Lord of War

Lord of War (2005) is a film in which a Ukrainian-born American arms dealer, Yuri Orlov, and his brother, Vitaly, who works with Yuri when not in voluntary rehab for drug abuse, make money by selling military arms to dictators including Andre Baptiste of Liberia. Whereas Yuri is able to maintain a mental wall keeping him from coming to terms with his contribution to innocent people getting killed by the autocrats who are his customers, Vitality is finally unable to resist facing his own complicity, and that of his brother. This itself illustrates that moral concerns may have some influence on some people but not others. Yuri’s position, which can be summed up as, what they do with the guns that we sell them is none of our business, contrasts with Vitaly as he realizes that as soon as the Somalian warlord takes the guns off the trucks, villages down the hill will be killed. Vitaly even sees a woman and her young child being hacked to death down below. Yuri tries to manage his brother so the sale can be completed and the two brothers can get out of Somalia, but Vitaly has finally had enough and has come to the conclusion that he and Yuri have been morally culpable by selling guns to even sadistic dictators like Andre Baptiste. Even as Yuri ignores his own conscience, Vitaly finally cannot ignore the dictates of his own, and he takes action. Does he ignore his happiness, and thus his self-interest, in being willing to die to save the villagers by blowing up (admittedly only) one of the two trucks, or has he reasoned through his conscience and found that it coincides with his happiness? In other words, are the moral dictates of a person’s conscience necessarily in line with a person’s happiness, and thus one’s self-interest? This is a question that the filmmaker could have explored in the film.

Joseph Butler (1692-1752), a European, Anglican bishop, theologian, and philosopher, “explicitly upheld the claims of conscience against all rivals, especially interest”, otherwise known as self-interest, which Butler claims is interested in the happiness of the self.[1] To be sure, because “’the greatest satisfactions to ourselves depend upon our having benevolence in a due degree’”, “’even from self-love we should endeavor to get over all inordinate regard to and consideration of ourselves,’ and cultivate other-regarding desires.”[2] Even with this extension, Butler took it for granted that “the dictates of conscience and self-love coincide,” even though, when he considered “which is the real arbiter of virtue, he [always came] down on the side of conscience.”[3] In the “cool hour” passage in one of his sermons, he asserts, “’Let it be allowed, though virtue or moral rectitude does indeed consist in affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such; yet that when we sit down in a cool hour, we can neither justify to ourselves this or any other pursuit, till we are convinced that it will be for our happiness, or at least not contrary to it’”.[4]  This does not mean that the ground of rightness is conduciveness to happiness, [and thus self-interest, and the passage] does not even mean that the motive of self-love is a good motive—the good motive is ‘affection to and pursuit of what is right and good as such’—it simply means that as a motive to action, self-love is more influential than the dictates of conscience.”[5] Yet rational self-interest, which is based or premised on self-love, is coincident to matters of conscience, he insists, so why should it matter which is more influential? 

Firstly, Butler includes the happiness of heaven in self-interest, and so just looking at our embodied life here, even rational self-interest can give different results than conscience. "Butler believed, on theological grounds . . ., that virtuous behavior brings the greatest happiness in the end."[6] Secondly, Butler states that other-regarding benevolent motives (and acts) do not necessarily impact the moral agent’s mental state, and thus happiness. A person can indeed follow one’s own conscience to act benevolently such that the other person’s mental state will change without one’s own necessarily changing (i.e., being happier). So in terms of ethics alone, excluding theology, even Butler would admit that self-interest and the normative dictates of conscience can conflict. From this standpoint, Vitaly's ethic in the film can be analyzed. 

Vitaly was lost and unhappy both in being a cook in his parents’ restaurant and working for his brother Yuri. In fact, his desire to escape—to feel happy—had been so great that he resorted to cocaine and repeatedly went to a clinic without success. It is only in coming to terms with the immorality of what he and his brother were doing in selling arms to dictators around the world that Vitaly found meaning sufficient to act with purpose. In witnessing a man in the nearby village use a machete to kill a woman and her young child, Vitaly does not decide to destroy the weapons to keep the warlord from killing all of the people in the small village in order to have purpose; rather, he is overwhelmed emotionally by the severity of the harm to the two innocent people and out of this sentiment he reasoned that by destroying the guns in the trucks, he could prevent the deaths of all of the villagers. That Vitaly found purpose—essentially, found himself—is not his motive even though as he lays dying after being shot by Baptiste’s son for blowing up one of the trucks, Vitaly finally is at peace and then he dies. It is like in Jainism, where spiritual freedom from the material realm is only realized as a person lies dying without even relying on one’s heart.

Therefore, even though acting justly by honoring rather than bracketing the dictates of conscience may, and Butler would say, does coincide with the self-interest that stems from self-love, being motivated does not depend on the extra push from being happy as a result even though happiness may result. In other words, the film can be interpreted as contradicting Butler’s theory by showing that Butler depends too much on self-love and its interests (i.e., to be personally happy as a result) in motivating a person to follow one’s conscience. Other-regard, or benevolence, can be oriented to improving the mental states, and thus self-interests, of other people without being motivated by one’s own happiness being positively affected too. This is so even if the moral agent is happier as a result.

To be sure, Vitaly clearly is very troubled internally by Yuri’s instance that Vitaly not disrupt or impede the sale going through. Yuri is doubtlessly motivated by self-interest, but in terms of money and being able to leave alive. That he has no moral scruples does not mean that he is oblivious to how bad his customers are as people. Vitaly, I submit, cannot live with himself unless he blows up the sale, literally, so in this respect he can be said to be motivated not only because he does not want the innocents below to be shot after he leaves, but also because he wants to improve his mental state from being in such pain. However, his ethical/mental crisis is triggered by his having witnessed the horrendous double-murder with the murderer calmly walking away with impunity. Being so emotionally shocked —in Hume’s terms, judging morally by having a strong sentiment of disapprobation—is the basis of Vitaly’s motivation to follow his conscience even though that means betraying his own brother.

The operative motive is not Vitaly’s rational self-interest in being happy or at peace, as Butler would claim, especially as Vitaly undoubtedly knows that he would probably be killed. What people are capable of doing to other people can be so horrific that a moral agent may emotionally disapprove so much and be so motivated to forestall further harm that one’s own self-interest qua happiness is of no concern. Even if relieving one’s own internal angst is motivated by a non-rational, instinctual urge, and one may indeed be at peace afterward, the angst and peace can be effects of something else that is triggering the distinctly normative, or ethical, process that ends with a decision and an action. It is Vitaly’s strong emotional reaction in seeing a woman and young child hacked to death out in the open that is decisive in motivating him to try to blow up both trucks so nobody else in the tents below would be killed. It can perhaps even be said that he is willing to sacrifice himself, and thus his happiness, to save the lives of others. It is an odd, unfortunate, commentary on human nature itself that even if Yuri had also witnessed the violence, he would still be intent on completing the sale. Yuri’s ethical compass is extremely compromised—he even reasons that because eventually lies become the norm in a marriage, it is only logical to start one off by lying. His wife Ava leaves him, and his parents disown him, and Vitaly is dead. So much for self-love and even rational self-interest. Butler gave them too much credit. Fortunately, the movie doesn’t.

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1. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), 329-44, p. 332.
2. Stephan Darwall, “Introduction,” in Joseph Butler, Five Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel and A Dissertation Upon the Nature of Virtue. Ed., Stephen Darwall (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1983), p. 7.
3. Alan R. White, ‘Conscience and Self-Love in Butler’s Sermons,” Philosophy 27 (1952), p. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 337.
5. Ibid.

6. Ibid., p. 340

A Night of Knowing Nothing

Diwali, or Deepavali, is one of the biggest festivals in India. More than a billion Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists in the world celebrate the festival of lights in which good triumphs over evil. “Despite its deep religious significance, Diwali today is also a cultural festival observed by people regardless of faith.”[1] In this regard, Diwali is like Christmas, which plenty of non-Christians celebrate as a day of giving complete with the secularized myth of Santa Claus, Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer, and Frosty the Snowman. To claim that Diwali is exclusively Hindu or Christmas is only a Christian holiday—and thus in resentment to ignore either holiday—violates the spirit that both share. The “Happy holidays” greeting is an oxymoron, given its underlying motive of resentment. Yet if this were the extent of human aggression, the world would be a much better place. The Indian documentary film, A Night of Knowing Nothing (2021), reveals much worse than the passive aggression of dismissing a national holiday as if it did not exist. The violence unjustifiably and wantonly inflicted by university police on students at several universities who are protesting caste discrimination and the politically partisan coup at the Film and Television Institute of India, goes beyond even the harm exacted by the discrimination by caste. A Diwali celebration is shown in the film, and this raises the question of whether we can of yet even assuming our species' “progress,” celebrate the victory of good over evil as long as human beings in power abuse their discretion with impunity.

The woman narrating the film reads from her letters to her estranged boyfriend, whose family has forbidden the relationship due to her lower caste. The film opens with a protest of students at the Film and Television Institute of India. The Hindu Nationalist Party had installed a second-rate actor as the director of the school, and students objected to the partisan nature of the appointment. Since the strike began, the school’s administration has responded by rule-making, doubtlessly as a means of tightening control. Five students were arrested in a midnight siege, undercutting the administration’s rationalist approach of rule-making.

The film then moves to a non-student woman giving a speech. She reports that police at Hyderabad Central University have been raping and beating students amid protests. That university’s upper-caste administration went after a Ph.D. student for protesting how untouchables were being treated in India. Prime Minister Modi’s government labeled the student an extremist. Other students were barred from the library (which reflects an administration’s lack of academic values) and their dorms. According to the speaker, “The students are on the front line against the fascist government.”

The woman narrating the film is left wondering about the victory of good or evil being celebrated at the festival. “I’m not sure which is which,” she says, doubtlessly referring to the caste system being used as a weapon by her ex-boyfriend’s parents. This line is like that by Gandhi in which he remarked that he used to think that the Vedas were truth but came to realize that truth itself is divine so unjust customs are not divine even if they are in the scriptures. I used to think that truth was God, but came to realize that God is truth.

The film then moves to New Delhi, to a student protest at Jawaharlal Nehru University. A speaker at a rally claims that for Lenin, democracy is necessary for socialism, and that social and political change are both needed. The presumption of egalitarianism in Soviet Communism is debatable, especially in practice, so the inclusion of socialism at an anti-caste protest may be problematic. What about the students who were against the injustices of the caste system but were not supporters of Lenin? It is perhaps not easy to keep a protest focused on its main point. The speaker is on firmer ground who argues that a low-caste person should be able to get a doctorate. Students chant, “Stop the violence against students.” The need for this slogan becomes clear when the film turns from the narrator’s empathy for the women police who are doubtlessly not wealthy. Are they really so different from the students? The narrator doesn’t think so, but then images of the police getting violent, even being joined by the military, saturate the screen as students chant, “A government of violence.” The narrator remarks that any ideology that opposes that of the Hindu nationalist government’s ideology is not allowed to exist. Campus police at JNU go on a rampage, behaving like wild animals under the cover of government. If the beatings and raping are to teach the protesting students a lesson, then what exactly is the lesson that is actually being “taught,” and how presumptuous is it for thugs to teach university students a lesson! 

The policemen on the right and left, respectively, are beating students. Actual footage!

The policeman in the foreground is about to destroy the security camera. From that act, it can be inferred that he knows that what he is doing is wrong. 

Clearly, university police are not members of a university community. I contend that the students should have shifted to protest universities having police at all. Organizations properly have security guards, who protect the property, whereas governments have police power. Indeed, the basis of a state is its monopoly of violence.

At Yale, a police state on steroids, on one corner on the night I saw the film on campus in 2023. An academic campus is no place for non-academic employees to impose passive-aggressive intimidation as a primitive and flawed deterrent through maintaining a saturated presence on campus (and even off campus!) on a routine rather than an as-needed basis. Amid such encroachments, Yale students knew that the campus had become a police state, and that the university administration was paranoid (or had succumbed to hyper-protective parents). 

Perhaps police who beat and rape students should be beaten and raped themselves; perhaps that would teach them a lesson. That goes for the government officials who give the orders in cases in which abuse of discretion by police employees does not account for all of the violence.

In the film, a student speaker claims that filmmakers should not think in black and white stark terms, but rather, in nuanced terms. Raping and beating another human being is hardly nuanced, however, and fortunately the film does not approach the heinous human beings who perpetrate such acts as such. Furthermore, given the government-sanctioning of the violence against non-violent students without the government being held accountable, can Diwali’s claim that good is victorious over evil be believed merely because it is so in myths? The violence shown in the film of police beating students and even taking out a security camera—hence evincing the arrogant presumption of being above being held accountable—makes clear that something more than protests is necessary for good to triumph over evil. It bears remembering that Thomas Hobbes asserts in his famous text, Leviathan, that a person can still act to protect one’s self-preservation even against the state. That right is not based on a state, but is inalienable because the instinct for self-preservation is for Hobbes the main human motive. In the film, the students should have had the means to protect themselves bodily, though of course Gandhi would rebuke this claim, pointing to the moral force in non-violent civic disobedience. Indeed, the moral depravity of the police (and the government) in the film, even more than the injustices of the caste system, should arguably have been the main point of the protests as they went on. The film makes this shift very well, and perhaps this is the main lesson from the film.

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1. Harmeet Kaur, “What to Know about Diwali, the Festival of Lights,” CNN.com, November 11, 2023.

Oppenheimer

An artificial sun rose on an otherwise dark night when the nuclear-bomb test named Trinity ushered in the era wherein our species’ aggressive instinct could render homo sapiens extinct. Given the salience of that instinctual urge—for we are related to the chimpanzee species—the wise (i.e., sapiens) species can be its own undoing. For it took a lot of intelligence in sub-atomic physics to invent the nuclear bomb, yet very little smarts went into deciding to use it against Japan, an enemy that would have lost anyway, in order to save American lives from having to invade the mainland (as if conventional bombs could not have reduced the casualties). Even less thought was put into the need to contain the proliferation of nuclear bombs. Expediency without heeding long-term risk is not a virtue. Kant wrote that even if our species were to institute a world federation, presumably having nation-states that would be semi-sovereign as a check against global totalitarianism, peace would merely be possible, rather than probable. This does not speak well of human nature, and this in turn renders the Trinity test something less than redeeming. “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” In the film, Oppenheimer (2023), Robert Oppenheimer reads from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, as a woman is on top of him in sexual intercourse. The irony of him being an instrument of mass destruction as director of the Manhattan Project and yet being engaged in potentially reproducing life with a woman is doubtlessly the point of that scene. Hindus who leap to the conclusion that Nolan is insulting their religion miss this point. Had the director included a scene in which Oppenheimer is praying, for example for the Jews in Nazi Germany at the time, a quote from the film, Gettysburg (1993) would have been similarly fitting. In that film, Col. Chamberlain of the Union army remarks, “What a piece of work is man . . . in action how like an angel!” Sgt. Kilrain replies, “Well, if he’s an angel, all right then . . . But he damn well must be a killer angel.” In the nuclear age, killer angel takes on added significance. The question is perhaps whether we have left angel behind as our species’ intelligence outdoes our species, whether in terms of nuclear war or rendering a climate unsuitable for us.

Even though Christopher Nolan, the director of Oppenheimer, said that he had been unconcerned with whether people leave the theaters with something to think about, such as the ethical and political implications of nuclear weapons, including whether Truman should have used two such bombs against Japan; rather, the viewers are to be engaged emotionally in dramatic tension between the characters in the film. I consider this stance to be short-sighted, as it does not take advantage of the potential that the medium of motion pictures has to stimulate philosophical thinking, such as in ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. This benefit of films is why I write essays on films.  Even in spite of Nolan’s intention, Oppenheimer is a good example of the salience of ethics and political thought in film.

Although Nolan overdoes too many and too brief visuals of quantum mechanics from Robert Oppenheimer’s imagination, no doubt because he used the giant-screen “IMAX” film, and jumps around too much from scene to scene in Oppenheimer’s life, the emotional engagement of viewers in the dramatic tension between characters, especially between Oppenheimer and his antagonist Lewis Strauss, is formidable. Especially given the salience of Oppenheimer’s emotional wrestling with the ethical and political significance of the bomb, it is easy for viewers to hate Strauss, and Nolan satisfies our instinctual urge for justice by providing scenes in which Strauss is denied Senate confirmation to serve on Eisenhower’s cabinet and Oppenheimer’s “contribution” to the U.S. in World War II and his hacked reputation are recognized as President Johnson gives the protagonist an award. In being able to stimulate strong feelings of anger and relief in the viewers, Nolan is a master story-teller. Nevertheless, the film offers so much more. Nolan has outdone himself, even if it was not his intent.

The debate on whether President Truman should have used nuclear weapons against Japan is well-known in both Japan and the United States. The film would have been deficient had Nolan excluded that question. Because Truman comes off as dismissive and rude in his meeting with Oppenheimer, I suspect that Nolan wanted the film to have a pessimistic attitude on Truman’s decision, especially given the air-time given to Oppenheimer’s concerns. His motive in getting involved in the Manhattan Project is originally informed by his Jewish identity and geared to stopping the Nazis. The Japanese come off as an ordinary military foe relative to the Germans, so Oppenheimer naturally concludes that the rationale for the bomb has passed by the time of the Trinity detonation. Even in the nuclear age, “regular” wars, such as the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War, and Russia’s war against Ukraine, have been fought without resort to nuclear weapons. Once Germany had been defeated and the horrific, mass-scale atrocities stopped, World War II could have been viewed as reverting to a “regular” war. If so, the use of extraordinary weapons could have been viewed differently—as expedient.

Indeed, even the value of saving American lives (admittedly at the cost of many Japanese civilians) pales relative to being the first country to use a nuclear bomb and, the “genie being out of the bottle,” risking an arms race to the bottom. I am the destroyer of worlds is not a scriptural passage to be taken lightly. As evinced by that line, the film raises fundamental ethical and political questions beyond that of Truman’s decision.

By the 21^st century, Israel, a small country surrounded by Islamic countries, had already acquired nuclear weapons, and in 2022, the president of Russia repeatedly threatened the West that he might use such weapons against Ukraine. The world took notice at Putin’s attempt to normalize the use of the atomic bomb in a regular war, but even so, the warning of a shot which would be heard around the world in its dire significance of portended ruin did not stir any political discussion between world leaders, at least publicly, on the more urgent need for global safeguards.

In Oppenheimer, Robert Oppenheimer’s concern is valid that, given human nature, large-scale nuclear war is almost inevitable at some point unless nuclear powers agree to mutually give up the bomb. Even in this respect, Oppenheimer—both the character and the movie—are too optimistic, for an international power to enforce the treaties would be necessary, again, given human nature. Among combatants in a war, the first casualty is truth-telling. If our species is indeed the wise, or sapiens, species of the homo genus, then it should be capable of not only uncovering quantum mechanics, but also self-regulating our most sordid and destructive instincts. We are animals, after all. If we are angels with a biological instinctual urge capable of sensing the presence of divinity, then alright, it must also be said that our death instinct can now also be fulfilled.   

Judgment at Nuremberg

Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) is a serious film that enables the viewers to wrestle with the demands of justice for atrocities enabled by German jurists in NAZI Germany and the post-war emerging Cold War between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., for which the American military needed the support of the German people against the Soviet Union. The film accepts the need of such support as being vital in 1947, when the actual trial took place (the film has it as 1948). To the extent that acceptance of this assumption is deemed spurious, the viewers would likely view the tension as being between the need for justice, a virtue, and expediency, a vice. Accordingly, the pressure from an American general on the prosecutor to recommend light sentences so not to turn the German people against the Americans and thus from helping them in the Cold War can be viewed as being astute political calculation in the political realist sense of international relations, or else undue influence or even corruption of a judicial proceeding.

The prosecutor, Tad Lawson, having liberated death camps, rebuffs the General Matt Merrin’s pressure, and the four defendants get life sentences.  Whether Merrin’s claim that the U.S. needs the support of the German people in the Cold War is valid or not, pressuring a prosecutor is clearly depicted as unethical and so Lawson comes off as virtuous in resisting the exogenous pressure even though he is in the American military. It is certainly ironic that the victor army would push for lighter sentences for the vanquished; typically the question is whether a trial by the victors can be fair. Israel’s kidnapping and subsequent trial of Eichmann brought this question to the forefront. A trial in Germany would have also brought up this question. Britain would have been a good choice that would have avoided the conflict of interest.  In the film, Lawson successfully resists exploiting a conflict of interest by deciding not to curry favor with the general by urging the judges to go light in sentencing the defendants.

To be sure, chief judge Haywood has an opportunity to give a light sentence to one of the defendants. Ernst Janning, an expert jurist before the NAZI period and the Minister of Justice under Hitler, is the only one of the defendants who should have known better than knowingly convict innocent people, including Irene Hoffman for having sex with a much-older Jewish man, and sterilizing others, including Rudolph Petersen for being mentally impaired. Janning gives an impassioned speech to the court in which he admits his guilt, and that he should indeed have known better. Haywood holds Janning responsible for the latter’s use of the judicial system to send Jews and Poles to the death camps anyway; the crimes are simply too heinous for justice to be ignored. In the final scene, Haywood tells Janning that he should have known that it would come to such crimes the moment he convicted a person Janning knew was innocent. Using the gutted-out infrastructure of a judiciary to enable the state to engage in mass murder seems to particularly bother the chief judge. That is to say: a jurist who has written juridical books has no excuse in making a mockery of a judiciary.

After the last scene, the film indicates that none of the actual defendants of the American trial of jurists were still in prison as of 1961, when the film was made. Janning is loosely based on Louis Schlegelberger, who was State Secretary in the German Reich Ministry of Justice. He got a life sentence for conspiracy to perpetuate war crimes and crimes against humanity. He instituted procedures for the persecution of Jews and Poles, and thus played a vital role in the mass extermination. As much as such severe harm deserves harsh justice, he was released just a few years after having been convicted for “health reasons” even though he died in 1970. Similarly, Rudolf Oeschey had his life sentence commuted to 20 years, but he was released in just 8 years. Guenther Joel, chief prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice, got a 10 year sentence but was released in 1951. The same for Ernst Lautz, the Chief Public Prosecutor of the People’s Court. Herbert Klemm, State Secretary in the Ministry, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released after just 10 years. Oswald Rothaug, a senior public prosecutor in the People’s Court and Chief Justice of the Special Court, had his life sentence commuted to 20 years but was released in just 9 years. Justice was clearly not served, and the film acknowledges this frailty of justice “in the real world.” The implications are that none of the fictional defendants would actually serve a life sentence, and the American military, which had tried and failed to get its way in the sentencing, ultimately gets its way. Any relief from Lawson resisting the pressure to urge light sentences such that justice wins the day is short-lived as the viewers read the film’s caveat at the end that in the end, all of the actual defendants of the jurist Nuremberg trial were still in prison as of 1961.

Interestingly, Maximilian Schell, who plays Hans Rolfe, the German defense attorney who applies NAZI thunder in severely questioning Irene Hoffman—such zeal being objected to by Lawson but allowed by the chief judge—beat out Spencer Tracy, who plays the chief judge who comes down on the side of justice (and is fair in ruling on the objections during the trial) and thus resists manipulations by “friendly” former NAZI civilians and the American military and a U.S. Senator, to get the Best Actor Oscar in 1961. Spencer Tracy is so mild-mannered throughout the film that his acting was typical rather than exceptional, whereas Richard Widmark, who plays Lawson, should have been in contention with Schell for the Oscar. Both actors are impassioned and frustrated, hence they both drew on strong emotions in playing their respective roles. Perhaps both should have gotten the award. The world, however, is not so just, as the movie makes clear in the end even if justice momentarily has the upper hand.

Citizen Kane: A Virtue Hearst Never Had

In Citizen Kane (1941), Charles Kane is not a replica of William Randolph Hearst. As a young, wealthy man running a newspaper, the character embodies a politico-economic ideal in both word and deed that Hearst only used as a campaign slogan. As per Kane's Statement of Principles, the young publisher is willing to diminish his own wealth held in stock in other companies in exposing the exploitive and corrupt money-bags in big corporations and trust who prey on the otherwise-unprotected working poor and presumably consumers too. For his part, Hearst merely published a daily oriented to the poor man.  As Kane's early ideal is a principle recognizable to, and even resonating with, virtually any audience, Welles' inclusion of the ideal in the film contributes to its endurance as a classic.

Hearst papers twice called for someone to put a bullet into William Mckinley.  When the U.S. president was fatally wounded on September 6, 1901, the American people turned on Hearst, even burning him in effigy. He ran for mayor of New York City, Governor of New York, and even for president, and lost all of those races. He did get elected to serve a term in the U.S. House of Representatives, but hardly ever showed up on Capitol Hill. His passions lied elsewhere than in listening to floor speeches, attending roll-call votes, and questioning witnesses at Congressional hearings. He found he had more power using his newspapers to shape public opinion.[1] I suspect he had very little regard for the public good, and thus any true interest in politics as a means.

Even though Hearst advocated the eight-hour work-day and an income tax, his purported intent to be the servant of the immigrants and working poor would be discredited by his vehement opposition to unions, including firing his employees who were members of the guild, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt raising the income tax rate on incomes over half a million. Antipodal to his earlier support for an income tax, he called the income tax system “intrusive, despotic, discriminatory, and perhaps revolutionary.”[2] Repealing the tax would be better for “the honesty, the industry, the wealth, and the welfare of the whole [population] of Americans.”[3] Facing demands from his creditors at the time, Hearst was actually looking out for the wealth, his appeal to the public good being a mere prop, or trope.

Charles “Citizen” Kane, on the other hand, was willing to use his papers to attack corrupt companies even in which he himself held stock. Speaking with his ex-guardian, Walter Thatcher, about the paper’s crusade against the Public Transit Company, in which Kane is one of the largest individual stockholders, the newspaper editor/company stockholder delivers the following as an explanation for his apparent willful disregard for his own financial interests.

“Mr. Thatcher, the trouble is you don't realize you're talking to two people. As Charles Foster Kane, who owns eighty-two thousand three hundred and sixty-four shares of Public Transit prefer, you see, I do have a general idea of my holdings. I sympathize with you. Charles Foster Kane is a scoundrel, his paper should be run out of town and a committee should be formed to boycott him. You may, if you can form such a committee, put me down for a contribution of one thousand dollars.”[4]

In other words, Kane knows that he is doing real damage to his financial position in going after the company. This point is essential, and warrants an explanation. So he continues,

“On the other hand, I am the publisher of the Inquirer. As such, it is my duty, I’ll let you in on a little secret, it is also my pleasure—to see to it that decent, hard-working people of this community aren’t robbed blind by a pack of money-mad pirates just because they haven’t anybody to look after their interests! I’ll let you in on another little secret, Mr. Thatcher. I think I’m the man to do it. You see I have money and property. If I don't look after the interests of the underprivileged, maybe somebody else will, maybe somebody without any money or property and that would be too bad.”[5]

Kane is wearing two hats, one of which he readily admits can indeed work against the other. He appeals to his duty as a journalist (and a wealthy man)—a duty that he enjoys (which is Kant’s ideal)—to, as Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY) was fond of saying on the floor of the U.S. Senate, “fight for the little guy.” I suspect that the secret behind Kane’s motive here lies in the powerlessness that he had as a boy when his mother made him leave her and his beloved sled, Rosebud. As his dying word attests, Kane never got over being forced to leave his boyhood home; but he could get some vicarious satisfaction exposing commercial cases of exploitation and corruption at the expense of the powerless. The virtue, Nietzsche would say, is actually the instinct to power overcoming obstacles in order to feel the pleasure of power. Poised against the robber barons, Kane thus has a passion for going after corruption at the expense of the innocent even if Kane’s own stock portfolio takes a hit in the process. His passion for justice is greater than his greed. Translated by Nietzsche, the will to power the main human instinct, and thus motive.

To be sure, Kane doubtlessly wants the power in politics; after all, he runs for governor (as Hearst did).  Even so, not many candidates for public office actually go after corrupt fat cats who scrape off even more off hardened sweat off the backs of the hard-working laborer, or knowingly rip off consumers. Precisely for this reason, the practice is not a bad political investment. Had Hearst actually watched the film (he claimed later he had not), he might have learned a valuable political lesson. Sacrificing one’s private interests for the public welfare can reap tremendous political benefits. Not many wealthy individuals are willing to expose injustices by speaking truth to power. Typically, they conclude that they have too much on the line to risk going after the bad guys. Hence, being one of the few to do so—knowingly taking a financial hit in the process—is a valuable political commodity.

In cinematic terms, putting an ideal such as justice above the vice of greed, a feat that even a flawed person like Charlie Kane can accomplish, is a timeless principle audiences through the centuries will be able to appreciate.[4] Hence, like Rick’s willingness in Casablanca to sacrifice personally not only for Elsa, but also for the larger anti-Nazi cause, Kane’s principle can be expected to contribute to Citizen Kane continuing on as a classic.

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1 For this and the preceding points in the paragraph, see “The Battle Over Citizen Kane,” The American Experience, WGBH Educational Foundation, 1996.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Script of Citizen Kane.

5. Ibid.

6. To be sure, the virtue in a person being willing to diminish one’s overall financial position by using it for a larger cause necessitates having sufficient assets. In this sense, this virtue is like munificence, which differs from liberality in that the amount of money given is much larger. Even though not every viewer of Citizen Kane will not be able to identify with such virtues personally, everyone can value the sacrifice of private interest for public good, and thus have an emotional connection to the movie.