Are we too sensitive ?
That is not different from what happened to this country, especially if we just want to look at since the insurrection, if we just want to look at, from that moment, this country that was the boiling over point of what was hiding underneath the surface for many, many years. And now we're at a point where you're either a snowflake and you're too liberal or you're too bigoted and you're saying your mind too much and you're way over the top
You? Well, five minutes moves quickly these days, but just expanding on that thought. So my question is, why is sensitivity being portrayed as a bad thing? Is that only a cover for those who wish to just continue to say whatever they want without repercussion or accountability? It is. It the natural ebb and flow of things. What is your take on it? I just think about how we're moving into the next 20 years and just some of the norms
And so I think the connectedness that the internet has brought has allowed us to gain in some ways greater understanding and awareness of the sensitivities we should have, that we'd like to have, but we haven't quite got there yet. And so we're going through these growing pains, I think, of the technology advancing as quickly as it has and continues to do, and we're sort of playing catch up
Jesse Thompson
@BigBear · 3:12
I think that in the process of learning how the collective is going to change and how we're going to educate ourselves on being more tolerant, more open minded, more willing to accept alternative lifestyles, to accept alternative ways of thinking, even political views, in this new way of communicating via the Internet, where you're not put in the same room as somebody else. It's a very slippery slope, right?
But maybe if we create bubbles or I saw a meme yesterday or today that was talking about was it the 80s or the Internet was considered the escapism from real life and now real life is escapism from the Internet. And it's there. People are thinking about it. But creating these spaces away from the Internet, sort of making our world smaller, our quote unquote lowercase w world smaller
And I wonder also how much traumatic experiences play into the I don't want to say dumbing down, but the heightened association that we all go through to live in this insane world. Because to think that everybody's 100% sane in an insane world would, to me, be insane itself
So if you practice believing one way enough, it will become an automatic belief. I believe I had that right. I may not, but the concept made sense to me to where if I constantly believe the rigid thought, I'm reinforcing it. I just wonder how much of that plays a part into this as well as people are seeking more growth and healing internally
And I loved when you pointed out not only of our personal past traumas, but also our exposure to, let's say, social media and news and how, in a sense, because we're continuing to expose ourselves to these traumas, quote unquote or things that are happening either locally and or globally, how much more they're becoming disassociated
I think it's a lot like I'll use the visualization of the Matrix. People can be controlled by agents. Different types of thinking comes in and they kind of seem to not be themselves. Now, some people can live into that for a lifetime and others they switch in and out as they grow. But behind them is still a person there, right?
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
Jesse Thompson
@BigBear · 4:52
And many of these people have no interest in making it to that destination. They wanted to go where we were going before. They were completely fine with that. But now, as a whole, the majority is saying, no. We're meeting on this beach. And this is the kind of beach we really should be the most healthy, the most accepting, the the most loving, the most sensitive, like caring for all of us as a collective and individually the way we should
So how just even being in this hypnotic state of the mass media messaging that's coming around makes it again all the more easier for people to double, triple, and to use your words, boil it down to this little group. That where I feel comfortable, where I can be a keyboard warrior and not have to have outside influence in this course correction
Jesse Thompson
@BigBear · 1:21
And that takes dialogue, whether that is disagreeing, arguing or agreeing, getting along, or just simply diversifying your thought process, right? That all begins with dialogue. So I've really enjoyed the dialogue that we are having here. And I think the people that are afraid of that dialogue, they're the ones that are impeding the change, impeding the course correction. And that's basically fear, right? I mean, you're afraid of change. You're afraid of what you may find
When I start to think about how so much of this is tied into our ego and when we feel good and when we feel right and important and the way that we reduce people and ideas into the boxes. Elevate and demote them as well as ourselves. In relation to all of these things, you can sort of see that science has even had these lenses overlaid onto top of it. And so instead of recognizing that it's about making the mistakes, it's about getting it wrong
All these types of things walk a fine line of observation and commentary. And when you're in a culture now where I look at SNL and all the jokes are wrapped around some sort of gay leaning joke that's in favor of gay people, it's a very tiptoe joke where we try to make gay people laugh. We try to make heterosexual people laugh. That's fine with the humor. It's over political humor. It's not a smart way of communicating certain comedic laws and certain comedic observations
When I spent time in the military, one of the things that I was always concerned about and maybe it was because I was a medic, it gave me a different perspective in my infantry units. So, like, I'm not looking at people as a body count number or anything like that, but looking at ways to preserve life even in the midst of war and chaos
The most progressive and transgressive era in cinema, arguably was the pre Code era of the 1930s, the 1920s and the 1930s before the Hayes Code caused us to have to censor ourselves and really pigeonhole us in a very conservative mindset where suddenly we couldn't show murder. We couldn't show any sort of race mixing we couldn't show certain sexual acts of a woman having some sort of agency in her sexual exploits
I think they said every 15 seconds in this country, us alone, there is a commercial of how to chemically solve your problem or chemically help your situation, no matter what it is. And here's the solution chemically. And I think that all plays part of it. It's this binary, one way track of thinking here's the way we do things, here's the way we don't do things. And if you don't believe in this, you're the outcast, right?
But The Honeymoon has had a very strong voice in some particular pockets of white American society that was otherwise not discussed unless black people or some sort of marginalized group challenged that normality. So I think when we talk about sensitivity and we address what we can get away with now or back then versus what we can now
You. I love a lot of the points you were bringing up. I think you were right in the aspect with some of the films you mentioned and shows. I think you're right as far as the lens of comedy and what it brings to a society. You would know better. I would, being in the field, how vital comedy has been throughout the ages. It was often the jokester
Okay, I'm going to open this by saying I'm playing devil's advocate because I don't know exactly what I think about this. But I'm curious. Do you think that the examples you presented are less about sensitivity and more about people wanting to lock down or lock into place, quote, unquote, right and wrong or good, bad, pleasant, unpleasant than it is about sensitive city? Maybe that's done for a variety of reasons, but not necessarily because people are feeling sensitive
Have some of the movies gone overboard in the grotesqueness, in trying to portray a certain message and the way they do it? Or is that even the question we should be asking? Is it an overcorrection or is it just same as has been? Our sensibilities have changed. We don't see caskets coming back from war, right? To give us kind of a more impactful picture of what is happening during war and to our soldiers
The problem is that there are some people that don't like facing ethics because the idea of guilt or the idea of the spotlight being focused on them doesn't feel well and it's them sensitive about it. I'll give an example with comedy is because we see a lot now we're in the culture of man hating and I think a lot of it is warranted because obviously men hold a lot of power in the United States and then a lot of power of the culture of our world
I don't mean to clutter your thread up, but the film that you're referring to is Birth of a Nation. That's A-D-W. Griffin's film, which is a very problematic film that I actually do own. Yeah. What a movie
Is but when you can find those pockets, those moments like this one, we are so much more enriched because it gives us not just like book learning, not just experience learning, but like the sharpening against one another. And so I don't know where I was going to
And that might be the topic of conversation around the water cooler, but today instead, it's like, oh, well, what did you stream or binge this weekend? Right? And those shows were not necessarily designed for our comfort level. They were more designed for fitting a time slot and maybe how they fit with the shows coming before and after. And so they could delve into these other ideas that were more challenging
Our bodies tend to betray us when it comes to dealing with the tough emotional world that we have inside us. We're trying to make sense of things. We're trying to hold back. It's almost like it's trying to kit out of us and we suppress it in. So I find that fascinating. It was just something that popped out to me as I was thinking about that, just how it's another aspect of sensitivity. Right
I saw that film in community college here in Chicago, in Moraine Valley, and I was the only black kid in that class. It was an intro to film class. And I had long procrastinated and being very insecure about being a filmmaker because I was in a predominant white college as a black kid from the South Side of Chicago. And when I finally said, you know what?
You. I ran out of time. But what I was going to say, I think the messiness that we we just never cleaned up over a period of time. We didn't learn from the past, we're not interested in really looking back. We're so steadfast focused on today. We don't tend to look at the full picture of the things that came before us. We kind of just look at the bad
And I think that's the problem that we're seeing is that the nature of sensitivity has evolved into a problematic force where we're seeing people say things like, I want to cancel him if he doesn't agree with me. I don't like this show if it upsets me, rather than saying, Know what? Unless it's harming somebody, this might not be for me. But sometimes we need to be uncomfortable to understand what the world is like. It's like what Plum said
And I really think that there's a fear that people are going to start coming together and we're going to start making headway on some things and these small stuff that they keep throwing in the monkey wrenches aren't going to be an issue because even when I'm on the swell we get along. But a lot of people dip now. It's like people giving disclaimers
Jesse Thompson
@BigBear · 4:36
We have to keep this at face value, look each other in the eye and have these conversations back and forth, no matter what they be, and whether we agree or disagree. And that's how progress is made, because it helps fortify us as individuals and in that same process, fortifies us as a collective. So I really appreciated listening to this on the way home from work. It was refreshing, it was insightful, and I enjoy all of your input