I haven’t been excited by Michael Moore films for a long time. They always struck me as preaching to the choir far too often. Of course gun culture is dangerous. Of course for-profit health care is abhorrent. Of course capitalism is a system that diminishes every life it touches. But Where to Invade Next seems to offer something different. It attempts to knock down the notion that people are bad.
“You’ll also perceive clearly why we’ve built these prisons. It’s because the core ideology of the United States isn’t capitalism, or American exceptionalism, but something even deeper: People are bad. People are so bad that they have to be constantly controlled and threatened with punishment, and if they get a moment of freedom they’ll go crazy and ruin everything.
The secret message of Where to Invade Next is that America’s had it wrong all along about human beings. You and I aren’t bad. All the people around us aren’t bad. It’s okay to get high, or get sick, or for teenagers to spend every waking moment trying to figure out how to bonk each other. If regular people get control over their own lives, they’ll use it wisely rather than burning the country down in a festival of mindless debauchery.”