Joaquin Phoenix is a dreadfully awkward character in Hollywood. The Joker actor reminded us of his eccentricities during his acceptance speech at Sunday night’s Oscars, but he also made some refreshing and insightful points.
His speech started with an acknowledgment of Hollywood’s penchant for activism on a variety of issues, pointing out that at the core of each cause is a shared concern about injustice. Then, there was the hard pivot to the matter of … cow insemination. Yes, seriously:
Any time you turn on the Oscars, you can expect an excess of politics, virtue-signaling, and preaching from cultural elites, but something about Phoenix’s tortured address resonated.
Understood to be an imperfect vessel for any message of social change and responsibility, Phoenix stuck to a subject he’s been talking about for decades: his concern about intensive animal farming. Most people willing to look at what goes on at industrial farms understand those actions to be cruel, and Phoenix knows this, but he aimed higher than just guilt-tripping the audience over the milk in their cereal.
What makes Phoenix’s remarks noteworthy is the approach he chose.
There are two ways the activist class can talk about humanity, and only one has long-term potential for meaningful advancement. There’s the gloomy Greta Thunberg framing that in the face of evidence of our effect on the natural world, humanity is “evil.” And then, there’s the Phoenix framing — that humans are regrettably self-centered (show me the lie) but carry the spark of creation.
What stands in the way of our creative spark in many cases are artificial barriers to new technology and innovations, laws passed by established industry interests colluding with big government to block competition.
Just look at how state legislatures, Canada, and the European Union have colluded with the meat lobby to make it harder for plant-based meat alternative companies such as Beyond Meat or Impossible Foods to market their products on shelves alongside genuine meat products. Leave it to lobbyists and bureaucrats to force veggie burgers into being labeled “veggie discs.”
Phoenix’s nod to our creativity is the kind of thinking that points innovators toward win-win solutions, not the totalitarian, by-any-means-necessary interventions pushed by Thunberg or socialist darling Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Joaquin Phoenix then pointed to the search for redemption in his own story and how it relates to all of us, saying: “That’s when we’re at our best: When we support each other. Not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other, when we guide each other toward redemption: That is the best of humanity.”
Phoenix is, of course, correct.
The dividers, the blame-casters, and the alarmists will inevitably drag us back to the Stone Age and call it justice. Phoenix thinks we’ve overstepped as well, but the difference is that he stopped well short of slandering humanity as some sort of virus. Instead, the actor pointed (in all his awkwardness) to our higher capacity for stewardship, and he painted the future in full color — not the black-and-white coloring born from fear and self-loathing.
Stephen Kent (@Stephen_Kent89) is the spokesperson for Young Voices, host of Beltway Banthas Podcast, and an entertainment contributor for the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog.
