Savvy Voices

Sustainability is all the rage today. But, what do we mean by sustainability? There are numerous and conflicting definitions of what sustainability means. However, most sources point to the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), also known as the Brundtland Report. According to the 1987 Brundtland Report, sustainability is: “Meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs.“[1] This definition is not testable and is incredibly vague. Let’s take the word sustainable literally.

A sustainable technology would be one that can be used indefinitely by humans without side effects and without any diminution in its effectiveness. This definition violates the laws of physics.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states entropy always increases. Entropy is normally defined as the measure of the disorder of a system or a measure of the energy not available for work. Entropy was discovered as part of thermodynamics and it explains that a perpetual motion machine is impossible. Sustainability taken literally is an attempt to create a perpetual motion machine. Some of the key issues for the sustainability paradigm revolve around so called non-renewable resources, such as the use of fossil fuels and the using up of other natural resources. The way this is often phrased today is Peak Oil, Peak Water, Peak _____ (pick your favorite resource). For more information see Peak Everything: Eight Things We are Running Out of and Why.[2] Peak Oil (natural resource) occurs when the amount of oil that can be extracted reaches its maximum or the point at which we reach the maximum net energy output from oil. The alternative definition takes into account that even if we can extract more oil, this is redundant if it takes more energy to extract the oil than we receive from the oil. The supposed solution for our Peak Oil problem is to develop renewable energy resources. The Clean Energy website provides the following definition “Renewable energy is natural energy which does not have a limited supply. Renewable energy can be used over and over again, and will never run out.”[3] What is natural energy? Either all energy is natural, since the so-called non-renewable energy also comes from nature, or only animal muscle power is natural. The nature-as-source qualification is rendered meaningless—unless they really want us to go back to animal muscle only. The “never run out” qualification violates the second law of thermodynamics. All energy resources will run out. All energy sources, fossil fuels, solar, hydroelectric, tidal, biomass, hydrothermal, fission, fusion, etc. are solar or stellar, i.e. arising from a star. For instance, hydroelectric energy is the result of the Sun heating the oceans or other large bodies of water. As the water evaporates and then condenses in the form of rain or snow on land masses it is collected in dams. The dams convert the gravitation force of the water into electric energy. Fossil fuels are created by sunlight converting dead organisms (both plants and animals) into biomass. The biomass is trapped underground by sea sediment and the pressure and heat converts the biomass into oil, coal, natural gas, etc..[4] Fission is the process whereby heavy elements, generally Uranium, are split into lighter elements and energy is released. These heavy elements were created in a star that has long since expired. Thus, all energy is solar or stellar. The Sun will not last forever and it does not provide unlimited energy. The concept of energy that “will never run out” and “can be used over and over again” does not hold up. Thus there is no such thing as renewable energy. This concept of peak resources is not new. You can find numerous examples of the “Peak Resource” concept in modern human history, e.g. the fertilizer crisis of the 19th century. In 1830, it was discovered that guano was an excellent fertilizer. The human population in Europe expanded in part because of the additional food that was produced due to this excellent fertilizer. The best sources of guano began to run out fairly quickly. People predicted the equivalent of “Peak Guano.” The question was not whether we would have “Peak Guano,” but Peak Fertilizer? We did not have a guano problem; we had an invention problem. The Haber-Bosch process invented in 1909, which allowed fixing nitrogen in air, solved the “Peak Guano” problem.[5] In the article “Peak Everything?” Reason Magazine, discussed how logical, scientific projections showed we would run out of lithium, neodymium, and phosphorus.[6] Peak Lithium was going to limit the batteries necessary for electric cars. In fact, it was expected that we would run out of lithium faster than we would run out of oil. The solution was a new invention that replaces lithium with zinc air batteries. Note that the solution was not a better way to extract lithium, but to make the supply of lithium irrelevant. It was a paradigm shift created by a new invention. Similarly, Peak Neodymium was going to limit our ability to build the electric motors of hybrid cars as well as other products. Interestingly, neodymium magnets were invented to overcome the problem of Peak Cobalt. In the area of permanent magnets, it now appears that a new induction motor will eliminate the need for permanent magnets. The Peak Phosphorus concept is a repeat of Peak Guano. Peak phosphorous supposedly threatens our ability to provide enough fertilizer for our agricultural needs. One solution is that phosphorous is a product of human urine. The phosphorous can be recycled using a no-mix toilet according to the article. What these prophets of doom ignore or forget is that the most important natural human resource is the human mind and our ability to create inventions to overcome these obstacles. As Paul Romer has observed,

“Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding: possibilities do not merely add up; they multiply.”[7]

The computer industry has also been beset by predictions of impeding doom, when it could no longer achieve Moore’s law of doubling the number of transistors every eighteen months. Ray Kurzweil has shown that if you restate Moore’s law as computational power, every time a technology reaches its limit to improve computational power a new technology takes over. Using this he shows that computational power has been growing exponentially since 1900. The first computational devices were electromechanical. When this reached their limit, they were replaced with relay devices; the relay devices were replaced with vacuum tubes, then transistors, and then integrated circuits.[8]

Life is a fight against entropy.

The unique way humans overcome entropy is by inventing. Inventions are not subject to diminishing returns or entropy. Potential inventions grow factorially, which is much faster than diminishing returns from natural resources. We do not have natural resources problem, we have an invention problem. The sustainability movement is pushing a political slogan, not science. In the process, they are actually inhibiting new technologies from being developed, by diverting resources from the most promising technologies to the politically acceptable technologies. Humans have created imaging devices that allow us to see individual molecules, perceive objects light years away, and microminute tissues inside the human body. Spacecraft have left our solar system, planes cross continents in a few hours, communication devices allow us to talk to almost anyone in the world instantaneously, vaccines have been invented that prevent diseases, medicines have been manufactured to treat all sorts of ailments. Food supply is so plentiful today that the biggest problem in many countries today is not starvation but overeating. All of this has taken place in just the last 100 years. Imagine what we can do in the next 100 years. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________ [1] Brundtland Commision, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brundtland_Commission, 11/7/10. [2] Alter, Lloyd, Peak Everything: Eight Things We are Running Out of and Why, Treehugger: A Discovery Company, 5/27/08, http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/05/peak-everything-8-things-we-are-running-out-of.php 11/7/10. [3] http://www.clean-energy-ideas.com/energy_definitions/definition_of_renewable_energy.html 11/7/10/. [4] Note that have been some alternative explanations proposed for how oil is produced that does not involve this biomass conversion [5] Mark Ridley had numerous “Peak Oil” examples in his book The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves, Harper Collins, 2010, New York, pp 121 -156. [6] Bailey, Ronald, Reason.com, Peak Everything?, April 27, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/27/peak-everything, 10/16/10. [7] Bailey, Ronald, Reason.com, Peak Everything?, April 27, 2010, http://reason.com/archives/2010/04/27/peak-everything, 10/16/10. [8] Kurzwiel, Ray, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Human Biology, Penguin Books, 2005, p 67.

A sustainable technology would be one that can be used indefinitely by humans without side effects and without any diminution in its effectiveness. This definition violates the laws of physics.

Life is a fight against entropy.

Taking liberties with true stories is precisely what one must do when telling a fictional story. That is art.

Belle (the 2013 Toronto festival movie, which played in select theatres in the U.S. in May 2014), had a DVD release on August 26, 2014 in the U.S.. Belle is based on a true story, with which liberties may have been taken. The story, set in the late 18th century, focusses on a mixed-race daughter of a Lord’s nephew. The father finds her living in poverty and entrusts her to Lord Mansfield’s care. The Zong massacre, that arguably set the anti-slavery laws in motion in England, is the case that brings Belle to her soul mate. We focus entirely on Belle, her identity struggles, and her relationship with an idealistic young lawyer. That may not be historically accurate. Taking liberties with true stories is precisely what one must do when telling a fictional story, i.e. make it as inspiring as possible and shape it to suit a classic storytelling structure. That is art. Gugu Mbatha-Raw effortlessly slots in as Dido Belle, the illegitimate daughter born to a ‘negro’ slave and a white aristocrat who adopts her. This is not a tale of slavery though, or even of an identity crisis. It is the telling of a strong individualism that refuses to be pigeon-holed by the collectivist culture of its time; spreading the contagion of courage to lift the lesser ones out of their fear. Misan Sagay’s screenplay sparkles; line after line of splendid dialogue is outdone only by the repartees that follow it. Here is a sample:

John Davinier: You utterly misunderstand me. I am saying that no man may have the value of cargo. Human beings cannot be priced since we are priceless. Freeman and slaves alike. I am with others here. All students in law, applying pressure on the insurance companies to refuse from hereon to insure slaves on any ship. Belle: But that would require a change in law. John Davinier: How can we expect to be civilized when we live in such a barbaric world? It is the utter injustice. Belle: It is more than that. It is the shame of a law that would uphold a financial transaction upon that atrocity.

My wife saw it twice in one week, the second time because she wanted me to see it. Emotions flowed freely in a crowded theatre from the halfway mark for me. Gugu doesn’t just beckon us into the world of Belle; she grabs us by the ears, never letting go, transporting us to 1789, where we suffer Belle’s every setback and rejoice her every triumph. In the end, the tears of relief were juxtaposed with tears of joy; it was art that triumphed in a catharsis that would have made Aristotle proud. “Forget the ten scholars who interpreted me, this is what I mean,” are words I hear from the great man smiling in his grave. Director Amma Assante never lets us astray—no moment is wasted in a hundred and four minutes of gripping drama; the subplots integrate perfectly into the main theme, the obligatory symbolism links back to an original painting of Belle and her light-skinned step-cousin, sister-like in friendship but poles apart in motivation. No Hollywood A-listers grace the screen, nor do any car chases, shootouts, or special effects—one never misses them.

How can I be too high of rank to dine with the servants, but too low of rank to dine with my own family?

About my only small regret is that what could have been the most cinematic scene of all—the drowning death of men at sea, is only talked about, but not shown. But then, it could only have occurred on screen as a visceral nightmare of Belle’s once she learns of it, for we just about never leave Belle’s point of view. Which sets us up for the Aristotelian catharsis rather well. It made me wonder—Will Belle turn out to be the finest movie of this decade? It certainly has been for me so far. Will it sweep the 2014 Oscars? Perhaps not, for objective evaluation of art escapes the industry’s practitioners who vote on these matters. Why then did the critics not rave about it? Film critics, unfortunately, do not understand film as a storytelling medium. They are without a framework for what a story ought to be.

Belle: Is Mable a slave? Lord Mansfield: I beg your pardon? Belle: Is… Mable… a slave? Lord Mansfield: She is free, and under our protection. Belle: Oh, like me.

Taking liberties with true stories is precisely what one must do when telling a fictional story. That is art.

How can I be too high of rank to dine with the servants, but too low of rank to dine with my own family?

Belle: Is Mable a slave? Lord Mansfield: I beg your pardon? Belle: Is… Mable… a slave? Lord Mansfield: She is free, and under our protection. Belle: Oh, like me.

1. Introduction

Film is a visual storytelling medium. An objective standard for the analysis of storytelling art is crucial to any rational evaluation of films.

The mind absorbs better when it is emotionally engaged in a story. Stories are like flight simulators, they teach by illustration. Stories that emphasize the efficacy of goal-directed action are consonant with enterprise, free will, and individualism. In a broad sense, stories can be demarcated into ones that promote individualism, or ones that work against it. We denote the former as Romanticism, and the latter as Naturalism. One can also get finer and mark all stories on a continuum instead. The pseudo-intellectual literati promote Naturalism and undermine Romanticism. Most film critics tend to belong either consciously or subconsciously to the pseudo-intellectual literati, or they are lacking an articulated framework, resulting in arbitrary evaluations of art. Film is a visual storytelling medium. An objective standard for the analysis of storytelling art is crucial to any rational evaluation of films.

2. Summary

As a literature movement, Romanticism grew out of the rejection of the idea that fiction writers must embody existing societal norms and ethics in their stories. Writers began to express their own worldview instead. This movement was mischaracterized as having the primacy of emotion. In The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, Ayn Rand redefined Romanticism as “a category of art based on the recognition of the principle that man possesses the faculty of volition, and Naturalism, as the category that denies it.” These two diametrically opposed schools, Rand opined, were at the heart of the basic premise underlying all forms of art. Romanticism showcases purposeful action by which men and women try to shape the world around them as against being shaped by it.

Romanticism showcases purposeful action by which men and women try to shape the world around them as against being shaped by it.

In what follows, we will be focusing on the story arts. Other analysts have tended to concentrate their analytical efforts on literature, particularly nineteenth-century literature. However, story art is manifested in various forms—short stories, novellas, novels, graphic novels, advertisements, theatrical plays, comic books, ballads, short film screenplays, and feature film screenplays. We will be zeroing in on story art as reflected in feature films and television drama, one reason being that this medium has not been analyzed from this perspective to the extent literature has been, and the other being that nowadays, screen stories have a wider reach than books. In January 1965, Rand wrote the obituary of Romanticism thus—“Partly in reaction against the debasement of values, but mainly in consequence of the general philosophical-cultural disintegration of our time (with its anti-value trend), Romanticism vanished from the movies and never reached television.” It is now almost half a century later. I wish to present a reality, which, in my opinion, whilst not always celebratory of human efficaciousness, is nevertheless a great deal better than the bleak prognosis Rand gave it in 1965. Perhaps the reason is that children are often born with a joyous sense of life, and that many adults remain uncorrupted by the pseudo-intellectual literati influence; this is where Hollywood finds a market for Romanticism. Perhaps there is another reason—one that no one foresaw, which is that Aristotle gives screenwriting teachers a pedigree they otherwise lack. Aristotle’s Poetics focusses on dramatic theory, not philosophy. Nevertheless, if you follow its prescriptions as a writer, you cannot but end up with a highly romanticist story; its philosophical foundation is too strong and too well integrated to permit otherwise. In my several years of association with this craft, I never heard a teacher, practicing professional, or an author of a how-to book ever recommend Naturalism. Aristotle has been liberally quoted in what I have read in books or heard in lectures. In fact, the how-to prescriptions are de facto highly romanticist, notwithstanding that many who teach or write how-to books have either not encountered the term, or have not given it the meaning that Rand did. Yet, many story outcomes are not so joyously romanticist. One reason is that prescriptions, taken as gospel by those new to the craft, are frequently discarded by the studios and the professionals. Furthermore, film critics, mired in their own pseudo-intellectualism, reward Naturalism, and some of the big awards (like the BAFTAs and the Academy Awards) translate to box-office success for the movie and critical acclaim for the cast and the producer-director-screenwriter team. Nevertheless, the Aristotle idolization is itself a cause for joy for it opens a door to preserving Romanticism. Even more celebratory are the romanticist stories that do make it to the screen. It does not behoove us as objectivists to copycat a prognosis fifty years on and proceed to lament the state of the world. We must call it as we see it—nothing less will do. In fact, if the ex post finding that Rand was overly pessimistic in her prognosis is correct, far from turning in her grave, she would actually be delighted. Notes: a. I am using ‘Hollywood’ as a metonym to cover all screen stories, including those produced in languages other than English, and including those produced outside the United States. b. In this context, we will use Rand’s definition of art with an explanatory twist—“Art is an artist’s selective re-creation of reality according to the way an artist sees the world around him—in-principle knowable and conquerable (the romanticist axis), or in-principle unfathomable and unconquerable (the naturalist axis).”

3. Romanticism versus Naturalism in the story arts

If the writer believes that a human being possesses free will, the writer would show him choosing values, and acting to gain or keep them by way of purposeful action, i.e. determining his own fate, or at least seeking strongly to influence it. If, in the writer’s judgment, the world is deterministic or indeterminable, events would unfold in a random way, and the story characters would receive their fate without being able to influence it. Based on this primary distinction, we can derive characteristics of romanticist stories and contrast them with naturalist ones.

A romanticist story therefore, must have a sequence of events, in which events follow logically from the preceding ones, given the purposeful actions set in motion by characters who seek values. A naturalist story, by contrast, is one in which at least some events are haphazard, and occur exogenously to the world of the characters.

The rest of what is Romanticism follows from the imperatives of drama. It is more engaging to watch a strong conflict as against when values are easily achieved through influencing events. It is more engaging to watch a conflict escalate to a final do-or-die battle—e.g. in sports, if the biggest battle took place earlier, how many in the audience would sit through the undercard afterward? The story must have a central issue at stake, which is to be resolved by the final battle, otherwise there is no point in the telling; we can watch average life without going to the movies. Naturalism, on the other hand, focusses on making art uninspiring.

Naturalism, on the other hand, focusses on making art uninspiring

The idea is to show the run-of-the-mill life, the average rather than ‘as it could be at its best’. Such a story would have three or more of these eight characteristics: a. Having conflicts unresolved at the end, thus subliminally implying that resolution is not likely in real life; b. Having accidental events determine the fate of the key characters as if accidental events are the key to outcomes; c. Letting coincidences occur to assist a protagonist’s victory as if one must rely on coincidences to secure victory; d. Letting all major characters be equally flawed without the flaws being corrected as if moral ambiguity is intrinsic to human nature and self-improvement impossible; e. Trivializing great achievement by character caricature and stereotyping, implying that great achievers (e.g. inventors) are necessarily eccentric, socially inept, or unhappy; f. Portraying the as is life in a specific location without a context for a universal truth about humankind to be gleaned from its happenings; g. The deliberate absence of a clear moral right and wrong (a world full of moral grey); and h. A meandering storyline that shows ‘a slice of real life’; the art of navel-gazing without a unifying purpose.

Naturalism is an inferior form of art.

Unresolved major conflicts used to be considered inexcusable for a story. Imagine a completed murder mystery, highly imaginative, with multiple viable suspects, that inexorably propels toward a climax, only for the audience to be told at the end that some mysteries remain unsolved; ‘such is life’. If the writer has not figured it out himself, he is cheating his readers by subjecting them to a half-baked idea. It is lazy writing. Naturalism is essentially lazy writing, lazy in the sense that the writer is unwilling or unable to undertake the large amount of thinking that is necessary to write a fully integrated plot and express it well. Naturalism is an inferior form of art.

4. Illustrations of Naturalism on screen

Romanticism is better understood by a contrast with the more severe examples of Naturalism. The following are all 21st Century examples of Naturalism and of lazy writing.

I. Disgrace (2009): JM Coetzee published the novel Disgrace in 1999. It was adapted for a film starring John Malkovich in 2009. The novel won the Man Booker Prize for literature; J.M. Coetzee was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. In the story, David Lurie, a disillusioned (readers are never told why he is so), 52-year-old, white, South African professor of literature in Cape Town, throws away his whole career after he has an affair with a female student. He gives the student a passing grade for an exam she did not take. However, he is indicted for the consensual sex instead, and inexplicably offers no defense even when the way back into his career is clear. He then joins his lesbian daughter Lucy on a farm in the Eastern Cape, where she lives alone, growing flowers and vegetables, for sale at the local farmers’ market. There, the two are subjected to a brutal attack at the hands of three black men; Lucy is gang-raped and beaten; Lurie is set on fire; both survive the attack. Lucy decides to keep the child that she conceives as a result, and to stay on the farm despite the danger—handing over her land to her neighbor and former farmhand, Petrus, who is implicated in the attack in the scenes that follow. Petrus’ guilt is left to the readers’ imagination—either the attack is a random event or he orchestrates it; readers never find out. Lucy regards her rape as Mother Earth’s revenge for white people domination of black people for a few generations earlier. Lurie, struggling to find a new meaning in his life, fails to write an opera about Byron he otherwise badly wanted to, and instead, devotes his time initially to helping Petrus on the farm, then to euthanizing unwanted dogs at a local animal welfare clinic. At the clinic one day, he suddenly has unsatisfying sex with the aging, unattractive, married, female manager. Finally, upon finding that corpses of unwanted dogs are hammered with a shovel to fit an incinerator entry point, he decides to spend his time meticulously rearranging the corpses to avoid the shoveling, which action, we are asked to infer, gives his life the meaning and himself the dignity that his literature professorship could not.

II. Crash (2004): Using an enormous ensemble cast, with no singularly visible protagonist, and no definitively pursued desires against an ascending conflict, the story liberally uses repetitive coincidence as a plot device to demonstrate that victims of racism are often racist themselves in different contexts and situations in a world full of moral grey. Critically acclaimed, Crash won two Academy awards (including Best Picture) and two BAFTAs (including Best Screenplay). III. No Country for Old Men (2007): The Coen Brothers adapted a novel involving the story of an ordinary man who stumbles upon a gang-killing scene, and a bagful of money. A cat-and-mouse drama unfolds between a nihilistic psychopathic killer who is chasing the bag of money, and the protagonist, the ordinary man, who turns into an ordinary thief. The psychopath is being pursued by the town’s Sheriff. The psychopath then murders the protagonist, which act the audience has to infer, as the murder, astonishingly, is not shown on screen.

Then more killings occur, as the psychopathic killer decides the fate of his victims by a coin toss. As the killer is trying to get away, coincidentally he is involved in a car accident, which is the other driver’s fault. Nevertheless, he limps away, leaving an unresolved mystery for the aging Sheriff, who, at the end, gives up, effectively acknowledging that there is no order in this universe, the pursuit of justice is futile, and nihilism wins anyway, so it is time for him to quit and wait for his own death. This ties the last scene to the first one—a dream in which he saw his dead father, abruptly switching a thriller to a coming-of-age story. Critically acclaimed, as naturalist stories that celebrate nihilism often are, the film won two Golden Globes (including Best Screenplay), three Academy awards (including Best Picture), and three BAFTAs.

IV. There Will be Blood (2007): A meandering, plot-less story of an oil prospector, initially shown as an entrepreneurial spirit, cognizant of his own strengths, and compassionate to boot, adopting the son of a colleague who suffered a fatal accident. Over time, the prospector morphs into an evil and highly eccentric person, without reason. This violates a cardinal storytelling rule from the Poetics (“Keep your characters consistent over the length of the story”). Tormented (as if any pursuit of wealth must lead to torment), he then disowns his adopted son, and eventually turns into a cold-blooded killer. This movie got into some critics’ Best film of the decade lists, winning two Academy awards, a BAFTA, and a Golden Globe, plus the Academy nomination for Best Picture.

V. The Hurt Locker (2009): One of the most plot-less stories ever to hit the screen, this is a journalistic slice-of-life account of unconnected incidents that happen to occur to a bomb explosives expert. At the end, he confesses to his infant son that the risky excitement of war is the only thing he truly loves. This documentary-style film won six Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Screenplay, and Best Director, and substantive critical acclaim.

Naturalism requires that the improbable is not achieved by heroic action, or a hard-to-achieve value is not sought in the first place (if any values are consistently desired at all) so that the heroism, if any, does not have a laser-like focus. The overriding subliminal inference is that humankind is inept, the forces of nature much too great, and heroism futile.

Notwithstanding the fawning of the critics and the award-givers, Naturalism does also have a fan base, and therefore at times a hard-to-ignore box-office performance. Yet, contemporary screenwriting teaching and its theory applauds Romanticism, virtually without exception.

5. Romanticism clarified

There is no generally accepted definition of Romanticism. Nineteenth century attempts to define it tended to declare it as the primacy of emotions, which definition has persisted to this day. We use Rand’s definition of the primacy of values, essentially of self-selected values, of individualism, and of free will, as a rebellion of the time against the authoritarian dictates of the classical movement. For a fuller exposition of this, refer Walter Donway’s talk on Romanticism at The Atlas Summit 2013.

6. Screenwriting theory and Aristotle

Although there is no one single, unifying body of thought generally accepted as ‘screenwriting theory’ the way Newtonian physics would be for the undergraduate student of physics, there are considerable commonalities in the teachings of screenwriting courses, how-to books, and in the pronouncements of its popular educators. Screenwriting prescriptions as gleaned from the teachings of its most successful advocates—Robert McKee, the late Blake Snyder, Michael Hauge, Linda Seger, Linda Cowgill, Karel Segers, Syd Field, and Hal Croasmun, are essentially highly romanticist. At first glance, this may not appear to be the case, as some written pieces may ask for a focus on character rather than plot. Yet, the universal recommendation is to have active protagonists who want something badly, to have causality rather than coincidences, internally consistent reality, high stakes, increasing jeopardy, a protagonist propelled into action by self-belief, high-level conflict, a pursuit of objectives/ values, and a climax that results in closure. Hague, for instance, says, “There must be a clear, specific, visible motivation or objective which the hero hopes to achieve by the end of the story. You can’t just have your hero shuffle through life and call that a movie.” Field cautions—”A screenplay without structure has no storyline; it wanders around, searching for itself, is dull and boring. It doesn’t work.” Cowgill states, “Your protagonist must be committed to something—her goal, a value system, a person, etc.—and be willing to fight for it, even die”. Seger goes further, “We want the protagonist to win, to reach the goal, to achieve the dream”. Like Rand, screenwriting guru Robert McKee also deplores the loss of story—the loss of what he calls the archplot. In an archplot, there is a single, active protagonist, linear time, a struggle against forces of antagonism to pursue desire, to a closed ending of absolute and irreversible change. McKee then uses the term minimalism to express the minimizing of such values, including devices such as open endings (e.g. Ides of March (2011), No Country for Old Men). Finally, McKee uses the term antiplot to denote a ridicule of formal principles—“the cinema counterpart of the Theatre of the Absurd”, e.g. Monty Python (1971-1983) movies, and Arbitrage (2012) starring Richard Gere. Aristotle is widely quoted by the screenwriting teacher fraternity. Some have even claimed that everything that is taught today (not just the foundations), was already covered by Aristotle. Aristotle’s Poetics has had several English translations, both literal and interpretive. The interpretive translations tend to be liberally interpretive, i.e. tend to attribute the author’s own agenda or edicts to Aristotle, in order to gain more credence. A screenwriting theorist (Lanouette, 2012) has recently argued that, “In the ever-expanding family of Arts and Letters conceived by humankind, Screenwriting is one of the newest members. Cursed as the bastard child of Playwriting, she strives for the acceptance of her adoptive father Film, who neglects poor Screenwriting to shamelessly favor his natural daughters Image and Montage.This unfortunate circumstance may explain why it is that Cinderella Screenwriting clings so desperately to a remote ancestry, so quick to remind those who’ll listen that she is actually a direct descendant of the great Aristotle, revered and infallible patriarch of the ancient family of Drama. She rarely misses an opportunity to refer to Aristotle’s Poetics, her pedigree papers, often quoting liberally from it.” Notwithstanding the likelihood of over-attribution however, there is no denying that Aristotle was prescribing what was later termed Romanticism by Rand. This then begs the question, “If the prescription for Romanticism is universal in the screenwriting community, why are naturalist plots even made into films? Why do they win awards?” The film-medium educators have no answer to this question. Indeed, many do not understand the nature of this question; some have never considered it. In fact, the act of rationalization is so widespread that educators take award-winning films and ones that have a cult following (e.g. Pulp Fiction, American Beauty) and somehow re-fit the prescription to the actual, as if box-office success, a cult following (e.g. Coen Brothers), or awards, confer credence or validity that somehow overrides a set norm. That approach leaves us with no objective standard by which to judge story art. Romanticism, on the other hand, is an objective standard. Box-office revenue, aggregate sales, or aggregate sales net of budget, are also all objectively measurable standards. Those, however, are standards of commercial success, not of artistic merit. The problem for educators is that once they loudly proclaim that they teach a how-to-make-it-in-Hollywood approach, they are compelled to reconcile awards and commercial success to their edicts rather than admit no knowledge of why some prescribed things fail and the ex-ante criticized scripts succeed; success in this case includes getting a screenplay optioned or made into a film. Robert McKee, however, remains the standout exception to this trend of ex-post rationalizing. Rand attributed the growth and increasing popularity of Naturalism, and the reduction and corruption of Romanticism, to the progressive disintegration of culture, paralleling the disintegration in the fields of ethics and politics.

Citizen Kane is a wayward, purposeless story, essentially an inferior screenplay.

The Academy, like its literary counterparts in the Man Booker, Pulitzer, and Nobel prizes, has never laid down an objective standard for judging art. In the literary arena, the inferred standard is Naturalism or Existentialism. The Academy has rewarded both romanticist and naturalist movies in the Best Picture and Best Screenplay categories, albeit the trend of the last eleven years is ominously consistent (in favor of Naturalism), except in the Best Foreign Film category, where those of the 6,000 working professionals who vote on it, must actually attest that they have seen it. Film critics however, have long since completed their journey into the dark world. For sixty consecutive years (1952-2012), film critics classified a wayward, purposeless examination of an unhappy newspaper baron (Citizen Kane) to be the greatest film of all time, offering little more than new techniques at the time and a gimmicky narrative structure as the reasons thereof. Citizen Kane is a wayward, purposeless story, essentially an inferior screenplay. Perhaps, like their literary counterparts, they did not dare to state the real reason—Orson Welles made Naturalism chic and initiated the debasement of humanity in movies in 1941.

Beware the great American novel, or the Man Booker Prize winning one. Beware the films that critics call “among the greatest of all time”. Do not feel ashamed or unworthy or like a simpleton if you ‘don’t get it’. You are not meant to, unless you know what their game is, or you belong to that class of pseudo-intellectual existentialist literati, who celebrate depictions of degradation, and plot-less stories, with a view to infiltrate your culture. Do not feel obliged to go into a book club or a film society and rave about something that you found dull.

7. Low-level and Bootleg Romanticism

Romanticism requires a well-ordered, well-thought-through plot. It is difficult, but it is the superior form of art.

In a January 1965 essay titled Bootleg Romanticism, Rand stated that romantic art is virtually nonexistent but for crime thrillers, which she designated as “the kindergarten arithmetic of which the higher mathematics is the greatest novels of world literature”. In lower-level Romanticism, there is an obvious good and bad side from the start (e.g. cops & robbers, detectives and serial killers etc.), and a lack of an internal value-clash for the principal characters, and thereby of internal growth or discovery. Rand used the term Bootleg Romanticism to describe situations where even lower-level Romanticism such as fantasies or crime thrillers are portrayed in a way whereby the heroic actions are performed with a tongue-in-cheek slant, the subtext telling the audience not to take them seriously, i.e. in effect saying “this is just for laughs, it’s not emotional fuel for your soul.” Romanticism requires a well-ordered, well-thought-through plot. It is difficult, but it is the superior form of art.

8. Illustrations of Romanticism—Movies

To make our search for Romanticism contemporary, I state five 21st Century examples of screen stories that, in my opinion, best exemplify Romanticism. There are of course, many more, especially if one goes back fifty years, but these are among the purest of the last ten years from the ones I have seen.

I. The Counterfeiters (2007): Based on a true WWII story, this German language film is a telling of an incredible internal value-clash within a Jewish artist, Salomon Sorowitsch (Sal). Sal makes a living as a forger of passports and currency. The Nazis hunt him down and send him to a concentration camp. Here, he uses his portraiture skills to get himself a better bunkhouse and food. The Nazis want to use him to forge the British Pound and the U.S. dollar. Initially motivated by survival, he is conflicted by the fact of the counterfeiting assisting the Germans in the war, and further conflicted by the pride he takes in his work—he has never been able to perfect his counterfeit of the U.S. dollar, and the Germans are throwing money at it. His fellow prisoners are on both sides of the debate—is it better to die honorably now, or die after helping the Nazis while retaining a slim possibility of escape? Sal engages in covert delaying tactics to buy time, which starts an engrossing cat-and-mouse detection game. It won the best foreign language film Oscar for 2007.

II. The Dark Knight (2008): Even Metacritic picked this one as one of the best superhero films, and one of the best of the decade. The Batman, the DA, and the Police Commissioner combine forces to stop rampant crime in Gotham City, but they seem unable to stop the relentless nihilism of The Joker (“This city needs a classier kind of criminal and I’m going to give it to them”). The Joker sets up a moral experiment on the seas that ends up with a result opposite to what he desired—it lifts convicted felons into moral uprightness rather than turn ordinary citizens into killers. His next experiment succeeds however, as The Batman, his alter ego the other male in an uneasy love triangle, miscalculates, letting the love of his life die, in order to rescue the personification of virtue and courage in the city, the DA, who loves the same woman. The DA survives. However, facially scarred in the fire, and emotionally scarred by the loss of his fiancée, he loses faith in virtue itself, and is turned by The Joker into Two-Face, an eccentric, evil killer in love with nihilism. The Batman, in an action that concretizes the ‘inspiring art as emotional fuel’ abstraction, offers to take the blame for the murders committed by the DA, to ‘preserve the possibility for Gotham that the good can persist to the end’. The sterling image of the DA as Gotham’s White Knight is to be preserved as though it was an art form. In the final scene, the Commissioner reluctantly takes up the offer, setting the police dogs to chase after The Batman, now Gotham City’s Dark Knight. The insightful concretization of the two moral experiments, and the personification of nihilism brilliantly portrayed by Heath Ledger, in addition to the outstanding screenplay, led me to categorize this story as high-level Romanticism.

III. Conviction (2010): Based on a true story, a mother of two young children, works relentlessly for eighteen years to free her brother, an ex-small-time-felon, wrongly convicted of murder. The brother happens to rob the victims’ home moments before the murder, which places him at the scene. The mother’s obsession with the pursuit ends up with her having to put herself through law school, suffer divorce, estrangement from her children, and multiple setbacks via a judicial system uninterested in the truth, before she finally realizes her goal.

IV. The Lives of Others (2006): Made with a shoestring budget of $2 million, the theme of this German language film is the surveillance of the citizenry in a police state, pitting the best of the citizens against the secret police. What is uplifting in this strong values clash is that the Stasi officer on the straight and narrow is edged to the right side of wrong by a sonata, and driven further into it by a stolen book of poetry, even as the police state pushes upstanding citizens into the wrong side of right. The feel of authenticity is the hallmark of this gem; they used the real surveillance machine, recreated the 1980s Berlin in streets that have remain unchanged, and the screenplay got more than a once-over from people who experienced the policing on one side or the other. It got the gong for the Best Foreign language film Oscar for 2006.

V. Agora (2009): Atheist Spanish writer-director Alejandro Amenábar reconstructed the tale of Hypatia, a female philosopher-astronomer-mathematician of the late 4th century Roman Egypt. U.S. audiences only got a limited theatrical release probably because of the overt anti-Christian stance. No film has so openly celebrated the epistemology of reason over faith. As the Pagans are fighting a losing war against the invading Christians, Hypatia determinedly pursues scientific truth, saving important scrolls from the library destroyed by the Christians. Of her three prominent pupils, two (Orestes and Davus) are in love with her; the third (Cyril) becomes an aggressive Christian missionary. Orestes chases Hypatia and power; he risks losing his power over Alexandria because of his love for Hypatia, but only Davus can save the intransigent Hypatia from torture at the hands of Cyril’s mob. Agora is the most romanticist and aesthetically high-standard film I have ever seen. Great performances, eye-catching cinematography, and concretizations of various abstractions—the conflict of reason versus faith, the joy of discovery, the determination of history by the philosophical convictions of its age—are all integrated into a story of love: a love triangle, the love of knowledge, and the love of a man for a woman based on the values she pursues.

9. Illustrations of Romanticism—Television

Television drama serials such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, House of Cards, and Homeland are breaking new ground. They involve multiple characters in relentless pursuit of their respective goals, albeit the world is typically portrayed as a moral grey, only the shades differ. As is required by TV drama, the story is held together by a place (the ad agency in Mad Men, Congress in House of Cards) or a person (family man Walter White making difficult choices as he faces imminent death from cancer in Breaking Bad, a marine in search of an ideology in Homeland). House of Cards is a pure pursuit of power; future seasons may concretize the effect of such a strategy on the lives of its principal proponents. In each case, decisions abound, and the plot is driven entirely by the choices made by the principal characters, albeit there is an absence of a fundamental value clash.

Television’s great advantage is the long story arc of the season. TV’s 50-minute stories, interrupted by commercials, were conveyed in the dialogues, violating the show, don’t tell doctrine. By making shows non-episodic and using multiple protagonists, television has supplied its writers multiple variables to play with, and plenty of time (when is the last episode of the last season?) to resolve the conflicts so set up. This makes for unpredictability—in a good way, in that story turns take us by surprise, or at least are not predictable because there are so many different paths a multi-protagonist long story can take. Further, end-of-episode and end-of-season scenes can be designed as cliffhangers—further factors that draw in the numbers and the ratings.

Contemporary long-arc non-episodic television drama stories are romanticist, but not perfectly so due to the absence of a strong good versus bad value conflict; the typical conflict is grey versus gray where no character displays even redemptive integrity.

However, so long as film stories with fantasy elements have strong allegories to the real world in terms of the moral dilemmas faced by the protagonists, they are also likely to do well, and indeed, they do so (refer Appendix I for the list of biggest earning movies of this century). The driver of this box-office performance is not the blockbuster budget, it’s the strength of the story—of its Romanticism, and of the ability of its allegories to relate to the real world, coupled with what Aristotle called ‘spectacle’—the visually stunning special effects, the physicality of the conflicts, and the physical beauty and emotional honesty of the star attractions.

10. Audience reach of screen stories

One research report (Market Watch) suggests that less than one in two Americans read a novel a year, while Pew Research suggests that one in four do not read any kind of book. A fiction book that sells over a million copies is considered a bestseller. Every year, some new books break into that zone. Including DVD hires and downloads, several Hollywood movies are seen by over a million people every year; the highest-grossing films have reached over a hundred million people. Successful TV drama has ‘live’ audiences in excess of a million. Over 10 million people watched the final episode of Breaking Bad. The drama series Lost averaged 17 million viewers; The Walking Dead’s finale was watched by 15.7 million viewers. The numbers increase when you add the internet downloads and DVD hires. As a whole, screen stories have a wider reach than literature—many that never read books, do watch films or television, whereas the converse is far less true. Every year, more screen stories (as compared to novels) exceed a pre-set Reach Watermark (whether one sets it at one million or ten million). It is, quite simply, easier to sit in front of a screen for two hours than read for six to eight hours. A TV drama serial, however, can take ten to twelve hours of viewing for one season, but it still easier than reading large literary works, which can take just as long to read. Further, a movie audience is close to 100% captured for the duration; very few leave the theatre after the film starts. Relatively, both serial TV drama and books will suffer lost audiences.

11. Corrupted end-values and symbolic monstrosities

In her essay, “The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age”, Rand remarked that Naturalism was in fact no longer presenting the statistical average, but the worst in humankind. This was the sort of depravity, which made the audience feel “at least I am not that that bad,” with the consequence being a release from aspiring to be the best one can be, a moral license to let go and stop trying, i.e. the very antithesis of what art ought to be doing. Some of our illustrations of Naturalism (e.g. Disgrace, There will be Blood) do precisely that by reflecting an existentialist view of life. The screenwriting equivalent of this phenomenon is expressed by McKee as the antiplot—a de facto celebration of vice, rather than virtue, whereas McKee’s archplot reflects what we call Romanticism, and his miniplot (minimization of values) reflects the statistical average Naturalism.

12. A framework for detecting Romanticism

I put forward a seventeen-question based framework for detecting Romanticism, with the degree of Romanticism being greater for the higher number of affirmative answers. It is important to note that the question of cinematic aesthetics is relevant. Everything from authenticity in costume and set design to cinematography and performances matters in terms of engagement; higher the engagement with the narrative, higher is the uplift felt by the participant. Equally important to note is the issue of the objectives—they need not be ones that an objectivist would pursue. a. Do we have at least one major character that wants something badly? b. Is this want, triggered by an exogenous event? (the first cause must be exogenous, not driven by the character who himself/ herself has the objective) c. Is there a strong conflict of diametrically opposed values in the story? d. Is the goal, sensible as well as improbable (due to conflict or difficulty), but not impossible? e. Are the characters taking purposeful and sensible action in pursuit of their wants? So what is a sensible goal, sensibly pursued? In Jaws, a shark attack kills people. This exogenous event causes the Sheriff to want to eliminate the shark. This is a sensible goal. He pursues it sensibly by hunting it down. In The Great Gatsby, a poor man pretends to be rich to impress a woman. He then joins the army because he is penniless, and when he returns from the war, makes a fortune by illegal means. He wants to impress the woman he is love with. That seems sensible enough for a man like that. However, rather than using his wealth to locate her easily using private detectives, and then using it to spend lavishly on her, he uses it to throw wild and extravagant parties for strangers, parties which he himself rarely attends. This is incongruous.

It if it were not for the fact that the literati have made The Great Gatsby one of the ‘great American novels’, a story set like this would not pass muster for a Pass grade at an undergraduate class in creative writing.

Virtually none of David Lurie’s actions in Disgrace make any sense, whereas, in Breaking Bad, Walter White has only a few months to live, so he wants to make a fast buck for his family. That seems plausible. He finds a way to do that using his knowledge of chemistry. That is sensible, purposeful action. In his situation, it makes sense. The morality of it is a separate matter—the moral question of whether to leave a virtuous legacy or money in an either/or situation can be answered even by the protagonist taking the wrong road—by showing the consequences of taking the wrong road. Romanticism does not imply having virtuous goals and happy endings (achieved values) as the norm. Good drama, however, requires having sensible goals, and pursuits that appear sensible when placed in their context. f. Is each subsequent event caused by the previous events, coupled with the actions of the purposeful characters reacting to it? g. Is the conflict resolved at the end in a way that the story cannot continue? h. Does the resolution change the story world, a character/s, or both, for the better? i. Are the characters consistent throughout the story? j. Are the manufactured realities, if any, consistent throughout the story? k. Is there no resort to coincidences to propel the story forward, or to end the final conflict? l. Are the aesthetic qualities (set and costume design, accents, dialogue) of the screen story authentic vis-à-vis the setting chosen? m. Are the aesthetic qualities (cinematography, pace, performances) gripping? At the storyboard stage, can the concretization be made visually spectacular? n. Is the story authentic vis-à-vis its major theme (e.g. evidence collection procedures, the way a courtroom functions, the way poetry is taught (e.g. in Dead Poets Society)? o. Are there no loopholes in the story? p. Is the story told without resorting to excessive exposition via dialogue/voiceover, with abstractions concretized rather than didactically explained? q. Are there unexpected twists and turns, which, with the benefit of hindsight, appear logical?

13. Improving the Romanticism of a story

Our 17-question framework is useful, not only for passing judgment with objective consistency, but also for restructuring a story to make it more romanticist.

Let us take The Butler (2013), a purportedly historic, slice-of-life account of a White House butler. The Butler breaks the cardinal rule of a good dramatic story—the protagonist is almost completely passive, and his goal is a very low-level one—being safe rather than sorry; staying out of trouble. Cecil Gaines, the butler, has a son who becomes a political activist for desegregation. If the story centered on the son instead, the closing images (where father and son reconcile as the son awakens the conscience of the father), the personalities, and many of the events, could be the same, but this point of view change could, with a few more tweaks, turn this story into a largely romanticist one. The Butler however, was perhaps intended to be propaganda Naturalism, rather than a romanticist film. Our framework will work easier as a detection and correction mechanism when the intention is right, but flaws have crept in the execution (i.e. writing) of a story.

14. Concluding comments

The can-do outlook engendered by romanticist art can make us all perpetually young in spirit. However, the scorn of the pseudo-intellectual literati against it is cloaked in the well-disguised garb of awards; only minds alerted to this phenomenon can catch it. Screen stories are now the most dominant form of story art. The corruption of screen stories by the literati is incomplete. It makes our continuing search for Romanticism worthwhile. The survival of Romanticism may be partially attributed to romanticist fantasy stories that facilitate spectacle such as Superman, Harry Potter, Twilight, and others. They succeed at the box-office in part due to spectacle. Romanticism has a natural, as-yet-uncorrupted, fan base (the very young). Perhaps its survival could also be partly attributed to Aristotle having slipped in under the radar as the anointed guru of screenwriting. Most film critics are either subconsciously existentialist, or operating in a vacuum, their critiquing simply a subconscious reaction wrapped in flowery language. In either case, they are no better than the average Joe on the street, and undeserving of their status. Anyone can promote Romanticism. It would be instructive to read The Romantic Manifesto: A Philosophy of Literature, by Ayn Rand. A Facebook group, Romanticism Watch, has been created to act as a sentry-force on high alert—the intent is to spot, and promote, romanticist works of art. Feel free to join the crusade. Note: This article first appeared, largely as is, on the site of The Story Department, under the heading “Romanticism in Hollywood.”

Appendix I (Useful Hyperlinks):

1. Ranking of highest-grossing films, box-office earnings only (adjusted for inflation) 2. Ranking of highest-grossing films, collateral revenue included (adjusted for inflation) 3. List of Best Picture Academy award winners by year 4. List of Golden Globe Best Motion Picture Drama winners and nominees 5. List of BAFTA Best Film award winners and nominees Appendix II: Filmography An illustrative selection of films by their dominant slant, drawn from what I have seen, and containing mostly recent works (some historical works are included for illustrative purposes). Readers could well come up with their own list. Many stories of superheroes, sci-fi, rom-coms, fantasy, animations, and westerns could be romanticist (e.g. Star Wars, Star Trek, Twilight, Superman, The Matrix), so I have used only one ingenious illustration——Pirates of the Caribbean. The Curse of the Black Pearl, being the first, gets the nod for originality.

The Naturalism 25

The Romanticism 25

1. Introduction

Film is a visual storytelling medium. An objective standard for the analysis of storytelling art is crucial to any rational evaluation of films.

2. Summary

Romanticism showcases purposeful action by which men and women try to shape the world around them as against being shaped by it.

3. Romanticism versus Naturalism in the story arts

Naturalism, on the other hand, focusses on making art uninspiring

Naturalism is an inferior form of art.

4. Illustrations of Naturalism on screen

Romanticism is better understood by a contrast with the more severe examples of Naturalism. The following are all 21st Century examples of Naturalism and of lazy writing.

5. Romanticism clarified

6. Screenwriting theory and Aristotle

Citizen Kane is a wayward, purposeless story, essentially an inferior screenplay.

7. Low-level and Bootleg Romanticism

Romanticism requires a well-ordered, well-thought-through plot. It is difficult, but it is the superior form of art.

8. Illustrations of Romanticism—Movies

9. Illustrations of Romanticism—Television

10. Audience reach of screen stories

11. Corrupted end-values and symbolic monstrosities

12. A framework for detecting Romanticism

13. Improving the Romanticism of a story

Our 17-question framework is useful, not only for passing judgment with objective consistency, but also for restructuring a story to make it more romanticist.

14. Concluding comments

Appendix I (Useful Hyperlinks):

The Naturalism 25

The Romanticism 25

What is wrong with the world? Politicians have ruined the world’s major economies almost to the point of no return, and the world does not know it yet. How do we fix it? The world’s largest economy can only be improved by wholesale changes to its laws. Any party in power will keep kicking the can down the road. However, if the Republicans actually understood what is at stake, and had enough courage, they would be willing to use any tactic to circumvent President Obama to get the right things done, even at the cost of pushing the economy into a depression (yes that’s right, a depression, not a mild recession). In investment banking parlance, greenmail is the practice of a company buying sufficient shares in another company to threaten takeover and making a quick profit as a result of the threatened company buying back its shares at a higher price. Greenmail comes from green (money) and blackmail. Why is there a need to blackmail Obama with money?

Greenmail comes from green (money) and blackmail. Why is there a need to blackmail Obama with money?

The world’s major economies have issued over $60 trillion of federal debt. Other federal commitments and state-level debt only adds to the world’s burden. The U.S. contributes about a third of that (almost $18 trillion). The interest component of the federal debt will be rising rapidly, even as per the conservative CBO projections. We know what happens to countries with runaway deficits. Nevertheless, this Administration and its economists are good at deceiving themselves and the people as well. “Once growth gets back on track, revenues will grow, the deficit will begin to fall, and everything will be hunky dory,” is what they say to delude themselves. Except that, with the stranglehold of regulation, the forced higher costs of feel-good environmentalism and expensive energy, a similarly deluded world economy, and escalating fiscal and trade deficits, growth is never going to get back on track. What growth they think they do see right now is consumption caused by Federal pump-priming. The Republican Congressmen and Senators need to understand that unless extremely radical steps are taken, the economy will eventually go into a depression anyway. It will remain broken for a very long time. If radical steps are taken, the economy will nevertheless rapidly go into a depression, but if the steps are the right ones, it will not stay broken for a long time. Those are now the only choices left. This is because the process of liquidating uneconomic investments caused by runaway Government spending and reinvesting the funds in profitable projects is not instantaneous. It will take time—two, maybe three years at best, and that if the economy is free to make swift adjustments. The smart thing the Republicans did on the last debt ceiling negotiation was to give Barack Obama only thirteen months of respite. Midnight, March 15, 2015 is the witching hour. But, like so many presidents before him, President Obama is a political huckster. He knows his counter. He will mercilessly stab their soft tissue. Stop paying ordinary folk, blame the opposition for a shutdown that need not be, and letters land on the doorsteps of Congressmen by the thousands. If that does not do it, stop the social security checks for seniors first, then for all, then stop the disability checks. This is how he will do it again. He has a winning formula. Stare the Republicans down; they always blink first. He plays them like a cheap fiddle. One of the smartest pieces of advice I ever received was to “never make empty threats.” The GOP has thrice indulged in brinksmanship, and taken the issue to the wire, forcing Treasury to undertake extraordinary measures to keep the U.S. from defaulting, only to capitulate at the last moment. The extraordinary measures buy a few weeks for both sides. There really is no point in going down to the wire, if the Republicans throw in the towel just when the bell sounds for the final round. Ending the Federal Reserve, or repealing all forms of anti-trust legislation, would be excellent principled causes to fight to the death for. As bad as Obamacare is, this time however, the GOP needs to pick a cause many of their own believe in. 58% of Republicans believe, or you could say have knowledge of the fact that, the man-made global warming movement is a sham. Even some environmentalists agree that ethanol subsidies increase food prices and simultaneously harm the environment. Increased food prices are a dangerous catalyst for food riots in the poorer parts of the world. Laws and regulations catering to the hysteria caused by climate scientology can easily wreck an economy; extensive damage is already under way. The greens are President Obama’s closest philosophical allies. But for them, he may well have signed up by now to the Keystone project, something the GOP can have as a first item on the demand list by requiring that eminent domain objections still be attended to, while brushing aside vacuous alarms raised by the men and women in green. Explaining this to the American public will be very hard. Mainstream media is not an independent referee. Prominent market commentators, like Warren Buffett, will call such measures asinine. In one sense though, Buffett is right—the debt ceiling is a weapon of mass destruction. It can be used to destruct the asinine laws that the country has adopted.

A global depression must be triggered now, to avoid the bigger one later—it’s that simple. Or at the very least the real threat of one should be used constructively.

Extraordinary measures will allow Treasury to keep paying debt till July 2015 as the IRS can delay tax refunds using the debt ceiling impasse as an excuse. But, like blackmail, greenmail only works when the threat is credible. Only a sound philosophical basis will allow convictions to form, and give the Republicans the requisite courage to make credible threats.

In the long run, a wholesale default on U.S. debt, accompanied by a strong encouragement for other financially stressed countries to default totally, would be the very best thing to happen to the world economy—the Government bond market must be extinguished. Permanently extinguished.

President Obama, however, is unlikely to give any ground even if the threat is fully carried out. He is likely to see in it an opportunity to demolish the GOP. Many more millions will be rendered jobless if the U.S. does default.

The stock market will go into a tailspin, and interest rates will, fortunately, rise substantially. They need to. Desperately.

More than likely, this president will take the law into his own hands to keep up debt servicing to postpone a crash, and potentially facilitate an impeachment action to remove him and his successor Joe Biden, for this scenario can be played out repeatedly.That too, must be done if required. Almost surely, mainstream media will then blame the GOP and possibly cost it more than the 2016 election—the tide will turn permanently against one or the other major party. That is the scope of this battle—an all-out gamble. The question is, with the mid-term elections behind them, and the control of the Senate wrested, do the Republicans have the nerve, the providence, the fortitude, for a fight of this magnitude? We would not be in this position if they did.

Greenmail comes from green (money) and blackmail. Why is there a need to blackmail Obama with money?

A global depression must be triggered now, to avoid the bigger one later—it’s that simple. Or at the very least the real threat of one should be used constructively.

The stock market will go into a tailspin, and interest rates will, fortunately, rise substantially. They need to. Desperately.

You must have heard the wrong explanation, something that goes like this:

American banks knowingly sold unrepayable home loans to a gullible public;
Unregulated Wall Street greed resulted in poor investments being sold to retirement funds the world over;
Credit derivatives, collaterized debt obligations (CDOs), and credit default swaps, were those evil toxic securities which banks created and which led to a loss of wealth;
This house of cards collapsed, leading to corporate insolvencies, stock market crashes, real estate value declines, and increased unemployment;
If governments had not stepped in to rescue the banks and insurance companies, we would have had a depression that could have lasted decades;
It proves once and for all, that in a system of unregulated capitalism, the greedy and the corrupt will take advantage of the simple and the virtuous;
So we must now regulate the financial system even more to prevent this from ever occurring again, and rescue us, the people, from the current malaise—via ‘economic stimulus’ that the government alone is an expert at providing.

There are almost no major media outlets anywhere—newspapers, television, radio, magazines, even Hollywood movies and television serials, that have not repeated a version of this wrong mantra. Nevertheless, it is imperative that serious students of finance and economics maintain a critical perspective and look behind the scenes for what the true story may be. For example, students of investment theory know that derivative contracts are zero-sum games in which wealth can neither be created nor destroyed. Explanations which merely lay the blame at the feet of ‘financial instruments’ and ‘greed’are either incorrect, or at least missing something crucial. So what is the real story, and who has been voicing it? In recent times, some of the prominent voices of the true, behind-the-curtain story have been: George Reisman; Thomas E Woods and other economists associated with the Ludwig Von Mises Institute; Ron Paul, a libertarian ex-congressman and a candidate for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 and 2012; Governor Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate for president in 2012; investment maven Peter Schiff; and the disciples of Ayn Rand. In times past, the real story was narrated several times by Ludwig Von Mises, Henry Hazlitt, and Friedrich Hayek—some of the greatest economists associated with the Austrian tradition of economics, and also by an outstanding exponent of free market capitalism—philosopher Ayn Rand. The principles of the free market have long since been discovered. An Inquiry into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations was written by Adam Smith in 1776, and the principles were refined in the 19th century. Those who follow the rules of logic, and are objective in their judgment, have not a shred of doubt as to the efficacy of the free market. Wherever there is a systemic economic problem—collapsing asset prices, widespread unemployment, a cluster of insolvencies, inflation, depression, stagflation, or recession—the source of the problem is almost always that elected officials have not allowed the free market to work. Governments interfere with the market economy using various devices such as subsidies, tax incentives & other legal distortions, unwarranted regulatory burdens, price or volume controls, dictates about which consumers are to be served, or outright nationalisation. This is the generic form of the story. The particulars of this story (the lessons of history wasted, yet again) In Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse, Tom Woods, an Austrian economist, discusses the particulars of this story and the G.W.Bush Administration carrots thus: The Clinton Administration revived legislation that was designed to ‘encourage’ banks to issue home loans to minorities. Even though Asian Americans were getting more home loans in percentage numbers than white Americans, an apparent lower rate of lending to African Americans and Latino Americans was taken as prima facie evidence of discrimination. The stick of reputation-destroying discrimination lawsuits became quite ominous as regulators began to collect data regularly from the banks. Later studies found that there never had been any evidence of discrimination when the data was adjusted for credit risk, but the media uproar drowned out the follow-up studies. The American dream was being denied to some on account of their race, said the media. The market, already tied up in subsidies and regulation, was further nudged into an uneconomic direction. The fire ignited. The Bush Administration then added carrots to the stick, and the financial party morphed into an inferno. Far more capital was diverted into real estate construction than was justifiable. Eventually there was glut of construction, and prices collapsed. Even though banks were packaging the risk of price downturns and selling them in the form of securities, they did hold significant portions of it themselves, and their solvency came into question. In the thinly capitalised industry of banking, it was not easy to tell which of the banks were solvent and which were not, so banks grew wary of lending to each other. In the modern economy, financial markets cannot function easily without financial intermediaries carrying large levels of risk to each other, and the contagion of panic spread. So what were the Bush-era carrots? First, the Government created or revitalized institutions that they owned to give them an appearance of government-supported credit risk. You may have heard of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the colloquial names used respectively for the Federal National Mortgage Association, and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation. These institutions were granted over USD 2 billion in a line of credit by the Department of Treasury. Moreover, their quasi-government status helped them to raise money cheaply. These institutions bought the worst of the risk, embedded in the form of securities, from the banks. Government alone can counterfeit money Further, Governments everywhere have allowed their central banks to create paper money out of thin air—so that they can spend money on vote-grabbing schemes without ‘raising taxes,’ which is an electoral no-no. It is a two-step process—governments raise money by issuing bonds, and the central banks boost the prices of those bonds by the money created out of thin air. The central bank may “intend” to reverse the price boost down the road. This money creation exercise also creates a temporary illusion of prosperity, a perfect device for getting re-elected when in power. In this case, it added fuel to the fire. The prosperity illusion, however, begins to fade. More and more money needs to be printed to kick the can down the road again. Eventually the problem gets too big to avoid, and the central bank can no longer control the process within reasonable interest-rate and inflation boundaries. Reality takes over. From 2003, and leading up to the crisis in 2007, the stick and carrot regime created an irresistible cycle of profit for the banks. The cycle began with unwarranted construction, followed by lending to the undeserving, who would then buy homes to keep the construction going, followed by the banks selling major portions of the risk to the Fannies, the Freddies, and anyone else who would buy it—and there were more of those when the illusion of prosperity was created, and finally, the banks were pocketing structuring fees for the CDOs so issued. The cycle took about a year from end to end. But at any given time, many such unfinished profit cycles would overlap. Thus when the bubble burst, the banks were left holding a lot of the risk. Overinvestments in one sector of the economy must be painfully liquidated and the capital redeployed to restore equilibrium. The problem cannot be cured by simply looking the other way, or by propping up the sector overinvested in, with even more government handouts. In fact, the more the market is prevented from functioning normally, the longer it will take to cure the problem. The cure is never costless either. The longer it is postponed, the more it will cost. The unavoidable inference The U.S. Government, due to its desire to force its will on the market, was the primary culprit behind the large-scale mal-investment, and the consequential crisis that followed. Why is this obvious truth hidden from the public? As governments are in the business of getting re-elected, they and the economists in their lucrative employ, do not wish to acknowledge, sometimes even to themselves, their principal causative role in the boom and bust cycle. In 1936, a mathematics lecturer by the name of John Maynard Keynes gave a vacuous scholarly credence to the notion that free markets do not work, and that governments, undoubtedly advised by utopian macroeconomists, must step in to ‘fix’ the market. This idea elevated the role of politicians, and opened the gates of fame and fortune to the macroeconomist government advisers. As Hunter Lewis amply demonstrates in Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts, this so-called treatise was mired in obfuscations, incorrect assumptions, and bad logic, but came replete with elegant and opaque prose, and equally elegant but dense and diversionary mathematical equations. With the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, a quack was elevated to the level of a superstar. Soon after, Keynes was duly anointed as the father of modern economics, and the science of money suffered so serious a setback that it has never recovered. With government control of curriculum in public and private education, hordes of future academics, newspaper columnists, elected officials, film and television producers, and even investment professionals and company presidents, have been trained to think in terms of the avarice myth (“markets left to themselves must necessarily reward avarice over conscientious work”), and the fixed pie myth (“wealth is never newly created, it is always taken by the powerful from the vulnerable”). In historic times, monarchs did dilute gold money to cheat their subjects but at least the classical economists (Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill) never pandered to the monarchs by offering a scholarly cloak of respectability to this deceptive practice. Following the Keynesian era’s extraordinary intellectual regression however, fine-tuning the economy by creating money out of thin air to stimulate the economy, and arbitrarily reversing this to slow down the economy, has been converted into a pseudo-intellectual art form. But in practice, the cumulative action over a decade or more in almost any part of the world is a savage level of net money printing, which results in an inflation tax that governments do not ever acknowledge as being entirely of their own making. Productivity has a natural tendency to get better and will rarely decline—thus prices should in general be reducing, yet endless inflation is now a world-wide phenomenon. Where to, next? Investment practitioners should not assume that market events are so unforeseeable that diversification across asset classes is the only rational avenue to pursue in an increasingly volatile world. It is befitting to try and understand the macro causes of why asset prices and economies as a whole are volatile, and why markets “appear” to fail. Modern finance theory does not illuminate the practitioner in this regard. If classical and Austrian perspectives are correct, various world economies are headed for a severe downturn when the music stops for unrepayable levels of government debt. Keynesian solutions to print even more money and to recklessly divert capital to economically unprofitable election promises are dangerously in play in the U.S., the U.K., Japan, China, in some Eurozone economies, and in Australia. Regulation of the finance sector has increased. Meanwhile, subsidies to the finance sector abound in terms of increasing government bond prices—through money printing for which the banks are the first beneficiaries, and prop-ups of the banks’ severe illiquidity and outrageously low levels of capital via the central bank lender of last resort credit facilities. Yet these subsidies are not even recognized and reported by the mainstream media, much less fought against. Vast numbers of politicians are untrained in Austrian or classical macroeconomics, and are ill-advised, often by advisers who are themselves similarly untrained. Thus, many who carry the courage of their convictions, could be taking ill-informed decisions, unaware of the deleterious long-term effects of their policies. There is no substitute for thinking, and a bit of quiet reflection. Read widely, ponder, and decide for yourself. Here is a collection of readings that may help:

Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts by Hunter Lewis
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E Woods
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand
Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt
The Government Against the Economy by George Reisman
How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D Schiff and Andrew J Schiff
The Frankenstein Candidate: A Woman Awakens to a Web of Deceit by Vinay Kolhatkar

Copyright: This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/pt/deed.en). This article first appeared on Contraditorio.

You must have heard the wrong explanation, something that goes like this:

American banks knowingly sold unrepayable home loans to a gullible public;
Unregulated Wall Street greed resulted in poor investments being sold to retirement funds the world over;
Credit derivatives, collaterized debt obligations (CDOs), and credit default swaps, were those evil toxic securities which banks created and which led to a loss of wealth;
This house of cards collapsed, leading to corporate insolvencies, stock market crashes, real estate value declines, and increased unemployment;
If governments had not stepped in to rescue the banks and insurance companies, we would have had a depression that could have lasted decades;
It proves once and for all, that in a system of unregulated capitalism, the greedy and the corrupt will take advantage of the simple and the virtuous;
So we must now regulate the financial system even more to prevent this from ever occurring again, and rescue us, the people, from the current malaise—via ‘economic stimulus’ that the government alone is an expert at providing.

Where Keynes Went Wrong: And Why World Governments Keep Creating Inflation, Bubbles, and Busts by Hunter Lewis
Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E Woods
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand
Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics by Henry Hazlitt
The Government Against the Economy by George Reisman
How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes by Peter D Schiff and Andrew J Schiff
The Frankenstein Candidate: A Woman Awakens to a Web of Deceit by Vinay Kolhatkar