In recent decades, the leftist political ethos has taken over how to tell fairy tales.
My favorite example is the arc Disney has gone through.
I’m a huge fan of the old Disney films. It makes me really sad how Disney has destroyed its own intellectual property and really screwed itself up as a company in the service of politics.
My favorite example is the difference between the film “Pinocchio” and the film “Frozen.”
In “Pinocchio,” Jiminy Cricket sings, “Always let your conscience be your guide.” The entire story of “Pinocchio” is that the boy who is coming of age refuses to let his conscience be his guide. He has to explore every bad idea, and finally learns that responsibility for protecting his own family and his father is actually how you become a real boy. The way that you actually mature in the world is to take on responsibility and duty and act with conscience, as opposed to going to Pleasure Island.
The theme could not have been more clearly stated.
Contrast that with the immorality of the most popular song in the last 20 years from Disney, “Let It Go,” in which there is literally a lyric that says “No right, no wrong, no rules, I’m free,” which is about as pagan an ethos as is possible to get.
You can see the arc of American morality in three generations right there.
If you look back to Shakespeare, he sometimes creates a toned-up version of fairy tales. All of his comedies are essentially a type of fairy tale, and every single one of them ends with a marriage. That’s because life is funny; all these bad things happen, and yet the generations move on. You get married, and you build something.
With the tragedies, everyone dies at the end. In these works, death is a tragedy because the characters have not fulfilled their function of passing it on to the next generation.
Moreover, in the tragedies, it’s not just an old person dying, it’s the young person dying that’s the real tragedy. The tragedy of King Lear isn’t Lear’s death; it’s Cordelia’s death.
That’s true throughout all of the stories of the West: the importance of the deepest things. And because we have become a sterile civilization, I wonder, how much of that is connected to the sterility of rationality?
I really pride myself on rationality. I love reason, reason’s great; logic is great. But the truth is that the things that people tie themselves to are beyond reason.
I’ve spoken about what I call role theory, which is the idea that all of religion and all of culture is built around particular roles that are universal to human beings.
But we as a society have decided that roles are bad. Roles are impositions from the outside. What we really are is free-floating, authentic desire. And because roles come with rules, they are an imposition on us, and therefore, we have to explode those roles to live a free and full life. In reality, the roles are what make us who we are. And that’s pretty much what every fairy tale is about.
What every great story is about is a person reconciling and making the most of the role that has been laid out for them; the world pre-exists you; you’re meant for a role the minute you’re born. That role is laid out for you. You have liberty to live out choices within that role, but the minute that liberty becomes a universal asset that destroys the role, the minute that happens, it’s no longer liberty.
Then it becomes libertinism, and everything descends into chaos.
