The strong move quiet, the weak start riots.

Here’s a scenario: eighteen students and one professor are sitting in Found class in 203 Palm Tree Hall at Roads College when bullets burst through the windows. There is nowhere to hide as the steady stream of bullets flows into the classroom, leaving each student (and professor) to try to protect themselves by diving behind bodies and placing others in front of the bullets.

Think this isn’t a feasible scenario? Ask Kinji Fukasaku, director of the movie Battle Royale, who worked in a munitions factory during World War II. His entire class was drafted when he was fifteen to work in the factory and one day they were caught in artillery fire. With nowhere to hide, his classmates dove under each other to shield themselves from harm.

This, my friends, is Rousseau’s view of the natural man in society: the self-serving and self-interested human always interested in survival and self-preservation. We argued recently about whether or not it was essential for humanity’s survival for humans to be co-dependent upon one another, and brought up several post-apocalyptic scenarios in which there could be a dichotomy of choices, namely whether or not to help those weaker than you or just leave them behind.

I offer this link to a fantastic movie that we previously viewed in the Philosophy Film Series last year: Battle Royale. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1225842003597524246

You can ignore the stuff in the intro about the adults fearing the children and all that stuff. It doesn’t make much sense. Just keep watching.

In this movie, a class of 9th graders is sent to an island and given weapons and a three day time limit in which they must kill all others on the island. If there is more than one person alive after three days are up, everyone dies. The question then, my fellow classmates, is whether or not we can kill each other to survive. The answer, as we quickly see, is yes. Factions quickly form within the class and there is a general lack of unity among the classmates as they almost all turn on each other and kill each other in an attempt to survive. One might argue that the reason factions form is due to humans’ need to interact and depend upon each other, but I offer this counterpoint: cold-hearted Kiriyama almost won the game and he operated entirely as a lone wolf. I argue that factions are alliances of convenience which often deteriorate when no external threat is present. Later in the movie, a group of girls that hide in a watchtower turn on each other as mutual suspicion rises and there is nothing to keep them united. This pattern is not new, as the girls’ inevitable betrayals echo the course of history. Take the alliance of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. against Nazi Germany, for example.

The other argument that one might derive from this movie is that in the end love conquers all, and since it is love between two people that allows them to both survive the game, it proves humanity’s co-dependence. To this I say that the two lovers are an anomaly in a system full of people that are overwhelmingly interested in serving themselves.

I encourage you all to watch this movie (it’s only an hour and 15 minutes) and reply to my questions:

1) Do you believe in Rousseau’s view of human nature? If not, why?
2) Do you believe that survival is the ultimate incentive for humans? Is it realistic for humans to consistently sacrifice themselves for others? We see two examples of this in the movie (The rogue Kawada, who won a previous game of Battle Royale through the grace of his love, and of course the two lover protagonists Shuya and Noriko.) Are these two examples glitches in the system? Or are they true representations of human nature? If they are, then what justifies the actions of the other players in the game?