Oskar Schindler

And that's going to be more effective if you recognize both the limitations of what you can do and even also the psychological conditions, what effect that's had on you internally as well.

So maybe you can then still be heroic and rescue people or whatever it is, like Oscar Schindler or somebody like that.

But you're able to do that because to some extent you've engaged with the conditions and recognised them.

Yeah, yeah.

And there's a real man at the heart of it.

There's Oskar Schindler.

Yeah.

And then there's the people who Oskar Schindler saved.

Mm-hmm.

I find the leap from wanting to pay tribute to those people rather... to wanting to pay tribute to a film about those people.

That's the bit where I keep getting

stuck.

I feel like I let an actual person down or something.

I feel like fucking Oscar Schindler or something.

If I had just given up that watch, that pink-haired Pegasus lady wouldn't have died.

Or something like

We can even wrestle further with did we developed this morality due to survival instinct? Well, there are examples in history, many of them, but we can talk about one specific one today where people gave up comfort, where they gave up freedom, or even gave up their lives for something that they believed was good or true.

How can that explain survival? The specific example I wanted to mention here is Oskar Schindler.

In the Holocaust, Oskar Schindler risked his wealth, safety, and position to save over 1,000 Jews even though by doing that, there was no obvious survival advantages.

I would encourage you guys to wrestle with is this evidence against a survival-only account? Because survival explains persistence, but it doesn't fully explain purpose.

Now, biology can explain a mechanism.

They should probably have a film made about them.

Oskar Schindler, wonderful.

Great story.

Schindler's Ark was turned into the film.

Schindler's List, amazing story.

And I looked up this week, 8,000 people in the world today traced their lineage back to those that Oskar Schindler saved.

Amazing.

Or did you see, I've forgotten the name of the film, One Life with Nicholas Winton.

And those are the people who in our movies tend to be the heroes.

Uh, and think of Schindler's List, Oskar Schindler.

Uh, he wasn't polite by any means.

He was a, a serial...

Social psychology can not only give us some of the tools we need to understand why people behave brutally, it can also help us understand why we sometimes act heroically.

Like, why did Jean Valjean reveal his true identity to save some stranger from being tried in his place? And why did Nazi Oskar Schindler risk his own hide to save over a thousand Jewish people? What made Darth Vader throw the Emperor down that hole, even as he was being electrocuted? I can't say there are any easy answers about either humanity's greatness or its horribleness, Certainly, there aren't any that we can find in the next 10 minutes.

But we can point ourselves in the right direction, and it starts with social thinking.

When we're trying to understand why people act like villains or heroes, one of the things we're really asking is, did they do what they did because of their personality or their situation? Austrian psychologist Fritz Haider began plumbing the depths of this question in the 1920s when he was developing what's now known as the attribution theory.

So ultimately, his only choice is to die, succeeding in his mission in the process, but forever fulfilling his detachment from those he loves, with whom he will never be reunited with again at that point.

In Schindler's List, the flaw of Oskar Schindler is actually his superpower that enables him to get away with so much of the saving of the Jewish workers that he is able to accomplish throughout the story.

This flaw does ultimately lead to his financial ruin, but at the same time, he does get to save a number of people in the process.

My final example for the tragic hero is Jeffrey Weigand in The Insider, the 1999 film directed by Michael Mann.

So our next topic is the atonement or redemption trope, and it is pretty much as it sounds.

We have a character who's feeling some form of guilt about something that has happened in the past, and they either need to atone to someone or receive redemption.

A prime example is Schindler's List, in which we have the heroic sacrifice trope as a form of redemption of that character.

Oster Schindler atones for his life of greed by losing everything to save hundreds of Jewish workers targeted by the Nazi regime.

Yeah, I think it was like NYU.

And he turned in Schindler's List as his like final project.

Okay.

All right.

And he made that and Jurassic Park in the exact same year.

I think if I

remember the story – and that's – yeah, those – I think the story is Martin Scorsese was supposed to do Schindler's List and he was supposed to do Cape Fear.

Got it.