"I aim to misbehave." | TYCD: Great Speeches in Ethics

In this inaugural "Great Speeches in Ethics," we'll reflect on how Mal Reynolds's resolve to speak for others represents a mode of speech in classical antiquity that French philosopher Michel Foucault calls "fearless speech."

6:15 | Fearless Speech, 18.

9:05 | Who am I -- Alfie Boe (Les Miserables in Concert -The 25th Anniversary) 

10:10 | Ramin Karimloo - Valjean's Soliloquy - Broadway - 2014

11:05 | Ibid.

12:45 | Fearless Speech, 13-14.

21:05 | "Touchstone, Metallurgy." 

21:15 | Venable, Shannon L. (2011). Gold: A Cultural Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC. p. 264. ISBN 978-0313-384318. Retrieved 2025-07-14 

22:15 | Fearless Speech, 102.

"The Culture of the Self" audio of Foucault lecturing at Berkeley on YouTube.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:01

There are words that are spoken that reverberate past the ears and minds of those present into hearts far beyond the moment of their birth. Words that etch themselves into our collective consciousness and steer the threads that weave themselves into the fabric of a shared moral responsibility. These are great speeches in ethics. Captain Mal Reynolds stands at the head of the table, his crew slumped in chairs around it or leaning wearily against the bulkhead of the ship behind it. Mal holds in his hand the data disc containing video proof that Reavers, the maniacal, cannibalistic monstrosities that have plagued settlements in the sector for the last decade, are the result of the government's secret experiments to pacify the population and prevent civil unrest. Ninety-nine percent of the test subjects, dosed with a special airborne sedative called the PAX, were so thoroughly narcotized that they not only became calm and passive, but they all just stopped working, laid down, fell asleep, billions, stayed still until they just stopped. An entire planet of silently screaming corpses. But one-tenth of one percent experienced a rebound effect. They were enraged. They became frenzied, hyperviolent, masochistic, monstrous murderers who would escape the planet and terrorize their unsuspecting and often helpless victims. The government buried the report. They covered up any evidence of the planet-wide catastrophe. They scrubbed even the mere mention of the planet's name from the official records. Mao breaks the weary silence. Parliament buried it. And it stayed buried till River dug it up. This is what they feared she knew. And they were right to fear. Because there's a whole universe of folk who are gonna know it too. They're gonna see it. Someone has to speak for these people. So now I'm asking more of you than I ever had before. Maybe y'all. As sure as I know anything, I know this. They will try again. Maybe on another world, maybe on this very ground swept clean. A year from now, ten, they'll swing back around to the belief that they can make people better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave. If you know anything about the TV show Firefly or the cinematic continuation of its story, Serenity, you know that while Mal Reynolds rarely passes up an opportunity to thumb his nose at authority, he isn't foolish enough to get into a fight he doesn't know he can win. Earlier in the movie, while laying low at a secret base, Mal's response to the question of what his plan might be is hide and ain't a plan? But this was too much. Mal had seen with his own eyes the cruel things that can be done in the name of making people better, and he wasn't willing to bear the burden of that knowledge by himself. In the fall of 1983, less than a year before his untimely death, the great French philosopher Michel Foucault gave a series of lectures in English at UC Berkeley that were posthumously published as the book Fearless Speech. Fearless speech is the way that he translates the Greek word that is the subject of his lectures, parasia, from the prefix pan, meaning any or all, and the root word rema, meaning speech or words. So the Greek has the implication of saying all that there is to be said, supporting the general French translation of franc parler and the English translation of free speech. Think about how in a military drama, or in the show The West Wing, when someone wants to speak to their superior in a way that might appear insubordinate, but that they feel needs to be said, they might ask permission to speak freely. This is a helpful way to contextualize paresia, the word for the action itself, and the parasiastes, the one who does the fearless speaking. Paresia represents a specific mode of speech in the classical world, according to Foucault. We see the word and its cognates attested in many situations where the same kinds of contexts, consequences, and effects are present for the parasiastes. There are five primary elements. First, the speaker speaks in a frank, honest, or non-rhetorical manner. To say that he speaks non-rhetorically in the context of an ancient Greek speaker, well that means something like he isn't trying to give a persuasive speech or use any other manner of appealing to your emotions or biases. Frankness means, hey, let me tell it to you straight. But in telling it straight, the Piresiastes has made clear that they aren't just telling you about their day or asking about the weather. They are expressing criticism. They are making a firm judgment. They're saying, this is the way I see things, but I really think it ought to be different. Here's what Foucault says about the Parisiastes.

SPEAKER_04 6:18

The Parisiastes is always less powerful than the one with whom he speaks. The parisia comes from below, as it were, and is directed towards above. This is why an ancient Greek would not say that a teacher or father who criticizes a child uses paritia. But when a philosopher criticizes a tyrant, when a citizen criticizes the majority, when a pupil criticizes his teacher, then such speakers may be using paroisia.

SPEAKER_03 6:58

This leads to the third element of paroisia, danger. In speaking frankly and offering criticism to someone more powerful or of a higher station or authority than you, you put yourself in a vulnerable position. I think we all understand the feeling of telling someone with power over us what we know they don't want to hear. What if they take it badly? What if they get angry and shoot the messenger, as it were? As a brief aside, this is also the reason that in general, our society has come to understand that things like workplace romances and relationships between teachers and students or superior officers and their subordinates, these are problematic even when everyone is of legal age and properly consenting. When there's a risk to speaking the truth built into the interaction, because of the vertical nature of the relationship, that can make consent and prudence more cloudy than in a relationship between equals. This is part of the reason we call this mode of communication fearless speech. It takes courage to say what you need to say, in spite of the danger it poses you. Why then does the Parisiastes speak in this way, even when it would cause them harm? Well, because of the fourth element. Duty. Simply put, the speaker believes that it is their duty to do this. There's no one forcing them. It might even be easy to let this moment pass, to say nothing, to avoid danger, but they have to do it. I think it's important to understand what we mean when we say duty. Duty is not the kind of thing that someone can ever have placed onto them by external circumstances. That is obligation. And to be clear, there can be courageous actions in circumstances of obligation. But a duty is about something you decide to place onto yourself, a contract you make with yourself. Think about the moment in Les Miserables where Jean Valjean learns that an innocent man is standing trial for crimes that Valjean himself committed long ago. This miscarriage of justice would be the price of him remaining free to run his factory and continue as the mayor of his town. How can I ever face my fellow men? How can I ever face myself again? He must speak up. He must let them know that he is Jean Valjean, not this innocent man. Because long ago he decided that there was something more to being Jean Valjean than the criminal he had been told he was. Or, as Mal might say, if someone tries to kill you, well you kill them right back. He had become so bitter and angry that it took the shame of knowing he could be right back in prison just to touch his hardened heart. If the bishop, who so kindly fed him and took him in, hadn't also repaid Valjon's treachery with forgiveness, he wouldn't have this moment to try to be someone else. And to fail to do justice and give himself up would be to abdicate his duty to the man he swore he would never be again. The final component of paresia is perhaps one that seems redundant, but actually is quite crucial in differentiating fearless speech from merely contentious speech. What the paresiastes is saying must actually be the truth. Maybe we take this for granted, but Foucault is careful to demonstrate that while there are some times when it seems like someone is trying to do paresia, what they're actually really doing is a kind of chattering or a bombastic style of speech that gets in the way of actual truth and growth.

SPEAKER_04 12:47

This pejorative sense occurs in Plato, for example, as a characterization of the bad democratic institution, where everyone has the right to address his fellow citizens and to tell them anything, even the most stupid or dangerous things for the city. This pejorative meaning is also found more frequently in Christian literature, where such bad parasia is opposed to silence as a discipline or as the requisite condition for the contemplation of God, as a verbal activity which reflects every movement of the heart and mind, every movement of the heart and mind.

SPEAKER_03 14:00

First, he says, don't meaninglessly repeat things. The word here is bata logetomai. The logo part makes sense because it's related to logos or words, speech. The bato part is curious to me. I've read a couple different ways of thinking about this. One relates to Batus I, King of Cyrene, who allegedly had a stammer. I also read one Greek resource that pointed towards Baton of Athens, a playwright who allegedly used meaningless repetition in the dialogue of his plays to lampoon philosophers and politicians of his day. Either way, the meaning here is clear. Don't be like those who just say the same words over and over without adding anything. Second, Christ says, don't believe that just using a lot of words will make your prayers more effective. This word here is polulogia. Again, we have the logos root, but we also have a prefix that should be pretty familiar to us. Pi omicron lambda upsilon is Latinized as poly, a prefix in English meaning many or multiple. So polologia is loquacity, many wordedness, babbling. The bad paresia, or what we might think of as a false paresia, is just empty talk. There are a lot of words there, but there isn't much substance. There must be truth in the Speech Act. Spending an hour to explain why the earth is flat, or how the Vikings left a giant stone carving, or how the city of Madrid does not exist. All these words and explanations don't matter if what you're saying doesn't align itself with the way things really are in the world. Let's take our components of what Foucault says goes into the act of paresia and turn it into a workable definition. Paresia is the frank, truthful speech act that makes a criticism despite the possibility of danger, and the speaker does it out of a sense of duty rather than obligation or coercion. I think it's also important that we think of this not just as a speech, but a speech act. That is, we're not just looking at words on a page, but holistically encompassing those words, the manner of speaking, the situation, the associated actions. Based on this, I think it's appropriate to say that what Mal is doing here is a kind of parasia. Mal Reynolds is the pilot of a shipping vessel, a veteran of a civil war in which he was on the losing side. Mal's libertarian values guide much of his behavior. He even says to the primary antagonist of the film, known only as the operative, that he doesn't want trouble or to be a hero. He just wants to go his way, to live his life in peace without causing anyone any more trouble than he has to. But he also has a code. It may look like chaos and brigandry at first glance, but the logic of it is clear. Sometimes you stay out of it. But sometimes there's a right and a wrong, and you do the right thing, because we all gotta live in the verse together. In the episode of Firefly called Train Job, Mal and his crew discover they've been contracted to steal medical supplies being shipped to a colony of farmers suffering from an outbreak of a debilitating illness. Rather than finish the job, they risk being caught to secretly return the medicine. When the sheriff of the colony catches them, he and Mal stand face to face, the latter knowing that he's up a creek unless the sheriff has a change of heart.

SPEAKER_02 17:36

You were truthful back in town. These are tough times. Man can get a job and might not look too close at what that job is. But a man learns all the details of a situation like ours. Well, then he has a choice. I don't believe he does.

SPEAKER_03 18:04

I think this situation perfectly illustrates what we mean when we say that duty is a commitment that you put on yourself, a contract or a covenant that you make with yourself that you will do something, be something, fulfill something. The sheriff was right. It is a choice to know that you're stealing medicine meant for sick people, and you have to either go through with killing them or give it back. But for Mal, well, it's not a choice at all because he knows the duty he has put on himself that he'll never put someone in the same position that he was put in. Vulnerable, hurt, at the mercy of someone bigger, tougher, or more well connected, to have his freedom simply taken from him. So back to Mal's speech. The source of the wrongdoing in this situation is, as Mal says, the government's belief that they can make people better, through getting rid of undesirables, through special scientific experiments that make everybody more peaceful or less argumentative or more docile. And Mal is going to broadcast the most damning criticism he can imagine, despite the fact that that government has organized its whole military might against him and his crew. Why? Well, because someone has to speak for these people. That's what Mal says. And that's what he does. And he asks his crew to join him. Maybe the best little cherry on top of his impassioned speech Sunday is a coda added by Jane, the hired muscle, a bully, and sometimes a coward and often a buffoon. He says, Shepard Book used to tell me, if you can't do something smart, do something right. Jane's truth here is the perfect cap to the speech. Or perhaps not a cap, but a funnel or a vestibule, or perhaps even a primer. Because Foucault doesn't stop at merely just looking at times when people used paresia, but he examined the relationship between the person who supposed that they were using paresia and what it was that they did. Remember the way that Jesus instructs his followers to pray? Don't be like these people who use all these words and they do it in front of other people merely to be seen. Well, guess what they were actually doing? Not very much, as it seems. They aren't feeding the poor, they're not visiting the lonely, they're not giving of themselves to provide for others. There must be, as Socrates says, a harmony between the logos, the words, and the bios, the life of the paraceastes, for true fearless speech to be taking place. Otherwise, it's just pretty fancy words. Foucault tells us that we look for what the ancient Greeks called a bossanos, or a touchstone, to know the true parasyastes. A touchstone is a special stone that's used to test the purity of precious metals and minerals. It was important especially for testing the purity of gold used as payments in the ancient world. Different gold alloys leave different markings on the same kind of touchstone. So testing individual gold pieces against known marks could help a business person know that they were being paid in quality gold. This practice was known to be used as far back as around 2500 BCE in the Indus River Valley Civilization, but it would have been quite well known in Socrates' world of the ancient classical Mediterranean. What is the touchstone of the true parasiastes? It's the person who tests the fit between the words and the life of the speaker. Socrates filled the role of the Basinos because he was always investigating what it was that people said and how it fit with their actions, whether they were just all talk or if they could back it up with those actions. Foucault calls this the parasiastic game, but it isn't a game in the sense that it's fun or recreational. Rather, it's a game. In the sense that there's play or free interaction between the touchstone and the one looking to test his life against the test of the parisiastes. Let's hear from Foucault one final time.

SPEAKER_04 22:14

And now, with Socrates, the problematization of Parisia takes the form of a game between logos, truth, and bios, life, in the realm of a personal teaching relation between two human beings. And the truth that the parisiastic discourse discloses is the truth of someone's life. That is the kind of relation someone has to the truth. How he constitutes himself as someone who has to know the truth through mathesis. And how this relation to truth is ontologically and ethically manifest in his own life. Whose harmonic relation to the truth can function as a touchstone. The objective of the cross-examinations Socrates conducts in his role of the touchstone, then, is to test the specific relation to truth of the other people's existence.

SPEAKER_03 23:37

I know that's kind of a big chunk to quote, but I think it's so cool to think about how Foucault literally said these words out loud. And what he said was so relevant to us today, especially for me as someone who hopes to be a good teacher and a good parent. My ability to fulfill my goal, to be virtuous in my actions and in my profession, well that rests on this ability to learn stuff, sure, but then to make sure that I make this stuff matter in the way I live my life. Foucault says that it must be ontologically and ethically manifest. Ontological is just a philosophy word for about the being or essence of a thing. So what he's saying is that the truth I learn from methesis, or theory and book learning, well, it must be so true that it passes from the realm of the theoretical into the very essence of my being, into the very choices that I make every day. One, because I love doing textual analysis, and a speech or a movie scene is a kind of text that we can break down and look at all its parts. Second, I've been really influenced by the examples of fictional characters and their words, because there's something kind of paradoxically credulous about the words that imaginary people say in the most desperate and determining of circumstances. But third, I wanted to take these words, these stories, these declarations that make us think and entertain us, and find a way to let them go even deeper into us to become part of our words, part of our minds, part of our actions. So look out for more episodes of Great Speeches of Ethics this summer. Next week we'll have our last episode of season two of Things You Can Do and a look ahead into season three, which will be all about the ethics of AI. I can't wait to get into it. Thanks for listening. Things You Can Do is a production of Pete Plays. It's written by me, Peter Owens. For references and citations, you can see the show notes. The great speeches and ethics theme is History in the Making by Pastis. Other music includes In the Storm by Amber Glow, Hopes Rising by August Williamson, and The Thief by Bjorn Alva. Full disclosure, the quotes of Foucault are just me doing my Foucault impression, but I tried to base it on recordings of how his English accent sounds. This almost certainly isn't the last time you'll hear me talk about Foucault in Parisia. His fearless speech lectures have been some of the most influential philosophical material in my life and thought. If you want to read it, the book is unfortunately out of print from Semio text, but you can find a link to a PDF of it for free in the show notes. Due to it being delivered by Foucault in English, it lacks a lot of the philosophical flair and jargon that can characterize his written works that are translated from French into English. If you're looking for a place to get into either Foucault, ancient Greek texts, or both, I think it's an amazing place to start. If you'd rather listen to some of Foucault's scholarship, the audio of another series of lectures at Berkeley called The Culture of the Self is available for free on YouTube.