Big Think

Question: What would you like to see the United States doing more of around the world?

Moby:    Being honest.  I mean it’s just a . . .  It’s such a shame that politic . . .  I mean, I’m not saying that politicians are crooks and liars.  I’m just saying there’s a deep lack of sincerity, you know?  Because the truth is we’re all human, you know?  We’re all driven by sex.  And we’re all driven by insecurity.  And we’re all driven by feelings of inferiority.  And at times we make mistakes.  And at times we’re arrogant . . . and you know.  But there’s no acknowledgment of this.  You know, that there’s . . . and that . . . there should be this solidarity that being human is hard, and it’s difficult.  And there are a lot of joys that come with it, but there are a lot of tragedies and sadness that comes with it.  And that . . . that unwillingness to accept that we all basically live the same lives.  And so as Americans I would just love our pundits and our politicians and people in the media to just say, “Look.  No one . . .  None of us really know what we’re doing.  None of us are nearly as bright and together as we pretend to be.  We all go home and cry into our pillows.  We all occasionally drink too much.  We all occasional do sexual things that we probably shouldn’t,” you know?  That’s what bonds us as a species.  And it’s . . .   But we’re in like . . . almost in this sort of like new Victorian era.  Like we’re okay with pornography, but we’re not at all comfortable with sort of vulnerable honesty about ourselves.

Question: What are we doing right?

Moby:    I think that we’re communicating and I think we’re talking.  And I think we’re approaching, you know, and ever more egalitarian society.  And we are constantly extending rights to new people and new creatures, you know?  I mean it’s . . . it’s fantastic.  I mean, go back 500 years or 600 years and the only people who had rights were aristocratic white mean.  And now everybody has rights, you know?  And so . . .  And there’s no question, you know?  I mean six hundred years ago, and if you were in U.K., could women own property?  Probably not, you know.  Kids had no rights.  The developmentally disabled had no rights.  Now it’s great.  We’ve sort of accepted everybody, you know.  Everybody . . .   And even certain species we’re even accepting have rights, you know?  So ultimately we’ll get to that point where every relatively _________ creature will have basic, you know, sort of rights of existence.

Question: Collectively, what should we be doing?

Moby:    It’s different for everybody.  I mean I think that . . .  I  . . .  Again I don’t wanna sound like . . . like a grad student, but I think that semiotics should taught at every grad . . . you know . . . at every grade school, you know?  Every ten year old . . .  Like every couple of years, kids should have refresher courses on semiotics because that’s what rules our world, you know.  The majority of Americans, when they decided the war in Iraq was a travesty was when they saw images of Iraqis being tortured and prisoned.  It didn’t matter that you had 100,000 dead Iraqis before that.  It took those specific, powerful images.  So different people respond to different, you know, semiotic triggers.  And it’s just a shame that we’re all so easily duped.

Question: What should we be doing as individuals?

Moby:    One thing would be to stop using animals for human purposes.  You know?  It’s bad for us.  It’s bad for the animals.  It’s bad for the environment.  There’s really no good justification for why people continue to eat and torture animals.  I just . . . it boggles my mind.  We could all stop driving so much.  As a country we con . . .   I mean, we could stop subsidizing outmoded and inefficient forms . . . you know . . . energy and agricultural processes.  We could have a human . . .  We could have a foreign policy that was self-interested, but still respected the rights of other people.