God, I'm full of so much gratitude right now. And I do not feel elevated above any of my fellow nominees or anyone in this room because we share the same love, the love of film. And this form of expression has given me the most extraordinary life. I don't know what I'd be without it. But I think the greatest gift that it's given me, and many of us in this room, is the opportunity to use our voice for the voiceless.

I've been thinking a lot about some of the distressing issues that we are facing collectively. I think at times we feel, or we're made to feel, that we champion different causes. But for me, I see commonality. I think, whether we're talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we're talking about the fight against injustice. We're talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender or one species has the right to dominate, control and use and exploit another with impunity.

I think that we've become very disconnected from the natural world, and many of us, what we're guilty of is an egocentric world view — the belief that we're the center of the universe. We go into the natural world, and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow, and when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. Then we take her milk that's intended for her calf, and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. And I think we fear the idea of personal change because we think that we have to sacrifice something, to give something up, but human beings, at our best, are so inventive and creative and ingenious. And I think that when we use love and compassion as our guiding principles, we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and to the environment.

Now, I have been, I have been a scoundrel in my life. I've been selfish. I've been cruel at times, hard to work with, and I'm grateful that so many of you in this room have given me a second chance. And I think that's when we're at our best, when we support each other, not when we cancel each other out for past mistakes, but when we help each other to grow, when we educate each other, when we guide each other toward redemption. That is the best of humanity.

When he was 17, my brother wrote this lyric. He said, 'Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow.'

Systemic

An Interview

The February 5, 2020 episode of the Ezra Klein Show, “Jill Lepore on what I get wrong,” consists of Jill Lepore’s interview of Klein concerning his just-released book, Why We’re Polarized. Lepore is a Harvard historian and New Yorker contributor. The interview includes the following exchange:

JL: In some big structural way in the book there’s a quite notable absence of villains. I wonder if you could talk about that as the explanation you came to, as a narrative choice. Why no villains?EK: … I want to understand people and people in general as following incentives. And this is very deep in me. It is tempermental. It goes way beyond this book. I don’t trust people’s stories of why they do things almost at all.

I’m not a huge believer in individual agency. Not in a narrow sense. Obviously if Donald Trump had not run for President American history would have been different. If Barack Obama had not given a speech in 2004, American political history would have been different. But I don’t think that if Mitch McConnell was beaten in Kentucky a couple of years ago that the current Republican leadership would be dramatically different. I don’t think if Newt Gingrich hadn’t appeared…. I’m very skeptical about the Newt Gingrichification of polarization literature, which is like, this one guy came from Georgia and he came up with all these new…. Maybe it would have happened a couple of years after him, but people were playing out the incentives of the system in a reasonably clear way that I think was going to happen in one way or another.

So there are obviously people I think of as villains in the sense that even as they are following their incentives their values are values that I find toxic. They are racist or they are willing to abandon the poor to no health insurance and so on. So there are people whose values I find quite grotesque.

Even so what I wanted to try to do here, the kind of book I’m writing, and I say this at the beginning, is I’m trying to tell you how a machine works.