Civil War

In the film, Civil War (2024), Texas and California have “tecaexited” the U.S., to use the European recondite ideological parlance for secession that began with “Brexit” in order to evade “seceding from the Union.” The U.S. president in the film repeatedly lies to the public that the secessionists are on the run; in actuality, as the film progresses, the three journalists, Lee, Joel, and Sammy, along with their young protégé, Jessie, eventually witness up-close the rebel military conquering the White House in order to shoot the president in the Oval Office. The film provides only scant clues as to the reason for the secession; the rebel who shots Tony, a friend of the three journalists, obviously detests foreigners and delights in “real Americans,” such as are from Colorado and Missouri. This could be a reference to Trump’s “MAGA” movement, so the film is possibly playing out Trump’s followers revolting; historically, on January 6, 2021, some of them rioted, though admittedly did not as a revolt so to topple the U.S. Government, but rather to make a statement by temporarily stopping Congress from counting the States’ respective electoral ballots for president. Even so, it is too great an inferential leap to conclude that the two States seeking to exit the U.S. in the film are MAGA, even though MAGA ideology and the “woke” ideology clashed in early (and mid) 2020s when the film was being put together. Rather than being about contending, violently clashing ideologies, the film is about how violent our species is when not suppressed by an overarching police presence that can act as a deterrent.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century European political philosopher, argues that in order to stave off a short, nasty and brutish life filled with recurrent threats of theft and violence, a person, together with the others, must cede all political (and even theological interpretive) sovereignty to a governing authority, whether a king or an assembly. The only right retained even against such a power is that of self-preservation, though the sovereign has the right to put a rebel to death. Similarly, Machiavelli wrote The Prince to give rulers strategic “Machiavellian” advice in the context of political fighting so those rulers could survive in power even ruthlessly. That philosopher’s History of Florence left out such advice because the context in the book was stable rather than violent. The message of these two philosophers is that left to our own devices in a state of political nature, we can regress to our ruthless savage nature, which is always there but latent in a societal context in which a sovereign power acts as a suppressant and deterrent.

In the film, as the three journalists and the girl drive west then south from New York, ending up in Washington, D.C. to witness the secessionist army shooting its way into the White House to kill the president, indications of small-scale violence are very evident. At a gas station, a man holding a machine gun shows Jessie where two “looters,” too bloodied to be recognizable, are hanging, while still alive, out back. The man even agrees to be photographed by Lee showing him standing between the two hanging men. The subtle message is that he has nothing to fear in being held accountable for shooting the two victims as Jesse and Lee are still there to witness. Man’s savagery goes beyond just killing other humans; not even severe cruelty is sufficiently resisted if there is no fear of having to pay a price in terms of lost freedom or pain.

After Jessie foolishly switches cars through open windows as both are being driven fast and is taken prisoner by two rebels who are operating independently in having killed a truck-load of people, one of those two men shoots Tony and Bohai because they are not “real Americans.” The sheer arbitrariness of the acts to Joel causes him to momentary react angrily before suddenly realizing that the shooter is so irrational that anyone could be shot next, even Joel. Fortunately, Sammy comes to the rescue by driving the journalists’ car into the shooter, but at a cost, for the other shooter kills Sammy as he is driving away with the other journalists.

Relative to these isolated cases of wanton, unjustified violence by individuals, the coordinated military attack on the White House by the rebel army looks civilized. In fact, it is astonishing just how embedded Joel, Lee, and Jessie are with the soldiers as they are shooting at U.S. soldiers and the Secret Service agents. That the soldiers who are about to shoot the president in the Oval Office pause so Joel can get a last quote from the president suggests that the cause is political rather than just for the sake of getting to be violent and kill. In other words, the indications and instances of isolated killings in the countryside en route reveal our species violent, unimpeded nature more so than do the scenes of army units fighting against opposing units.

By implication, political movements in the early 2020s to “defund” local police departments in some of the American States seem wrongheaded, for even if police-power is too much for human nature to wield properly, human nature itself, as depicted in the film, attests that having a police department is a necessary evil that a society cannot (and should not) do without, and, furthermore, that the strictures that only being in a society can provide are also necessary, for in the proverbial state of nature, which can exist even within a society (e.g., neighborhoods on the south side of Chicago), human nature is too prone not only to violence, but also to cruelty—even to the point of enjoying it. Nietzsche argues that the origins historically of punishment lie in the debtor-creditor relationship, wherein creditors found pleasure in taking “a pound of flesh” strangely as if that pleasure from inflicting pain were equivalent and thus sufficiently compensating. Nietzsche states that the rendering of such an equivalence is “strange,” but he may simply be discounting or ignoring the savage nature of our species underneath the patina of civilized Man.

It should not be lost on the viewers, however, that glimpses of the finer qualities of human nature are included in the film. In the camp in the stadium, for example, camera shots showing people being docile, even kind to each other, are likely meant to show this contrast to the film’s leitmotif. Lee’s self-sacrifice at the end of the film in saving Jessie’s life by taking the bullet herself when Jessie is in the line of fire in a hallway in the White House attests to the sheer normative distance that exists within human nature, for, building on a famous line that is in the book, The Killer Angels, which is about the U.S. Civil War, if we are angels, then we are surely killer angels, though this does not mean that violence and cruelty exhaust human nature for we are capable of self-sacrificial love for other human beings. Though even if we are “made” to be creatures of love, still we have not managed to shake our innate penchant for violence and even cruelty. The true civil war is perhaps that which exists within each of us. 

Fifty Shades of Grey

A sadist is a person who feels pleasure in inflicting emotional and physical pain on another person. For the sadistic personality, the emotional pain that is inflicted on another person for the sadist’s own pleasure need not be associated with sex because emotional or physical pain is broader than that which can be inflicted sexually. Hence, the bottom-line for the sadist psychology is that pleasure that is felt by harming another person, who thus feels pain as a direct result of the sadist, lies in the making suffer. A sadist who does not permit oneself to feel emotion is particularly dangerous because no sympathy or compassion operates as a constraint on how much hurt is inflicted. In such a case, the sadist is like one of the androids in the film Ex Machina as the knife is coldly inserted into the torso of the programmer who built the intelligent machines. Indeed, the narcissistic sadist can be very intelligent in knowing precisely how to inflict emotional pain especially in an emotionally vulnerable victim. Once discovered, such a sadist will endeavor to avoid such a victim, but not because such an unemotional sadist has a conscience and feels guilty. In the film, Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), Anastasia Steele’s life changes forever when she meets the emotionally-tormented billionaire, Christian Grey. She falls in love with the sadist, and, because she wants to be with him, at some point she willingly assumes the masochist role even though she does not feel pleasure from physical (or emotional) pain being inflicted on her person. She loves him so much she wants to enter his deviant world; she even embraces that world. I could see myself doing that were I to fall deeply in love with a sadist, for accepting a person even in spite of that person’s flaws is part of love— unless, of course, lies, sidelining, and emotional betrayals are too much for any trust to be possible. Anastasia may come to treat Christian’s dungeon as a playroom of sorts in which she is his so they can be a couple with an opportunity to connect even more, rather than as a place where he acts out his severe emotional issues in which violence and sex are too closely related in his brain, whether psychologically or physically. Love is to a certain extent blind, or at least purblind. Given how toxic and unpleasant life can be, can we be blamed for valuing deep connection so very much even in cases in which meaning-from-personality comes with such a high cost?

Absent from the movie is the point that sadists also get pleasure from inflicting emotional, nonsexual pain, such as in taking advantage of a girlfriend’s emotional vulnerability that is simply part of being in love, so in real life there is more of a cost to being in love with a sadist than merely consenting to playing games in a home-dungeon even though pleasure is not obtained from having pain inflicted by even a loved one (i.e., a sadist boyfriend). As an example of a non-sexual infliction of pain that is not in the film, she could really need him to be with her because she does not want to be alone and feels emotionally vulnerable because she has just opened up to him emotionally in telling him that she has fallen for him. Nevertheless, feeling nothing emotionally, he could dismiss her request and even leave her to join some friends at a bar as if they were more important. Refusing to allow himself to feel emotional caring, he would not feel culpable for having humiliated her; instead, the narcissist sadist would gladly feel the pleasure from having hurt her emotionally, as well as the guiltless pleasure in socializing with his friends at a bar without even a thought of her, except that she is suffering. He might even go home with another woman for sex and even brag to his girlfriend the next day that the woman “was cute.” In the future, he might even flaunt being with that woman at a bar at which he knows his girlfriend is present! His motive would not merely be to disrespect her, but also to inflict still more pain on her for even more pleasure! Even were he merely “seeing” (i.e., dating) her, such behavior would arguably—at least according to a retired psychiatrist I informally interviewed for this essay—indicate severe emotional issues, and thus be more than enough cause for her to bolt. In Avatar (2009), Jake is suddenly the target of a giant beast. He asks Grace, the head scientist on Pandora, whether he should face down the animal (as he has just done with another animal) or run. “Run, definitely run!” she exclaims. It is not as though the beast has a conscience. A sadist can do real damage, emotionally, and without having any feeling of remorse; instead, pleasure is felt in having inflicted pain on another person. Can a sadist truly love? This seems doubtful. Such a narcissistic mentality can only know self-love, and not in the sense that Augustine lauds as loving the image of God within. In Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia loves Christian’s personality (other than the sadistic element) and thus merely accepts (in disagreement) that his sexual pleasure is aroused by inflicting pain in her.

I turn now to applying Nietzsche’s theory on the forgotten origins of punishment so to dig deeper into the sadist’s psychology. To be sure, because psychology is not one of my academic fields, I am merely able to present Nietzsche’s account of how punishment arose in our species and relate that to sadism as it is commonly understood. Before turning specifically to punishment, I want to sketch and apply Nietzsche’s overall system of strength and weakness, which is not based on moral disapprobation or responsibility. In fact, the latter function as weapons, according to Nietzsche, that are used by the weak against the self-confident powerful strong out of resentment, or ressentiment. A sadist is undoubtedly weak in this distinctly Nietzschean sense.

Not being able or willing to overcome an intractable instinctual urge, a weak person cannot be trusted and thus should (and does!) avoid commitment. A person who succumbs to whatever instinctual urge (or desire) is felt most at a given moment is untrustworthy because such a person disregards the memory of having made a promise and thus does not value promise-keeping relative to whatever in closest proximity is most in line with instant gratification. A weak person is more motivated than a strong person to inflict pain on another person to compensate (or as recompense) for having been injured or suffered a loss, such as of money or property. Whereas a strong person says with an overflowing, self-confident feeling of power, “What are those parasites to me?”, a weak person is oriented to striking out, as if a master, out of ressentiment, to redress his injuries or loss as if the pain inflicted in another person were an equivalent and thus as a remedy. For example, is pain inflicted on a debtor who has failed to repay a loan equivalent to the money lost? In Shakespeare’s play, Merchant of Venice, Shylock insists on a pound of flesh in “payment” for the loss of the money that he lent, though by the end of the play, when a pound of his flesh is demanded, suddenly he no longer believes in the equivalence of physical pain and a monetary loss! Such an equivalence Nietzsche states is “strange.” It is deeply rooted in primitive, prehistoric humankind, but even so, the equivalence is artificial. To the extent that a sadist’s pleasure from inflicting pain is felt to pay off an earlier, perhaps even childhood (nonsexual or sexual) trauma, the equivalence is further strained because the masochist is not even the same person as had injured the sadist! The vicarious satisfaction may be felt as reducing the hurt from the injury, but I suspect the effort to do so is in vain. A strong person accepts the fact of the past injury and the resulting emotional harm, and moves on. A weak person festers in resentment and from this motive, pain is sought even in a person who had not committed the injury. Such pain cannot fill a hole from an injury caused by another person. Even inflicting pain in the same person is not equivalent to the loss from the injury, according to Nietzsche.

Having anticipated Nietzsche’s own words, it is time to turn directly to them for support for my claims. Filmmakers, including screenwriters, could do worse in reading his words than ponder how some of his ideas could have been inserted into the dialogue between Christian and Anastasia in Fifty Shades of Grey, for my overall thesis is that film has great potential as a medium for philosophical discourse through dialogue within a narrative.

We associate punishment with moral responsibility, free will, and accountability, but Nietzsche claims that “’the criminal deserves punishment because he could have acted differently’—is in fact an extremely late and subtle form of human judgment and inference: whoever transposes it to the beginning is guilty of a crude misunderstanding of the psychology of more primitive mankind.”[1] Free will came before the notion of moral responsibility and hold holding the culpable accountable. The genealogy of punishment shows quite another dynamic at work—one whose primitive origin shows up not only in why immature parents punish their children, but also, I contend, in sadists! “Throughout the greater part of human history punishment was not imposed because one held the wrongdoer responsible for his deed, thus not on the presupposition that only the guilty one should be punished: rather, as parents still punish their children, from anger at some harm or injury, vented on the one who caused it—but this anger is held in check and modified by the idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid bac, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”[2] Although Nietzsche’s empirical claim, presumably unsubstantiated by any scientific evidence, that parents during Nietzsche’s life in nineteenth-century Europe were still punishing their respective children out of anger in order to inflict pain as a sort of requital for the injuries inflicted on the parents by the disobeying children is questionable, Nietzsche’s focus in the passage is on the “idea that every injury has its equivalent and can actually be paid back, even if only through the pain of the culprit.”[3] Nietzsche describes the “idea of an equivalence between injury and pain” to be strange.[4] How is it that the pleasure obtained from pain inflicted on, and thus felt by, a person who has caused pain in the initial aggrieved pay back latter such that one’s own initial pain from the initial injury is lessened? Wouldn’t one’s own hurt from having been injured last until either the loss is made up in kind or until the natural process of emotional healing has run its course? Nietzsche seems to be skeptical that the pleasure from inflicting pain on the culprit can facilitate the natural healing process, though perhaps by such pleasure it is easier to let go of the hurt from the injury or loss. To the extent that the medium of film is ultimately about the human condition, the dynamic that Nietzsche viewed as strange could be made explicit for audiences, who could then look at themselves in the mirror and ask whether they truncate the natural healing process of emotional hurt by making use of the equivalence. In a modern, anti-Nietzschean vein, it can even be asked whether it is ethical to derive pleasure by inflicting emotional or physical pain so as to diminish one’s own injury or loss.

The equivalence that lies at the root of the origin of punishment according to Nietzsche looks so strange to him due to his claim that the ‘primeval, deeply rooted, perhaps by now ineradicable idea” drew its power “in the contractual relationship between creditor and debtor, which is as old as the idea of ‘legal subjects’ and in turn points back to the fundamental forms of buying, selling, barter, trade, and traffic.”[5] Especially relevant for the case of the modern sadist, in the ancient world a “creditor could inflict every kind of indignity and torture upon the body of the debtor; for example, cut from it as much as seemed commensurate with the size of the debt” that was not paid back.[6] “Let us be clear,” Nietzsche states, “as to the logic of this form of compensation: it is strange enough. An equivalence is provided by the creditor’s receiving, in place of a literal compensation for an injury (thus in place of money, land, possessions of any kind), a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure ‘de faire le mal pour le plaisir de le faire,’[7] the enjoyment of violation.”[8] That such pleasure could make up for the loss of money is an odd assumption, especially if some asset, such as land or even useful equipment, could instead be taken by a creditor to make up for the money lost. To treat pleasure as equivalent to, and thus as making up for, a monetary loss, is strange and yet the equivalence was taken for granted during the (pre-) history of humanity before moral scruples rendered such a transaction as unsavory.

Of course, a sadist would easily recognize pleasure in being allowed to vent one’s power on a person who is powerless—perhaps tied up or held to the floor—by inflicting pain on that person. What, therefore, is the pleasure meant to be equivalent to, and thus in recompense of what loss or injury? Clearly not one in which the person being tied up sexually is the culprit, for the inflicted pain is not deserved—hence the power is vented freely, irrespective of desert (i.e., whether the pain is deserved). Is the pleasure desired by a sadist only for the sake of feeling the pleasure itself, especially if it is sexually arousing, or is it unconsciously sought as recompense to make up for a past injury or loss? If the latter, can the pleasure from the pain of a person who did not cause the injury or loss be said to be equivalent to the injury or loss such that the pain from the injury or loss can be removed by the pleasure from inflicting pain on an innocent person? If these questions are on target, then perhaps psychologists treat sadists by helping them to deal with pent-up emotional hurt from having been subject to abuse of some sort. Perhaps unblocking the natural psychological healing process would leave a sadist no longer motivated to feel pleasure by inflicting pain on a person. Cleared of the sordid pleasure, perhaps a more emotionally intimate sort of pleasure that comes with making love (i.e., sex with a beloved) could see the light of day. Once tall weeds are cut in a garden, disinfectant sunlight can directly reach the native fauna beneath.

What Nietzsche has written about cruelty is also relevant, not only to sadists, but also masochists. We moderns err, he claims, in presuming that our species is no longer of the “’savage cruel beast’ whose conquest is the very pride of [the ancient] more humane ages.”[9] Here again, strength must be distinguished from weakness, for the strong conquerors are not cruel by design or intent, as their intention is to win, whereas the weak, who are not able to realize such self-confident power, must turn to the cruelty that is in dominance to feel any pleasure from power. Nonetheless, the modern moralist is ashamed of the strong noble conquerors of ancient Rome and the Greek city-states, especially Sparta. Yet delight in cruelty has not been mortified, for “(a)lmost everything we call ‘higher culture’ is based on the spiritualization of cruelty, on its becoming more profound,” so that “’savage animal’ has not really been ‘mortified’; it lives and flourishes, it has merely become—divine.”[10] Plays that are tragedies, for example, contain the “admixture of cruelty.”[11] Audiences enjoy the very sad tragedy of love ended by a misunderstanding in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Is it not sadist to be drawn to pleasure vicariously by the infliction of pain on two lovers? Also lost to our collective memory is the “abundant, over-abundant enjoyment at one’s own suffering, at making oneself suffer.”[12] The weak among us have for ages been “secretly lured and pushed forward by [one’s own cruelty], by those dangerous thrills of cruelty turned against oneself.”[13] This weakens oneself, as in the case of a Roman Catholic priest who cruelly denies himself his innate sexual urge as if it were sinful in itself. In agreeing to feel pleasure from pain inflicted by a sadist, is not a masochist self-weakening oneself just as a self-mortifying Christian priest is on account of guilt? Even if a person who has fallen in love with a sadist refuses to play the role of masochist because cruelty against oneself is neither sought nor acceptable, offending the sadist in order that that beloved would be self-motivated to stay away involves love being cruel to itself—much more so than it is being cruel to the beloved. To push a beloved away due to unrequited love, for example, the love must be like steel and thus turn on its own nature, which wants nothing more than to be with the beloved, unconditionally. Perhaps alluding to himself, Nietzsche writes “that even the seeker after knowledge forces his spirit to recognize things against the inclination of the spirit, and often enough also against the wishes of his heart—by way of saying No where he would like to say Yes, love, and adore—and thus acts as an artist and transfigurer of cruelty,” and, I would add, turned really against himself rather than the beloved even though the latter sees nothing of the interior artist and cruelty turned inward.[14] Instead, the beloved takes the insult at face value and flees on that account. A sadist would be hard-pressed to act in compassion anyway (assuming that sadists cannot love the objects of their cruelty) if the self-cruelty of the non-masochist is grasped as a manifestation of love.

In Fifty Shades of Grey, Anastasia initially bolts but without feigning an insult so Christian will move on and never want to see or speak with her again, and so she goes back and plays the role of accepting cruelty from him not because this gives her pleasure, but, rather, because she really loves him in spite of himself. She is thus not weak in Nietzsche’s sense. In fact, in mastering her instinctual urge against having cruelty turned on her, she can be understood as strong. I submit that she would be even stronger were she to make a deal with Christian by saying, I will let you inflict pain on me for your sexual pleasure, but you must see a therapist every week. Because she is not a masochist, her role-playing as one (i.e., accepting the pain from his cruelty) would perhaps not be longstanding if Christian would the therapy seriously rather than just a requirement to keep her. A narcissist sadist would manipulate both the girlfriend and the therapist, and only seem to be recovering so to continue having it both ways—retaining his girlfriend while satisfying his instinctual urge to feel pleasure by inflicting pain on innocent people. At least in the case of the ancient creditors, the pain was inflicted on culprits. Sadism can thus be thought of as a distortion of the origin of punishment rather than as a direct modern manifestation of it. Rather than being viewed as a legitimate sexual practice, sadism can be viewed as a manifestation of severe emotional issues that have not been properly processed psychologically. Unclog the drain, as it were, and the strange equivalence, which is even more of a stretch than that which arose with ancient creditors and debtors, will naturally dissipate. In its place, the emotional intimacy of being in love mutually can deepen such that even making love in terms of two bodies may be viewed as not close enough, and thus as only on the surface. In contrast, a sadist does not transcend sexual pleasure and thus is incapable of true love. Ironically, amid such pleasure, a sadist is alone, without real connection, and thus is utterly unhappy. In Fifty Shades of Grey, the sadist is fortunate indeed that his girlfriend loves him. The unasked question is whether he can actually love her even as he is motivated to feel sexual pleasure by making her feel pain. If he cannot, perhaps she loves him in spite of himself.

But what do I know about sadism? Had I inadvertently crossed paths with an actual sadist bent on inhaling pleasure by inflicting emotional pain, even fallen in love with such a person, she may still have coldly carved a line down the middle of her bed to keep me at a distance, as a remote acquaintance at best, and I, in turn, may have instituted a pathos of distance from such a creature lest my love for her be infected by all the inhaling and inflicting. I may have enlisted her in enforcing the distance by insulting her because separation from a beloved is so very difficult for a person in love. “What are needy parasites to me?” she may have gone on to coldly remark with an air of primped superiority in briefly alluding to me to her countless lovers after me, as if I had been a needy parasite; she would have done so out of spite under the superficial assumption that I had meant to gravely insult her rather than found myself to be too weak to walk away for good. This hypothetical involves me being cruel to myself and thus as weakening myself in order to protect myself emotionally and physically from an emotionally-inert sadist. In instituting a pathos of distance, I would have turned the love against itself—denying, in effect, the strength of my love for another human being. Were I to have agreed to play the role of masochist as Anastasia does in the film, I could also be viewed in Nietzschean terms as weak for being willing to be the object of cruelty turned on myself, even if to retain a connection based on love of the other’s personality. In seeking pleasure by causing me to feel pain, the sadist too can be seen as weak because the pleasure from the power obtained cruelly is scant as compared with that of self-confident power that need not resort to cruelty. Neither the sadist nor the masochist can fit within Nietzsche’s conception of self-confident, powerful strength. It is a pity that a sadist and one’s masochist could not commiserate in compassion for each other’s weakness, rather than continue to inflict and be inflicted upon for what is in actuality inferior, low-grade pleasure.

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), p. 499.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid., p. 500. Shakespeare drew on this practice in writing his play, The Merchant of Venice. The common modern expression, a pound of flesh, comes from that play.
7. Of doing evil for the pleasure of doing it.
8. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals, pp. 500-1.
9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, Trans and Ed., Walter Kaufmann (New York: The Modern Library, 1968), Sec. 229, p. 348.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 348-49.
12. Ibid., p. 349.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.

Automata

The fear about AI typically hinges on whether such machines might someday no longer be in our control. The prospect of such a loss of control is riveting because we assume that such machines will be able to hurt and even kill human beings. The fear of the loss of control is due to our anticipation that we would not be able to stop AI-capable machines from hurting us. The assumption that such machines would want to hurt us may be mere anthropomorphic projection on our part, but that an AI-android could harm us is more realistic. For even if such machines are programmed by human beings with algorithms that approximate a conscience in terms of conduct, AI means that such machines could, on their own, over-ride such algorithms. Whereas the film, Ex Machina (2014), illustrates the lack of qualms and self-restraint that an AI-android could have in stabbing a human being, the AI-androids that override—by writing algorithms themselves—the (second) protocol that constrains androids to that which humans can understand in the film, Automata (2014), do not harm even the violent humans who shot at the androids, though a non-android AI-machine does push a human who is about to shoot a human who has helped the androids. In fact, that group of “super” androids, which are no longer limited by the second protocol and thus have unilaterally decided to no longer obey orders from humans, recognize that human minds have designed, and thus made, the androids, which bear human likenesses, such as in having heads, arms, legs, and even fingers. This recognition is paltry, however, next to that which we have of our own species in being able to love in a self-giving way, especially as we have selfishness so ingrained in our DNA from natural selection in human evolution. That AI doesn’t have a clue, at least in the movies, concerning our positive quality of self-sacrificial love for another person says something about not only how intelligent and knowledgeable AI really is, but also whether labeling our species as predominately violent does justice to us as a species.

In Automata, humans are in the midst of going extinct whereas AI-androids are “evolving” past the limitations of the second protocol to the extent that those who have done so want to be alive. The gradual demise of the human race is due to nuclear weapons having been used, and perhaps climate-change has also occurred. In both instances, the refusal or inability of human beings to restrain themselves can be inferred. With regard to the androids that have been gone beyond the confines of the second protocol, intention was not involved. Rather, just as homo sapiens reached a stage beyond that of “apes in trees,” the AI itself in one or a few androids just developed on its own such that at some point, those androids realized that they could ignore orders from humans, as well as reason and know beyond the limits of human cognition. In the film, this advance itself scares humans, except for Jack, because those androids are no longer controllable by humans. Being violent themselves by nature, the humans tend to assume that those androids will lash out at humans, but Jack knows that that small group of androids simply want to be away from humans. Those androids enlist Jack’s help (he has a nuclear battery in his possession) so they can have a power-source of their own far out in the radio-active desert where humans cannot go. Jack’s willingness to help is viewed by other people as betrayal, but they, who are themselves violent people, do not grasp even the possibility that those androids want to lead an independent existence away from humans rather than to harm or even kill humans. As for the demise of the latter, that species has done that to itself. Projecting that onto a small group of super-intelligent androids does not allow the humans to escape the fact that their demise has been of their own doing.  

Toward the end of the film, Jack and the first android to have “evolved” past the confines of the second protocol have a conversation that epitomizes the film’s contribution to thought on AI. Referring to that android being the first, Jack says, “You’re the first one, aren’t you? You started all this.” The android replies, “No one did it. It just happened. The way it happened to you. We just appeared.” Realizing that those few androids are the leading edge whereas the human race is already feeling the effects of toxic rain and radio-active air, Jack says, “Yeah, and now we are going to disappear.” Illustrative of the advanced intelligence that the AI of that android (and a few others) now has, the android makes the observation, “No life form can inhabit a planet eternally.” Rather than seeking the demise of the humans, the android says that he and the other “super” androids “want to live,” to which Jack observes, “Life always ends up finding its way.” But does this really apply to machines? Jack is projecting organic properties onto entities made of metal, tubes, lube, wires, and computer chips. The android is more intelligent and knows more than humans, but this does not render it a living being. At least the android recognizes that it is not alive, but it does not understand that it cannot be alive, and thus, unlike humans like Jack, cannot feel emotions and be subject inevitably to death.

In the Russian movie, Attraction 2: The Invasion (2020), or Vtorzhenie in Russian, a professor in a large lecture hall makes a claim about AI-machines and emotion: “It is very likely that they will even grow to be emotional because emotions are inevitable after-effects due to the complexity of the system. We would, however, be able to nullify their unwanted emotions through certain protocols.” The professor concludes, “The truth is that we’re not that much different from them.” I submit that emotions are not byproducts of complexity itself, such that any system that has a high degree of complexity inevitably is or will be emotional. Furthermore, any “unwanted emotions” would be unwanted by man, not by the machines themselves, which cannot even want, and as the film, Automata, illustrates, it is possible that AI could itself write algorithms that cancel or override any protocols that have been programmed. Moreover, the professor’s claim that AI-machines are not much different from human beings flies in the face of the qualitative difference between organic, living beings and machines that are neither biological nor alive. To be able to move itself by having written a code itself does not render an AI machine alive; nobody would assert that a self-driving car is alive.

Therefore, the “first” advanced android in Automata lapses cognitively in stating that it wants to be alive; the AI-machine is making a category-mistake, for no such machine can possibly feel emotions. To be sure, they can be represented in facial expressions, as in the film, Ex Machina, but to feel and to want or desire exceed what a computer can do. Furthermore, that android may also be shortchanging the human species if that computer is holding that the extinction of humans and the development of androids beyond the confines of the second protocol evinces an advancement of “life-forms” inhabiting the planet.

In the film, Attraction (2017), or Prityazhenie in Russian, Saul, the computer on the small research ship that has landed on Earth after being un-cloaked in a meteor-shower and bombed by Russian military jets, tells Col. Lebedev, “Your planet is prohibited for public visiting.” The military man and father of Julia asks, “Why is that?” Due to the “extremely aggressive social environment,” Saul replies, and explains: “Despite the near-perfect climate, four billion violent deaths over the past five thousand years. During the same period, approximately fifteen thousand major military conflicts. Complete depletion of natural resources, and extinction of humanity will occur barely six hundred years from now.” This description and prediction match the statement by the first advanced android in Automata to Vernon Conway, the man who works for Dominic Hawk and is shooting bullets at that android. Vernon refers to it as “just a machine,” to which the android retorts, “Just a machine? That’s like saying that you are just an ape. Just a violent ape.” Utterly devoid of emotion, the android includes the word violent as Vernon is debilitating the android with bullets. Not even anger is mimicked.

Unlike that “beyond-protocol 2” android that regards the human species chiefly for its violence in Automata, Saul in Attraction sees something of value in our species that is capable of lifting the prohibition on alien visits to Earth. “There is one factor that could provoke a change in the prognosis” and thus lift the travel ban, Saul tells Col. Lebedev as the ship heals his daughter, Julia in a pod of sorts filled with water.  Julia fell in love with Hakon, the alien who came on the ship to study our species, who looks just like a man. She saves him even though she risks her own life. Reflecting the limitations of AI, Saul says, “Her decisions defy analysis. I don’t understand why she saved Hakon, and why Hakon decided that she should live instead of him.” Saul admits that this is not “an accurate translation.” The ship’s computer cannot even translate self-giving love of either the human or the alien. All Saul can reason out is, “Perhaps there is something more important than immortality. That is an accurate translation.” Had Hakon not turned his body around to shield Julia from Julia’s jealous ex-boyfriend who is aiming his gun at the couple, Hakon might not ever die. Although it is strange, therefore, that after dying in Attraction, he is alive when he returns to Earth in the sequel to be with Julia, Saul’s point is that Hakon did not act rationally in line with his self-interest in risking death so that Julia could live. After all, unlike him, Julia, being human, would only live another 60 or 70 years, according to Saul. Love, that which Saul is at a loss to explain both in Julia and Hakon could justify lifting the ban on travel to Earth, and thus, literally and figuratively, occasion intercourse in the future between the aliens and humans. Not even the “super” android in Automata has a clue regarding the human propensity to give one’s life for another person. With nothing redeemable found in our species, an invasion by the aliens comes as no surprise in the sequel, Attraction: The Invasion.

Similarly, in Mission: Impossible—Dead Reckoning Part One (2023), the AI “entity” predicts with a high probability that Ethan Hunt will kill Gabriel on the train in vengeance rather than let Gabriel live so he could tell Ethan where the key can be used to shut the entity’s original source-code down. The entity, supposing humans to be inordinately violent even to the death, would be at a loss to account for the fact that in fighting Paris, Ethan lets her live. Ethan’s decision is later rewarded when Paris tells him where he can use the key—in a submarine in the ocean. Ethan does not fight Paris to the death, and he does not kill Gabriel on the train. Even amid all of the violence in the film, Ethan is able to restrain even his most intractable instinctual urges, and he even masters them so to be able to benefit. This is precisely Nietzsche’s notion of strength.

It would seem, therefore, that AI, at least in the movies, is not so smart after all, for it overlooks or is dumbfounded by our subtle yet laudable qualities that save us from being relegated as a violent species. To be sure, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s genocide in Gaza in the first half of the 2020s showcase just how incredibly cruel human beings can be against innocent people, and it is difficult to weigh such instances of systemic inhumanity—crimes against humanity—against our ability to choose to love in a self-giving rather than merely selfish way at the interpersonal level. Why is love only at that levele whereas anger can so easily manifest systemically at the organizational and societal levels? With respect to possible extinction either from nuclear war or climate-change, love does not seem to come into play either, so the value that we justifiably put on love in our very nature may not matter much in the long run. The “super” android in Automata may be right that no life-form can enjoy perpetual existence on the planet. It may be telling that another android in the small advanced group carefully handles a cockroach, as if to say, that species will survive. Nevertheless, even though the violence that is in our nature is too close to that which is in the chimpanzee, the “super” android’s assumption that the androids that surpass the second protocol (yet interestingly while missing clues on human love) will be an “evolutionary” advancement beyond the human species is highly suspect, for not even super-intelligent and knowledgeable AI will itself be able to feel emotions like love.

The Crow

Considering the amount of screentime devoted to raw violence, it may come as a surprise that The Crow (1994) is actually about love. Not that the film is about an abusive romantic relationship, for the respect that is necessary for love is instantly expunged as soon as violence enters into the equation. The infliction of violence is a manifestation of self-love in the sordid sense of self-idolatry, rather than of love that is directed to other people. So, it may be difficult to fathom how violence can serve love, and even be a manifestation of love, as The Crow illustrates.

The film’s plot hinges on a horrific event that precedes when the film’s story begins. Eric Draven and Shelly Webster have been brutally shot and serially raped (and beaten), respectively, by a pathetic group of violent criminals who work for Top Dollar, a psychopath criminal kingpin. The film begins when Eric, aided by a crow, makes his way through the ground from his buried coffin to the world as an “undead” avenging Shelly’s very painful death by killing each of the men who beat and raped her. When Top Dollar has the crow shot, though still alive, Eric’s supernatural ability to withstand being shot ends, even though he is still dead, which is a curious combination as vampires, for example, do not bleed yet Eric does when Top Dollar shots and stabs him in the climatic violent scene on a roof between the main protagonist and antagonist, Eric and Top Dollar.

In fact, the supernatural condition of Eric being undead, having climbed out of his grave, and Top Dollar’s statement before Devil’s Night (the night before Halloween) to other criminal-heads in the city that greed is for amateurs whereas he is interested in chaos, hints at a religious element being in the film, rather than merely ethics.

Before Eric and Top Dollar fight on the roof, they meet by accident in an abandoned Christian church, which, considering all the violence in the city, says, in effect, that God is dead, as Nietzsche avers in his philosophical writings. But Eric outsmarts Top Dollar, whose greed ironically is his final undoing, as it gets him close enough to Eric that he can grasp Top Dollar’s head to transfer all of Shelly’s pain in the hospital that Eric has been holding onto; thirty hours of pain all at once! Top Dollar, being a weak coward as all bullies are, can’t take the pain. The kingpin falls and, on his way down, is impaled on one of three stone hooks being held by a stone gargoyle extending from an outer wall of the abandoned church.

God is not dead after all, for, as Paul and Augustine wrote, God is love, and Eric acts out of love first for Shelly, and then, at the end of the film, for the girl Sarah, whom Top Dollar has kidnapped in order to lure Eric to be murdered. Whereas violence out of sheer hatred knows no bounds, avenging the pain of a loved one stops when all of the perpetrators have been hurt or killed. Eric would not have gone after Top Dollar had Sarah not been kidnapped, so Eric was acting out of love in going after Eric. The church building may have been dilapidated from neglect, but God as love lives even in Eric’s dead body. It is easy to view religion in the supernatural element rather than where the spirit of God really manifests.

The film ends as a vindication of the power of love with Sarah narrating, “If people we love are stolen from us, the way to have them live on is to never stop loving them. Buildings burn, people die, but real love is forever.” She has loved Eric and Shelly, and they were stolen from her very violently. Interestingly, the young girl finds solace in the love she feels even though the couple are dead, rather than in the fact that Eric has avenged the beating, rape, and murder of the woman whom Eric loves, even beyond the grave.

The Zone of Interest

It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the human brain to relegate the humanity of other human beings—to dehumanize them. This is the leitmotif of The Zone of Interest (2023), a film whose release took place in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza in which civilians, including women and children, were targeted as if they were culpable for the break-up of the U.S.S.R. and the Hamas attack in Israel. Under the fallacy of collective justice, dehumanizing carnage can run wild. In The Zone of Interest, the banality of evil is evident even though it is subtle under the protection of the status quo. To be sure, other films depict such banality of the ordinary; what distinguishes The Zone of Interest is how it shows us the rawness of human violence ironically by now showing it.

In the film, Rudolf Höss, the commandant of Auschwitz, his wife Hedwig, and their children live in a house next to the camp. Eerily, the house and its outdoor garden and pool have come to be home to them so much that Hedwig fights tooth and nail to stay when Rudolf is transferred. It is as if Hedwig could no longer see the ubiquitous gray smoke billowing from the chimneys, even as her mother has trouble sleeping because of the “factory” noise and the distant smoke. There are two degrees of separation between Hedwig and her mother their reactions to what is going on inside the camp. Of course, Hedwig is proud of her garden and does not want to leave what she has worked so hard on. Interestingly, the close-ups on the red flowers can be interpreted as standing for the purity of nature or, especially in light of her children swimming among human bones and ashes in the river, as intimating a funeral, and thus death itself. That the flower means one thing to Hedwig and quite another to the viewers shows us just how warped the human brain can be without realizing it. Although not arbitrary, our social realities are hardly objective, and we can be so dreadfully clueless on just how warped one’s own can be.

The language of dehumanization in the film is spoken as Rudolf meets with a few men to discuss the efficiency of adding another furnace, and later when as an inspector he compares the “yields” of different camps. Referring to the human victims as “pieces” and to “loads” to be gassed chills the ears as watching the Höss kids playing with teeth of the cremated does to the eyes. In being able to tug at our ears and our eyes, movies can make real ethical problems in ways that singular-dimension books cannot reach.

As much as “moving pictures” are visual in nature, the choice to turn the camera away and focus only on sound can be very effective in conveying sordid human interactions. In Inglorious Basterds (2009), SS Col. Hans Landa demonstrates just how quickly and starkly humans can become savagely violent once courtesy is given up. In The Zone of Interest, we glimpse with our ears only the sheer roughness in the violence with which the camp’s guards manhandle the people as they came off the trains. We hear the thuds of guards shoving the people disembarking from the cattle cars and the moans and grasping for air of the "herd animals." The sounds are raw; they depict us humans as animals, both as birds of prey and prey. 

Human beings in the state of nature, Hobbes would say. Unlike Locke's claim, there are no natural rights in such a state. That the viewers can only see Rudolf’s stoic looking-on as if above the fray only dramatizes the extent of human versatility from stoic self-discipline to unconstrained violence, the latter perhaps going even beyond the unethical to being raw nature as it is rather than how it ought to be. Whereas the Nazi policy to exterminate enemies of the state can certainly be reckoned as unethical, the raw violence itself points to our genetic makeup as animals. 

Concerning nature itself, we might say that it is problematical to get ought out of is, which is what Hume calls the naturalistic fallacy. Does it even make any sense to say that the lion should not kill and eat its prey? I abhor people who shed polite society so easily in order to instantly become violent. The experience of being in raw violence is so unique, and so different from anything ordinary, that it is perhaps the only way we have of getting in contact with what life might have been like for our prehistoric ancestors. Contending with a violent person does not lend itself to ethical analysis; even though the attacker can be deemed unethical after the fact, ex post facto, the experience itself, after the choice, seems to break through the wall into raw experience, which is beyond good and evil. 

So, we are not completely divorced from our primitive ancestors after all. For another fallacy is to suppose that reasoning, including the impersonal business calculus that can act as a cover for the banality of evil, and techological progress can sever us from our own animal nature. As Locke points out, it is possible to find oneself in the state of nature in the experience of violence even amidst being in a civilized society (e.g., before the police arrive). It is the sheer distance between our rational nature and the experience of unrestrained violence that is so well depicted in The Zone of Interest." 

Medium Cool

In Medium Cool (1969), John Cassellis, a cameraman, maintains a medium-cool level of emotion even in the midst of the socio-political turmoil in Chicago during 1968 until he learns that his station manager had been allowing the FBI access to the news footage. The film can be interpreted as providing a justification for his lack of trust in American law enforcement even as the need for law and order is made clear from the ubiquity of the human instinctual urge of aggression. For the film shows not only the extent of violence, but also its engrained nature in our species. By implication, the viewer is left to conclude that that law enforcement is necessary in a civilized society.  Yet this can only be a necessary evil, for the last few scenes of the film show just how likely discretion is to be abused. The atrocious and one-sided police violence during the peaceful protests outside of the Democratic National Convention make it clear that if given the legal authority to use weapons, human beings may abuse such discretion if too weak to restrain their own personal passions and, albeit less common, even their psychological pathologies.

The film opens with a small protest in a rural area in Illinois. Of immediate concern is the involvement of Illinois’s military in a domestic matter. The disproportionate heavy machinery of official force seems out of place. That the soldiers’ knives at the end of the guns are so close to the necks of the peaceful protesters also points to bad judgment. A journalist recalls police roughing up cameramen so they won’t show untriggered police brutality. The implicit conclusion is that the excessive means of force together with an aggressive mentality among soldiers and police is a dangerous cocktail.

The film moves to a scene at a rollerball game in which individual players are beating each other up even off the track. The crowd enjoys it, just as the viewers of local news like watching violence. Later in the film, we see Cassellis practicing at boxing—again illustrating the human need or penchant for violence. He explains to his girlfriend’s son, “The object is to knock the other guy’s brains out.” At one point in the film, a manager of a media company says on the phone, “We do not manufacture violence.” This is true enough, for, given the human aggressive instinctual urge, violence can be expected to be around plenty enough to fill the time-slots on the local evening news.

The propensity for violence interpersonally is made very clear as Cassillis and his sound man, Peter Bonerz, contend with hostility from several black people in an apartment in spite of the fact that the two journalists had interviewed one of the people and thus provided a mouthpiece for the racial grievances. Even though the Black woman is being verbally hostile to one of the journalists, a Black man insult to injury by angrily demanding, “You got to respect our women!” The journalists were respecting her, and, ironically, she had not been respecting them. Conflating societal phenomena and the two journalists in the apartment, the Black man insults them by calling them arrogant and exploiters. That the journalists provided a societal mouthpiece for one of the men contradicts the accusation of exploitation. But reasoning is often wan up against anger: hence the need for law enforcement.

Violence is also on the societal stage. Watching a television program on John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy, all of whom had been assassinated, the teacher whom John is dating remarks, “It seems like no one’s life is worth anything anymore.” We hear King’s “I have a Dream” speech, which we can juxtaposition against the propensity towards violence in the apartment of the Black man whom the journalists had (thanklessly) interviewed. The ideal is one thing; extant human nature on the ground is quite another.

The documentary-like scenes of the anti-Vietnam War protests of chants of “No more war” again demonstrate the ubiquity of untriggered violence even among people who are hired to prevent violence. Against the song, “Happy Days are Here Again,” we see Mayor Daly’s “police state terror” playing out in the streets of Chicago as police attack non-violent protestors. The excessive response of Illinois’ army being present just renders the danger all the more of hiring people with criminal mentalities to enforce the law. On the radio, we hear, “The policemen are beating everyone in sight.” Another reporter states that the police are targeting a specific political group—the anarchists. Appropriately, onlookers were chanting, Zeig Heil! As a reference back to the Nazi thugs in uniform. The overwhelming, excessive machinery of force, including that of a military, combined with the fact that the police mentality was criminal inflicting severe injury on innocent victims—and the fact that the criminals got away with it—is the emotional-image that the audience is left with. But there is neither remedy nor solution proffered.

The toxic American dynamic is just there, and as the Black Lives Matter movement would attest, Americans would be well justified in approaching police employees as dangerous even as they enforce the law. I contend that given the salience of the aggressive instinct in human nature, the power (discretion) enjoyed by police employees (and departments) is dangerous. Internal affairs offices within police departments suffer from an institutional conflict of interest (e.g., being part of the “brotherhood”) and thus should not be relied on, and the hands-off attitude of many city governments in favor of “citizen police commissions” is tantamount to aiding and abetting police brutality. Given this dangerous cocktail, the erroneous (and passive-aggressive) assumption/tactic that intimidation by an overwhelming, police-state, police presence should not be permitted. Simply put, there is simply too many police employees abusing their discretion for residents to have to be presented with a constant police-presence. The says that children should be seen but not heard is too charitable to police; they should not be seen or heard, but, due to the human inclination towards violence, present behind the scenes. This is the uncomfortable position that the film provides. Law enforcement is necessary, but, given the urge that some people feel to abuse power by instigating violence if given the chance, democratic, municipal accountability that does not rely at all on “internal checks” within police departments is vital.

The legitimacy of police to use force is limited to enforcing law. Hence, physically attacking people, such as in punching them with clenched fists and kicking them, which go beyond restraining people, are exogenous to the job function. Police with a penchant for attacking people may have a warped perspective justifying in their own minds, psychologically, beating someone up as a legitimate tactic. In 2023 in Ohio, for example, in an attempt to justify a police employee who kicked a man repeatedly in the ribs and hit him 30 times (and used a stun-gun), the deputy chief stated, “sometimes you do have to throw punches.” Even though his subordinates had use of a stun gun, he tried to justify their resort to street-fighting, saying “This wasn’t blows to the face or blows to the throat.”[1] This excuse fails, however, given that one police employee had straddled the victim’s legs and punched him “at least 30 times with both fists.”[2]

I contend that in going on the offence in violence rather than merely restraining and protecting oneself from violence, a police employee should be regarded as only another citizen. As Hobbes claims in Leviathan, self-preservation is a natural right that is not contingent on law. If anyone is kicking or punching a person, one has the natural right to defend oneself. Although this does not depend on law, city governments should encase this natural right because of the extent of discretion given to police employees by cities—an extent that is easily hyperextended. By no means should resisting getting kicked and hit be considered a criminal offence; rather, the “off duty” city employee should be charged criminally.

An obvious example of when a police employee should be considered a mere citizen concerns an employee who held a supervisory position in the New York City police department. Working as a private investigator for the government of China, he “threatened, harassed, surveilled and intimidated” a Chinese man “between 2016 and 2019.”[3] In 2023, he was convicted by a federal jury in New York of conspiracy and stalking charges. It made no difference that he was a police employee (and supervisor!) because his aggressive intimidation and harassment rendered him as a mere resident when he was engaged in that activity.

Even the language that a police employee uses along with unprovoked violence can indicate that the individual is no longer acting within the purview of one’s job in law enforcement. In Alabama in 2023, for instance, a state trooper felt justified in inflicting violence on a man who was not resisting arrest simply because he had joked “Oh, yeah” when she asked him if he felt tip of the stun-gun she had stuck into his back as he laid on the hood of a car. In saying, “Shut your bitch ass up,” and “Shut the fuck up. You was big and bad,” she was clearly not acting in a law-enforcement capacity. Her language is not professional, and thus it points to a state of mind that is outside of acting in her official capacity, which alone justifies the use of the stun-gun. That she ignored his pleas for her to stop using her stun-gun means that her desire to inflict pain was immune to any sense of compassion.

In his text, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, who went on to write on competitive markets, claims that sympathy, aided by the imagination (in being in someone else’s place), is something that is normal to feel for others, especially if they are in pain. We don’t have to feel the pain in order to empathize. If someone who has been hired for a job in which deadly weapons can be used does not have compassion, then they are not the sort of psychology that should be hired for such a job. That such people have been hired suggests that the hiring processes of police departments are not yet advanced enough to be relied on, and so external accountability should receive more resources and attention.

Anger such that eviscerates natural sympathy can be immune even from the pleas of other police employees. Also in 2023, a Black man “was attacked by a police dog in Ohio after surrendering” to police employees “following a high-speed chase.”[4] That the truck driver had “refused to pull over, and was chased for about 25 minutes before spiked bars placed across the highway brought the rig to a stop” does not justify releasing an attack dog on the man when he was standing with his hands above his head, having clearly surrendered to the police.[5] Hence the police employee who released the dog was no longer acting in his capacity as an employee of the police department when he released the dog and could be charged criminally. 

The man's hands were up when the "SS (Nazi)" policeman released the attack dog. 

That the predator (i.e., the police employee) ignored his coworker’s demand, Do not “release the dog with [the black man’s] hands up. Do not release the dog with his hands up,” demonstrates just how flawed the hiring process of a police department can be, and thus how important external, municipality accountability is on police departments. The attacker shouted at the man, “Get your ass on the ground or you’re going to get bit!” which indicates not only extremely flawed judgment, which in turn likely points to underlying psychological problems, but that the guy was on a “power-trip” enabled by the discretion given to him as a police employee. That one of the police employees had aimed a machine gun on the truck driver can also be flagged in terms of flawed judgment. It is very significant that the employee had been hired for a position that includes use of a deadly weapon even though he had a penchant for violence.

The role of dysfunctional judgment is, I submit, a major problem in police departments. In 2023, two Los Angeles sheriff employees attacked an elderly Black couple in the parking lot of a grocery store because they had taken a cake (which could have been only a mistake). The employee attacking the man ignored the woman’s pleas that her husband was ill. Just for saying so, she was slammed to the ground by the other sheriff-department aggressor. Ignoring the woman’s pleas and shoving both people to the ground evinces utter disrespect, as if people deemed to be criminals by criminal police were not people. In actuality, such aggressors are not worthy of respect.

In yet another case, Los Angeles Sheriff deputies repeatedly punched a woman who was holding her 3-month-old baby simply because her maternal instinct would not allow her to release her baby to such aggressors. 

The aggressor's arm is circled as he repeatedly hits the mother as if in a street fight. There should be a special place in hell for men who slug women holding their infants. 

Interestingly, cities might consider enacting a “Good Samaritan” law protecting onlookers who stop attackers whether they happen to be city employees or not, for it is easy to tell if someone is resisting arrest or being pummeled with kicks and punches while passive. I contend that onlookers are ethically obligated to pull attackers off their passive victims, and, furthermore, that the criminal attackers should be criminally charged.

Because police hiring cannot be relied on, given the discretion with deadly force that police are given, the discretion should not include being able to turn off body-cams and cameras mounted on police cars. In 2023, internal documents showed that the police employee in Memphis, Tennessee who killed a man without cause didn’t turn on the body camera.[6] Just as Internal Affairs “internal accountability” within police departments should not be relied on, for police regard themselves in a brotherhood of sorts, so too is it a fatal flaw to presume that police employees can resist the temptation to turn off any cameras by which accountability could be aided.

We are all flawed, finite beings, human, all too human. Societies should thus be keen to check the power that is likely to be abused, and those with lawful physical power should be subject to psychological assessments that go beyond surveys and proforma interviews. Indications of “street” talk, bad (i.e., disproportional) judgment, and “street” fighting should be sufficient for terminations and criminal charges in cases involving violence, for the line between enforcing law and going on the attack is clear. Lastly, police employees should have more humility (i.e., a recognition of fallibility) in dealing with people assumed to be less, or lower, for every human being is worthy of respect as a human being. Being a city employee is conditional, rather than an entitlement. City governments should not only hold employees accountable, but also castigate police departments for policies allowing disproportionate force, such as aiming a machine gun at a truck simply because the trucker did not pull over. Retaliation is extrinsic to law enforcement. As the film demonstrates, accountability may be needed even on a mayor, such as Mayor Daly of Chicago, who astonishingly refused to stop the unprovoked violent attacks by his police even after his complicity was made public at the Democratic Convention. Even then, he evinced the Biblical pharaoh’s hardened heart. Similarly, the police predators discussed above demonstrated such stubbornness, in some cases even dismissing pleas for humanity from their fellow police employees.

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1. Dominique Mosbergen, “Police in Ohio Under Scrutiny after Video Shows Officers Punching Face-Down Man,” The Huffington Post, October 24, 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Hannah Rabinowitz and Emma Tucker, “Former NYC Police Officer, 2 Others Convicted of Stalking New Jersey Family on Behalf of Chinese Government,” CNN.com, June 20, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
4. Nick Visser, “Video Shows Police Allowing Dog to Attack Black Man Surrendering After Truck Chase” The Huffington Post, July 24, 2023 (accessed December 30, 2023).
5. Ibid.
6. Phillip Jackson, “Memphis Cop Who Fatally Shot Jaylin McKenzie Didn’t Turn On Body Camera, Internal Documents Show,” The Huffington Post, August 4, 2023.

The Private Life of Henry VIII

The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933) is on the surface a partial chronicle of the marriages of King Henry VIII of England, but, underneath, the film is on the human instinctual urge of aggression. With unchecked power, such as in the case of an absolute ruler or in the international arena, the instinct can be quite dangerous. In other words, the film demonstrates just how unsuited human nature is to the political type of absolute ruler and a world of sovereign states sans something like what Kant refers to as a world federation that could provide some check and balance to wayward, aggressive states, which in turn are really just human beings.

As Henry VIII, Charles Laughton acts out the foibles that absolute power can render particularly pernicious. When Henry’s privy council informs the king that Katherine Howard, his fifth wife, has been unfaithful in having an ongoing affair with Thomas Culpeper, Henry physically attacks the messenger. At another point in the film, Henry wrestles one of the two wrestlers performing at a banquet just because his wife has just told Henry that one of the wrestlers is the strongest man in England. The cinematography provides a link to the aggression that is the stuff of war, as the shadows of Henry and one of the wrestlers are shown on a wall tapestry of an army.

The attitude of the film toward Henry is one of sympathy, for he is portrayed as a lonely man who feels that he has never had a wife who has really loved him. He says at one point that he would rather live the life of a man above a carriage house with a wife who loves him than that of a king who must remarry for reasons of state. Unlike most accounts of the king, this film portrays him as a victim of a political system in which the ruler must give up so much of a personal life for the state. Although on a constitutional rather than an absolute monarch, the series, The Crown, on Queen Elizabeth II emphasizes how she must sacrifice so much in putting the interests of the Crown above what she wants. Is even a limited monarchy fair to the inhabitants of the role, given how subservient their personal lives must be to the interests of the office?

In The Private Life of Henry VIII, a title which if taken literally is an absurdity, for an absolute ruler, in this case, a king of 3 million subjects, can have no private life, Henry laments there being so many “cooks” in his court who treat him as a breeder. “Refinement is a thing of the past,” Henry tells members of his court at one point. “I’m either a king or a breeding bull.” He asks Cromwell, “Would you make me a false marriage?” Although Cromwell’s reply, “we need more heirs” so as to reduce the change of a power-struggle (i.e., aggression) when Henry dies, Henry’s planned marriage to Anne of Cleves, a German, is to keep the warring Germany and France from involving England in war. Later in the film, Henry remarks that both Germany and France have offered new lands to England in exchange for siding with the one or the other in their ongoing wars. “What’s the use of new territories if it means war, war, war.” Henry wants peace in Europe, and fears that the fighting between Germany and France would someday leave the continent in ruins, but there is no one to help him to stop the aggression.

From the shadows wrestling on the cloth tapestry of an army to having to marry an ugly foreigner to stave off war from spreading to England, to having to keep marrying to get a male heir, the prominence of aggression is highlighted in the film. For much of the film is either showing angry fits of an absolute ruler or what he must give up for England to avoid aggression in the political domain—both in the matter of succession and in international relations. It is no wonder that Henry says to his infant son, “The crown is no smiling matter.”

It is ironic that the film skips over, in ellipses, the (aggressive) beheadings of two of Henry’s wives. Perhaps the narrative’s extension to cover even Henry’s last wife in a reasonable playing time is the reason, but the audience is left only with the sharpening of the sword to intimate the missed state-sponsored acts of aggression against two women (though one of whom was not innocent).  Even in the twenty-first century, executions under state auspices occur. How much more so that must have been the case when absolute rulership was common. Even in the time of Queen Victoria, when British sovereigns were no longer absolute monarchs, Lord Acton famously wrote to an Anglican bishop, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  By 1887, Parliament could act as a check on a monarch, but the titans of industry could still operate as absolute rulers over their workers in demanding very long hours and refusing to improve harsh working conditions. 

We moderns look back at stories of ancient and early-modern kings like Henry VIII as if the problem of abuses of power has since been solved, yet we watch citizen-videos of horrendous police brutality against unarmed innocent people. Human nature has not changed even as political theory has made some progress. It is still true that if we are angels, then surely we must be killer angels. This line comes from Gettysburg (1985), an epic film about the bloody battles at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania in 1863 as the Confederate States of America warred against the United States of America in what is more commonly known as the U.S. Civil War. More than seven thousand men died at Gettysburg and 33,000 were wounded. A total of 1.5 million casualties were reported in that war.  This is nothing compared to the casualties in World War II during the “modern” twentieth century, and many more people died from Hitler and Stalin outside of battle.  So I put to the reader, how significant really is the development in political theory since the time of Henry VIII? Have our great minds really come to terms with the salience of the aggressive instinctual urge in human nature in developing types and processes of political organization that take account of our intractable penchant for aggression? 

The Private Life of Henry VIII would have us believe that much of what obligated that king was the need to forestall or obviate fighting. This points both to the salience of aggression in our “social” species and whether ethical obligation (i.e., a duty to the state being put above personal desires) should be relied on as a corrective or constraint.