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【演讲者简介】
“伟大的哲人本杰明·阿弗莱克说过：要评判我，请看我那些好想法有多好，别看我烂想法有多烂。”6月3日，昔日的“心灵捕手”马特·达蒙回到了片中他饰演的威尔所在的名校麻省理工学院(MIT)，在该校毕业典礼发表演讲，除了秀一下跟他好友本·阿弗莱克的恩爱，达蒙也掏心窝地当起人生导师，演讲十分动情、励志。
马特·达蒙（Matt Damon），1970年10月8日出生于美国马萨诸塞州剑桥市 ，演员、编剧、制片人。 1988年，在电影《现代灰姑娘》中首次出镜。1998年，凭借电影《心灵捕手》获得奥斯卡最佳男主角和金球奖最佳男主角奖提名，并与好友本·阿弗莱克共同获得奥斯卡最佳原创剧本和金球奖最佳编剧奖 ，一跃成为好莱坞金童。同年出演《拯救大兵瑞恩》中片名角色大兵瑞恩。2001年，主演《十一罗汉》。2002年，其主演的《谍影重重》系列第一部《伯恩的身份》上映，并在2004，2007年分别出演了《伯恩的霸权》和《伯恩的最后通牒》 。
2007年，被《人物》杂志评选为“全球最性感男人”，并获得柏林电影节银熊奖杰出艺术贡献奖，同年7月，成为第2343位留名好莱坞星光大道的明星。2010年，因出演曼德拉传记电影《成事在人》获得第82届奥斯卡最佳男配角提名。2010年3月27日，获得第24届美国电影艺术奖。2011年1月，北美广播影评人协会颁发乔伊·西格尔人道主义奖。2024年1月22日，冬季达沃斯世界经济论坛授予“水晶奖”。2024年，出演科幻大片《火星救援》。 2024年1月，凭《火星救援》获第73届金球奖喜剧类最佳男演员奖和第88届奥斯卡最佳男主角提名，并在时隔9年后，重新回归《谍影重重》系列电影，定档2024年7月29日。
【演讲全文】
Matt Damon's Commencement address: "There’s more at stake today than in any story ever told."
Thank you.
Thank you, President Reif — and thank you, Class of 2024!
It’s an honor to be part of this day — an honor to be here with you, with your friends, your professors, and your parents. But let’s be honest — It’s an honor I didn’t earn.
Let’s just put that out there. I mean, I’ve seen the list of previous commencement speakers: Nobel Prize winners. The UN Secretary General. President of the World Bank. President of the United States.
And who did you get? The guy who did the voice for a cartoon horse.
If you’re wondering which cartoon horse: that’s “Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron.”
Definitely one of my best performances ... as a cartoon horse.
Look, I don’t even have a college degree. As you might have heard, I went to Harvard. I just didn’tgraduate from Harvard. I got pretty close, but I started to get movie roles and didn’t finish all mycourses. I put on a cap and gown and walked with my class; my Mom and Dad were there and everything; I just never got an actual degree.
You could say I kind of fake graduated.
So you can imagine how excited I was when President Reif called to invite me to speak at the MITcommencement. Then you can imagine how sorry I was to learn that the MIT commencement speaker does not get to go home with a degree.
So yes, today, for the second time in my life, I am fake graduating from a college in my hometown.
My Mom and Dad are here again...
And this time I brought my wife and four kids. Welcome, kids, to Dad’s fake graduation. You must be so proud.
So as I said, my Mom is here. She’s a professor, so she knows the value of an MIT degree.
She also knows that I couldn’t have gotten in here.
I mean, Harvard, yes. Or a safety school — like Yale.
Look, I’m not running for any kind of office. I can say ... pretty much whatever I want.
No, I couldn’t have gotten in here, but I did grow up here. Grew up in the neighborhood, in the shadow of this imposing place. My brother Kyle and I, and my friend Ben Affleck—brilliant guy,good guy, never really amounted to much — we all grew up here, in Central Square, children of this sometimes rocky marriage between this city and its great institutions.
To us, MIT was kind of The Man ... This big, impressive, impersonal force ... That was our provincial,knee-jerk, teenage reaction, anyway.
Then Ben and I shot a movie here.
One of the scenes in Good Will Hunting was based on something that actually happened to my brother. Kyle was visiting a physicist we knew at MIT, and he was walking down the Infinite Corridor. He saw those blackboards that line the halls. So my brother, who’s an artist, picked upsome chalk and wrote an incredibly elaborate, totally fake, version of an equation.
It was so cool and so completely insane that no one erased it for months. This is true.
Anyway, Kyle came back and he said, you guys, listen to this ... They’ve got blackboards running down the hall! Because these kids are so smart they just need to, you know, drop everything and solve problems!
It was then we knew for sure we could never have gotten in.
But like I said, we later made a movie here. Which did not go unnoticed on campus. In fact I’d like to read you some actual lines, some selected passages, from the review of Good Will Hunting in the MIT school paper.
Oh, and if you haven’t seen it, Will was me, and Sean was played by the late Robin Williams, a manI miss a hell of a lot.
So I’m quoting here: “Good Will Hunting is very entertaining; but then again, any movie partially set at MIT has to be.”
There’s more. “In the end...,” the reviewer writes,
“the actual character development flies out the window. Will and Sean talk, bond, solve each other’s problems, and then cry and hug each other.After said crying and hugging, the movie ends... Such feel-good pretentiousness is definitely notmy mug of eggnog.”
Well, this kind of hurts my feelings.
But don’t worry: I now know better than to cry at MIT.
But look, I’m happy to be here anyway. I might still be a knee-jerk teenager in key respects, but Iknow an amazing school when I see it. We’re lucky to have MIT in Boston. And we’re lucky it drawsthe people it does, people like you, from around the world.
I mean, you’re working on some crazy stuff in these buildings. Stuff that would freak me out if I actually understood it. Theories, models, paradigm shifts.
I’ll tell you one that’s been on my mind: Simulation Theory.
Maybe you’ve heard of it. Maybe you took a class with Max Tegmark.
Well, for the uninitiated, there’s a philosopher named Nick Bostrom at Oxford, and he’s postulated that if there’s a truly advanced form of intelligence out there in the universe, then it’s probably advanced enough to run simulations of entire worlds — maybe trillions of them — maybe even ourown.
The basic idea, as I understand it, is that we could be living in a massive simulation run by a far smarter civilization, a giant computer game, and we don’t even know it.
And here’s the thing: a lot of physicists, cosmologists, won’t rule it out. I watched a discussion thatwas moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, of the Hayden Planetarium, and by and large, the panel couldn’t give a definitive answer. Tyson himself put the odds at 50-50.
I’m not sure how scientific that is, but it had numbers in it, so I was impressed.
Well, it got me to thinking: What if this—all of this—is a simulation? I mean, it’s a crazy idea, butwhat if it is?
And if there are multiple simulations, how come we’re in the one where Donald Trump becomes the Republican nominee?
Can we, like, transfer to a different one?
Professor Tegmark has an excellent take on all this. “My advice,” he said recently,
“is to go out anddo really interesting things... so the simulators don’t shut you down.”
But then again: what if it isn’t a simulation? Well, either way, my answer is the same.
Either way, what we do matters. What we do affects the outcome.
So either way, MIT, you’ve got to go out and do really interesting things. Important things. Inventive things. Because this world ... real or imagined ... this world has some problems we needyou to drop everything and solve.
Go ahead: take your pick from the world’s worst buffet.
Economic inequality, there’s a problem ... Or how about the refugee crisis, massive global insecurity... climate change and pandemics ... institutional racism ... a pull to nativism, fear-driven brainsworking overtime ... here in America and in places like Austria, where a far-right candidate nearly won the presidential election for the first time since World War II.
Or Brexit, for God’s sakes, that insane idea that the best path for Britain is to cut loose from Europe and drift out to sea. Add to that an American political system that’s failing... we’ve got congressmen on a two-year election cycle who are only incentivized to think short term, andsimply do not engage with long-term problems.
Add to that a media that thrives on scandal and people with their pants down ... Anything to get you to tune in so they can hawk you products that you don’t need.
And add to that a banking system that steals people’s money.
Like I said, I’m never running for office!
But while I’m on this, let me say this to the bankers who brought you the biggest heist in history: It was theft and you knew it. It was fraud and you knew it.
And you know what else? We know that you knew it.
And yeah, OK, you sort of got away with it. You got that house in the Hamptons that other peoplepaid for ... as their own mortgages went underwater.
Well, you might have their money, but you don’t have our respect.
Just so you know, when we pass you on the street and look you in the eye ... that’s what we’rethinking.
I don’t know if justice is coming for you in this life or the next. But if justice does come for you in this life ... her name is Elizabeth Warren.
OK, so before my banking digression, I rattled off a bunch of big problems.
And a natural response is to tune out, turn away.
But before you step out into our big, troubled world, I want to pass along a piece of advice that Bill Clinton offered me a little over a decade ago. Well, actually, when he said it, it felt less like advice and more like a direct order.
What he said was “turn toward the problems you see.”
It seemed kind of simple at the time, but the older I get, the more wisdom I see in this.
And that’s what I want to urge you to do today: turn toward the problems you see.
And don’t just turn toward them. Engage with them. Walk right up to them, look them in the eye... then look yourself in the eye and decide what you’re going to do about them.
In my experience, there’s just no substitute for actually going and seeing things.
I owe this insight, like many others, to my Mom. When I was a teenager, Mom thought it was important for us to see the world outside of Boston. And I don’t mean Framingham. She took us to places like Guatemala, where we saw extreme poverty up close. It changed my whole frame ofreference.
I think it was that same impulse that took my brother and me to Zambia in 2006, as part of the ONE Campaign — the organization that Bono founded to fight desperate, stupid poverty and preventable disease in the developing world. On that trip, in a small community, I met a girl andwalked with her to a nearby bore well where she could get clean water.
She had just come from school. And I knew the reason that she was able to go to school at all: clean water. Namely, the fact that clean water was available nearby, so she didn’t have to walkmiles back and forth all day to get water for her family, as so many girls and women do.
I asked her if she wanted to stay in her village when she grew up. She said, “No! I want to go toLusaka and become a nurse!”
Clean water — something as basic as that — had given this child the chance to dream.
As I learned more about water and sanitation, I was floored by the extent to which it undergirds all these problems of extreme poverty. The fate of entire communities, economies, countries iscaught up in that glass of water, something the rest of us get to take for granted.
People at ONE told me that water is the least sexy aspect of the effort to fight extreme poverty. And water goes hand-in-hand with sanitation. If you think water isn’t sexy, you should try to getinto the shit business.
But I was already hooked. The enormity of it, and the complexity of the issue, had already hookedme. And getting out in the world and meeting people like this little girl is what put me on the pathto starting Water.org, with a brilliant civil engineer named Gary White.
For Gary and me both, seeing the world ... its problems, its possibilities ... heightened our disbeliefthat so many people, millions, in fact, can’t get a safe, clean drink of water or a safe, clean, privateplace to go to the bathroom. And it heightened our determination to do something about it.
You see some tough things out there. But you also see life- changing joy. And it all changes you.
There was a refugee crisis back in ’09 that I read about in an amazing article in the New York Times. People were streaming across the border of Zimbabwe to a little town in northern South Africa called Messina. I was working in South Africa, so I went up to Messina to see for myself what wasgoing on.
I spent a day speaking with women who had made this perilous journey across the Limpopo River,dodging bandits on one side, crocodiles in the river, and bandits on the other. Every woman Ispoke to that day had been raped. Every single one. On one side of the river or both.
At the end of my time there I met a woman who was so positive, so joyful. She had just beengiven her papers and had been given political asylum in South Africa. And in the midst of this joyfulconversation, I mustered up the courage and said,
“Ma’am, do you mind my asking: were you assaulted on your journey to South Africa?”
And she replied, still smiling, “Oh, yes, I was raped. But I have my papers now. And those bastards didn’t get my dignity.”
Human beings will take your breath away. They will teach you a lot... but you have to engage. I only had that experience because I went there myself. It was horrible in many ways, it was hardto get to ... but of course that’s the point. There’s a lot of trouble out there, MIT. But there’s a lot of beauty, too. I hope you see both.
But again, the point is not to become some kind of well- rounded, high-minded voyeur.
The point is to try to eliminate your blind spots — the things that keep us from grasping the bigger picture. And look, even though I grew up in this neighborhood — in this incredible, multicultural neighborhood that was a little rough at that time — I find myself here before you as an American,white, male movie star. I don’t have a clue where my blind spots begin and end.
But looking at the world as it is, and engaging with it, is the first step toward finding our blind spots. And that’s when we can really start to understand ourselves better ... and begin to solve someproblems.
With that as your goal, there’s a few more things I hope you’ll keep in mind.
First, you’re going to fail sometimes, and that’s a good thing.
For all the amazing successes I’ve been lucky to share in, few things have shaped me more thanthe auditions that Ben and I used to do as young actors — where we would get on a bus, show up in New York, wait for our turn, cry our hearts out for a scene, and then be told, “OK, thanks.”Meaning: game over.
We used to call it “being OK thanksed.”
Those experiences became our armor.
So now you’re thinking, that’s great, Matt. Failure is good. Thanks a ton. Tell me something I didn’thear at my high school graduation.
To which I say: OK, I will!
You know the real danger for MIT graduates? It’s not getting “OK thanksed.” The real danger is allthat smoke that’s been blown up your ... graduation gowns about how freaking smart you are.
Well, you are that freaking smart! But don’t believe the hype that’s thrown at you. You don’t have all the answers. And you shouldn’t. And that’s fine.
You’re going to have your share of bad ideas.
