 After Avengers Endgame radically disrupted the MCU, I'm cautiously looking forward to where Marvel Studios takes the story in Phase Four. But with Black Widow coming out soon, I wanted to take a look back at one of my favorite films, Captain America, Winter Soldier. Hey fellas, either one of you know where the Smithsonian is, I'm here to pick up a fossil. It's hilarious. For me, Winter Soldier was the moment that the MCU grew up. Don't get me wrong, I loved Iron Man, the first Avenger and Thor were both really solid, fun introductions to their title characters and the Incredible Hulk exists. Joss Whedon's Avengers brought the team together and unified the feel and tone with an incredible mix of clever writing, great humor, heart and action. But Joe and Anthony Russo's work on Winter Soldier brought meaning and depth to the universe that was just missing before. It opened the door to a broader world of themes and allowed Marvel's films to go beyond just telling fun, entertaining stories about the exploits of colorful comic book characters and start telling fun, entertaining stories about all of that and big, important ideas. This isn't freedom, this is fear. And that's what we're going to talk about on this episode of Out of Frame. In the first Avenger, Steve Rogers is a soldier and a leader. He believes in the righteousness of his mission and his country, he does his duty, he follows orders, for the most part. He's a hero, not just because he's defending the world against an evil, mad scientist Nazi or because he's upholding quintessential values like freedom for all, but because on an individual level he's willing to put his life on the line for everyone, every day. I gotta put her in the water. Please don't do this, we have time, we can work it out. Right now I'm in the middle of nowhere, if I wait any longer a lot of people are gonna die. Peggy, this is my choice. I really like the film, but if I had one complaint about the first Avenger, it would be that a lot of the characters, including Rogers, aren't all that complex or well-developed. The drama is largely physical. Will Steve be able to save his friends? Will he defeat Hydra? Will he and Peggy get together? The emotional and intellectual stakes are much lower and almost entirely about Steve's level of commitment to saving the day. We all know Nazis are the worst, so there's no debate about whether or not the villain has a point, he doesn't, or if Steve's mission to defeat Hydra is justified, it is, it's all very black and white. The same thing is true for most of the other Phase One movies. Even in Avengers, the primary external stakes are simply to save the world from a massive army of subhuman alien monsters. Loki's reasons for bringing them to Earth are borderline incoherent and in the end it's really just part of Thanos' master plan. It's very one-dimensional. Enough! You are all of you beneath me. I am a god, you dull creature, and I will not be bullied by that. The biggest internal question in Avengers is simply whether or not the heroes can get their act together and work as a team. That's fine, but it's also the reason a lot of critics and snobs think that superhero movies are for kids. But by developing the internal, intellectual conflict and making Winter Soldier about a battle of ideas, every bit as much as it's a battle of strength, the Russo's permanently changed the game for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Before we dig into this too much more, just know that there are going to be a lot of spoilers for Captain America, Winter Soldier. If you haven't seen it yet, definitely check it out. I'll wait. Duh? Okay, let's talk about it. There are a ton of reasons to love this film. It's got some of the best action sequences of any movie in the canon. It deeply developed Steve's character in his relationship with Nick Fury, Bucky, and Natasha. What about the nurse that lives across the hall from you? She seems kind of nice. Secure the engine room, then find me a date. I'm multitasking. It establishes a great new relationship with Sam Wilson. Don't say it. Don't you say it. I left. Come on! And its plot is filled with complex and exciting mysteries to unravel. The personal stakes for Captain America are really high. You're my friend. You're my mission. Then finish it. Cause I'm with you to the end of the line. But more than all of that, the film is a debate between two fundamentally opposing world views, pitting the value of individual freedom against the goal of national security. Multiple scenes throughout the movie reinforce these ideas, but it begins in an elevator with Nick Fury telling Steve Rogers a story. Well, Grandad worked in a nice building, got good tips. He'd walk home every night, roll a wand, stuffed in his lunch bag. He'd say hi, people would say hi back. Time went on, neighborhood got rougher. Grandad got the grip in that lunch bag a little tighter. Every week something punk would say, what's in the bag? What would he do? He'd show him a bunch of crumpled ones and a loaded 22 Magnum. Grandad loved people, but he didn't trust them very much. Yeah, I know. They're a little bit bigger than a 22. This is not only an incredible cinematic set piece that establishes the terms of the final confrontation. It's also the central intellectual argument for the whole film. SHIELD is building new helicarriers that can not only hover above the planet indefinitely, but which can also remotely target individuals with long range guns based on their DNA. These weapons would be a source of concentrated, deadly power, unparalleled in human history. Nick Fury would have us believe this is a good thing. We're gonna neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen. Not the punishment usually came after the crime. We can't afford to wait that long. Who's we? Take note of that line. It's incredibly insightful, but we'll get back to that later. We're about to get to the core issue at hand. After New York, I convinced the World Security Council we needed a quantum surge in threat analysis. For once, we're way ahead of the curve. By holding a gun to everyone on earth and calling it protection. You know, I read those SSR files. Greatest generation, guys did some nasty stuff. Yeah, we compromised, sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well, but we did it so that people could be free. This isn't freedom, this is fear. This isn't freedom. Even though a lot of the plot of Captain America, Winter Soldier revolves around the mystery of a superhuman assassin and Hydra's infiltration inside S.H.I.E.L.D. that line is the absolute core of what matters in this movie. The question it asks of Steve and of all of us is this, is the promise of a perfectly secure world worth the price of our individual rights? At the end of the film, World Security Council Secretary Alexander Pierce played masterfully by Robert Redford is even more direct. Let me ask you a question. What if Pakistan marched into Mumbai tomorrow and you knew that they were gonna drag your daughters into a soccer stadium for execution and you could just stop it with a flick of the switch? Wouldn't you? When you are? A lot of people would struggle with an answer, but before you give me yours, let me turn that question around. Imagine that it's not you with the power to decide who lives or dies. In fact, imagine that this power will never be in your hands. Is there anyone on earth to whom you would entrust a switch that allows them to target and kill individuals all over the world at their sole discretion? Should you trust any group of people with that power? I don't, but let's get back to Steve. Who's we? Nick Fury uses the term to mean shield, but as the movie reveals, shield has already been corrupted by Hydra and they're planning to use the power of the helicarriers to target and kill millions of innocent people. I can bring order to the lives of seven billion people by sacrificing 20 million. It's the next step, Nick. You have the courage to take it. And let's not forget that in this universe, the World Security Council already fired a nuclear weapon at New York City. But more importantly, it's worth really thinking about what we actually means in terms of making decisions. This is always one of the more controversial points I make on this series, but the fact of the matter is groups of people don't make decisions. They can't. They have no brains or agency of their own. This observation is at the heart of a branch of economics called public choice theory, which looks at the way incentives and individual self-interest affects political decision-making. While groups help us easily categorize communities of people who share one trade or another, we should never forget that they are comprised of individuals with their own values and goals. They're the ones who are actually making decisions. Even if we're talking about democracy, a majority of voters can only share their general preferences by electing individual politicians to make decisions on their behalf. Those people are then granted tremendous power over what happens to millions of other citizens, including all those who didn't vote for them and don't share their values and ideas. I'm sorry, did I just mishear you or did you agree with me? Oh, I want to take it back. Politicians are just people who have their own values and who respond to incentives just the same as anyone else. The big difference is that they face far fewer direct consequences for their actions and the cost of their decisions is paid for by other people. When those same politicians can imprison or physically harm anyone who refuses to do what they say, it's easy to see why power is so often abused. Now, in theory, if enough people are unhappy with their representatives' choices, they can hold another election and try again. But at the end of the day, no decision is made by a collective hive mind. Who's we? The point is, when Nick Fury says we, he's using a shorthand that obscures reality. He actually means that he and his friends get to play God with their new flying death machines. Meanwhile, people like Captain America, who don't agree that they should have that power to begin with, don't get a say. And who knows, maybe Nick Fury would have been more trustworthy with that kind of power, but he wasn't in control of it for very long. That's predictable, and we need to keep it in mind whenever someone demands that we give them tons of power in exchange for security. We've seen this kind of logic play out in the real world more times than I can count. When I was a freshman in college, 19 terrorist hijackers brought down the Twin Towers and crashed into the Pentagon on 9-11. It was such a shocking experience that at first I thought the news clips I was seeing on the TVs in the cafeteria were from a movie. But as the grim reality set in and I had a chance to think about what was happening, my biggest fear wasn't that there would be more terrorist attacks all over the country, but that the reaction would be a terrifying push for the expansion of power in the name of national security. I was right. In just a few months, the United States launched a global war on terror, starting with a military invasion of Afghanistan and Congress fast-tracked an unbelievably expansive piece of legislation, now known as the USA Patriot Act. The 342-page bill was passed less than two months after the attack with shockingly little debate or dissent. The language of the final bill was not even available to read for 24 hours before Congress voted to approve it on October 24th, 2001. The US Senate approved it the next day, almost unanimously. It was originally supposed to expire in 2005, but each time it's come up for reauthorization, it's sailed through the process with little opposition. In fact, it was set to expire again in March of this year and you probably didn't even hear about it. You also might not be aware that the name of the bill itself is an acronym, which stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by providing appropriate tools required to intercept and obstruct terrorism. The 23-year-old staffer who came up with that name probably felt clever, but what exactly were those appropriate tools? Well, glad you asked. The Patriot Act gave the US government the power to wiretap and search homes without notification or due process in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment. It gave them the power to obtain private business and personal records with little more than a rubber stamp from FISA courts that are required to approve the action, even if the FBI can't offer any material facts to justify the search. It created hundreds of new banking regulations and reporting requirements, giving the government access to your financial records and accounts. It gave the Immigration and Naturalization Service more power to detain people at the border and restrict immigration, denying visas or entry to anyone they claim has ties to terrorist or criminal organizations. It smashed the due process standards the NSA and FBI used to have to follow in order to obtain digital records, allowing them to go through your internet service provider and companies like Google to gain access to your private browsing and email history with something called a national security letter. The NSL also prevents companies from notifying you that your records were compromised. The Patriot Act also paved the way for law enforcement agencies around the country to expand civil asset forfeiture and policies like stop and frisk. Every one of these powers has been abused. Everyone has left a trail of innocent people whose lives were ruined because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time or because creative prosecutors figured out how to use their newfound authority to get convictions. And yet with all this power, there's little evidence that the law has ever directly prevented an attack or helped us catch a major terrorist. But repealing a law is much, much harder than getting it passed to begin with. And so a few weeks ago, the USA Patriot Act was quietly reauthorized again. The real question is, why did we allow this? When people feel fear, they're much more willing to accept anything that makes the world seem a little safer. This happens because anxiety actually disrupts the normal functions of the prefrontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that helps us make decisions and solve problems. When people are stressed, it's much easier to convince them to accept policies without thinking critically. I'm concerned that's happening again right now. In the wake of a viral pandemic, we've seen an explosion of support for expanding government power. It's easy to understand why people are afraid, but if the answer is restricting individual liberty all over the world on the hope that politicians will use that power for good, the cure could do far more harm than the disease. Politicians have an incentive to exploit fear to gain more power. And just like in Captain America Winter Soldier, that power won't always be in the hands of people with good intentions or the right ideas. I'm not going to say that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, but whenever life forces us to deal with danger and anxiety, we need to be careful not to let that drive us to overreact and abandon our most important principles. It's possible to counteract this effect by slowing down, calming ourselves and waiting to make important decisions until after our strongest emotional reactions, subside. One of the things that makes Steve Rogers such a great character for the MCU is that he's always been the moral bedrock for everyone around him. His principles and courage allow him to stand up to those who would trade freedom for the false promise of security. Shield, Hydra, it all goes. Looks like you're giving the orders now, Captain. Intuitively, it's easy to think that totalitarianism performs better in a crisis. Dictators can mobilize more resources. They're all too happy to use brutality to force people to do what they want, and citizens who live in fear of their rulers are more compliant. But as confident as political leaders often want to appear, nobody actually knows what solutions are going to work best. One size doesn't actually fit all. Freedom doesn't just make us more independent. It also makes us the most flexible and agile when those traits are the most needed. It allows us to experiment with different ways of helping each other and to communicate what we've learned with everyone else. It allows entrepreneurs to quickly adapt and bring goods and services to people who need them instead of waiting for slow-moving bureaucracies to grant their approval. Free societies are also considerably wealthier, which means that they have way more ability to cushion people from the worst consequences of a disaster. Throughout history, people who have traded their freedom for promises of security have found that they wind up with neither. The intellectual conflict at the heart of Captain America Winter Soldier is just as relevant today as it has ever been. We're constantly bombarded with alarming messages from the news and social media. Terrorism, immigration, drug cartels and gangs, pandemic disease, GMOs, student loan debt, there's always something to be afraid of and there's always someone willing to sell us a sense of security in exchange for more power. But while that sense of security is usually an illusion, the cost of giving up our freedom is not. We need to calm ourselves and confront our fear instead of allowing it to hijack our ability to reason and lead us to make bad decisions that we can't take back. The price of freedom is high. It always has been. And it's price I'm willing to pay. And if I'm the only one, then so be it. But I'm willing to bet I'm not. I'm with Captain Rogers. Are you? Hey everybody, thanks for watching this episode of Out of Frame. How do you calm yourself when you experience fear and anxiety? Have you ever made a decision that you wish you'd made differently today? Let's talk about it in the comments. And while you're there, don't forget to give this video a like, subscribe and hit that bell icon to be sure you're the first to know when a new episode comes out. Lastly, be sure to follow us on all our social media at YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Thanks for watching.