Human Behavior

Movies Featuring Courage

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Ruxandra Teslo wrote an interesting Substack post:  Intellectual Courage as the Scarcest Resource, which sparked a good discussion in comments. Which got me thinking:  What are some good films that feature courage, especially moral and intellectual courage?  Here are a few that I think fit, some of which I’ve seen, some of which I haven’t seen but have heard about, and some suggested by others to whom I asked this question.

The White Rose, 1982 German film about the anti-Nazi resistance group of that name. There have been several other good movies about the group and its members, especially Sophie Scholl, but this film is in a class all its own. It portrays the members of the group not as plaster saints but as the kids they actually were–albeit kids with astonishing levels of moral, intellectual, and physical courage. The film never made it to streaming, but VHS tapes and maybe DVDs are findable.  In German, with English subtitles.

There are several similarly-named films: this is the one with Lena Stolze as Sophie Scholl. Really, very highly recommended.

We The Living, a 1942 Italian movie based on Ayn Rand’s novel of the same name (which IMO was the best of her works from a literary & characterization standpoint).  The film was weirdly approved by the fascist censors but then called back when they belatedly realized it was broadly anti-totalitarian, not only anti-communist.  Very good film, except for the frequent display of white subtitles against a snow background…of course, you don’t need the subtitles if you can understand Italian.

A French Village--a French TV series set in a small town during the years of the Occupation. It does not make all French people out to be heroes, by any means, and portrays the difficulties and ambiguities that can exist in such situations, along with some portraits of genuine heroism.  I reviewed the series here, and Sgt Mom also reviewed it.  (Apologies for the weird and irritating typography, it is a WordPress problem which has recently shown up.)

Fueled–A strange Japanese movie, based on the fictionalized story of a man who built an oil-trading business from scratch, beginning when oil was a minor factor in Japan. The film & the book it is based on are apparently favorites of the militarist Right in Japan, and, indeed, there is no hint of an apology for WWII and its atrocities.  Still, I thought it was a good story about courage and determination in business.

(I saw this movie a few years ago, and was reminded of it by Biden’s policy of drawing down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve–which reminded me of the movie’s image of the Japanese oil people, after the end of the war, going down to the very bottom of the Japanese Navy’s deep storage facility to see what was left.)

Devotion–based on the true story of Jesse Brown, a black man who became a US Navy fighter pilot in 1946…and his (white) wingman, Thomas Hudner, who took incredible risks during the Korean War by landing his Corsair in enemy territory in a rescue attempt.  I reviewed the film last year.

No Highway in the Sky, a 1951 film based on the novel by Neville Shute.  A metallurgist, Theodore Honey, calculates that a new British passenger aircraft, the Rutland Reindeer, will be destroyed by metal fatigue of the tail after exactly 1440 flight hours on any particular airplane.  A vibration test-to-destruction is underway with an experimental model of the tail, in order to determine whether or not the airplane really needs to be removed from service,  but commercially-operated Reindeers are building up hours and some will reach the possibly-deadly number of 1440 before the test can be completed.

A crash occurs with an airplane which has flown 1407 hours, but the pilot is blamed.  Honey, the metallurgist, is sent to Labrador to examine the wreckage–traveling on a Reindeer which already has 1422 hours.  They do arrive safely in Newfoundland for a fuel stop…what, if anything, should Honey do before the airplane departs for the next leg of its flight to Labrador?  Certainly, not be on the flight is one option…but there are others, which will have quite negative consequences for him if he is wrong about the metal fatigue.

The movie was surely inspired by the disasters that hit the first commercial jet transport, the Comet, and has resonance with Boeing and the 737 Max MCAS failures.

12 Angry Men.  This 1952 movie, which I’ve somehow never seen, is about a jury in a murder trial, in which one member holds out for the acquittal which he believes is the right thing to do, against overwhelming pressure from the other jury members.  An extensive review is here.

The site that the above link goes through is focused entirely on heroism, in fiction, legend, and real life, and the authors have written some books on the subject.  I see that they describe Harry Potter as the ultimate fictional hero….they’re talking about the books, there have also been Harry Potter movies, has anyone seen them?  If so, any opinions?

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Freedom, the Village, and Social Media (updated)

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To what extent are ‘cancellation’ campaigns against people expressing unpopular opinions (unpopular, at least, in the view of some substantial number of people)–now a regular and unpleasant feature of social media sites–really a new phenomenon, rather than being just a modern incarnation of a kind of behavior which has long existed?

Hans Fallada’s novel  Every Man Dies Alone, is centered on a couple who become anti-Nazi activists after their son Ottochen is killed in the war;  it was inspired by, and is loosely based on, the true story of a real-life couple  who distributed anti-Nazi postcards and were executed for it.  I thought the book was excellent.  The present  present post, though, is not a book review, but rather a development of some thoughts inspired by a particular passage in the story.

Trudel, who was Ottochen’s fiancee, is a sweet and intelligent girl who is strongly anti-Nazi..and unlike Ottochen’s parents, she became an activist prior to being struck by personal tragedy: she is a member of a resistance cell at the factory where she works.  But she finds that she cannot stand the unending psychological strain of underground work, made even worse by the rigid and doctrinaire man (apparently a Communist) who is leader of the cell and she drops out. Another member of the cell, who has long been in love with her, also finds that he is not built for such work, and drops out also.

After they marry and Trudel becomes pregnant, they decide to leave the politically hysterical environment of Berlin for a small town where, they believe, life will be freer and calmer.

Like many city dwellers, they’d had the mistaken belief that spying was only really bad in Berlin and that decency still prevailed in small towns. And like many city dwellers, they had made the painful discovery that recrimination, eavesdropping, and informing were ten times worse in small towns than in the big city. In a small town, everyone was fully exposed, you couldn’t ever disappear in the crowd. Personal circumstances were quickly ascertained, conversations with neighbors were practically unavoidable, and the way  such conversations could be twisted was something they had already experienced in their own lives, to their chagrin.

Reading the above passage, I was struck by the thought that if we are now living in an ‘electronic village,’ even a ‘global village’, as Marshall McLuhan put it several decades, ¦then perhaps that also means we are facing some of the unpleasant characteristics that, as Fallada notes, can be a part of village life. And these characteristics aren’t something that appears only in eras of insane totalitarianism such as existed in Germany during the Nazi era. Peter Drucker, in Managing in the Next Society, wrote about the tension between liberty and community:

Rural society has been romanticized for millennia, especially in the West, where rural communities have usually been portrayed as idylic. However, the community in rural society is actually both compulsory and coercive.  And that explains why, for millennia, the dream of rural people was to escape into the city.  ‘Stadluft macht frei ‘ (city air frees) says an old German proverb dating back to the eleventh or twelfth century.

Consider: Going way back to 2013,  an assistant manager at a Wal-Mart store lost his job because of a post he put up on his Facebook page, in which he made some negative and slightly obscene comments about Muslim women wearing niquabs. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) complained, and the man was fired. (Having demonstrated their power, CAIR then kindly asked that he be rehired  (I don’t know whether he ever was.)

If, in the pre-social-media era, a Wal-Mart manager living in a large city had made negative comments about some group to friends in person, the odds that it would have resulted in his firing would have been pretty low. On the other hand, if a store manager living in a village were to repeatedly express opinions hostile to the deeply-held beliefs of the majority of the villageers–say, if a rural store manager in 1955 became well-known as hostile to religion,  it might well have had an adverse effect on his employment. The electronic village has to some extent re-created the social pressures of the traditional village.

Of course, the village culture doesn’t always reinforce and serve the values of the politically dominant . During WWII, for example, the people of  Chambon-sur-Lignon, a town in the France’s  Massif Central Range, saved more than 5000 Jews from the Holocaust. The village community can act as a bulwark for civil society against the over-reaching power of distant tyrants, and in some cases, as with Chambon-sur-Lignon, “the community culture will be of a nature that can accept, respect, and help  people whose beliefs from their own.

Certainly, the ability of the Internet to facilitate the distribution of information and opinion, beyond the control of the media gatekeepers, has been and is of tremendous value in preserving liberty. Without it, we as a society would be in even more trouble than we currently are. But the erosion of privacy, and the resultant fear of expressing oneself or acting in ‘unapproved’   ways that might harm your Permanent Record (to use the phrases with which teachers and school administrators used to threaten students) are factors whose influence in undeniable.

The widespread distribution and sharing of information enabled by technology becomes particularly dangerous when the national government is in the hands of people who lack respect for individual liberties and when the administrative discretion granted to individual bureaucrats is high. Can anyone doubt the high likelihood that information from Electronic Medical Records which were pushed as part of Obamacare will at some point be used to destroy political opponents of whatever Administration is in power at the time? (If, indeed, these records have not already been so used.)  Can anyone doubt that, with the ideology of  ‘progressivism’  becoming increasingly intolerant, ever-larger numbers of people have been and will continue to be denied jobs, promotions, college admissions, and tenure based on opinions that they have expressed in a Facebook or Twitter post or a blog post at some point in their lives? (and, quite likely, the other way around as the political winds shift and the ‘progressives’ themselves are under attack)  and that expressions of opinion will unless the climate changes markedly,  tend to become much more guarded, just as a village merchant might be reluctant to say anything to offend the small group of people on whose goodwill he is permanently dependent for his livelihood?

Special musical bonus

I (still) haven’t read it, but Roger McNamee’s book Zucked is subtitled Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe.  The author is a well-known VC and was himself an early investor in FB.  (Although some have asserted that on-line cancellation campaigns have been largely a Twitter phenomenon, the early phases of this phenomenon predated Twitter popularity and used Facebook and other early social media as vehicles.  This all accelerated considerably with Twitter under its previous ownership; I’m hopeful that it may be damped down somewhat under Musk leadership, especially with the introduction of the Community Notes feature.

As an overall conclusion, I think that electronic cancellation in the global village is indeed the modern manifestation of behavior patterns that have long existed–but enabled by technology to operate both more rapidly and with much wider geographical scope.

Your thoughts?

Of Leadership and Courage

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In the wake of the Trump assassination attempt,  I’ve run across a few posts that raise some…psychopolitical and psychosocial…issues which I think are worthy of thought and discussion.  I don’t have time to think through and write a proper post right now, so will just put some excerpts and links out here and see what develops–I’ll probably add some commentary later.

Claire Lehmann at X:

What if the motive is Incel-related and Trump wasn’t a target because of his politics, but because of his status and success with women

My immediate reaction was, well, aren’t personal issues and demons often a major factor in why someone gets involved with an ideology, especially an extremist ideology?  But OTOH, there’s a difference between someone who acts through an ideology on behalf of his demons and someone who doesn’t even bother with much of an ideological shield, or indeed any ideological shield.  We don’t know which type this character was, yet.

Also from Claire:

The irony is that in trying to assassinate Donald Trump, Crooks inadvertently provided Trump with an opportunity to display the very qualities that have already made him a cult icon. Trump’s immediate reaction—standing up and raising his fist to the crowd despite the clear and present danger—exemplified the kind of raw, physical courage that our evolutionary programming associates with effective leadership and high status.

She has followed up with a post at Quillette:  Courage and Cowardice in Pennsylvania…the post and discussion are worth reading.  I have posted some not-fully-baked thoughts in the comments.

Comes now Stepfanie Tyler at X:

graduated in 2012 w a degree in Women’s Studies
cried in 2016 when Trump got elected
lost touch w the dems somewhere around MeToo
discovered entrepreneurship
updated my voter registration in 2018 but didn’t tell anyone
told myself i was a ‘single-issue-voting Centrist’
the last 6-12 months i’ve believed i was going to abstain from voting in the upcoming election because the options are equally terrible
but watching Trump survive an assassination attempt and act like a total fucking savage just shifted me into some strange, patriotic gear that my fancy-feminism-white-men-bad infected brain never showed me
like, the dude took a bullet and stood up with blood dripping down his face, and rallied a fucking crowd while fist pumping, yelling “FIGHT!”
sorry, but i’m voting for that. and saying it out loud feels so freeing

And, finally, a response to Stepfanie from I/O:

“I experienced a sudden political transformation because I liked that after he got grazed by a bullet he stood up and pumped his fist” is just another way of saying “I prefer to base my politics on primal animal instinct,” which I’m pretty sure is a non-ideal way to do politics.

Your thoughts?

What, Precisely, is the Issue with ‘Elites’? (updated)

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Conservatives and libertarians often speak about “elites” in pejorative terms. Why is this? I doubt that many among us would argue in favor of mediocrity (like the senator who famously argued that mediocre people also deserve representation on the Supreme Court) and/or of extreme egalitarianism and social leveling. Indeed, quite a few outspoken conservatives and libertarians could themselves be considered to have elite status in view of their professional, economic, and/or scholarly accomplishments. And people using the E-word rarely make an attempt to clearly defined what category of people they are talking about. (With one major exception that I’ll discuss later in this post)   So what is the critique of elitism all about?

Several factors seem to me to be at work…

1)There is a perception that the multiple ladders of success which have existed in American society are increasingly being collapsed into a single ladder, with access tightly controlled via educational credentials

2)It is increasingly observed that these credentials actually have fairly low predictive power concerning an individual’s actual ability to perform important tasks and make wise judgments about institutional or national issues. The assumption that school-based knowledge generally trumps practical experience seems increasingly questionable as the sphere of activity for which this assertion is made has expanded, and is indeed increasingly viewed with suspicion or with outright disdain.

3)It is observed that people working in certain fields arrogate to themselves an assumed elite status despite the fact that their jobs actually require relatively little in terms of skill and judgment. Ace of Spades cited a history writer on class distinctions in Victorian England:

She noted, for example, that a Bank of England clerk would be a member of the middle/professional class, despite the fact that what he did all day was hand-write numbers into ledgers and do simple arithmetic and some filing work and the like, whereas, say, a carpenter actually did real thinking, real planning, at his job, with elements of real creativity. And yet it was the Bank of England clerk who was considered a “mind” worker and the carpenter merely a hand-laborer.

Ace suggests that “that distinction has obviously persisted, even in America, with the ingrained sort of idea that a low-level associate producer making crap money and rote choices on an MSNBC daytime talk show was somehow “above” someone making real command decisions in his occupation, like a plumber. And this sort of idea is very important to that low-level producer at MSNBC, because by thinking this way, he puts himself in the league of doctors and engineers.”

(The same prejudice can be seen in terminology currently used in discussions of community colleges and technical schools: that these institutions are needed to train people for “mid-skill” jobs, with the implied assumption being that people with 4-year degrees automatically have higher-skilled jobs than people with fewer years of seat time. Really? An undergraduate sociology major performing some rote job at a “non-profit” is doing something requiring higher skills than a toolmaker or an air traffic controller?)

4) Marriage, and even serious dating, seem increasingly to follow class boundaries, with “class” being defined very largely by educational credentials. Part of this is due to expanded educational and career opportunities for women—the doctor who once would have married his receptionist may now marry a female doctor—but a good part of it is, I think, due to the very high valuation placed on educational credentials. This phenomenon, of course, tends to lead to the solidification and perpetuation of class barriers.

5) People who have achieved success in one field too often assume a faux expertise in unrelated fields, as with the actor or singer who is credited with having something worthwhile to say about foreign policy or economics irrespective of lack of study/experience in those fields.

6) People who have achieved success via the manipulation of words and images have increasingly tended to discount all other forms of intelligence…for those who attacked George W Bush as “stupid”, for example, the fact that he learned to fly a supersonic fighter (the F-102, not the most pilot-friendly airplane ever designed) was a totally irrelevant piece of data.

(An interesting 1954 pulp novel, Year of Consent, posited a future America that was in reality run by those manipulators of words and image..a fact that many people in high level positions have failed to recognize…”“Even the biggest wheels only know part of it.  They think the Communications Administrative Department exists to help them–and not the other way around.”)

7)  Markers that have played a role in assessing class status in many societies–accent and manner of speech, in particular—seem to be becoming increasingly important. This factor had a lot to do with the hostility directed toward Sarah Palin as well as that directed toward George W Bush. Had these two individuals spoken in the manner expected of one who has attended boarding schools and expensive eastern colleges–regardless of the academic quality of those schools and colleges–their critics would still have probably disliked them, but the hostility would have lost much of its hysterical edge.  (The point about manner of speech also applies to some extent to the extreme hostility directed toward Donald Trump, who of course actually did attend one of those expensive eastern colleges, but comes across as more blue-collar and less Ivy in manner of talking.)

8) There is concern that those providing direction to institutions increasingly bear little of the burden for their own failures. This is especially true of government–particularly the legislature and the courts, where a bad decision will generally have no negative consequences whatsoever for the individuals making it and of those who run the K-12 government schools–but also to a disturbing extent in the business world, especially with regard to those corporations with close ties with government and those in the financial sector.

9) There is concern that the people directing institutions increasingly have life experiences totally different from their employees and customers. Many of the “robber barons” of yore had actually started as low-level workers, and regardless of how much they exploited their own workers, they could understand and identify with them in a manner that is very difficult for someone whose path has involved 6 years of college followed by a series of fast-track corporate assignments.

10) In addition to the previously-mentioned overemphasis on educational credentials, it is accurately perceived that there is now a movement toward granting special privileges–in the sense in which that term was applied to the nobility at the time of the French Revolution–to those who are college-educated and especially those who have acquired advanced degrees. Biden’s student-loan ‘forgiveness’ plan would mean that if two people are working side by side doing the same job, the one who did not attend college–or did not get an expensive and debt-funded degree–would be legally required to subsidize the one with the expensive degree and the big loan. This is reminiscent of the French nobility’s exemption from taxation.

11) There has long been a perception that members of one profession–lawyers–play a vastly disproportionate role in our political process, resulting in public policies that benefit that group and that often fail because they reflect an excessively-narrow worldview and set of life experiences.  In recent years, that critique has expended to encompass those in the financial and technology industries.

So, I don’t think the issues being raised are really about the existence of elites so much as they are about the current structure of many elite and faux-elite groups and the characteristics and performance of those who currently inhabit them.

I should note one prominent exception to my point about people using the E-word not really defining who they mean: a recent Rasmussen poll on the political and social opinions of ‘elites’, defined as people who have a postgraduate degree, earn at least $150K annually, and live in a high density area.  This rather strange definition of ‘elites’…is someone earning $160K in a high density (and high cost of living) area, albeit with for example a masters in education or sociology,  really automatically an ‘elite’? Does Warren Buffet fail the eliteness test because he lives in Nebraska? Is the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, a non-elite because her highest degree is a BA in political science?

Seems to me that this definition of ‘elites’ encompasses a lot of people who are not really elite in terms of spending, financial security, and any kind of actual authority…but who believe that they are entitled to such things and are resentful that they have not been granted them.

Interestingly, Rasmussen did not establish their definition of eliteness a priori and then conduct a survey to determine the attitudes of those matching the definition, rather, they observed the existence of a certain set of Americans who were consistently outliers in their attitudes, established a definition based on their demographics, and conducted a survey to find out more about their views.

Your thoughts on elites and elitism?

(This post is an update of this earlier post)

Worthwhile Reading

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Academia Versus Civilization, at Quillette

A talk by Jensen Huang, founder & CEO of NVDIA, at Stanford.  Very, very good.  Related post and discussion.

Ruxandra Teslo notes that student protestors in the 1960s wanted less bureaucracy and more freedom…today, most of them seem to want less freedom and more bureaucracy.

It’s not the phones, says Marc Andreessen, referring to the psychological dysfunction that seems to afflict so many of today’s young people.  He’s responding to a post by Jash Dholani, who says “the young aren’t driving, f******, and drinking because high energy activity is fundamentally incompatible with modern ethics. If you’re always told to be harmless (but also guilty!) then your innate will to power withers. You vegetate. Man, the greatest animal, turned to plant.”

Elon Musk says:

Many movies exist about a lone inventor in a garage having a eureka moment, but almost none about manufacturing, so it’s underappreciated by the public. Compared to the insane pain of reaching high-volume, positive-margin production, prototypes are a piece of cake.

(Not many such movies,  but one that comes to mind is Valley of Decision, a 1945 film centered around family-owned steel mill in Pittsburgh.  I reviewed the movie, and the book on which it is based, here.  Also, there’s Executive Suite, a film from 1954 which involves executive succession at a furniture manufacturer…mentioned in a batch of reviews that I posted here)

In a comment at an earlier version of this post at Ricochet, Gary McVey noted that

“the eastern Europeans (in other words, the Communists, if not always the Soviets) were pretty good about trying to publicize the drama of start-up, the challenges of production. When we mock those days for films “about a couple falling in love at the tractor factory”, we are mocking something that, if you actually see the films, is in fact objectively a good thing. Some of them, by the Poles, Hungarians, and Czechs, were good. The best of them had little or nothing to do with Marxist theories, just the everyday achievements of construction, engineering, and metalwork that sated Western audiences found dull as dishwater.

A tractor factory’s a good thing to have, if you care to eat. There was nothing contemptible about making movies about it.”

Ashwin Varma argues that the usual narrative about WWII industrial production is defective, in that it does not give sufficient credit to the role of government.

The Department of Education embarked on a project to modernize and simplify the process for applying for student aid.  It is not going well.

The Biden administration is supporting the reopening of a nuclear plant in Michigan.  As Stephen Green says, it’s the right thing to do, but the Democrats doing it reeks of desperation.

gCaptain is a good source on the Baltimore bridge disaster and on all matters nautical.

In my post Visit to a Noteworthy Robot, I described a trip to a store equipped with Amazon’s no-check-out system.  Now, Amazon has decided to drop this system in most of the stores in which it is being used…problem is that too much human intervention (1000 people in India reviewing images that the AI can’t reliably interpret) to be cost-effective.

Cultural Theory of Mind and the consequences of not having it, especially the foreign-policy consequences.

Interesting chart: the ratio of commodity prices to the S&P 500.

An argument that the theft of national sovereignty at the Euro level was orchestrated entirely by legal elites – not political, much less economic, ones.

What kind of people tend to block (what they think are) sources of misinformation?

GE’s energy business has now been spun off as a separate corporation, GE Vernova.  They seem to be pretty well-positioned in nuclear; it will be interesting to see how much emphasis they put on this sector vis-a-vis their gas and wind businesses.

Speaking of nuclear, here’s a chart on the temperature ranges required for various industrial processes versus the temperature ranges available from various types of reactors.