MindMatters: The Value And Relevance of Joker

What if these extra-dimensional forces somehow rearranged the human genome to the point that it allowed the creation of psychopathic and sociopathic individuals without the ability to feel empathy or compassion, thus mirroring their *own* minds, and creating "organic portals" that they could access to affect this reality and create chaos and fear to feed themselves via negative emotions?

I was happy for him! I was cheering inside. "Yeah, shoot that bastard!"

"The meaning of life is to give life meaning."

Oh crap! That applies to the Dark Side as well, doesn't it?

I bet everybody who watched the film felt the same way, though you have to be pretty comfortable with your shadow self to admit it. There's a reason we don't let our monsters out, or there would be bodies in the street. But in Arthur Fleck's case, his outbursts seemed warranted to me.

In any case.., I'm damned GLAD the Far Left smeared this film from the outset! I hope they collectively continue to reject it. Because the damned thing is an Antifa war anthem. I don't think they have the collective maturity to understand that it's meant to be educational material made for responsible adults.

In Jordan Peterson's first book, Maps of Meaning, he describes a couple of early experiences which marked him. The first was meeting a serial killer in prison. Peterson describes his shock at how absolutely ordinary this man appeared to be, the literal face of the 'banality of evil'. The second realization was much worse: that he also had the same homicidal urges.

The point Peterson makes is: there isn't much separating ourselves from the chaos of Joker's world, if we are truly honest about it. How do we know we wouldn't fall into the same homicidal glee, if the walls of civilization would suddenly collapse? A study of Nazi German and Stalinist Russia indicates that most of us wouldn't be very heroic, to understate the case.

Many of Peterson's insights are of this nature and have been disturbing to people for the same reason that the recent Joker movie is disturbing; it cuts a little too close to the bone. Who really wants to see, in viceral form, the darkest aspect of our own nature that Joker embodies, and which Peterson constantly points us towards?

Some of Peterson's most interesting articulations have been in describing how somebody like Arthur Fleck, the failed artist, becomes Adolf Hitler, the clown dictator, through failure and resentment. And Peterson has written and taught extensively about how 'ideological possession' has caused whole populations to descend into murderous genocide. The shadow , says Carl Jung, reaches right down to hell.

But Arthur Fleck has no ideology, nor principle to guide him. He is not animated by Marxism or Fascism or any other kind of ideology. In a way, this is all more terrifying: Joker is one without any grand narrative or promise land to believe in. Such a person can only smash things; he cannot create anything but chaos.

Perhaps Jordan Peterson, in his political fury, has conflated the pathologies of the idealistic protester with the pathologies of pure nihilism — which are antisocial and 'beyond good and evil'. Not that he isn't correct to show how idealism leads to nihilism, which is actually the lesson of Joker.

But today it is not dogmatic marxism or fascism that we have to contend with, but something much worse: the one who is invisible, but who screeches with laughter and wants to drown the world in blood. He has no name. And his name is Arthur Fleck.

For example, Woodsman writes: I bet everybody who watched the film felt the same way, though you have to be pretty comfortable with your shadow self to admit it. There's a reason we don't let our monsters out, or there would be bodies in the street.

The truth is more visceral and fundamental than that described by our psychological lingo, in which no one, often including ourselves, is ever really there. Just ideas and ideologies. Just abstractions. Fundamentally, just lies.

What you quoted is significant in how it illustrates the need/desire to sanitize evil by abstracting it - making it mental and non-agentive. By doing this, we can pretend to self-awareness without actually achieving it. We acknowledge that it is possible to 'fall into' homicidal glee, into the 'darkest aspect of our own nature,' and that this is made possible by 'failure or resentment.' We can be possessed by ideologies, but never beings.

I can't help but feel that things like this film are just more provocations, more subtle pushes for what they want. Which is to create enough violence to make the "rest" of the 99% fight back. To provide a reason for either the government or the UN to try and fix things. Well, that might be stretching things, but they really want to get rid of Trump and to disarm the American people.