For Goodness Sake ★☆☆☆☆

I can not give a good reason as to why I decided to watch an thirty-year-old, celebrity cameo-heavy short by a reactionary propagandist. Sometimes I make poor choices with my time. So why not overanalyse it like some sort of Youtube dickhead?

It starts with the sort of utterly bizarre logic and blatantly leading questions that Dennis Prager carried forward to his more recent videos: What has caused you more grief in your life—natural disasters or other people? What would you like to be most? His attempts frame the obvious and common answer of “people” to the former and the lack of people giving an unintuitive answer of “good” to the later as significant set the tone for a strange and incurious look into the concept of “goodness” through the means of mildly humorous at best comedy sketches occasionally interrupted by odd assertions such as “obviously we all get better as we get older.”

The short, unsurprisingly, has no real interrogation of what goodness really means. Most of what is shown boils down to basic politeness and charity. Any social or systematic aspects of behaviour beyond the direct interpersonal are delegitimised or never acknowledged as a possibility. A hollow, conservative view of morality. The idea of actually trying to fundamentally improve the world is sneered at as head in the clouds thinking that is necessarily disconnected from “real people”, and breaking the law portrayed as fundamentally bad. The idea of stealing from the rich is brought up, but only to be put in the mouth of a man stealing a sports car with transparently flimsy justification. People don’t resort to crime because of poverty and desperation, simply because they are being bad.

To Dennis Prager goodness fundamentally means fitting in with the social order with as little friction as possible.