- What's up guys, Greg here!
We've talked about the philosophy of South Park
a lot over the years,
but today we wanted to zoom in
on one of your favorite characters, Cartman.
- Wow!
Only three more hours see people.
Only three more hours and you can take me away
from this crappy goddamn planet full of hippies.
- And try to figure out if there's any philosophical method
to is blue beanied madness.
At first, this may seem absurd.
After all, this is a character defined by his arguably
sociopathic tendencies his rampant greed,
and his outlandish schemes.
Of course, Cartman's antics never fail to make us laugh,
cringe or both, but is there anything more to him?
Specifically, can such a hellish little jerk
actually be understood, philosophically?
That is to say,
is there a philosophy of Cartman?
Let's find out in this Wisecrack edition on South Park:
Is Cartman actually a Nihilist?
And spoilers ahead for basically all of South Park
and two kind of cranky philosophers.
But first I want you to ponder
an important philosophical question.
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Back to the show.
Let's start with Cartman's mission statement.
- Whatever! I do what I want!
- In a nutshell, this can be understood as meaning:
I don't care about any values
other than my own self-interest.
I only act upon my own selfish desires.
- Whatever! I ran for Congress and won!
Then I had sex with an intern, killed her and hid her body!
- This slogan then first appears to be expressing
a form of nihilism.
- All right. Then we're going to have to eat Butters.
- The belief in nothing.
That life has no essential meaning
and that there is no ultimate basis for things like goodness
or truth or knowledge.
The argument would go:
Cartman is a nihilist because he believes in nothing.
Except for himself.
And he can do this precisely because
there is no external set of moral or ethical values
outside of his own ego.
We're not the first people to have this thought.
In fact, a personality test website did an analysis
of fictional characters and deemed Cartman,
the eighth most nihilistic character of all time.
And to anyone who's ever seen an episode of South Park,
this would probably seem to track.
Cartman is rampantly greedy.
He's pathologically selfish.
In fact, he often appears to be completely unable
to empathize with other humans.
He has no understanding of the concept of guilt.
- I didn't feel bad before, but now I just feel terrible.
- You just feel bad for yourself that you're in detention!
- Right.
- He also has no ability to tell the difference between
being nice and just putting on a nice sweater.
- That's not being nice.
That's just putting on a nice sweater.
- I don't understand the difference.
- At one point, he buys an entire theme park
for $1 million just to keep everyone else out.
- So much to do at Cartman land, but you can't come!
- Obviously, Cartman is also prolifically racist.
♪ Minorities ♪
♪ Mexicans and Asians ♪
♪ Black people ♪
♪ I think even saw Native Americans (gross) ♪
- His antisemitism is particularly prominent and consistent.
He's also all of the other bad things: sexist.
- I would never let a woman kick my ass!
If she tried anything, I'd be like:
aye! You get your bitch ass back in the kitchen!
And make me some pie!
- Ableist.
- Dude, I can't believe they exploit
handicapped people like this.
I mean, making them compete against each other,
just for our amusement.
- And classist.
- Oh wow, poor people being arrested.
What a rare occurrence.
- Basically, if you're a member of any sort of
marginalized group whatsoever,
Cartman almost certainly either hates you
or somehow thinks you're less important than he is.
But Cartman's hatred of non-cis white hetero males,
is also accompanied by a disregard for social norms
in general.
Sure he's frequently and casually homophobic.
- What the (bleep) is up with that?
That's (bleep) gay!
- But at the same time,
he often exhibits an ambiguous sexual identity
and sexuality.
He's been known to wear clothes
that transgress gender binaries.
And in one episode, he attempts to prank Butters
by fellating him in his sleep.
- I took a picture of his wiener in my mouth!
- He has also appeared to engage in sexual relationships
with older men, and don't forget the time
he got rich as a Christian musician,
by singing about his erotic love for Jesus.
- I want to get down on my knees and start pleasing Jesus
I want to feel his salvation all over my face!
- But Cartman's biggest transgression of social norms,
is the lack of value he puts on individual human life.
Despite his mother's unwavering love,
Cartman doesn't see her as a properly autonomous being.
- She's my mom.
I can do whatever I want with her!
- And it's not just his mom he thinks
he should be allowed to murder either,
he's willing to kill Kyle just to get out of detention!
- I'm killing you.
But unfortunately I could only afford a whiffle bat,
so it's going to take a while.
- At his most extreme,
Cartman's willing to transgress just about
every rule of civilized society.
He infects Kyle with HIV as revenge.
- He purposely infected me with this HIV virus!
- Is that true, Eric? Did you give Kyle aids?
- Well, he was being a total dick!
And he's a big tattle tale, going around
and talking crap about me!
- He convinces a gullible Butters the world has ended,
so he can attend Kyle's birthday party.
- You best wait for the radiation levels to go down.
Probably next week sometime, after Saturday.
- He gets every adult in South Park arrested
on a spurious charge of sexual abuse.
- All you gotta do is call the police
and say that your parents both molested you.
- And during his brief stint as a ginger,
he attempts to have every non redheaded child in the world,
killed!
- We must gather together every child who is not ginger
and exterminate them!
- But then of course, there's Cartman's crowning act
of nihilistic glory,
the characters most memorable and definitively capital E,
evil scheme: his revenge on Scott Tenorman.
Quick recap: Scott sold Cartman his pubes,
so Cartman had Scott's parents killed
and then fed their bodies to Scott in a chilli.
- Na, na, na, na, na, na!
I made you eat your parents!
- And this all happened within sight of Scott's idols
Radiohead because it's South Park, of course!
- Jeez, what a little cry baby.
- You going to cry all day, cry baby?
- You know, everyone has problems.
It doesn't mean you have to be a little cry baby about it.
- This plot line incidentally,
is loosely based on Shakespeare's most maligned play:
Titus Andronicus, but we're dorkily digressing.
Okay then, so Cartman equals nihilist, right?
Not so fast.
Is Cartman's creed really all that nihilism amounts to?
Doing what you want all the time
and to hell with what harm it may cause.
Is it really as simple as going to the most extreme lengths
in order to satisfy your crudest, basest,
most selfish desires?
There have been many prominent philosophers
who have flirted with elements of nihilism,
from Nietzsche to Sartre.
But probably the granddaddy of them all,
the most consistent and proud nihilist
in the history of philosophy, was a guy called Max Stirner.
Stirner defended his nihilistic philosophy
in his book the Ego and Its Own.
But Stirner's slogan isn't exactly,
whatever, I do what I want!
Instead it's: all things are nothing to me.
Or, I have set my calls on nothing.
Now there are certainly elements of Stirner's philosophy
which might resonate with one Eric Cartman.
Stirner describes himself as an egoist.
Right off the bat, he claims that basically
every higher cause, whether it's God,
the very concept of goodness,
or even patriotism for one's nation,
is ultimately grounded in somebody else's egotistical
self interest.
So to liberate himself from this,
Stirner resolves to be a consistent egoist himself.
So by making nothing his primary intellectual cause,
Stirner's primary cause and value,
is himself!
Cartman is a rampant egoist as well.
Indeed in the south park universe,
the only individual who comes close to matching his egoism
is Yeezus himself.
Just like Kanye can't hear Jimmy's fish sticks joke
without assuming it's about him.
- I am not gay!
And I sure as hell ain't no fish!
- Cartman is determined to take credit
for Jimmy's joke in the first place.
- Anyway, what was really important for us as a team Ellen,
was to make sure that everyone knew
that we came up with the joke.
- And don't even get us started
on how he believed he slayed a big dragon
and saved all of mankind.
In practice what Stirner's egoism means is"
nothing has any meaning except the meaning
I choose to give it.
Therefore, I shouldn't have to do or believe anything
unless I have decided to.
Completely autonomously for myself.
Religion, family, the state and so on,
are dismissed by Stirner as spooks, as fixed ideas
or as wheels in the head,
that we have all allowed to turn our mental gears
on our behalf.
The only sensible course of action, he says is,
to reject them!
What matters isn't doing what's right or wrong,
but having the power to do what I choose.
It's sort of saying like that every belief
comes from inside someone's head,
so you might as well believe what's coming from
inside your own head.
This too might sound a lot like Cartman.
In many ways, Stirner shares Cartman's disregard
for social norms.
He's even declared that the consistent egoist
should have no problems with pretty universally taboo things
like incest.
Ooh! Damn!
But Stirner's egoism and Cartman's philosophy
actually lead us down two very different roads.
And for one central reason:
Cartman is straight up greedy for material things.
He's willing to turn off Kenny's life support machine,
for instance, because he knows he's first in line
to inherit his PSP.
- Who cares? Kenny's dead!
When do I take possession of my PSP, sir?
- In contrast,
Stirner doesn't really care about property in the sense of
property rights like Cartman does.
Stirner unlike Cartman, isn't all about owning
fancy China plates or hyper exclusive Pokemon cards.
In fact, he thinks that property rights
are just another pointless convention;
a wheel in the head that true egoist's ought to reject.
If an egoist wanted something,
he wouldn't wait to inherit it,
he'd just take it for himself.
But he also wouldn't bother to keep an object
he wasn't using just for the sake of having it.
On Stirner's words:
Cartman's about as likely to say that last sentence
as he is to share his french fries.
Stirner's attitude toward property is informed
by the fact that he refuses to correlate
an egotist's thoughts with their body sensual desires.
For him, it's all a matter of principle.
And part of that principle is not becoming
what Stirner calls: a slave to one's desires for things like
sex or power.
This is in stark contrast to Cartman,
whose idea of doing what he wants
is always to gratify his most immediate appetite:
right now.
- Whatever! I do what I want!
- So if Stirner believes that egoists
are only supposed to care about themselves,
then they should have no interest
in dominating other people.
And yet Cartman is obsessed with status.
- Kenny's family is so poor, that yesterday
they had to put their cardboard box up
for a second mortgage!
- Stirner would consider this to be a sign of weakness
because Cartman needs other people to like and respect him,
in order to feel like a real boy.
So his sense of self is actually
intertwined with the egos of others.
Cartman's ideal society would have him at the head of it
because he longs to exercise power.
- You will respect my authority!
- Stirner's by contrast,
would be a union of egoists.
An extremely loose, non-hierarchical collective
bound only by a sort of mutual disinterested respect.
In the union of egoists, we would all agree to pretty much
leave each other alone.
And that's fine because nobody's cooler than I am anyway.
Stirner's form of nihilism is even kind of, sorta
anti-discriminatory.
While Stirner wouldn't think that he needed to do any
specific structural work to combat oppression like racism,
he also doesn't think that egoists should recognize race
as a thing that exists.
The only level of categorization
he would have been cool with was just: the human species.
Full stop.
He'd say race is just another wheel in the head,
or another thing we should all stop believing in.
Which, well, we don't have time to unpack all of that,
but we do know that Cartman unfortunately loves to recognize
and then be totally shitty to, people based on race.
Stirner's version of egoism then,
is pretty specific.
If all things are nothing,
this also means that what we typically associate
with the self-like needs, desires, social status,
and belief systems, are also nothing.
You need to reject those things as well,
if you want to be a consistent nihilistic egoist.
And actually Cartman can show us why Stirner
might think this.
Invariably, in South Park, Cartman's selfish pursuit
of his own most immediate desires goes wrong.
His desire for everyone to like him, and think he's cool,
makes him an object of ridicule.
His drive to own stuff at one point
causes him to be literally absorbed by his
Dawson's Creek trapper keeper.
After he creates the ginger separatist movement,
Cartman's racism very nearly leads him to getting taken out
by his own followers.
Okay, so Cartman's philosophy might have some
superficial trappings of nihilism,
a sort of dumb nihilism, if you would.
But his belief that nothing else matters
is centered around his belief that, only he matters!
A true nihilist by Stirner's definition,
will leave his selfhood behind.
So we're left wondering,
is there a different way to interpret Cartman's
elementary school level philosophical creed
beyond his reductive nihilism?
Maybe!
See South Park's considered by many to be aligned with
modern day libertarianism.
An ideology, which prioritizes individual liberty
above all other values.
Fittingly, Parker even said that his main political belief
is: don't tell me what to do.
Not unlike Cartman.
- Whatever! I do what I want!
- So to understand Cartman,
we could go back to someone who's often associated with
modern day libertarianism:
Ayn Rand.
Rand rejected the libertarian movement of her day,
considering it to be too close to an anarchy,
and calling libertarians, hippies,
with the same derision as our cartoon friend.
- Goddamn hippy!
- She preferred to identify as "radical for capitalism".
Which sounds like a certain Ivy league lacrosse player
named Bradford might wear,
while offering you Scotch out of a human skull
at his free masons society headquarters.
Anyway, Rand was a novelist and philosopher best known
for writing the very, very heavy Atlas Shrugged.
Her philosophy is less nuanced than Stirner's,
and isn't taken too seriously by most academic scholars,
but that doesn't make her not interesting.
Her beliefs were rooted in ethical egoism
or rational self-interest,
arguing that a heroic man's greatest purpose
is pursuing his own happiness.
Rand thought people ought to have (reading quote on screen)
Which sounds suspiciously like Cartman's amusement park
scheme, or the time he faked Tourette's,
so he can finally say whatever he wants with impunity.
- Tampon!
Tampon, dick, (bleep).
- In both cases, it's all about him and his desires.
Regardless of how they affect others.
Unlike Stirner's egoism,
which encourages free individual thinking
and self constructed values,
Rand's own creed is pretty prescriptive.
The true Randian has very little intellectual wiggle room.
She even started a cult following where the first rule was:
Ayn Rand is the greatest human being who has ever lived.
Specifically, Rand depicted her ethical egoism
as most compatible with the capitalist pursuit of wealth,
and unlike Stirner who harbored loose non-hierarchical
views, Rand's ethos is pretty explicitly, hierarchical.
From her early days,
she warned fervently against celebrating the common man.
As cultural critic, Lisa Duggan writes in her book,
Mean Girl: Ayn Rand and the culture of greed:
Now Cartman might not be as physically jacked as
Rand's heroes,
who's classic masculinity was always described
in very horny detail.
But he seems a little like a circle shape version
of a Rand-ian hero.
He certainly sees himself as superior to those around him
and lauds his personal power over those he finds
inferior for any reason,
from their race to their size.
- Race war!
Race war! Race war!
Race war's on everybody!
- And sure, he's very recently seemed to care more
about his friendships after only 24 years on the air.
But still, he's typically rejected most forms
of human solidarity.
He only expresses interest in social movements
when he can use them to his own benefit.
- What is that?
- That's Cartman's new transgender bathroom.
- Cartman's a girl now?
- He's not a woman.
He's not a man.
He is something that you'll never understand.
But he would die for me.
- Or to advance his own reputation.
- He's lying. Make him show you his phone.
- Unfortunately, that'd be a breach of my civil rights,
but I can assure you,
nobody respected you girls poignant protest more than I did.
- Incidentally, Rand's heroes were initially based
on a literal child murderer, whom a young Rand found
super sexy.
The man, William Hickman, proclaimed at his trial that:
I am like the state.
What is good for me is only right.
Which Rand described as the best and strongest expression
of a real man psychology I ever heard.
And if that real man murders kids,
so be it, apparently!
The idea that what's good for me is right,
certainly sounds like Cartman to a T.
- I'm going around making the world a better place!
- For you!
You're making it a better place for you!
- Right, that's what superheros do.
- And that fourth grade sadist's most devious plots,
certainly follow what Duggan described as Rand's heroes:
Cartman also shares these guys so-called:
For Rand's heroes,
individual achievement meant capitalist success
and domination, no matter the cost.
That's a far cry from Stirner's rejection
of private property.
According to Duggan, Rand's views on life best apply
to those who's fantasies of success and domination
include no doubt or guilt.
Sound familiar?
- I realize now that even though you might not get caught
doing something bad, you can still get caught later.
- Oh, Jesus.
- Cartman certainly pursues such guiltless ends
in his various entrepreneurial ventures.
From starting a crack baby athletic league,
to opening a covert junk food business at fat camp!
Cartman's singular lack of empathy,
also makes sense in a Rand-ian context.
As Rand journaled about her ideal hero:
Again, we've heard that one before.
- This is a serious issue, Eric!
What you're doing is very offensive!
- Me?
You're the one talking about killer titties!
- Rand added that her heroes also defined by indifference,
and that:
Cartman might rarely stay calm,
but contempt is somewhat his middle name.
Contempt for girls.
- Apologize?
That's not what I said you dumb bitch!
- To Jewish people.
- Mel Gibson says in the movie that Jews are the devil!
- To poor people.
- We would tell your parents to shop at nicer places,
but your mom is so poor, she can't even pay attention.
- In this way, much of what makes Cartman pretty misaligned
with Stirner's nihilism,
put's some pretty squarely in the room of Rand-ian acolyte.
Rand's heroes may have never fed someone their own parents
in a bowl of chili, but they share Cartman's
pretty ruthless pursuit of his own desires.
At the end of the day,
both Cartman and Rand think that a real hero
does what they want.
By comparison, this makes Stirner's version of nihilism
look almost quaint!
But what do you guys think?
Does Cartman make a bad nihilist, a better Randian, or both?
Or is he just a completely amoral (bleep) up?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
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over selfishness.
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And as always, thanks for watching.
Peace!