectives uh anyway i know we don't have that many chapters showing you brand's perspective on the world after he's been merged into this uh business of shared memories and this kind of immortality that's been offered him but he's not happy it's not as though bran's perspective is that oh now he would never want to go back to the real world that he would never want to walk on two feet again that he would never want to just be selfishly interested in his own sex life or having his own children or on the contrary we see a very frustrated and this is also contrasting the book and the tv show tv show to deal with any of this stuff we see a frustrated and miserable crippled boy who still very much wishes he could be a knight and wishes he could uh have sex or have a romance or love affair with someone he very much still wants all the things that a that a normal uh individual human being wants and it seems that having access to the memories of a thousand years or what have you uh being able to see the world with a thousand eyes and one as the book repeatedly gives us this phrase that no this actually doesn't satisfy him in any way whatsoever i it doesn't have this um euphoric or overwhelming or you know life life altering or life ending significance that it does in a song for leah now why am i taking the time to say this well remember one part of what we're discussing or analyzing here are books and stories that have not yet been written and they may never be written um i would encourage george rr martin to get on a vegan diet immediately and lower his chances of having a heart attack by about 70 percent but george r martin may never live long enough to to conclude this tale it is certainly possible based on the text as we now have it that unlike the story of song for leah that bran will rebel against the hive mind that he will rebel against and discard um this idea of the the collocation of memories shall i say of people's memories being worshipped it's possible he will decide that no what's really worth living in life is life as an individual that's possible if so it's a remarkable contrast to what every other story george r martin has ever written has to say about this matter um it is not an exaggeration to say that a large part of his perspective on religion is that what religion is offering humanity is the tempting intoxicating promise of a hive mind and of immortality of exactly this kind that it never can deliver on that this is some kind of fundamental yearning we have as human beings perhaps because our own evolution our own biology is leading toward that conclusion millions of years in the future you know or on some other planet or what have you that that's the kind of end point we we want the the teleological goal we uh we want to work towards biologically sentimentally or however we want to put it uh that this is the fundamental human yearning and then to achieve that is you know kind of totally and ultimately uh satisfying now i'm describing this so far in a somewhat flattering way i've already let you guys know i think it's complete nonsense i mean i know more wants to uh mentate your memories than i want to digest your food you know what i mean i don't want to excrete what you eat it doesn't make sense to me the idea of merging the function of the of one brain with another is not any more mysterious or inspirational or interesting to me the idea of merging one stomach with with another i'm i'm i'm a nihilist in this context i'm a kind of biological nihilist and i i would say further um look at the monkeys of the forest you know creatures that are not so different look at the look at the uh you know look at the squawking penguins of antarctica do you think oh how much better their lives would be if all of them could squawk in unison if each penguin could access the memory of a thousand years of what a thousand other penguins had done um instead of living in this this terrible state of isolation no whatever is meaningful in the life of a penguin is irreducibly and ineluctably and uniquely individual this is my experience whether i'm a monkey in the jungle or a penguin on a sheet of ice in antarctica and i wouldn't even suppose that any one penguin would be particularly interested in the memories of other penguins from a thousand years earlier yeah yeah well that's that's what those guys did with their lives but when i'm interested in what i'm consumed with is what i do with mine you know whether my experience hunting fish or my experience laying an egg or finding a maid all the things that penguins you know uh consumes within their incredibly limited intellectual capacity but you know why would your ideal be of a perfectly harmonious hive-minded penguin society where they all quack in unison instead of all quite each quacking at the other what's you know what's the point i think this is a really stupid and childish misinterpretation not just of human nature but of but of nature with a capital letter n and again you know whatever joy and misery there is in being a monkey whatever may be meaningful in the the life of a monkey which i will readily admit is largely meaningless um still this you know this can't be separated from the individuality of the monkey and his his memories serve his purpose as my memories serve mine my memories are tools for me to make use of and i i just i totally reject this notion that somehow by sharing the tool we'd be transforming uh you know transforming our lives or the meaning of them or what is to be done you know and again even this you know um all of you had grandparents not all of you knew your grandparents how interested were you in your grandparents experiences how much time did you spend asking your grandparents about their memories in their lives do you even care now do you want to after this livestream is over call your grandmother up and say hey share with me your memories and experiences you know most of us don't care and you know what did your grandparents do with their life well they sure sat around playing cards a lot the memories of so many hands of poker of so many games of pinochle you know i'm sorry but you know i think there what it is george r martin is is choosing to romanticize i think is is kind of tragically misguided now you guys may remember it's another real uh science fiction uh um science fiction source material that may have haunted you for the rest of your life there is a moment in the original blade runner film toward the end where the antagonist is going to die and he regrets the first time i saw it it was tremendously emotionally moving to me i forget if i was 11 years old or 16 years old i was a much younger man i was a child or what have you um but you know this so the villain the antagonist is dying and he he says the words he is regretting he's reflecting that all of his memories the memories of all these amazing things he has done they will now dissolve and disappear forever like tears in the rain you know like you know tear drops joining the rain that runs down his face they'll disappear forever and yes that can seem very moving uh when my own father died i remember just kind of reflecting how remarkable it was because my father was an expert in a number of kind of technical fields he knew a lot about how to set up the lighting in art galleries for example he worked in art galleries wow there was this whole you know it was kind of a century worth of expertise you know an experience within this technical field that was accessible the day before yesterday and now is irretrievably lost forever you know now you know just a few days ago you could have asked this guy a question within this you know the history of museums and how to how to plan and build museums that was this is their expertise and he could have instantly and effortlessly told you the answer and today at no price someone knows you know i understand there's this sentimental sense of of what is lost but you know for myself as a mature adult i want to completely unsentimentally you know assert to you that no you know thoughts in your head you know they exist in space just like a discarded can of coke on the sidewalk you know like these are things they come and go you make use of them and when you're dead they're gone and they're of no use to you and they're of no use to anyone else anymore and you know you may cherish your memories but i think even that is a mistake i think it's a mistake george rr martin in his private life is guilty of just based on his writing based on his his sentimentality you know as i know it if you want to be understood if you want your memories and experiences to matter to someone else you have to put in the level of effort equal to creating a work of art now some of you if you have a grandfather who lived through world war ii you are probably not that interested in hearing him say casually and drunken drunkenly uh meander through a bunch of reflections about what happened in world war two you may have had this experience ask your grandfather hey what did you do in world war ii and you just get a bunch of sneering aimless sarcastic remarks and reflections okay so that's that's memory i mean your grandfather would have to put an effort even if it's not recorded and it's not written for a book he would have to put in the effort to gather his thoughts and organize them and present you with a kind of work of art it could be a podcast it could be a youtube video obviously he could write a memoir he could write a book or something but that actually if we want other people to understand our memories if we want them to be able to make use of our memories if we want them to uh if we want to even be interested or curious about our memories that requires art and what's significant in life is not actually sharing your memories or showing your consciousness or having a high bond what's significant is sharing works of art and well that's actually the production and work and labor and to understand how unnatural that is that that's not something biological you know this is something contrary to and outside of uh nature evolution and all of the science fiction and religious tropes that he that he brings into it um so uh niles uh venstrum says uh homie make deep dive videos on a song of ice and fire release your perspective on it um it's it's new to us well if you check the playlist niles you may already know but i think this is gonna be the 24th video in that in that playlist uh so you already have many many hours to listen to of me talking about game of thrones but you know a really sort of saddening question to think about is how much am i going to care when the next book finally comes out five years ago i would have been so thrilled to see a new game of thrones book i would have been so thrilled to even have a new tv show or film adaptation but today you know today all of our expectations have been very much all of our expectations have been very much dimmed and diminished so someone in the audience knew the name of chewbacca's homeworld so it was not in fact wookiestan it was not waconia it was not the republic of wook trade market now republic of look come on the wook republic you know [Laughter] so yeah t-man comments quote i've always thought of the hive mind as an a religious philosophy a christian wonder if that's a typo if you mean that so he said an irreligious philosophy christian writers like c.s lewis wendell berry and kierkegaard are conspicuously anti-hive mind yeah okay well um there's a lot in that comment that that's an interesting uh set of reflections there uh t-man um or perhaps you pronounce it that's more sounds more fun um you know in some of george rr martin's stories it's completely explicit that the concept is being used to demolish religion it is being used as part of a very harsh critique of an attack on religion i do not think you could say that about um a song of ice and fire yet it's not there yet uh it's just not i mean it's abs you know you can you can put together all the different comments about about religion in the books uh but no doubt you know as i say version zero of the text what what was happening there where was it coming from where is it going well again bran goes to the mysterious woods in the north discovers this remnant of a more ancient people whose lives were intertwined with the the first men who are very closely parallel to first nations indigenous people in this kind of so the last remainder of the indigenous people the last remember the so-called children of the forest and children of the forest itself is also an allusion to uh first nations who were referred to that way in french by french colonists uh in you know what's now quebec pretty far north in canada and so on um [Music] anyway uh this i presumed cultural illusions i assume he is not alluding to the indigenous people of northern laos which is also possible um but anyway uh you know that's a very simple linear demonstrative plot development and then he returns presumably i mean again that's already happened in the tv show he returns to in some sense rule or control westeros now you tell me does anyone believe that in the books it ends with bran being the king in king's landing it's i think most people at least as the books exist now on paper seems wildly improbable it's possible that was the idea in version zero was that bran would triumphantly return uh again if it's closely modeled on dune then that would that would follow the pattern of dune you know again exile in the desert spiritual awakening and then the guy becomes a sort of great revolutionary political leader when he returns today it's this is not impossible that was the that was the original plan for the book so that it's an idea that's still um you know that george r martin is still playing with but i think most people anyway today it seems very very hard to see that the the final conclusion of the plot is going to be bran stark king of westeros and indeed sorry i mean ultimately what what would that mean philosophically what would that mean politically well again if it's a 100 un-ironic extension of the same set of tropes that george rr martin has been obsessed with throughout his whole career it will just be a reflection on the superiority of this hive mind form of organization that what's really superior is being able to access the memories of people from centuries ago and to have this immortality provided to you through the merging of individual consciousness well okay it could be that that is where the text is going and that's where it always initially was going if so i mean you know then really you're in a situation where um the red god the uh the god of fire is fighting against this hive-minded god and you have a situation where one religion is the true religion and the other is false you know like globally for westeros and nsos combined and that's the moral of the story is that this is uh a combat between a real monotheistic religion a monotheist religion as a true theos as a true god true magical power behind it um that relor whatever you want to say the red religion in this fictional world and then on the other hand you have whether you want to call it the blue religion or what have you but the religion north of the wall which is based on a true supernatural hive mind and the thesis is just that that hive might offers a better future for humanity and that in the distant past it offered some kind of lost utopia some kind of wonderful world for the children of the forest that was a better way to have an intelligent society it's possible it's just that dumb and that's possible that's why none of the other political ideas really make any sense or are going anywhere now you know it's possible also there is some material about democracy in the books as they're already extant so the books that have been published and some of the isolated chapters of the next book have been published so i'm treating all that as what's already known what's already been been published or distributed on the internet uh we do get tyrion and a few other witnesses reflecting upon how different the democracies of the exotic east are from feudalism in westeros it's possible instead a more a more sophisticated future well again the books may never be finished it's possible that bran goes witnesses the reality of this hive mind and rejects it but rejects also the individualism and selfishness that makes feudalism so horrible in this fictional world and then he knows he then concludes oh there's a middle path which is democracy that oh what you need is not a hive mind not a science fiction i fight i feel like you have to insist this is a science fiction i might i don't know as opposed to a biologically real or i think so also if you think if you say hive mind without science fiction do you guys actually think this is how bees perceive the world like it's such a weird choice is this how ants experience reality no of course not you know um it's possible bran will reject uh you know the the collocation of of memories and what have you and will instead say well what's really important is that we have this very different kind of uh cooperation through democracy and political equality which again the book does not hold up as a positive example it shows tyrion laughing at and scoffing at um flagrantly corrupt elections all the discussions we get of democracy in the east and by the way also these same just as with ancient greece and ancient rome democracy is combined with slavery whereas feudalism excludes slavery so you know uh westeros does not have democracy but they also don't have slavery whereas essos at least some cities and [ __ ] have both uh democracy and slavery so you know again okay that would be more more sophisticated is it more plausible does anyone really think that the ultimate point of the game of thrones books is to recognize the superiority of braavosi society what westeros needs is to reform to resemble bravos again the whole structure of the book especially if you're aware of version zero it doesn't make sense that way you could have a totally different book that consists of uh bran going into exile in braavos and deciding bravo really has a better foreign political organization and then returning to westeros uh by the way you could have that also with um wow it's been a while seven reading talk about these books the last of the targaryens daenerys daenerys targaryen daenerys targaryen goes away to live in essos do you think the the conclusion of the story is that daenerys brings the full brutality and barbarism of uh nomadic you know horse-riding peoples that she reorganizes uh the society of west west uh sorry westeros to resemble the society of vessels you know this is not plausible again especially if you if you've read uh uh you know version zero of of the plot um indeed inversion zero how much space was even given to daenerys and her story how much did she matter how much would she have been developed if it were only three volumes long uh following that original plan i think barely at all i think there wouldn't be that much that much space for her to matter as a character in all her meditations about slavery and political leadership uh so and so forth but i think uh anyway you know what is the political philosophy of daenerys targaryen it is not the political philosophy of george r martin i mean it's not the point of this book you know the tv show again tv show handled this in an incredibly clumsy and ultimately boring way but when daenerys returns from sos to westeros she doesn't have a better idea of how to organize society she doesn't have a political agenda her agenda is revenge and if you've read the books you know george rr martin is anti-revenge part of the whole reason for the southern conspiracy plot um taking down adorn and someone is just the critique of revenge revenge vendettas etc so it can't possibly be that the books are going to end with the celebration of revenge but you know what democracy barbarity feudalism what really matters is getting revenge in enemies there is no way that's the conclusion and the point of all these themes and issues and examples that george r martin has been has been playing with now you know it is possible sir but in terms of the the role daenerys might play at this moment religiously who does daenerys work for now in the book you know how much philosophy is there that can be separated from religion most of the philosophy is is tight religion well you know the short answer is nobody she's not working for the the red god relore she's not working for the children of the forest or you know their mysterious leader with a thousand eyes and one etc etc you know she's not she doesn't believe in or support any of the religions it is it is possible that in the book unlike the tv show that when she arrives in westeros she will just literally destroy some or all of the religions some of his anti-religious themes could come out there well no you know never forget i know from some of us we've read it such a long time ago but the initial introduction of the god relore is in the context of both burning statues and burning people of human sacrifice the brutality and evil of the religion overlords really shown to us up front and um the reason we are given for opposing stannis which now has become easier and easier to forget as so many books have gone by the reason we're giving for opposing stannis is that it will it will just be unspeakable evil will come from his religious fundamentalism that his commitment to that religion and what he will do if he takes over power will be terrible now the tv show has spoiled this for us of course but presumably we're going to be reminded of how evil stannis really is and how how evil his religion is and and that agenda when he sacrifices his own daughter to the gods this is there's already people already predicted that in the books just based on the way it was written uh that it was implicitly foreshadowed in the style of writing but of course this actually happened on the tv show that's a plot twist uh yet to come so you know yes there is a whole there is in terms of the political philosophy of the books he's set up quite a number of religions that he opposes explicitly it is not possible that the conclusion of the books the political hypothesis and conclusion will be you know what people need people just need to be conquered by the iron islands people just need to convert to the religion of the iron house that's a good that's a good religion though the drowned god that's there's you know what people really need to do is reform westeros to get back to the old way of the iron islands you know that's a whole long discourse and there's a kind of cultural critique and anthropology there what he has to say about the the iron islands and religion and politics in that in that context having set up those those abstractions but he's setting them up like bowling pins to be knocked down one religion after another in these books is bad bad bad evil evil evil wrong wrong wrong now basically what i'm saying to you is my my hope is that the hive mind in the north that the the religion that bran represents will also be in some sense overturned as bad evil wrong i mean what we've been told again and again at this point this this could be a big difference from dune right well a big difference from um the original trilogy of star wars also star wars if case you didn't know was influenced by doom it's derivative of doing to a remarkable extent okay so in the original star wars if you haven't seen all the movies and tv shows and crap that's what the very very first film the main thing you're told is oh this is an old ancient religion that's disappeared and been forgotten and nobody believes in it anymore they're just a few people darth vader is one of them and you know there's this showdown where darth vader is facing off against some kind of military commander or general and it's obvious most people have nothing but contempt for the force and for you know uh the distant memory of the jedi knights whatever they once were now later in these in these films including the so-called prequels all of this changes and in fact this religion only disappeared a couple decades ago well it disappeared around the time luke was born and luke is like 16 so like okay so 16 years ago this really completely screwed up the continuity and and that's lost it's not possible for a mass religion and a whole army and series of civil wars and things like that it's not possible for the jedi knights to be forgotten in 16 years it's just ridiculous but anyway in the original film one of the main things that's stressed is that this is this ancient doctrine that has become obscure and forgotten and it's special but now luke is going to revive it he's the chosen one who's going to revive this ancient mysteries okay that's a trope we've all seen about a thousand times got it well george r martin sets you up with exactly the same pattern or luke skywalker is this kid in a wheelchair this crippled boy and it is emphasized again again right up to the end of the the books as we don't have them right at the end of the extent text you know oh there are fewer and fewer children of the forest all the time there are fewer and fewer ravens that are capable of doing this everything is shrunk these are the last survivors in the last cave of this disappearing culture well yes it's possible he's going to just do the luke skywalker plot it's possible he's going to do the dune battle for arrakis plot well oh guess what the the religion of these indigenous people who have been kind of ignored and mistreated by the authority that the peasant indigenous religion of the remote country said that that's now going to become the religion of the empire that would be the dune structure right to take the sorry uh the fremen in dune the indigenous people of the deep uh remote areas of the desert and then take that and take over the the capital and make it the emperor's ruling culture okay that's that's possible that's probably in version zero of the text the original draft for this to be only three volumes that's probably exactly what bran was going to do because you're going to take this religion from the cave and bring it to the capital city and now everyone gets to be ruled by magical ravens that remember things that happened a thousand years ago and they get to put their consciousness into a hive mind all this [ __ ] great okay so yeah it is totally possible it is also possible that now because the story has drifted and george martin's interest has drifted a very long way away from that it is totally possible that bran will instead conclude look this religion has died out for a reason you know what human sacrifice in front of a magical tree that's something from the past that should stay in the past it's just not that great um it's possible he's going to conclude you know what what really matters is his own life and for everybody in society their own lives here and now and not to be beholden to a peculiar species of immortals you know in a cave somewhere uh not neither do you behold into the trees nor the ravens nor the peculiar sort of immortality they represent that maybe this should be it should be left behind now look guys i haven't even mentioned once here the the so-called the great others i think nobody predicts maybe george barbara martin is going to surprise all maybe the conclusion is that the great others march all the way south nobody stops the zombies they completely conquer everything and that's the end of civilization they just wipe out westeros completely ceases to exist after having been entirely conquered uh by the others nobody nobody is predicting this um what will happen with the war with the great otherwise or what that what that represents so i guess i might as well say it any of you know the books i think will already feel this and not really needed to be explained but the political and philosophical significance of the great others is of course that it fails to unite westeros against a common enemy um the warring factions the feuds the different ideologies and so on that they represent the different notions of morality and the different religions they represent they ought to all i mean hypothetically they ought to all support stannis they ought to all unite behind stannis and you know like stannis says he he uh concludes that uh he doesn't have to uh become the king in order to save the kingdom he has to save the kingdom in order to become the king they could all back stannis and say look you know what what really the the thing that really matters right now is not the house of dorne getting revenge for the murder of uh you know the former wife of the king and so on you know there's specific members the royal family were killed in the you know a generation earlier that's not what really matters what really matters is that dorne and you know uh each of the houses each with their own petty uh power mongering politics going on that they set those things aside they set their religious differences aside that the iron islands and the house of the north they all reconcile the differences and together fight against the great other a term that comes straight out of a [ __ ] anthropology textbook you know it's uh about as subtle as an elephant in heat completely obvious the symbolic significance and they don't you know and the lack of union and the continued infighting uh far beyond the point of the issue of diminishing returns for the point where they're they're destroying their own possible survival and future that's the political and philosophical significance there okay but what next you know like you know that is that's that's a good point i mean don't get me wrong that's a that's kind of a great and meaningful meditation for for humanity but you know okay what's the conclusion you know what's it all about uh look there is no way that the political and philosophical conclusion in this book is jamie lannister has all the answers you know it has been hinted at again and again jamie lannister had the option to take the throne at many different points and that he still could you tell me do you think the actual conclusion story just like well jamie lannister learned all the lessons of house lannister he learned all the lessons from this war and he's got the correct political philosophy he knows what's best for the future of westeros so it's going to be reconciled the whole thing will be settled under his rule there's no chance i mean if jamie lannister ever sits on the iron throne i think it'll last for two chapters it'll be two chapters before someone cuts his head off you know it's hard to imagine that that lasting any length of time and it probably would make some kind of philosophical or political point it's possible that's that's gonna happen you know uh nobody thinks that his sister cersei lannister is uh yeah that's how it's gonna end is cersei wins the war because cersei knows how to rule the kingdom you know because cersei wants to impress you know her deceased father cersei gets her revenge against the male gender you know uh she she resents that she wasn't born a boy and she was never good enough to please her father and the end of the plot is she's finally satisfied she went nobody thinks this is possible and the reason for this is fundamentally i mean this is implicit in the first half of the the discussion of the video you know this is a book written for political and philosophical purposes right it's not the case that he is just writing a story and then happens to be bolting on political philosophy afterwards the whole story is structured about and the reason why it's meaningful and the reason why these things are unfolding is a kind of um political and philosophical hypothesis so i won't say it again the part of that political philosophy that's easy to iterate that's easy to specify is the critique of religion right okay but what is the book saying positively about religion that's very hard to say right the part of the book that's easy to uh analyze specify atom right iterate but it's easy to deal with is the critique of feudalism right okay so we don't have to talk about it we're all sophisticated people right critique of feelings okay but what is it saying positively whether about democracy or about something better than feudalism what what does it think about i can't say it's saying anything positive about feudalism this is one of the most rousing condemnations of feudalism of the last century this is a really in-depth passionate condemnation of feudalism and in many ways a passionate condemnation of religion too the religion of the dark ages broadly speaking okay but you don't think he's condemning feudalism because he thinks we should go back to living like the nomadic horse people of essos do you that would be an easy novel to write any of you could write that novel okay the novel is daenerys targaryen grows up in this horrible feudal society she's exiled she runs away to live in the wild plains with uh you know much better life enjoyed by nomadic people living at a lower level of technology blah blah blah and she learns oh this is really the life worth living and then brings it back to westeros and burns down all the stone houses and forces people to go back to living as nomads that's that'll be a much easier novel to write right you have a very simple sense of good and evil oh so society living in uh settled villages towns and cities that's bad nomad nomadic warrior slave trading you know horse riding you know this kind of pseudo mongolian uh parallel universe in in hessos oh and that's good that's the life that's worth living and then transpose one of the other obviously that's not the point you know obviously you know i don't think daenerys targaryen represents any kind of positive fluster or or you know moralistic reforms so withering critique of religion yes withering critique of feudalism yes obviously but what is the point positively what is it that brandon stark is going to learn in that cave that is the conclusion that is the point of game of thrones of the whole a song of ice and fire universe and by the way this is also why it's fundamentally really quite meaningless to go back further in the timeline there's really nothing interesting in dealing with the foundation of you know the house of the dragon or whatever you want to call it the founding of of house targaryen because again in terms of political philosophy what the book is is dealing with it doesn't have to do with that they're not it's not really interested in the justification of a system of feudalism through the bloodline of the rulers being linked to telepathic control of dragons um the further back you go in the history the further you go away from you know this unique drama that's in the in the song of ice and fire books um the turning point in history that this that this is all about uh you know it it really i i recognize hbo was trying to make money by going further back in the timeline instead of further ahead and there were proposals going all the way back to the age of heroes to some you know go back to kind of the stone ages in in westeros but then i mean fundamentally what is the point you know how how can we have a book or a movie or a tv show that's just glorifying the victory of the dragon riding people who conquered this society and created this horrible feudal system that the books the song of ice and fire books exist to criticize excoriate and ultimately overturn like to show the the badness it's just i mean i know it's an overused term it's kind of tone tone-deaf to engage in a glorification of house targaryen when the whole point is setting them up as the evil that westeros didn't have any good to contrast to it you know like the house targaryen had to fall it had to be torn down and the whole society created by hostile grant had to be told torn down it's completely ridiculous to have a society based on people believing in the genetic superiority of albinos that's what we're talking about right albinism people born with white hair and purple eyes they have a genetic abnormality and everyone's supposed to worship them well read the actual duncan egg novels you know read the way that's depicted that's that society that had to be torn down that's i mean there's nothing positive about the the rule of the targaryens it's depicted in this really really negative way this really thorough going critique of again feudalism and religion so i think the step uh backward being taken by uh hbo i i can only i can only see the disadvantages of it or not and not the advantages because it's in as much as you're turning this into a glorification of a celebration of house targaryen um you're taking a meaningful story and rendering it uh completely meaningless oh right guys sorry and in terms of the conclusion of the book nobody seems to think that the conclusion of the story is to to re-establish house targaryen right like whether or not that's through the bloodline of jon snow being revealed nobody thinks oh well the point is westeros has been messed up because they have been lacking dragons and lacking a supposedly genetically superior sub-race of humanity of genetically superior feudal house that is the only group of people capable of writing the dragons so the way to solve westeros's problems is to restore to the throne someone with that bloodline whether that's jon snow or not whether that's daenerys targaryen or not to restore to the throne people with white hair and strange eyes who have some kind of genetic advantage in writing dragons and then and then problems will be solved why because you'll go back to completely hopeless uh despotism forever and ever you know so i just mentioned everyone knows there is this issue of the targaryen bloodline obviously with jon snow being one of the main characters so and so forth and no in this sense nobody cares nobody thinks that can be the real political and philosophical significance of the books right that can't be the uh that can't be the conclusion that this is uh this is working its way towards and look again if it wasn't already implicitly obvious enough our understanding of the political and philosophical significance of this huge corpus of text leading up to that conclusion right we can't really understand any of it until the end of the story is is shown and that's also why i think it's so important to analyze what version zero of the text would have been what the text would have been if george r martin had just written that short three volume uh version that you know was was set out the initial proposal to the to the publisher i mean cybas the literal game of thrones in the book he didn't even have that idea until like volume five or six or something of this series it's not there in the first book game of thrones all right yeah well you know life is like a game of cybast this goes on and on and on we have all these discussions about politics and the nature of different characters being shown and reflected on from the way they play cybes right so you have all this kind of all this symbolism all these references and reference right but we until the the story is done and it may never be done there is this real sense in which we can't know what he is going on about but again based on the corpus of his work leading up to this it seems it seems very difficult to believe that the conclusion is just going to be oh well bravo's had it right along that's the way to organize society or that any of the city states of of essos had it right it's certainly not going to be we have to get back to being ruled by the bloodline of of ancient valyria so you know george r martin has now been you know deep he's he's been deeply committed to this kind of uh this long game of cybes this long series of reflections and analyses and and critiques of of politics and and religion and again the the negative analytical element what it is he's against what he's criticizing what is he's exploring it's very clear but uh the extent to which we really remain in the dark about the positive conclusion um well it's fascinating in a word it's it's fascinating and i cringe to think that the conclusion of this book is ultimately just going to be the same as a song for leah and seven times never kill man because that's it's very possible it's very possible that george r martin hasn't changed and that all he can do in the end is point the finger and say look um humanity can't be happy until it can imitate a beehive in the you know organization of its behavior until we have this you know totally fictional notion of a hive mind i'm just going to look at the the questions here because they did have some questions and comments coming in melissa has been uh melissa has been patiently sitting through this performance is there anything you want to ask about and you want to anything you want to draw my attention to no i just think it's funny that when you mentioned the drowned god i was thinking just that and i had a smile come to my face because i was thinking of just the ridiculousness of the religion within chemotherapy that wasn't right right so the drowned god though it really is true to form for martin in that it's taking some of the fictional aspects of religion and making them physically real and even scientifically real so you know they have a resurrection experience a life after death experience where they're briefly drowned and resuscitated they're given cpr after drowning and that this is you know in the cultural context a great deal is made of it so it's moving beyond mere baptism where people briefly black out drowning and then come back from the dead and this is at the crux of their religious experience so i mean that that's that's really the way he likes to write about religion like is to look at something and say okay well your religion has resurrection okay what if there really is resurrection um oh okay well your religion promises immortality of the soul okay well what if there really is immortality of the soul and then to kind of expose it or demonstrate it in a tragic way you know so in a song for leah you get immortality of the soul your body is also literally consumed you're eaten alive by a kind of parasite that's how you achieve this immortality so you know i mean now again to me i don't think this is great writing um but this is something that's been in science fiction and fantasy uh for a very long time you know the idea that you you have to make some kind of terrible segments now again some of that i feel that the earlier books are not as well written as as the later books but you know you do get these ideas already even in uh daenerys targaryen demanding that this ritualist save the life of her husband you know uh cal drogo the king of the horse lords everyone say um you know oh okay well i can do that for you you know and it is magic it is it is supernatural you can have immortality but of his body only you know it's the immortality of the body not of the soul and this is contrasted to there are several ways in which you do have immortality the soul game of thrones you can live on you can be immortal in the mind of a raven flying around a cave in the arctic circle you know is that is that the kind of immortal you want because look i'm just saying if that were on offer i wouldn't want it i'm not into it i'm not i'm not buying if that's your religion i'm not buying and i'm not going to engage in human sacrifice or animal sacrifice in front of a magical tree uh to get it but yeah that's that's really that's really his pattern and um you know the idea that religion would take away people's extreme sexual desires or evolved mating instincts and control overpopulation as a result that it would kind of discipline and subdue a population which obviously is a certain kind of anthropological way of looking at what religion is in the real world uh in seven times never kill man that's made real it's a go okay so they have this mystical religion and it actually takes away their more ape-like instincts their more mammalian instincts and they they have this very limited sex drive and they they mate in this you know they reproduce in this controlled way and then when they lose their religion all of these instincts return and instead they're having too many babies and too much violence and internacion fighting so they recover these more human and also more mammalian aspects of their character that their religion was was taking away so that is that is very much what he likes to do again and again and again but you know what is the point you know look you can ask this this is a legit question you can ask even of the books as they already exist so the books may never be finished looking at the corpus literature we have already for george rr martin in the political philosophy george r martin what is true happiness there are so many things you can look at and say oh this is not true happiness this is not your happiness no this is this is a false kind of happiness tyrion lannister you know what money money is not happiness uh sleeping with prostitutes is not happiness alcohol is not happiness and you know again you can also find these ideas throughout his other writings his writing prior to uh song by giving us he's not uh he's not a hedonist in the sense he doesn't really believe in many of his characters sleep around not jamie lannister interesting i mean jamie lannister lives this kind of chased life uh despite despite his deplorable relationship with his own sister but anyway you know um otherwise he and he's not comfortable with his sexuality this way but you know what is happiness in game of thrones from the very beginning and including in the dunkin egg novellas happiness is not serving an oath happiness is not honor happiness is not living by a nightly code right in a very 1960s way george r martin is instead saying to you all the time hey all this stuff about chivalry and nightly honor and living by an oath and a code that's just the man trying to keep you down that's just the system oppressing us that's throughout the whole thing right you you see that there's this sense of uh rebellion against honor and nobility and and all those tropes i mean i don't just mean that he's subverting them in some literary sense he's really telling you this is bad and evil and wrong this is not true happiness but what is right okay you could really rapidly go through all the religions the religion of law pardon me the religion of relore is not offering you true happiness even though it can offer you it does offer you prognostication about the future this is one of the most desirable things for people in the whole history that wanting to know the future wanting to control the weather i mean there are certain things that people have for millennia hoped to find in religion well the religion of relore actually offers you many things i mean magically in this book oh okay so if you join this religion and if you do this kind of thing you can stare into the fire and you can actually get guidance and advice and visions of the future and so on you know uh and by the way some people take the view that the religion of war hasn't revealed the things that will actually happen in the future that that instead it's only revealing like what's currently unfolding kind of thing um to carry the book well in case you forget there was definite foreknowledge that if um tyrion lannister got on a particular boat this is when he's a prisoner that there would be a shipwreck and that he would instead end up with daenerys targaryen so that is a program that's pronounced prognostication for the future for something incredibly improbable and something that nobody had control over an uncontrolled shipwreck and it happened so again he's taking something that's normally fictional in religion or is even a swindle in religion in the real world if someone promises you they can show you what's going to happen in the future okay well let's make that real within this fantasy science fiction world and it's tragic and it's horrible and it reveals to you the darkness of human nature right like oh like wouldn't it be a wonderful world if this thing we dream of or wish foreign religion were real no no no it wouldn't be wonderful here's what human nature is really like that's what he looks to do again and again you know so so likewise i mean someone could hypothesize you could write a very boring novel where the religion of the iron islands just satisfies human nature and that's it you know how about by the way just the religion of uh sorry in the southeast of westeros where they still fight where they still decide um who's guilty who's innocent because they believe in the religion of the seven so much that they just fight duels of honor sorry so there's throughout westeros but the conservative parts of westeros still do this um uh in the veil that's what i was thinking so in the veil they still believe in this right oh well tyrion lannister is on trial so is that good is it good to have people believe that a sword fight reveals the will of the gods is that good or evil you know obviously it is it isn't fair to say that george is satirizing these things it's not a satire of religion he's saying oh okay let let me show you what life is like in a society where people really believe in fate where people really believe that minor and trivial things you can't control or who wins a sword fight and something that that is the fate of the gods or reveals oh and guess what here's what human nature is like you know so i and again even in that case was tyrion lannister in a stern minnesota guilty does anyone believe you know even within this fictional world that who wins a sword fight really does reveal guilt or innocence uh in a trial um yeah and the the next uh humanitarian does the same trick again as you know he has another uh trial by combat and what was the conclusion of that trial and and by the way the murder mystery who actually the different murder mysteries and who's responsible for what some of them also remain still undisclosed and unknown who actually killed joffrey baratheon you know justice for joffrey [Laughter] well if you believe in the trial by combat then you have your answer right if you believe you believe in the gods and maybe that is the answer maybe that's the the plot twist is that you know so no i just say that's that's very much his his pattern with that um you know many people many youtubers even they try to interpret the books as being anti-war i think that's not true i mean i think that's actually a real misunderstanding it's not anti-war i think like all of us george rr martin is opposed to fighting meaningless wars for for meaningless reasons okay we had samuel tarly uh mentioned here so someone said samuel charlie for king at least he reads books but that's not the point of his like so look if george r martin if the political philosophy if you really were a pacifist that could be the conclusion it could be you know what samwell tarly was rejected by his own father his own father we eventually find out was is a really great military leader it's many books later that we get his father fleshed out as a character a bit by the way but you guys some people may read the books they might not even connect them so many pages later but samuel tarley's father does come up again um thousands of pages later whatever many many hundreds of pages there um okay so his father was a great military leader his father rejected him for being a coward but in fact samwell tarly is the best possible political leader that a different author could have written that book we say no you know who's really you know the better way to organize society is to have people like samuel tarly as our leaders that is not george martin's perspective i mean i would wager money maybe george would would then do it intentionally just to take my money away from me but like there is no chance that the point inclusion of the book is simultaneously is right and among other things ultimately coward or not samuel tarly has to fight against the great other which is that ultimately there are some things worth fighting for or worth fighting about that that that runs through all all the books even uh the mercenary who worked for um tyrion lannister and then he ends up eventually parting ways with him uh he has a simple name like grim but i'm forgetting it now what is that braun braun so you know braun the mercenary you know to me it's actually very touching and moving that he ends up in this situation where he's in this small castle and may have to fight for his life against tyrion's sister you know what as she temporarily takes over power and you know you know you have these really deadly serious struggles for survival within politics in terms of civil war and then also with one kingdom against another i don't get the sense at all that george r martin is anti-war in that sense he doesn't it's not that he thinks all war is is bad or fruitless or that sam sanchez is good right but again that could any of you you could write that book instead someone else could write a book that's sincerely anti-war and where also by the way i don't even think what he's saying about uh essos is that like the problem with those people is that they love war or something you know the critique of essos is not a critique of of war the whole the books as a whole they contain a great deal of reflection on on man's inhumanity man for sure but and yet they are not anti-war and by the way the books as we currently have them one of the last things sam tarley says i know it's not the absolute last thing but you know um toward the end of the text of god of course someone asks him are you still a coward and he proudly says no i've fought a great other i've done this have done that that he regards himself he no longer is a coward that he's gotten over it that he's accepted the role of of violence and more so inasmuch as sam tarly um is a mouthpiece for the philosophy of george r martin he's someone who started off as a fat book reading nerd and a coward but who who did indeed uh man up as they say who did indeed come to embrace uh the notion of himself as a more active and you know muscular character in the the abstract sense of of muscular yeah sort of and by the way that may be what's coming next in his plot i think it's quite likely that in the books as in the tv show he's going to reject becoming a maester he's going to say screw this i've got to go back and fight a war i've it's handled very poorly in the tv show but presumably that is what's going to happen he's not going to do five years of training he's going to briefly talk to the people at the citadel and say well look there's a war to fight i'm going to go back and fight it but yeah what did you say i found your discussion of the mind science fiction yes my thesis is that that is the center of the story that that is what the books are organized around and version zero of the text i think that's clear on so but i may be wrong i think in versions of this case we'll see what happens with the final text yeah i just thought you remember arya stark's involvement with the many face gods yes which hasn't been mentioned in this episode there's so much to talk about right right yes all right right no no no so look look it's a great example and extends this discussion and it's especially interesting to talk about politically okay the many face god of essos so everyone assumes this is just a shaggy dog story that this isn't the main plot and i think that's probably right but if i'm wrong it's even more interesting right like the story of bran and his voyage to the north and whatever his spiritual discovery is and then his return that is the central story of these books that's not my choice it's not my preference probably be more interesting if arya stark is the main character and is the central story that way if her voyage to braavos and her return if that's the world-changing spiritual discovery right but clearly it's not again if i were writing the book maybe maybe i would make arya stark that kind of world transforming epoch defining hero character but that's not the book george is writing um okay the religion of the many-faced god the death cult of braavos it's not a hive mind it's a religion we are explicitly told created by a slave rebellion ah so this is political right so you had these slaves rebelling against the slave masters this was the oppressed against the oppressor and then after that brief initial period um it's remained tolerated within bravosi society that anyone can take revenge on anyone and again george r martin has anti-revenge comes up it's explicitly articulated throughout the book but that anyone can can take revenge on anyone just by basically asking to do so at this temple and let's be clear there's no trial there's no jury there's no presentation of evidence so what do you think happens in the real world the tv show completely dropped the ball on this i mean if george r martin has a heart attack tomorrow we'll never hear but obviously in the book this is not being praised and held up to you as an excellent idea hey what do you think would happen if we opened a temple of the many face god in in las vegas nevada next week how many people playing cards are commission i'm certain that guy cheated me in poker and we'll go to the temple and you know like human nature is dark how many people are going to get revenge and how many other people for for what for what petty reasons or just based on a lie based on a misperception or misconception so so far in the book none of that has been dealt with none none there's been there has been no skepticism or scrutiny um on the morality of the temple the miniface got and now this is partly because we're seeing it from the perspective of a child who unlike in the tv show she has a very good quality of life there the quality of food and clothing and so on she has she's actually taken care of her weather and she's very happy about being at the temple this tv show made it look like a rather dreary it made it look like slavery uh her status but that's not the case in the book at all and she's in the process of learning this new language and doing all these different assignments under underassumed identities right yeah so you know the religion of the many-faced god um it's not a high of mind right so instead you have the dead becoming a mask for the living so that the living can take out revenge can carry out vendettas against other living people yeah so it's a purely negative purely subtractive i mean you could say it's the antithesis of immortality it's you know it's it's about mortality it's about killing people but yeah in this weird way the same ideas are there and as you know it's explicitly stated by arya that when she's wearing the mask of this other person that she takes on so i'm afraid this is actually she takes on their memories i don't know but she takes on some of their character and feelings like there's some echo of the person that's with her but i i don't i don't think they i don't think it exposes they they get the memories someone in the audience can can uh but in any case it's not it's not like brand's experience and it's also not like uh warging with the uh with the wolves so if there is some mention of of getting little glimpses of memories i think there is maybe i think there is maybe i think there's a brief statement that when she has this mask on she has some access to the memories or feelings of the the girl uh it might be in there in that in that same way yeah but look you know still like a totally different book and again we don't know what the significance of bran's journey his brand's spiritual transformation in the north is but he's going to return to the south and then transform the south um nobody thinks that arya stark is going to bravos and it's going to bring back the religion of the many face god this death call and that that's the better way to organize society or the better way to live the better religion for all of us to uh to believe in i mean it seems obviously just to be a kind of um frankly a form of organized crime that's tolerated in braavos for historical reasons and has you know religion you know draped on it rather loosely and you know and rather unjustifiably you know one might say it's a place where people commit suicide and people take revenge on others as you know it's an ugly horrible aspect of their of their culture i mean can anyone say bravos would be a worse place if they got rid of this society of assassins who pretentiously you know kind of present themselves as uh as as priests among us you know it's just it's just ridiculous but you know and also by the way i mean i'm not in favor of suicide too i mean the people who come and commit suicide because they're brokenhearted or something you know that's uh that's another aspect of that at that time so i'd say that that's just just as impossible it is to believe that george r martin is cheerleading for the religion of the iron islands which some people would ted kaczynski would be pro iron islands ted kaczynski would be pro uh you know yeah pro cal drogo yeah right everyone said pro uh horse riding nomad that is not george rr martin's political philosophy he is also not in favor of the temple to manifest god it's completely ridiculous to read the text as if as if that's the hypothesis he's counter posing to everything he's criticizing in feudalism which i can see what is saying that it's not like the same idea as um the story about the leah sorry yeah yeah a song for leo right so it's not seeing it in an optimistic way right um so that's that is kind of interesting to me that uh in the game of thrones series he hasn't seen it as transformative in the same way his earlier story is this high point but um yeah i know i and to me i just did find interesting news it's funny to say this but i found it interesting that you say that you are not interested in this idea of mine yes you don't think this is something worth yeah literature because it's it's as you know you could determine yourself in biological violence that uh you find it this as uninteresting as eating and digesting somebody's food yeah i just thought for somebody who is interested in reading history that you might find this idea inspiring that you'd be able to take on people's memories yeah i i you know i think it's less meaningful than wearing someone else's clothes you know i mean i think that you you it's it's hard to do it's hard to get to that point of nihilism where you realize no even my memories and even my emotions are really just implements that i use and that are discarded that i discard and that at some point you know i may be the one discarded and then you know my memories and my emotions go along with me you know i i mean this has come up under many different headings in our relationship but we don't talk about it in terms of acting or theater or performance you know for the camera but like you know i think it is a real turning point where you just admit to yourself that for example crying is a signal we have to show others how we feel you know and by the way i don't necessarily mean manipulating or misleading people you know you weep to tell someone that you're in distress to show someone um that you're suffering and what it is you're concerned about weeping is a signal it's a form of communication that's that's all it is you know and um you know it's obviously especially as a child it's very easy to feel that emotions emotional experiences and so on are more more real than reality your feelings are more real than the things you feel them about or feeling in response to but you know no you know weeping and anger and all that these are you know these are tools you know these these are kinds of of implements and they're they're never going to be as meaningful as the purpose they're put to as why you're you're using the tool you know it's a way of doing it and again this stuff i had to think about when i was involved in the theater when i was involved in acting and so i'm going to think about you know when you're talking about uh you know culturally um the whole concept of antidepressant medication and so on so you know the the medicalization and reification of feelings that goes on philosophically culturally and and politically in our times and you know no i mean no no you know like there is a real sense in which you know we clothe ourselves with sadness we clothe ourselves with the motion we exhibit emotion in the same way that we wear clothes is a signal to other people in the same way that clothes may conceal more than they reveal about you you know um that you know that this is all it is i mean to profoundly deal with the shallowness of the figments of our imagination whether those are emotions feelings memories um or what have you to really accept that um i think i think it's a hard thing to do i think it's an inevitable part of of growing up um and you know again the the deeper lesson is you know if my grandfather had something meaningful to share with me about what happened in world war ii it's not enough for him to feel it it's not enough for him to remember it it's not enough for him to break down weeping either you know what i mean he actually has to put in a level of effort tantamount to creating a work of art you know to to share that with me and by the way guys i'm not saying this to insult anyone you may know some people who tell the same stories again and again like you've known them for many years they told you that story when you were younger than you heard maybe you saw them telling someone else the same story 10 years later that is a kind of art i mean it's the storytellers are in a time before youtube and a time before filmmaking was financially viable for normal people it used to cost a lot of money used to have a film um you know um there was a sense in which i mean of course you could also write a song about your experience or whatever people used to more than i do today prepare and perform a story about something that happened and it might be a story that's amusing and it might be a story that's heartbreaking and there were people who measured out their whole lives in a series of these stories they did share with their grandchildren they really put that effort but that is an art you know that's not a thought it's not a feeling it's not an emotion it's not a merging of consciousness or anything else and you know when you really know people and you can cross-examine the stories they're telling you can often point out well yeah but you know you're lying about or concealing this this other thing that's there you know you're telling the story in a certain way again as with the clothes we wear they conceal more than they reveal now of course this is not to dismiss the thing so uh both of my grandfathers were involved in world war ii in very different ways one of them was out doing combat the other was on a military base and um neither of them ever told me anything meaningful about their spiritual world or two and i was like my grandfather yeah never told anything but but but sorry i'm just sorry to catch you but they may not have had anything meaningful to tell you know like from their perspective you know um war is waiting you know like you know even on the combat lines like yeah i spent a lot of time standing around holding a cup of coffee waiting for orders and then i got the orders and i got my motorcycle and went over to the like you know what what is it that's meaningful to tell so you know again this is a false thing to presume that there was a great story to tell there but you know to take to take that experience and make it into a story if you guys some for some people this will be the first video ever so on my channel i had all kinds of experiences in cambodia and laos and thailand okay and you know i've had many people say to me including my own mother i tell her some anecdotes about my experiences out there because we didn't talk for like 10 years i was alienated from my parents the alienation was mutual um you know so when i tell her anecdotes put time off she always immediately says oh you have to write a memoir you have to write an autobiography oh you have to make a film about this or something and you know well you could you know yeah yeah these things are meaningful but you know to take that story and fashion it and communicate to make it meaningful for an audience you know that is an art you know and and the it's not a memory you're sharing you know it's not you know now again we're talking so far about things that have some kind of very obvious um meaning because they're political i mean that's the reality why is your grandfather's experience of world war ii with significant you know obviously political and and historical significance but you know um the average self-pitying middle-aged male reflecting on relationships that didn't work out loves loves that were lost sexual encounters and experiences that were dissatisfactory or didn't didn't end the way they want to you know uh your your grandparents never told you about that either you know mine didn't tell me but you know and you know uh yeah are we missing out and again not that that can't be made into a work of art but what a huge challenge to take what it's not so much that memory is meaningless it's that it is by nature self-serving you know um you know we study history not for what it subtracts from the past but for what it adds to the present you know memory as such is just self-serving but to turn it into something meaningful for someone else that is an art great question the audience quote any thoughts on star trek that'd be a whole different live stream i think yeah um i think overall star trek shows the tragedy of trying to have any kind of any kind of uh meaningful project um that's just run by a heartless corporation where there's no no no author no artist or no team of authors artists at the center who define it you know uh you know what would game of thrones be without george r martin what if came what if george amanda died 10 years ago you know what i mean i mean star trek isn't even like that there's no book it's working from but the centerlessness of star trek and the aimlessness of star trek you know very much results from the structure of authorship and so to give them credit you might not know this about star trek but for most of the history of the tv show they were open to anyone sending in a spec script so anyone like you some guy living in los angeles could write his idea for a script send it in and gene roddenberry would look at it so like star trek the next generation the jean-luc picard era and you had you had a shot of getting getting your show made you could just come up with so anyone could contribute i mean this is before the internet so there was there was some barriers he had to pay for postage you know we had actually printed it on paper and sent it in and people did there were people who got episodes made out of their ideas and that's the same way the books were written too you know so these these novels so i i'm only answering this because it certainly is a contrast to just how centrally organized the game of thrones literature is that at this point absolutely everything is the product of of just one man you know it's literature it's entirely the result of one man's genius and sometimes his lack of genes so it's all thanks to him and it also can all be uh be blamed so yeah we we have some comments you're agreeing with or reflecting further on some things that have come up in the discussion already uh so look kiss says quote on a superficial level i suspect that maybe george r martin projects a lot of himself onto bran as the as he is the frustrated hive mind of the song of ice and fire in a sense a great question from matthew ackee quote reading is definitely better than video games for various reasons however how can we justify reading fiction instead of philosophy non-fiction etc don't i mean matthew anything in your life that requires justification just don't justify it that's really all i have to say with that i just don't um i've said this before one of the reasons why i'm very bad at spelling the names of the game of thrones characters like you know daenerys targaryen is that the vast majority of this i heard as uh books on tape and it was actually originally it was while packing and unpacking later i listened to this stuff while working out at the gym but my first encounter was literature you'd be surprised how much time you spend packing up suitcases and furniture and stuff like that but um you know it competed with listening to podcasts for me in that way uh but you know obviously i could have been listening to something else bucket but if you think you have to justify it don't you know i think it's it's that simple you know people as soon as you recognize that you're justifying drinking alcohol don't just don't don't justify it and don't drink alcohol you know so now if you've got any if you've got any problem that way and if you've got if you've got something better to read we have such a stack of books there no you know and then that's all also much earlier in this broadcast i said look i don't even know how i'm going to feel when the next book gets published take a look at my reading list i i have better things to do but really you know i you know five years ago i was so positively motivated for this but now you know i don't know how i'm going to feel uh if or when the next book comes out you know and obviously the some of the spin-off books that george george himself has written was just this collective shrug of the shoulders uh from even the most die hand department from even the most die hard uh you know game of thrones fans huh so valor in the in the audience says that he's afraid that uh george might be a little bit heinlein in his political view so i do actually know heinlein enough to know what you're getting at um i would uh the real comparison highline would be about sexual politics and the family and so on um that that would be interesting someone could write an essay on that uh george to what extent that highline uh influenced george r.r martin as interesting question so i continue the comment here quote he views elective systems as superior but he's american and it's common especially for many of his era to be roman fetishes so okay that's melissa and i we've been reading a lot of stuff from ancient rome in this last year uh primary source stuff you know not modern books about ancient rome but texts translated from latin into english directly i i don't see it in songwriting there's i don't see any admiration for ancient rome in it i'm just i'm just being honest with you um [Music] i don't have a lot more to say about that so that's energy you have two suggestions here one is about the connection to heinlein and yeah you know that probably some of the darker elements of uh incest and and uh the nature of the family whatever you could you can make an argument there but yeah no um someone else will have to write an essay about that whether it's what heinlein says about democracy what he says about the military what he says about war or um ancient rome but no i don't i really don't see george or martin having any significant interest in or sympathy for in jerome okay so question from lakis and fair enough question quote why would any philosophy found in a song of ice and fire etc need to provide true happiness so i think you're you're misunderstanding the point but i'll continue your quote quote i mean even george r martin said the ethnic would be better sweet okay um so it's not the case that a philosophy needs to be about happiness this is not what i said and that's not what i was insinuating or suggesting indirectly the point is you can quite quickly come to the point of what someone's philosophy is by narrowing down what do they say in this corpus of literature about true happiness so i'll give you two examples from myself one my own book no more manifestos as you can even guess from the title there's a lot of criticism of politics there's a lot of negative things said about politics some about religion too right okay but if you say look positively what is this guy saying about the meaning of life what and also positively what is he saying about politics a very rapid way to say okay we got all these pages and how many hundreds of pages it is let's rifle to it what is he saying positively what happens what is this positive example happiness that will normally indicate to you what this person has to say about about philosophy and indeed about political philosophy that this person says do you look true so so someone writes a book i mean a very conventional right-wing conservative may write a long book or series of books with a lot of some right-wing conservative writes a book criticizing left-wing people but when i ask you okay what is the model of happiness in this book say it's ben shapiro or something ben shapiro's model of happiness is a heterosexual man married to a heterosexual woman raising children and doing these same [ __ ] religious rituals forever this is very simple that's happiness for him white picket fence in the suburbs religion religious heterosexual he has a very normal boring very narrow boring idea of happiness that is his idea of human happiness um some some other writer feels writes a book where they say look the only way to be happy is to go out and really take risks really be a creative artist really be this kind of reckless figure pushing your own boundaries getting out of your own comfort zone different authors will have different ideas of happiness that will very rapidly bring you to an understanding of what their philosophy is if you're looking through a corpus of text so i've said this about my own book which very few of you have read some of you have read it say okay well you can i mean it's not a summary of the book it's sort of like a fish hook you can put out there and then bring you to the the heart of the matter rapidly you could an intelligent person could do an analysis in the book okay isil mazzard says all this stuff critique of politics critique of history critique of religion under many different things okay but you know when he talks about happiness when he talks about what it is to be alive and what what is the meaningful life which comes with many different parts of the book you can bring that together and that really shows you what this guy's philosophy is all about this is what he thinks a meaningful life is this is what he thinks it means to be happy as an individual and for the organization of society as well what that requires the organization to side now i can also say that about the corpus of literature on this youtube channel i know 3 000 videos thousands hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of monologues have been uploaded channel and if someone says you will look isil mazzard about lucielle you have this huge sprawling corpus of literature produced over many years talking about many different political issues ethical issues philosophical issues okay what's it all about what is it you could indeed attempt to summarize it come to the heart of the matter by saying okay well you know what if you see what this guy mastered says about happiness about leading a meaningful what that that's a trail of breadcrumbs that takes you it takes you every point so yes i do think that mode of analysis with the corpus of work of george rr martin it's telling it's revelatory it reveals exactly what i want to talk about in this video now even though it is bittersweet to use george r martin's favorite term if you read his story a song for elia it is i believe it has been published as a book it's a stand-alone book it's not that long a book if you read a song for liar it very clearly shows you this is happiness this isn't all right it very clearly shows you people think sexual gratification is happiness and they're wrong people think they can overcome loneliness and isolation in life and the feeling that nobody else really understands them through a close sexual relationship with their husband wife and they're wrong right like it's it's real it's it's an incredibly demonstrative transparent note now it's also tragic it's also bittersweet because the alternative it presents you with this true unity achieved through the hive mind it's horrible in some obvious ways like you are devoured alive by a parasite you know that's it but that is that is the the model of happiness um you know shown to you in that book it tells you right away philosophically and politically you know what what his point is now again sorry so it was useful here it's very easily used negatively when talking about the corpus literature for game of thrones and by the way sorry another i've already made a video talking about look at his book seven times never kill man uh seven times never kill man very clearly the judgments about happiness it is not telling you that organized religion will lead to true happiness it is really clearly saying to you organized religion is just the system trying to keep you down it's just the man oppressing you you might think this is liberating you you might think this is doing these pauses but actually religion is oppressive it's completely clear what is happiness and what is not in that sorry also so you know does anyone think that what he is presenting as the religion of the seven is the way to be happy that this is the way to be happy as an individual person or in the organization society some other author would have written a much simpler book that contrasts the catholic society of the religion of the seven to the horse lords of essos the horse riding nomads and where it's just very simple this is not true happiness this is you know like in order to be happy what you need to do is get back to living as a lawless nomad where life is in the words of hobbes nasty british and short people have sword fights people die of infections people die of curable diseases the rate of uh you know maternal mortality and childbirth is very high there's no medicine there's no technology but that's true there were plenty of authors who would write that book that's the contrast okay here's the the urban society the dark ages then here's and one is true human happiness and one isn't that is not the contrast george r martin is providing you with and of course this becomes even more ridiculous if you try to say well the life on the iron islands is really happy or life in dorne is happy nobody reads these books and thinks oh he's showing us that dorne is the superior society you know it's it's not though so it is a useful um optic it is a useful analytical way of viewing a corpus of text and look i think in some cases that analysis results in you condemning the author and really revealing what a terrible person the author is napoleon bonaparte what is napoleon bonaparte's idea of happiness for the individual and for society as a whole adolf hitler what is the religious idea of happiness i mean really you can you can look at other historical figures they all wrote books in particular examples but there are historical figures you can analyze in this way and their idea of happiness personal individual happiness and then how that's compatible with or incompatible with larger and larger units of social organizations tell tell a um intelligent really quickly this relates to my own notion of myself as an author and as a as a filmmaker and what have you i once sat down with my aunt judy so now now some of you are going to be able to google her and find the person driver i once sat down with my aunt judy this was in it this was in an ex vegetarian restaurant some of you in toronto will know which astro restaurant is the restaurant that used to be vegetarian and they actually had a sign on the window at that time saying sorry comma we have chicken that went from being a vegetarian to being vegetarian but also offering chicken i think eventually they just became a total meat serving restaurant they became vegetarian with a chicken object because they weren't making enough money so i remember on the site the sign on the restaurant said sorry kama we have chicken um so there's man judy and she said to me i'm sorry some of you heard the senator before she said to me we were talking about the fact that the film industry was thriving in toronto at that time which it was and she says yes but what is the point of making all these movies if they're just crap like what's the point of making them if if they're just videos and i i laughed out loud at her and i really it was a sincere laugh it wasn't uh it wasn't a contrived oh no i really i really thought this was uh hilarious and i asked her what is the point of drinking water what is the point of breathing air why do you think people want to eat food i didn't say that across the street from there was a bookstore a bookstore i've taken a melissa to a secondhand used bookstore say you stand in front of a shelf full of books in a bookstore like that what percentage of these books are garbage or meaningless or whatever you want to put you know like you're looking at like the novel section or something but any second even the non-fiction section is it 99 is it 99.9 but the the minority of us who want to do something meaningful the minority of us who want to make a really meaningful film it's possible for us to do so because of that 99 they create and sustain the whole industry all these people are fed and clothed and have apartments and breathe air and drink water thanks to the 99 of films that are meaningless then once in a while someone gets to make one film that's medieval now i really see it positive that way like the publishing industry and book publishing well gee i sure am glad there are 99 of books that are garbage because i get to publish my one book as a result you know like the whole like what i'm doing has a like my meaningful life has a parasitic relationship to the meaningless life led by 90 of people or 99 people or whatever it may be whatever that percentage may be and you know i mean this in relation to the creative arts filmmaking so on and so forth you know so this is a contrast because i view that positively i feel gratitude and i was gonna be [ __ ] up like i feel grateful toward the publishing industry because once in a while someone gets to publish a really important book and once in a while it might be me you know but even if i'm just a reader i'm so grateful for these books i get to read that are good but i realized they would not have been published that that publishing wouldn't have been possible if it wasn't for the 99 of books that i disregard as many so this is true publishing this is true of the the film industry you know so on and so forth and her view of it was instead of zero sum you know her her view of it instead was fundamentally communist she basically felt that the government should snuff out the freedom of the press and the film industry and control these things so there were only you know films being made that are approved by joseph stalin or what have you as being of a public benefit educational benefit or morally uplifting purpose purposes some of this that's the kind of society she wants to live she's a [ __ ] goddess and not a moderate communist let me just add you know that's her that's her view of society and she thinks that by reducing the number of meaningless films you're going to increase the number of meaningful films by reducing the number of meaningless books you're going to increase the number of me and no my view is the opposite more garbage more mainstream crap more you know the flourishing of the meaningless side of the industry will let that small minority flourish also you know we the authors who want to do something really meaningful we're going to get to exist parasitically on the back of this great blue whale of an industry crashing through the waves that's you know producing this kind of mainstream crap and feeding everybody involved providing them with food and shelter that i can't do you know i can't keep all the makeup artists in los angeles employed but when i do make my one film i expect to be able to just call in this makeup artist call in all these technical people people doing the lighting well they're being employed making all this other crap so i have a very positive view that way i you know this is also why i'm not an anti-natalist i'm not against life itself you know i'm very i enjoy life i'm very kind of in this sense pro-life word that is more than me but you know there are a lot of people have a fundamentally you know negative view of life well so just so when you see that when you think about you know what is happiness what is happiness for the individual what is happiness to the larger unit of society right and then do you see one as antithetical to the other one is inimical to the other do you see the individual as trying to steal something away from the larger society or is contributing to the legislation and you know grateful tellers these are big profound differences and that shows in people's writing it shows in their writing when they're writing fiction it shows in the writing when they're when they're writing non-fiction there are a lot of people are fundamentally bitter self-hating anti-social people and they write books where their notion of happiness shows that in their in their books you know it show that in their books and their films you know okay well this is what this guy thinks happiness is uh look voltaire you know what does voltaire ultimately think happiness is so candide by voltaire the conclusion of the book and the positive model of happiness is of running away to live with your girlfriend or wife whatever you want to say is to run away to a cottage and live in this kind of uh isolation and his uh you know his turn of phrase that's become famous is just to cultivate your own garden is to cut yourself off from society cut yourself off from religion go and get a cottage in the countryside and just grow your own vegetables that's his model of of happiness and it's also by the way explicit to stop chasing beautiful women and just stay with the same one woman even though she's ugly the ugly and stupid actually in the book it's explicit but it doesn't matter just settle down with one woman just take it that's explicit in candide it's a long enough book to have more than one that you should just live in a cottage with your one wife or girlfriend even though she's uh she's ugly and stupid and you're not in love with her anymore and just tend your own garden to not make the world a better place that is at least in in candidate at least in in that work that is voltaire's notion of happiness and look at how he lived his own life and look at what he did in politics in his own lifestyle and it's that's what he did you know he tried to attend his own garden he got himself off from the struggle and so on you know i mean so you know that really tells you something and and then when you know that now if you go and read candida a second time because you only find that the conclusion you will see i mean frankly you learn something about his fundamental shallowness that shows throughout the rest of his book and the rest of what he has to say about uh about both religion and happiness sorry about both religion and politics you'll see something like that so yeah you can tell a lot about a person you can tell a lot about a writer you can tell a lot about a political leader through the interrogation of their concept of happiness it's a useful analytical structure um and you know sometimes of course all it reveals is bad writing is that there's really nothing that that makes sense here and you know i mean the character of batman what makes batman happy i mean this collapses it falls apart no matter what analysis you bring to it um does batman actually enjoy punching people like is this you know is he that darker character that he's on this kind of sadistic cruel this is a sadistic cruel revenge fantasy is that his character i mean there have been so many different interpretations of batman sometimes he is portrayed that way somebody's portrayed as an insane you know revenge seeking kind of uh sociopath son of sometimes you know the original name of the comic book was detective comics sometimes he's a detective in a cape where he's this very calm he's a sherlock holmes-like figure so you know i don't go go on and on about this but yes it is it is useful in terms of what is the happiness what is the philosophy and what is the political philosophy of this book as a whole and and of this author as a person i think it's it's a really uh really useful optic to bring to these things so look by the way sorry it's not the topic of this i agree little water says batman is an awful story um look what was karl marx's idea of happiness happiness to the personal individual and happiness for society as a whole this is not going to reveal to you what a great person karl marx was or what a great author he was or what a great political philosophy he has i think it reveals how shallow and limited and stupid karl marx's whole literary political and economic project is now at the opposite extreme if you look at most of the kind of right-wing libertarian authors normally it's quite transparent it's nakedly put out there right for their idea of happiness you know as they say in america life liberty and the pursuit of happiness what happiness means to them it's very clearly iterated to you up front and it's often embarrassingly horrifyingly shallow shallow and self-centered and what have you so yes this can be applied constructively and destructively to uh different authors uh revealing different uh different i think important aspects of political philosophy okay so um i have a moment for this i'm gonna wrap this up in just a few minutes guys coming up to the two hour mark if you guys have a second to hit the thumbs up button i'd appreciate it it'll just help more people find the broadcast whether today tomorrow or 10 years from now wicked energy comments quote doesn't listening to popular media make it easier to relate to other people sometimes isn't it alienating to not be familiar with popular films music etc okay so great great questions comment have you ever been to iran if you lived in iran for five years would you listen to popular music there would you watch the popular films made by iranian filmmakers how about north korea i remember laughing at someone when they suggested to me when i was living in laos laos was at that time a communist dictatorship by the way that i would start getting into local music and film music and tv shows like soap operas they had no [Laughter] you know i learned a lot living in laos but no i don't relate to or appreciate their pop music i don't like to appreciate their cinema and if i lived in iran living around could be very rewarding for me i mean the critique politically of what's wrong with iranian society and the religion and so i can imagine many ways which they'd be very stimulating no i'm not going to sympathize with they're not going to be interested in their their pop culture right so you know now notice i'm not i'm not giving you an answer no i'm not saying you know there's nothing significant or meaningful about popular culture or mainstream i'm not saying that um take yourself out of your comfort zone think about some other cultures and think about what it really says about you what it really means if you are immersed in the mainstream cinema of north korea of iran of saudi arabia of communist china of any of these these places well have you considered that i might be more alienated from canadian society than you are from iranian society or north korean society so you ask isn't it alienating not to be familiar with what's going on in pop culture isn't it alienating for me to be plunged into that culture just as it would be alienating for you and iran or north korea so valor says coming back to a point discussed quite some time ago he didn't pull the roman thing completely out of nowhere if you type in grrm rome you'll see two posts obsessing over the fictionalization of rome's uh late republic era yeah well you know um so i have this city villa i'm not i i didn't ridicule your point i didn't say that's ridiculous or stupid i just sat there and reflected honestly that i i don't see any interest in rome in in the song of ice and fire corpus of literature as it now exists it's possible the next book will come out and it's all going to be related to um the legacy of rome uh i don't see that anywhere in a song of ice and fire the serious interest in wrong i also don't see it anywhere in the thousand worlds books right so again i'm not ridiculing you but i feel that you will look in vain for that now maybe you know you know maybe you're right maybe that's exactly what's coming next i mean look look that is coming back to karl popper's uh philosophy it would certainly be a daring prediction to say that rome hasn't been talked about yet because that will be the ideal of the conclusion book so so valor let's take your hypothesis and let's make it really sexy let's make it really provocative okay what if the argument of the next book of game of thrones or maybe the next book after that but of the books to come is that the real solution to the riddle is republicanism and it's republicanism in a capital r sense and he plunges into what made rome great what made the roman empire work like maybe critique of rome and celebration melissa is laughing off camera she's been reading this stuff we've been reading appian and salis and some other great ancient roman uh historians and authors time paul today and there are a lot of bad things about insurance okay casey neistat it's not all good news about rome uh it didn't just end badly you know um you know the brothers grace the mean light motif of the next volume of game of thrones is the brothers grak eye and maybe the next volume of game of thrones is a carefully concealed critique of the constitution of the united states of america for not being true to the legacy of the roman public maybe that is the intellectual conclusion like i'm not i'm not saying this to ridiculous valor it's possible you know it's possible i am just saying up to this point if he has that interest he has suppressed it incredibly effectively he has completely concealed that from the audience if that's where this is going by contrast you know the story about the squishers in there did you get that from the box you know um you know his interest in uh lovecraft's ideas as they come up in the squishers and the the the oily black rocks and the foundation of the temple there are so many interests you have that are that are not concealed part of him wants to be writing something that's more like lovecraft's cosmology not even any specific story about lovecraft but this kind of you know schlock horror rising from the depths of the ocean thing that comes up again and again so if he's really interested in rome he is surprised and the the model of the roman republic or uh he has suppressed that far far more effectively than he suppressed there's numerous other thematic interests and creative impulses which are frankly you know pouring out all over the page palmell as part of why the books go on for so many uh so many hundreds of pages yeah so another real down to earth comment from little water quote i lost hope in the next book to come out his latest books were already getting stale well so okay this is a good place to end so a final comment from uh do you want to give me a little kiss says quote my problem is that the hive mind cannot be a model for human happiness because it can never be a real human experience so it doesn't tell me much about george r martin's model of happiness if it it even exists so this i totally disagree with you um the catholic idea of heaven can never exist the catholic idea of the great chain of being can never exist the catholic idea of people infallibility can never exist all of these impossible things nevertheless were a model for society they totally restructured and reformed and reordered society and produced the society of the dark ages right intangible impossible ideas are what political and social organization are all about they're what political philosophy is all about plato's idea of the republic is a totally impossible plan for society laughably impossible and by the way aristotle himself laughed at it like within his own time it was laughed at okay guess what that can profoundly transform and reorganize society and you can point to certain examples in history where it did to some extent where people tried to live up to uh plato's notion of the republic one way or another where it did where it did influence them now i could go on and on with different cultural examples you know around the world uh communism is a little bit too broad because there are many crazy ideas in the communism the philosophy of mao zedong specifically it's completely impossible it's completely ridiculous i don't want to digress into here iterating although but this is like uh hot ice this is like a square circle this is wooden iron and this is totally ridiculously impossible okay impossible intangible ideals things that people have never experienced things that people can barely think through in a coherent way those do become for society they do transform society and i i think you could offer a really sincere critique of my philosophy which is pro-democracy i'm very much in favor of of direct democracy to the greatest extent you know kind of practicable and i'm a critic critic of my own views by the way i'm not a naive democrat but um you know my arguments in favor of democracy you could say the exact same thing you could say direct democracy has never existed nobody has ever experienced it how can direct democracy be a model for our society and politics and it can't i mean i think i think when it comes to these things the more intangible the better um you know it's precisely through the understanding of the intangible perfect model of democracy that you can work out all the details for the imperfect tragic deeply flawed democracy that you're actually going to get in the same way that that catholic set of ideals produced and justified a catholic society through the dark ages that in some ways resembled its ideals and in some ways was a parody of those ideals it was it was a terrible you know tragic let down so i just say i had a confrontation with one of my professors once that left him very stunned and impressed at my profundity and this was in my very first year at university and this was in my first few months at university so i was a very young stupid man frankly young and ignorant and stupid anyway um the particular professor uh identified as an anarchist but he was a very erudite bookish sort of anarchist he wasn't quite the stereotypical normal anarchist and um he was talking about idealism both in philosophy and politics and he said look you know uh i guess i could speak the first person he says look you know i'm opposed to this idea of perfection i'm opposed to this idea that we need anything perfect that we need anything ideal and this this was his example that he just i don't know if he's he could possibly said it every year for 20 years teaching the same course i don't know if he used to many times or made it with a spot it's not that sophisticated example so you might have just made it he said i think that a group of imperfect men can come together with imperfect pieces of wood and imperfect hammers and imperfect nails and they can build a boat and it's an imperfect boat but there's just no need to have any kind of ideal have any kind of perfection any kind of transcendental perfect notion for people to come together and build a boat and then by the same token there's no need for any kind of ideal or perfect notion to build a society to build a you know there's no need for political ideals or a notion of whether that's a perfect marxist society or a perfect democracy or or what have you and i put up my stack my hand and said what about the blueprint and i think he said also that none of these things can be perfect so i'm now here i'm embellishing what he said quite a bit i guess but um you know the the boat can't be perfect and the piece of wood each individual piece of wood can't be worked there's no perfect bar okay what about the blueprint right there's a sense in which the blue blueprint can be perfect and the sense in which it must be perfect and if it's not when you put the boat in the water we're all going to die and he really stood there and he put his hands on his chin oh that the plan is for and i said yeah that you have imperfect men with imperfect tools and imperfect pieces of wood but either they're using a blueprint that's perfect it's not none of you will ever touch the blueprints none of you okay there's a sense of what you will none of you will touch the ideal ship the notion of perfection described by the blueprint you can't touch an idea you can't touch an ideal you'll never ride in a perfect ship but yes these intangible abstract idealized notions guide our actions as imperfect people in coming together whether we be in our hundreds in our thousands or in our millions to you know build the ship that hopefully when the rain falls will keep us all afloat