[FRIAM] Breaking Bad

[glen]

I have a friend who calls himself a "virtue ethicist". He means it in some jargonal sense. But if I hear him with charity, what he means is something like moral intuitionism. And it's simply another rendering of nature v nurture, the false dichotomy to end all false dichotomies. Rather than ask *can* "good people" turn "bad", we might want to particularize "people", "good", and "bad", then ask "what does it take to turn type T_0 people into T_1 people?"

Despite my abstract re-wording, it applies to Walter White in the arc of the show. He never turned "bad". He exhibited the same tribal character throughout, retaining loyalty to those in his group. But the group definition changed through the arc. The group boundary permeability hardened (and softened). The Other became Us and vice versa. Etc. To some extent, we might say the show is less about breaking bad and more about breaking *out* ... out of the entitled stupor our standard lives, built on implicitly assumed bureaucracy, put us into. Were I a betting person, I'd bet that what many in the media are calling "polarization" can be well-understood as a "waking up". Some of us are waking up and realizing our democracy is fragile. Others are waking up and realizing they're losing autonomy one "freedom" at a time. Etc. When we make a posterior value judgement about these transformations, it's difficult to make a charitable one. And what most of us seem to want is to hide in that comfy stupor of entitlement, to minimize surprisal.

It is a fantastic show.

On 1/15/24 09:45, Jochen Fromm wrote:
> The TV series Breaking Bad was created 10 years ago, but I only recently was able to watch it on Netflix. As you know it is about the question how a good man turns bad. The story starts with a tragedy, a lung cancer diagnosis for the main character Walt(er) White. Life has not been kind to the underpaid and overqualified chemistry teacher who has a disabled son and a pregnant wife. The cancer diagnosis pushes him over the edge and after it he seems to driven by the question "if life has been so bad to me why should I be good?". The episodes that follow describe how he "breaks bad" and turns toward crime.
> 
> What do you think, did you like the TV series created in Albuquerque? Is the story accurate from a psychological perspective, i.e. can good people turn into bad ones if life refuses to be kind to them? In a way this story of a person who turns into a villain is the opposite of Joseph Campbell's classic story of a person who turns into a hero, isn't it?


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