The Older I Get, The More I Understand George Carlin!

Added: 2026-05-10

[00:00:00]George Carlin once said something really profound in an interview with Charlie Rose. Take a listen.

[00:00:06]I sort of gave up on the human race and gave up on the American dream and culture and nation and decided that I didn't care about the outcome and that gave me a lot of freedom from a kind of distant platform to be sort of the amused a kind of to watch the whole thing with a combination of wonder and pity. I try to put that into words.

[00:00:25]>> Not caring about the outcome, what do you mean by that? Not having an emotional stake in whether this experiment with human beings works. I really don't care.

[00:00:33]I love people as I meet them one by one.

[00:00:35]People are just wonderful as individuals. You see the whole universe in their eyes if you look carefully. But as soon as they begin to group, as soon as they begin to clot, when there are five of them or 10 or even groups as small as two, they begin to change. They sacrifice the beauty of the individual for the sake of the group. I decided it was all under the control of groups now, whether it's business, religion, political people or what. And I would distance myself from wishing for a good outcome. Let it do what it's going to do and I'll enjoy it as an entertainment.

[00:01:05]I'll reflect [clears throat] on Years ago George Carlin said, "It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it." And at the time a lot of people laughed because, well, >> [music] >> it's George Carlin. That's what he did.

[00:01:16]He made people laugh while saying things most people were uncomfortable admitting out loud. The older you get and the more you listen to him carefully, the more you realize there was a lot of truth behind what he was saying. So hearing him later say that he eventually gave up on the American dream honestly makes perfect sense to me because once you become deeply aware of how people, systems, [music] and society actually operate, it becomes difficult to keep emotionally investing in ideas that were designed more to comfort people than to reflect reality. One thing he said that made perfect sense to me was when he said loved people individually but struggled with people in groups. And if we're being honest with ourselves, most of us have seen exactly what he meant because one-on-one people are usually reasonable. You can sit down with somebody, talk to them, understand where they're coming from, even disagree with them without things becoming ugly. Most people, individually, are far more human than we give them credit for. But once people become part of a group, something changes. That's when ego starts taking over, insecurity starts taking over, and people begin reinforcing each other's fears, biases, and need to belong. And the strange thing is, a person can believe one thing privately, but the moment they're surrounded by a crowd, they suddenly start moving with the group because human at the cost of their own honesty. And that's the part of humanity Carlin became tired of.

[00:02:32]Not people themselves, but what people become once they merge into crowds, institutions, movements, corporations, political tribes, all these systems where individuality slowly disappears and people stop seeing each other as human beings first. When he said he stopped emotionally investing in whether society succeeds or fails, I felt that.

[00:02:51]It came from disappointment, exhaustion, and years of watching the same patterns repeat themselves over and over again.

[00:02:58]Because at some point, constantly expecting society to become wiser or more self-aware starts draining you emotionally. Eventually, some people reach a point where they stop trying to force hope into everything, and instead, just observe human behavior for what it is, and that's the real point Carlin was making. Not that humanity is evil, but that people are often better individually than they are collectively.

[00:03:19]And once you truly understand that, >> [music] >> you stop being shocked by a lot of what happens in the world. And you know what?

[00:03:24]The older I get, the more I know he was right.