Kurt Voss-Hoynes
28 September 2016
You Can’t Fight the Feeling
Walter is at the front of the chemistry classroom discussing the idea of chirality, the concept that just as your left and right hand are mirror images of one another, organic compounds can exist as mirror-image forms of one another at the molecular level. As Walter is explaining this concept to his students, he tries to enforce the lesson with an example, but he loses his train of thought.
The constant struggle to be successful in America is the bad dream people wake up to every morning before they go to the job that one day promises the reward of the sweet nectar of the American Dream. This American Dream is based on competition as the defining characteristic of our society and human relations. Ideas that stem from a neoliberal perspective of an American society that in present day is aimed at the promotion of the virtues self-reliance, independence, and personal responsibility. Our society champions self-worth and the idea of working hard in order to achieve success because only with hard work can we achieve success. Our society also informs us that our intrinsic moral responsibility is to look after ourselves and our families along with a duty to look after our neighbors. A duty to look after our neighbors is a virtuous trait, something that only the best of us have, but while virtuous, this duty is overshadowed by the guiding principle that our main drive in life is to not become the neighbor that must be helped. This moral and neoliberal contradiction controls us because it weaves our complex society into a vast blanket of competition. Everywhere we go and everything we experience is born out of competition. This fallacy is what sprouts the worst trait in us, greed. For greed is main issue we encounter in Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. Through greed, we explore how the main idea our government champions, hard work breeds success, is not reflected entirely in our society. Instead, our society encounters the mirror image of this idea with the bad effect of the holistic promotion of greed. The multi-faceted, closed society created in Breaking Bad explores greed through the evolution of Walt from a teacher to drug kingpin and illustrates that the neoliberal emphasis of success ultimately leads to the demise of the individual and society. As a result, we witness moral flaws by individuals dedicated to achieving more and more success, yet while they believe that they are achieving success, they are inflicting more harm upon their society than good.
A feeling of fear is something undesirable, yet fear is something that clouds our judgement, thoughts, and controls out lives. It is impossible to fight the feeling, but we wake up every morning just to have a chance fight it. To Walter White, a man with a son who suffers from cerebral palsy and a wife who has recently become pregnant, it is far from easy to wake up and immediately fight the feeling of fear. He missed his opportunity to cash out on a past investment that would make his immediate departure from the world financially irrelevant for his family, and both his teaching job and car wash job are not getting him any closer to supporting his family from the grave. There is nothing Walter White can do because the policy makers of our society have allowed the free market to decide that teachers, the educators of our future leaders, will be paid a salary that allows them to barely get by financially year after year. Simple decisions like this by a free market leads to a cultural acceptance of the idea that your place on this world is decided by how well you are able to maneuver through the bumpy road of success. Along with this, natural forces plagued Walter with cancer, a disease that left Walter thinking that he had absolutely no control over his life. A feeling that is far too familiar to people all over the world and far too paralleled with fear. It is this feeling of fear, and Walter’s inability to fight it that lead to Walter’s true neoliberal transformation into a self-driven induvial.
Just like chiral molecules, Walt has two mirror image personalities. In the beginning we see the public servant Walt who has compassion and concern for society. This is best examined in Walt’s mental battle that occurs when he was called upon by fate to deal with Crazy 8. Walt can’t get himself to go beyond his moral mental restriction to end the life of Crazy 8 in order to promote his self-worth and enhance his monetary value in society. See, Walt here battles his conscious and ultimately falls into the belief of the neoliberal. Walt ends the life of Crazy 8 to save his, which allows Walt to essentially outcompete Crazy 8 on an economic basis. This moral fallacy exemplifies how the road to riches in this world has lots of lanes, so only the player with lots of game will be able to come out on top. This is what neoliberalism is at its heart, may the best player win the game and ultimately win the riches. Through this moral flaw of the individual, we see that not everybody is able to commit actions as desperate and drastic as Walt. Murdering in cold blood, bringing bombs into hospitals, and laundering money are not activities that the average individual is able to mentally and morally commit to. Over time, Walt developed a feeling of control and power, which ultimately led him to disregard his fear because he was finally in control. Walt achieved his neoliberal transformation and he was able to achieve his main goal of providing for his family, but at the same time death and destruction plagued the society around him. Walt lead to the direct and indirect killing of too many people, and he was able to build a drug empire financed with blood money that bled his society dry of prosperity.
Compassion and empathy are qualities that keep us grounded. For compassion and empathy are only fully understood by those who have truly experienced pain. Jesse Pinkman is a character who has experienced pain throughout his whole life. Of course it is easy to misunderstand Jessie as a druggie and somebody who is worth essentially nothing, but it is more important to see Jessie as someone seeking to escape his accumulated pain by the end of the show. If anyone is able to understand fear, it is Jessie. He covered for his little brother with his parents who look at their oldest son as a failure, he was heartbroken over the loss of someone who he fell for, he almost lost Brock to poisoning, and much more. All of this only highlights the mountain of pain that Jessie has encountered by the end of his journey with Walt. For in the beginning of his life Jessie may have easily been seen as a character just trying to live his life and have fun, but Jessie’s encounter of how evil the world really is changes him into a symbol that reflects the demise of society that comes from societal reliance upon greed. For Jessie is simply the end product of an attempt to escape the world after being used by so many evil drug lords. By the end of Walter’s rampage, Jessie saw that he had only amassed a pile of blood money. He didn’t even bother to show any concern for this money, and Jessie realized that the world is more evil that any one person can assume. Jessie changed from an immature druggie to a psychologically damaged member of society due to the maniac actions of he was forced to commit by Walt and Gus, those dominated by the control of greed and the lure of power.
Feedback:
Kai
For the thesis statement, I can clearly know what it is.
What: while people believe they are achieving success, they are inflicting more harm upon society than good.
Why: the evolution of Walt from a teacher to kingpin and illustrates the neoliberal emphasis on success.
Will
Why? Illustrates that adhering to the values that neoliberalism holds dear results in more harm than good, at least in Walt’s case. Because of his downfall, the people around him also suffer, which shows an extension of the wide-ranging effects of neoliberalism
What? Greed gets the better of people and ultimately society when it is applied, very apparent in Walt’s case and BB as a whole
First sentence is great, very detailed and can be defended as well as disputed, don’t know if “we see that” is necessary though
So what? Great thesis overall, very well defined and explained
Leo Li
Why? The evolution of Walt’s character has particularly evolved the neoliberal idea and has led to its success.
What? Walt has achieved his success through greed and has harmed the society during the process of his neoliberal route.
First sentence is defendable with details through Walter’s actions and the idea that is supported throughout his development.
So what? So how would you define this success that Walter has achieved and where/how has it inflicted the society?
xrlzoyi
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