I believe Walt does not seem to be a completely bad person in the beginning
because in the TV series he is intoduced as a good person who cares for his
wife and his disabled son and only gradually becomes an evil villain late in
life because he needs money for his treatment and wants to leave something
behind for his family. Does it matter when you start to break bad? Could it be
that the earlier you start the deeper the effect on your personality? Donald
Trump for instance must have started really early to break bad. It must have
been very early in his childhood when his mother abandoned him and his parents
put him in a private boarding school where he learned to be a bully who lies
and cheats and
mocks..https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/trump-the-bully-how-childhood-military-school-shaped-the-future-president/-J.
-------- Original message --------From: glen <geprope...@gmail.com> Date:
1/15/24 7:37 PM (GMT+01:00) To: friam@redfish.com Subject: Re: [FRIAM]
Breaking Bad 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?-- ꙮ Mɥǝu ǝlǝdɥɐuʇs ɟᴉƃɥʇ' ʇɥǝ ƃɹɐss snɟɟǝɹs˙ ꙮ-. --- - / ...- .- .-..
.. -.. / -- --- .-. ... . / -.-. --- -.. .FRIAM Applied Complexity Group
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