“Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it’s up to the physical sciences.”
Like most scientists in horror films the characters of Flatliners think that science can reveal everything, damn the consequences…
…and be it a sci fi or horror movie that always works really well.
The movie posters had the rather cheesy catch phrase “Some lines shouldn’t be crossed.” (Terrible pun). But this goes to the heart of an the issue of should science have boundaries. And as so many horror stories came out of the Romantic era it will always be tied to the Romantic’s distrust of the arrogance of science to find all answers. And they’re not entirely wrong. The history of science, while a great story of the progress and advancement of the human race, has these dark side notes of human experimentation and only considering the consequence of one’s actions only after the after(I am confused and don’t know what you are saying here) (Oppenheimer…”I am become death…”). We see it in Frankenstein. We saw it in The Island of Dr. Moreau. We saw it throughout the X-files, Fringe, Outer Limits, and the Twilight Zone and a dozen other stories, movies and TV shows. They’re cautionary tales to remind people that science has always been and always will be a double edged sword that when misused or misunderstood can do far more damage than good. And the idea of killing yourself to scientifically see what’s on the other side of death does seem to be one of those lines science shouldn’t be so eager to go past.
In this case how would you like all of your worst sins and things your regret come back not just as memories but as tangible, physical things to torment and torture. I assume for many of us this would be a nightmare…more so for the highly flawed characters of this movie.
Now, somewhere between being a cool vampire and being the most deadly force in the history of counter-terrorism, Kieffer Sutherland played the rather arrogant and guilt-ridden character of Nelson. This character was the driving force behind these experiments of Flatliners, Nelson, is also the one most tied to death. He claims he has no fear of what is on the other side and it is just pure curiosity on his part, but he is also suffering from the buried guilt of having killed someone in his youth. In fact you find that the only other character so interested in the experiments is Julia Robert’s character, who also lost someone to death, show that their desire to know about death isn’t curiosity, it is very much the fear of not knowing what death it.
The fear of death is often tied to the fear of being judged for your actions (it’s sad people have such a limited view of God they think he is so willing to damn you). And that is what ties each of the characters of Flatliners together. Whether what happened was their fault or not, whether it was major or minor, they felt guilty about it and in this film their guilt became a physical manifestation. Now I don’t know if the writers were intentionally going for this or it’s just an interesting parallel, but this does partially match up to the idea that when you die you review your life and you the parts that you review in most detail are the ones that you are most emotionally tied to…and there are few emotions stronger than guilt. It also seems to parallel the Buddhist idea that in the afterlife one of the things you will face is the karmic consequences of your actions and if you can’t move past these (move past the guilt) then you will be forced to live through the karmic consequences of those actions in your next life (but this may be reading too much into the screenwriter’s intent).
Whatever the actual purpose the writer and director were attempting to bring out about the nature of the afterlife, they do have a fairly clear point that the way out is not death but forgiveness.
“The Other 99%” (or I’ve also seen 98%) they don’t seem to have a lot of specific goals and ideas. But by their title alone they seem to think that because the top 1% has the majority of the wealth in the world then that clearly means that they’re the ones ruining our lives and it has nothing whatsoever to do with our choices. I think it’s fair to say that whatever the cornucopia of beliefs this movement holds; they all seem to think that the wealth should be spread around a little more. But does that work?
Well let’s look at some facts and figures.… (yes I do math so you don’t have to, you should thank me for doing something so drearily dull as this for you).
They seem to think that if the wealth were spread out just a little more that their lives would be better.
So let’s look at some common statistics before we look at the heart of their argument.
What leads to a better life?
Well the UN has some statistics on standards of living (I’m not sure if this is the best judge for what is a good life, but we’ll play in the liberal’s ballpark and use the UN’s numbers). Now if we chart that against the average GDP for each country (numbers from the CIA Handbook), (I’ll include a long boring chart with all these figures at the end if you want to check my math) we find that, low and behold the more money you have the better the average quality of life is in any given country. (In case you want to know the better quality of life the higher the score). Not terribly surprising when you consider that one of the UN’s criteria is average GDP, but you’ll notice that that the line goes up exponentially (it curves up) rather than linearly (a straight line) thus suggesting that at some point you need more money just to get the same jump you did last time. Thus to get to the highest standards of living you need lots of money, at least as an average GDP.
Further it would not be unreasonable to argue that there are secondary benefits, (not having to worry about debt, freedom for leisure, the joys of philanthropy–which is really dependent on having lots of money, etc) that come from extra money not shown in the UN’s standard of living numbers thus making the exact curve even more pronounced in the favor of higher GDP having numerous benefits. So in reality, if we were able to measure all the benefits provided by higher income (see video below), for every extra $10,000 you earn your quality of life better than what it is suggested by the UN data graph below. (Or to put it another way if we had accurate data and not just UN numbers you would not see as great a level of diminishing returns, but closer to a linear progression).
But is money alone what causes a good life? Not quite because we need to answer what creates lots of money.
And for that we turn to economic liberty…you know the very thing these whiners at The Other 99% are arguing against. For that we turn to the Heritage Foundation and its yearly ranking of economic Freedom. (Again, the higher the score the more economically free). Seems pretty clear to me that if you have economic freedom you get more money and a better standard of living. Yes, yes, yes correlation does not equal causation…but you’d have to be a damn fool to not see that they’re not related. (By the way, the United States has dropped it’s economic freedom almost every year for the last decade…you know all the while that the economy kept getting worse and worse…I’m sure one had nothing to do with the other).
Okay, so it apear to me that you need more economic freedom if you’re going to have a better life. However, maybe that’s only one interpretaion. Maybe these Other 99% people have a point. So where do we get numbers for economic inequality? Luckily the UN collects those numbers as well. They use something call the Gini coefficient–I could bore you with the math, but let’s just say that the lower the number the more wealth is concentrated in the hands of the few, and the higher the number the more the money is spread around. I’m dealing with a slightly smaller pool of countries because the UN reports do not have a complete listing for all countries (countries where a GDP of nothing is spread around equally or countires where the dictator owns everything are pretty much what makes up the majority of the list where you find no data).
If you’re looking for a straight line, you’ll find Waldo in there before you find a straight line. At most you could argue you see the a bell curve here (especially since some of the worst countries where everyone shares in poverty are not on the list and proably have Gini coefficient near 10, and GDP near 0 weren’t calculated) but that would be a very weak correlation at best. Yes you don’t want massive inequality like you would see in Saudi Arabia, but you don’t complete socialist sharing either). What you seem to want is a Gini score between 30-45 (the U.S. is at 40) but this is no guraentee of success. You’ll notice that some of the lowest countries for GDP, standard of living, and economic freedom are all in that range. Conversly if you cross a 70 score on econoimc liberty it seems literally impossible to be in a bad spot.
The distribution of wealth on the whole seems to be a very irrelevant piece of information. It doesn’t appear to be a cause of good or bad economies nor does it appear to be an effect or sign of good or bad economies. It’s a useless talking point. It doesn’t matter what portion of the pie you’re getting…it only matter how big in an abosolute sense a piece you’re getting. If you’getting only a diproportionate 1% of the U.S. eocnomy you’re doing better than most of the world currently (would you rather have your exactly equal share by population of the Somalian economy?) and certainly better than 99.999999999% of the people throughout history.
Real math seems to show that economic inequality is nothing more than a useless talking point that drummed up for class warfare purposes.
If these idiots at “The Other 99%” really cared about improving the quality of life of the 99% who aren’t among the rich, then they would be protesting government, bureaucracy, red tape, taxes and regulation…but they don’t care about that…they don’t want it better for everyone, they just want if better for them so they can sit around all day and get paid for doing nothing…that or they are obscenely bad at math.
So the next time you get into an argument that the rich control too much or that they aren’t paying their fair share and that should change (i.e. redistribute wealth and lower our economic freedom) ask them what proof they have that such a move would improve our quality of life or even average GDP. What proof do they have? Because it certainly isn’t any proof from this little thing called reality.
“Philosophy failed. Religion failed. Now it’s up to the physical sciences.”
