Anything is possible (unfortunately)

What happens when the world has no objective truths and no moral center?

I won’t share any spoilers about the plot of this movie. But I do want to share its essential message, which is summarized in a speech at the end of the film by Glen Powell’s character “Gary,” a college professor who moonlights as a pretend hitman.

Here is Gary’s big life lesson:

At first, Gary’s advice sounds inspirational, especially if you’re an impressionable young student: I no longer believe in objective or epistemological truths. I reject absolutes, norms, and the moral law. I cast off all traditional constraints on my beliefs and behavior. I shall seize the identity I want for myself. I will create my reality and exult in a universe filled with endless possibilities. Behold my brave new world — a life without limits. Free at last!

But then, as the fog lifts from your cinematic reverie, you pause to think critically about what you’ve just seen and heard. Putting together the pieces of the story, including its disturbing climax, you try to imagine exactly where Gary’s worldview might take us.

In Hit Man, it leads Gary to completely transform himself through the power of imagination and the triumph of his own will. By channeling his “passion and abandon,” Gary becomes a new man… and gets the girl. Unshackled from his colorless and ineffectual past, Gary discovers the power and possibility of his new muse: Desire. Or, as someone on Reddit said more crudely: “Gary’s entire character arc was predicated on having a boner for a smoking hot Latina chick.”

By dispensing with his old moral compass and following his bliss boner¹, Gary transforms himself into a funny, uninhibited, charismatic monster.

“It’s all good.” — True or false?

Now, imagine if Gary’s philosophy of life seeped out of the classroom and spread across our culture. We’d gradually see millions of people awaken to the “passion and abandon” within. We’d get a society fueled by wants instead of wisdom, by Id instead of Superego. We’d get a post-Biblical, post-modern, post-fact world where the truth doesn’t come from tradition, science, evidence, revelation, or reason, but from desire, feelings, instinct, and power. We’d get citizens who are no longer interested in the difference between fact and fiction, good and evil, truth and falsehood because, as Gary says, there are no objective, moral, or epistemological truths.

In other words, we’d get a nation that looks disturbingly familiar.

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it….

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction… and the distinction between true and false… no longer exist.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

In conclusion…

• Gary is not a hero.

• Gary is a bad influence on our kids, our society, and our politics.

• The world is now teeming with Garys.

• Beware of Gary.

1. Circumcision: a visible and permanent reminder of the Covenant that says, “Thou shalt not [follow your boner and] covet thy neighbor’s wife.”