View image "We were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.... The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars for our poems, not our corpses."
That's right. Either from beyond the grave ("Anything that says there's anything after death is ultimately an optimistic story," Kubrick said of "The Shining"), or from within it, Stanley Kubrick responds to a critic who accuses him and his films of nihilism:
Is this, I wonder, because he couldn't actually find any internal evidence to support his trend-spotting? If not, then it is extraordinary that so serious a charge should be made against [my film] (and myself) inside so fuzzy and unfocussed a piece of alarmist journalism.The accuser is Fred M. Hechinger in the New York Times, the movie in question is "A Clockwork Orange," and the date is February 27, 1972. "A Clockwork Orange" was the subject of red-hot debate all over the place, celebrated as a masterpiece and condemned as everything from "fascistic" to "anarchistic" to "nihilistic."
(Oh, and If you haven't already, be sure to "bone up" on the spirited discussion of Kubrick below. Is he just a big ol' human-hater?)
I'd never read this letter before today, when I found it while searching through the New York Times archive. Naturally, one should always trust the art and not (just) the artist, but Kubrick has to much to say here about about his view of humankind, and this is so revealing of the vision expressed in his films, that I'm going to quote him at length:
Hechinger is probably quite sincere in what he feels. But what the witness feels, as the judge said, is not evidence -- the more so when the charge is one of purveying "the essence of fascism."Make what you will of Kubrick's stated intentions, but note the value he places on humanity and free will. He continues:"Is this an uncharitable reading of the film's thesis?" Mr. Hechinger asks himself with unwonted, if momentary, doubt. I would reply that it is an irrelevant reading of the thesis, in fact an insensitive and inverted reading of the thesis, which, so far from advocating that fascism be given a second chance, warns against the new psychedelic fascism -- the eye-popping, multimedia, quadrasonic, drug-orienting conditioning of human beings by other beings -- which many believe will usher in the forfeiture of human citizenship and the beginning of zombiedom.
It is quite true that my film's view of man is less flattering than the one Rousseau entertained in a similarly allegorical narrative ["Emile"] -- but, in order to avoid fascism, does one have to view man as a noble savage, rather than an ignoble one? Being a pessimist is not yet enough to qualify one as a tyrant (I hope).... [Times film critic Vincent Canby] classified "A Clockwork Orange" as "a superlative example" of the kind of movies that "seriously attempt to analyze the meaning of violence and the social climate that tolerates it." He certainly did not denounce me as a fascist, no more than any well-balanced commentator who read "A Modest Proposal" would have accused Dean Swift of being a cannibal. [...]Kubrick continues...
... Mr. Hechinger seems to rest his entire case against me on a quote appearing in The New York Times of January 30, in which I said: "Man is isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved... and any attempt to create social institutions based on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure." From this, apparently, Mr. Hechinger concluded, "the thesis that man is irretrievably bad and corrupt is the essence of fascism," and summarily condemned the film.Consider the previous paragraphs in light of the "Dawn of Man" section of "2001: A Space Odyssey." Kubrick does not hate the "ignoble savage." What sense would that make? He simply accepts the nature of the beast within us.Mr. Hechinger is entitled to hold an optimistic view of the nature of man, but this does not give him the right to make ugly assertions of fascism against those who do not share his opinion.
I wonder how he would reconcile his simplistic notions with the views of such an acknowledged anti-fascist as Arthur Koestler, who wrote in his book "The Ghost in the Machine," "The Promethean myth has acquired an ugly twist: the giant reaching out to steal the lightning from the Gods is insane... When you mention, however tentatively, the hypothesis that a paranoid streak is inherent in the human condition, you will promptly be accused of taking a one-sided, morbid view of history; of being hypnotized by its negative aspects, of picking out the black stones in the mosaic and neglecting the triumphant achievements of human progress.... To dwell on the glories of man and ignore the symptoms of his possible insanity is not a sign of optimism but of ostrichism. It could only be compared to the attitude of that jolly physician who, a short time before Van Gogh committed suicide, declared that he could not be insane because he painted such beautiful pictures."
It is because of the hysterical denunciations of self-proclaimed "alert liberals" like Mr. Hechinger that the cause of liberalism is weakened, and it is for the same reason that so few liberal-minded politicians risk making realistic statements about contemporary social problems.
The age of the alibi, in which we find ourselves, began with the opening sentence of Rousseau's "Emile": "Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault." It is based on two misconceptions: that man in his natural state was happy and good, and that primal man had no society.
Robert Ardrey has written in "The Social Contract," "The organizing principle of Rousseau's life was his unshakable belief in the original goodness of man, including his own. That it led him into most towering hypocrisies, as recorded in the 'Confessions,' is of no shaking importance; such hypocrisies must follow from such an assumption. More significant are the disillusionments, the pessimism, and the paranoia that such a belief in human nature must induce."Kubrick -- known for his distant, detached style -- sees hubris, in the form of a falsely idealized vision of man -- as the very cause of much of human misery.
Audrey elaborates in "African Genesis": "The idealistic American is an environmentalist who accepts the doctrine of man's innate nobility and looks chiefly to economic causes for the source of human woe. And so now, at the peak of the American triumph over that ancient enemy, want, he finds himself harassed by racial conflict of increasing bitterness, harrowed by juvenile delinquency probing championship heights."Kubrick's films are discomforting, chilly and oftentimes harsh, but they are among those poems.Rousseau's romantic fallacy that it is society which corrupts man, not man who corrupts society, places a flattering gauze between ourselves and reality. This view, to use Mr. Hechinger's frame of reference, is solid box office but, in the end, such a self-inflating illusion leads to despair.
The Englightenment declared man's rational independence from the tyranny of the Supernatural. It opened up dizzying and frightening vistas of the intellectual future. But before this became too alarming, Rousseau replaced a religion of the Supernatural Being with a religion of natural man. God might be dead. "Long live man."
"How else," writes Ardrey, "can one explain -- except as a substitute for old religious cravings -- the immoderate influence on the rational mind of the doctrine of innate goodness?"
Finally, the question must be considered whether Rousseau's view of man as a fallen angel is not really the most pessimistic and hopeless of philosophies. It leaves man a monster who has gone steadily away from his original nobility. It is, I am convinced, more optimistic to accept Ardrey's view that "... we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles and our irreconcilable regiments? For our treaties, whatever they may be worth; our symphonies, however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams, however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars for our poems, not our corpses."
Exactly: What Rousseau fails to see is that we are society.
Thanks for posting this, Jim!
If apes are our forefathers, then why do we put them in cages and treat them as all other animals? Shouldn't they be given the highest of honor if we owe our existance to them? If evolution is a simple fact, then why is it universally know as a theory? And if it's so simple and factual, why isn't it universally accepted like gravity and air- two simple scientific truths accepted although invisible to the naked eye? I am not a creationist who believes the universe was created in 6 literal days. That belief directly contradicts science. However, I believe that life and the universe is a product of intelligent design. Everything in our modern world of technology is a product of design, from movies to your Ipod. Just because we may not understand the technology that goes into the fabrication of a powerful computer doesn't mean we think it might have evolved. (Let's not confuse scientific progress with the doctrine of evolution.) We know it has a designer and considerable intelligence was involved. Why, then, is it so easy for people to rule out a Creator, or to conclude that life and the universe with all its marvelous complexity came merely by chance? In any case, my objective is not to ridicule or mock a person who believes in evolution. In fact, it is not a person's believing in evolution that offends me. It's when I see evolutionists arrogantly scoff at people who are religious, and then hypocritically and dogmatically try to affirm their doctrine in the consciousness of the world. I don't want a filmmaker or a movie critic implying by his attitude that I'm an idiot for not believing in evolution.
I wonder if you'd call the rape scene(s) from A Clockwork Orange "torture porn" - consider, however more intelligent the film and director are, that a site featuring the "good" parts of Hostel 2 might also have those rape scenes.
Along the same lines, what differentiates Kubrick's defense above from Oliver Stone's defense of Natural Born Killers? That the director has high hopes for us doesn't change the nature of the scenes he displays.
Good god, Jim!
I can't believe I've never heard of this letter or seen mention of it in any books on Kubrick I've read. He's always come off before as one of those great artists who can only make their statements within the work itself, and avoid discussing their point-of-view separately. This is one of the clearest and deepest statements SK made about his point-of-view, and beautiful besides.
Thanks!
What a find! It's nice to see that Kubrick was as brilliant as a writer and thinker as he was as a filmmaker. And I love his quote from Koestler. "Ostrichism" indeed.
JF,
Just a couple of corrections: All primates descended from a common ancestor, not from each other. We did not descend from chimps or vice-versa. We have both followed separate paths of evolutionary progress.
In the sciences the word theory comes from the formation of a theoretical model. First one has a hypothesis. This is a conjecture as to what may be occurring. Once a model has been constructed to test that hypothesis and it can be affirmed or falsified through empirical data and used as a valid predictor of future results (that is to say, as Carl Sagan used to say, Once it has been proven to be true - Proven)it becomes a Theory. So that, JF, is why evolution is known as a "theory." It's a little matter of having been proven to be true. The problem is that the word has been mangled in everyday usage for a couple of centuries to mean hypothesis. That may be what people think it means when they hear it, but in science it means proven by empirical data.
As for why it isn't accepted. Well, you can't see something in your lifetime or mine that takes hundreds of thousands or millions of years to gradually produce results. However, those results can be seen through things like the fossil record and in living experiments with fruit flies that have the ability to go through thousands of generations within just a couple of years. So why don't people accept it? Because they never bother to look up theoretical model in an encyclopedia. They assume we came from chimps. They think in their provincial viewpoints that if it is not visible to their eyes it must not be true. That of course is childish magical thinking where the self defines the universe. They never even venture out, as you have done, and pose the questions with someone who may be able to answer them in open forum that is not a creationist forum.
As for the universe not being designed I have no answer because that is a personal belief. I rule out nothing with the universe. It is vast and extraordinary and I have no idea why it is here. I'd like it to stay that way. But design? It's possible. The designer could even be a higher form of intelligence than us from a past or alternate universe. I have no idea, it's all just hypothesis.
And as long as we're talking about a creator, just one final thought on evolution. I know you are not a creationist but one thing that has always bothered me with true believers or creationists if we must (Michael Shermer once said, "I don't believe in evolution, I've looked at the evidence and know it to be fact. Santa Claus you have to believe in, because there is no evidence for his existance") is that they think evolution contradicts their god. Why a god would create an entire universe as a static state never to develop I have no idea. When presented with evolution, if I believed in a god that created everything, I would embrace it immediately as it would make my god look stunningly intelligent. But creationists seem to be saying, "trillions of changes on the molecular and genetic levels in quadrillions of species over billions of years to get us where we are now? WHOOAAAAAA My god is WAAAYYYY too dumb for that. There's no way my dum-dum god could ever come with something that intricate. No, no, no he just made us as we are a few thousand years ago. You're giving him way too much credit."
Why as a believer would one want to do that: make your god look small, unimaginative and dense?
Another mystery for the ages.
I suppose the post by JF above sort of answers my questions about differentiating ACO from H2 and NBK - some people just don't get the more mature themes, and focus instead on the more simple fact that it shows violence and that's bad.
Still, I'd like to propose that in Pauline Kael's review of ACO, her remarks about gratuitousness echo your writings on Stone and NBK. Maybe only on a superficial level. But while we're on this level, here's what Eli Roth had to say in defense of Hostel 2, from your July Scanners entry Waxing Roth: Define "failure":
...when if you looked closely, you'd see that my film actually has a very strong anti-violence moral core...
JF: As Jonathan points out, a "theory" means something different in scientific terms than it does in common usage. It's a working model, an empirically demonstrated, internally consistent set of ideas and principles that produces reliable results in repeated testing and that predicts future behavior. Like the "theory" of gravity. That's not to say every theory is a proof -- the scientific method is founded on the principles of revision and correction as new evidence and insights come to light. What I meant was that Kubrick in "2001" presents a matter-of-fact view of evolution -- hence, the title of the first section, "The Dawn of Man." You can accept it or reject it, love it or hate it, but that's Kubrick's vision, and that's what he's showing in this film.
anonymous: Very good question. The grotesque "Singin' In the Rain" rape scene has been interpreted both ways: as a vicious, giddy joke at the expense of the victims, and as a horrific, nightmaring depiction of violence. I can see it both ways and, in fact, I don't think the two can be separated. The movie is told from the POV of Our Humble Narrator, Alex, and that surely arouses strong, disturbing, conflicting emotions in the viewer. Does it work in terms of the overall film? I'm still not sure. I have had a long, appreciate-hate relationship with "Clockwork Orange," and it's still not resolved. Maybe never will be...
Oliver Stone's defense of "NBK" was similar (that violence is both groovy/exhilarating and horrible), but I don't think his movie supports his thesis. (The evidence contradicts the theory, I guess.) Tarantino said he knew the movie was shit when he saw the sitcom scene. That bit is an early indication, I think, that Stone doesn't know what he's doing, that he's pandering to the audience as much as the sitcom he's supposedly satirizing. And for all the bile he directs at tabloid TV "journalism," the movie's romanticized, sensationalized view of the rebel-outlaw-hero-lovers is indistinguishable. Stone's big problem (and let me repeat that I'm a defender of "JFK") is that his sense of humor (if, in fact, he has one) is as heavy as his name. I think "NBK" panders in ways "Clockwork Orange" does not.
anonymous: I just saw your second post. I'm not at all saying there are neat, clear lines between, say, the depiction of violence, the condemnation or satirization of violence, and the condemnation of violence. All those things may be going on at the same time. The best I can do is try to describe how I think they function in the film. I still haven't seen "Hostel, Part II." Have you? If so, what do you think about Roth's statement? Does the movie itself tend to support it or not?
Accepting that man is an ignoble savage and neither hating nor loving him for it is a good way to put it.
Another thing he said regarding A Clockwork Orange: “[It] suggests the failure of culture to have any morally refining effect on society. Hitler loved good music and many top Nazis were cultured and sophisticated men, but it didn‘t do them, or anybody else, much good.”
What does that say about culture? Or, if you prefer, about morality?
That comment puts this statment in a much different light: "the miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars for our poems, not our corpses"
Which suggests of course, that culture, cinema, was more important to Kubrick than contributing to or maintaining a morally refined society.
Making him "anti-human" as we tend to understand the term.
Alex: I think we're talking about to different things: culture and society. Kubrick is arguing in favor of maintaining a "morally refined society," and detailing our failures to do so (among them, the "new psychedelic fascism" he describes -- remember it was 1972). I don't know that Kubrick was endorsing the view that culture is more important than society, but that mankind has done a better job of creating art than it does of governing itself. Art has outlived all the Great Civilizations.
Mankind's history of Great Social Orders is impressive, but riddled with terrible institutional flaws and injustices: slavery, despotism, corruption, racism, religious persecution, wars, terrorism, crime, etc. Of these civilizations -- the Mayans or he Romans -- what has lasted to this day? Art. That, I believe, is what he was getting at. (I've always thought that humans were pretty lousy at ordering and governing themselves; perhaps we're ungovernable animals. So, I guess I'm sympathetic to Kubrick's POV. It doesn't seem anti-human to me, just realistic.)
Thanks to all for the thougts. Jim, thanks for the clarification.
P.S. In case anyone's wondering, my original comment was not a slam against Jim Emerson.. I like reading Emerson's blog.
P.P.S. I think 2001: A Space Oddyssy is an extraordinary film. It always instills a sense of wonder in me. The evolutionary themes do clash with my beliefs but don't ruin the experience for me because the film allows you to think on your own.. in fact, it ENCOURAGES you to think. -JF
On the "Hostel II" thing:
I'm not so sure I'm in line with Roth's identification of his film as anti-violence -- not because I find his film morally rotten (I don't) but because I think Roth is essentially neutral towards his content. He's not getting off on it (as some of his more hyperbolic detractors claim), but he's still okay with putting up on screen. Which is rather the point.
Stay with me here: For all his affirmations that the film reflects the chaos of reality and the lip service the scenario pays to the (metaphorical) consequences of global capitalism, it's a bit of a smokescreen. I think the real project of "Hostel Part II" is Eli Roth, horror aficionado extraordinaire, working through one of those moments that all intelligent horror fans have at some point -- those moments where you wonder to yourself, "What exactly is it that attracts me to these images of fear, pain and death?" Other people just work it out for themselves and move on, but Roth has the advantage of a public canvas. So he makes a film from his vantage point: He knows that we in the audience are expecting horrible things, long evil drawn-out things. So, knowing us (because, after all, he is one of us), he toys with our expectations. He draws out the tension-release cycle only to deny release, either by making the stinger scenes short and unexpected (i.e. the death that opens the film) or by obscuring them completely (the bit where a guard sticks his head in front of a security monitor at THE EXACT MOMENT that something awful is happening on that monitor). He plays on his reputation as a Merry Prankster by making sure we know this is all in good sport, only to intentionally and abruptly cut the joke off (the power-saw scene). He shuffles sympathies around until there's nobody left to root for. In doing so, he creates the impossible -- a "torture porn" that dares to let the audience question itself. (I think the reason the infamous Matarazzo/Bathory sequence sticks in the craw of so many -- myself included -- is that it feels completely at odds with the rest of the film; considering the off-tone baroque grotesquerie and the fact that we never see the Bathory surrogate in the film again, I wouldn't be surprised if it had been added in post as a sop to the presumably-antsy target teenage audience.)
The vague proclamations of relevance, in other words, are there to cover the fact that he's basically made a fratboy "Funny Games." I'm not saying Roth is Michael Haneke, but he does seem to be figuring out his place in the cinematic food chain.
The ONLY moral conclusion is that man in his natural state is not happy and good.
The ONLY way for man to be happy and good is to intentionally choose to act apart from his nature.
Kubrick deftly uses causality, non-contradiction, contrastive thinking, and pursues growth to prove he is a profoundly moral director.
Jim,(again) thank you for having the courage and mental capacity to prove why today's most profitable philosophical and religious discussions are framed by movies.
Regarding some of the comments here, I think we're missing one major point: "2001" is a story about INTELLIGENT DESIGN, though the term did not exist then. Intelligent Design as it exists today could virtually be considered a ripoff of the script for 2001. IDers like Michael Behe don't dispute the evidence of a 5 bill year old Earth, transitions in the fossil record, etc. - rather they insist that these provide evidence of an intelligent designer (lots of mumbo jumbo about "irreducible complexity" and such).
Ditto "2001" - the (presumed) aliens who placed the monoliths guide mankind through the evolutionary process. Without the epiphanies provided by contact w/ the monolith, man would be unable to leap to the next evolutionary stage, having stagnated in the current stage and having no further room to develop.
Don't take this as an argument for ID from me - hell no! - but I don't see any other way to interpret "2001" except as a precursor to Intelligent Design. Granted there's no evidence in the film that the monolith makers CREATED man, but they sure as heck are required to help him develop.
The ONLY moral conclusion is that man in his natural state is not happy and good.
The ONLY way for man to be happy and good is to intentionally choose to act apart from his nature.
Kubrick deftly uses causality, non-contradiction, contrastive thinking, and pursues growth to prove he is a profoundly moral director.
How does that apply to A Clockwork Orange? Alex is quite happy when he chooses not to be "good", non?
And I think it might be overly reductive to say that man "must act contrary to his nature in order to be happy". It's difficult to wrap my head around that idea in that I see happiness as being a natural need.
A lot of this discussion is saying that Kubrick was not a misanthrope, just a realist. He said that world is what it is, without exactly making any moral judgments.
On culture vs. morality, I wonder if art is the only thing that mankind can sustain then why bother being moral? Art survives. Morality never does.
Christopher: Kubrick himself said that God is at the heart of 2001. That it was a search for a scientific definition of God in the face of the vastness of the Universe.
Arthur C. Clarke once said that the theme of 2001 was basically Genesis 1:27.
26: And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
28: And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
29: And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.
30: And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.
31: And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.
Steve C.,
You bring up a very good point comparing Haneke to Roth, and "Hostel II" to "Funny Games". Whereas Roth sometimes showed us too much then played with us by showing us nothing. Much of the violence in "Funny Games" happens off screen, where we can only hear it. Until of course Haneke plays the god hand and manipulates us into enjoying the violence on screen then pulls it away. In the interview he said the remote control scene was there to make us look at the violence we just enjoyed and take it away, so we then look at ourselves (not verbatim people, but that's the idea.) This is not why it annoyed me. It annoyed me because the "god hand" was used in such a heavy handed manner. At that point I figured what's the point of caring about anything when the director isn't playing fair. Roth in his teasing, always seemed to be playing a bit more fair, but in the end "Hostel II" didn't make me question the need for violence within myself (I guess Haneke's attempt didn't either) because he equated this level of violence to either rich moguls or understandable and perhaps justified revenge by one of the captured (who also in the end is as rich as any of the moguls), leaving me safe at the borders peering in. Or maybe "HII" is about a vegan finally eating meat for the first time. It will be interesting to see how a Jodie Foster vehicle handles the whole justification of violence thing (The Brave One.)
Errr, I don't quite buy it. Kubrick rejects both the Enlightenment and Rousseau (and that implies a rejection of Rousseau's intellectual children - Kant, Marx, Hegel and so many others).
If primal man has society (i.e. humans are social beings by nature), then Kubrick should be returning to classical philosophy - the Aristotlians and all their progeny (the scholastics, Maimonides, medieval Islamic philosophy). But Kubrick shows no sign of taking classical philosophy (or medieval or Renaissance humanism) seriously.
If he did, then there would be more depictions of positive political actors in Kubrick. It's not that bad politics or unjust societies aren't an interesting subject within classical philosophy, but classical philosophy holds there is always a way to make society better (at least temporarily). Thus, depictions of positive political actions and actors should predominate - or at least be more prominent in Kubrick's work.
Instead, the only positive political actor in the whole work of Kubrick is Spartacus.
Responding to above point
'Man must act contrary to his nature to be happy and good...'
I agree with JF that this is overly simplistic. Most of you are probably familiar with Maslow's Heirarchy of human needs, which would shed a great deal of light on that proposition.
Humans are complex creatures with several needs, and they often times come into conflict. Maslow divided our needs into two basic categories, and five total subcategories. Psychologists have since modified and refined his model but the basics remain the same.
Lower Order needs: These needs are necessary for us to function as normal people.
1) Survival needs: food, water, shelter, etc
2) Safety needs: The feeling that food, water, and shelter, etc, are not about to disappear at any moment; and that life in general will be good.
3) Social needs: Maslow developed that idea that people absolutely require human interaction to even survive after witnessing controversial experiments in which infant primates were placed alone in a room and given food and water through a hole in the wall at regular intervals. The primates which had more interesting rooms (with toys, pictures on the walls, etc) survived longer, but sooner or later all of the primates deprived of any social interaction simply stopped eating and died, even though their first two needs were fully met. Fully developed humans may be able to survive on their own (think Robinson Crusoe) but almost certainly not without eventually suffering from severe psychological disorders. Naturally, no empirical study could morally be conducted.
Higher Order Needs: These are the needs that humans need in order to be 'happy', in other words to do more than just survive.
4: Ego needs: The need to see yourself, and be seen, as a good and worthy person.
5: Self-actualization needs: The need to meet your full potential; to do some great, important thing, whatever that might be for you. Since Maslow, many psychologists have posited that need 4 can only truly be met by meeting need 5. People can only really feel good about themselves when they actually accomplish something (or at least try) that they feel is great. Note that it doesn't matter whether anyone else thinks it's great. The serial killer in Se7en would be a perfect example. Hitler would be another.
So, in conclusion, people often take risks in terms of needs 1, 2, or 3, in order to achieve needs 4/5. Unfortunately, all of this does nothing to tell us whether or not people actually DO 'good'. What exactly 'good' is is a debate that philosophers have grappled with for millenia.
As for why 'creationists' or more generally 'intelligent designists' (also known as the Ontological argument, which has been around at least since the time of St. Thomas Aquinas, who is the first writer to get credit for it almost 1000 years ago), it can be shown to be irrational (though not, of course, disproved) with Ockhams Razor, aka the the Fallacy of the Unnecessary Postulation, which was posited first by Lord Ockham of course, and later on applied to the Ontological argument by David Hume.
Basically the idea that we should believe there is an intelligent creator came about because we knew of no other more logical alternative. After Darwin, and the Theory of Evolution (and again I stress that Theory is strictly a scientific term, and does NOT imply that evolution is unproven, as opposed to the popular usage of the term), we DID have an alternative to an intelligent designer.
So why is evolution 'more' logical? Because it does not require the postulation of an unproven entity to work. What does that mean in plain English? It means that scientists (and normal people, if they care to) can actually SEE evolution happening (in fruit flies for example, as mentioned above), and can actually SEE the evidence that it happens. Not only that but it's an extremely elegant, internally consistent, and common-sense model.
It's true that no one can 'disprove' a god exists, but that does not mean we have the slightest reason at all to believe one exists. You also cannot disprove that there is an invisible, immaterial dragon hovering over your head this very minute, but if I were to tell you there is, you'd consider I was either joking, or a raving lunatic. The thing is, intelligent, (or crafty) charismatic people have used this invisible dragon to control large portions of the human population for thousands of years.
I don't really have a huge problem with religion, as it's a natural consequence of our human need for safety (need 2), and it serves as a powerful and useful social organiser. Despite all of the injustice, war, and so on, that has been engendered by religion, as we can see in Iraq today, even a terrible dictator is better than total anarchy.
So I say to religionists of all stripes and colours; go ahead and believe in your god if it makes you a decent person. And if it occasionally compels some of you to hate others for no good reason, well, that's the price we all have to pay for this aspect of human nature. If people weren't being controlled by religion, they'd probably be being controlled by something else, and it'd probably be just as bad.
Talking about Kubrick, I think that his object in ACO, was simply to show a hypothetical: What if, through brainwashing, there was a way that we could turn a complete sociopath without a single redeeming trait into a so called 'good' citizen. Would that actually be a good thing? Kubrick's point, I think, was that it would not be. That freedom in general will often have terrible consequences, but that giving up freedom is always worse.
I don't necessarily hold to that myself.