Lit Teacher Reacts: Ren – The Money Game Part 2 | Yeats, Dante & The Politics of Money

Original video:    • Ren - Money Game Part 2 (Official Lyric Vi...  

In this video, I react to Ren – The Money Game Part 2 and explore its explosive mix of rhyme, politics, and philosophy. Ren’s sharp lyrics tackle money, corruption, and hypocrisy, and I connect them to some of the greatest works in literature, drama, and art.

From Yeats’ “The Second Coming” (“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”) to Dante’s Inferno (the hypocrites with golden cloaks lined with lead), from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear to Milton’s Paradise Lost, Ren’s words echo centuries of warnings about power, greed, and human frailty.

I also draw connections to:

-V for Vendetta and how media shapes perception.
-Leonard Peikoff’s The Ominous Parallels (Weimar Republic → Nazi Germany → today’s ominous parallels).
-Molière on hypocrisy and the timeless disgust we feel for hypocrites.
-The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters by Goya.
-George Frederick Watts’ Mammon (1885), allegory of money trampling the weak.
-Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good and Bad Government.
-The Raft of the Medusa by Géricault and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on imperialism’s cost
-Karl Marx’s “commodity fetishism.”
-Plato’s Gorgias on rhetoric vs. teaching.
-Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (“ending is better than mending”).
-The Tulip Mania painting as symbols of manufactured scarcity.
-Ozymandias by Shelley — the vanity of power.
-Marlowe’s Faustus — selling your soul for fame and fortune.
-Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son — cycles of tyranny.
-F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby — the corruption of old money.

Ren’s lyrics like “Money is a game, turns a saint into a sinner” and “She sells seashells on the seashore” aren’t just clever — they’re windows into universal questions about greed, power, and human nature.

If you enjoy this breakdown, check out my free translation of Homer’s Iliad: troubadour.studio/iliad
— and explore how ancient epic poetry still speaks to us today.

💬 Drop your thoughts in the comments: Which reference hit hardest for you? Yeats? Dante? Gatsby?

Chapters:
0:00 Intro
1:00 First Impressions
5:00 Hypocrisy in Politics (Dante & Shakespeare)
12:00 Media & V for Vendetta
18:00 Paradise Lost & Mammon
24:00 Marx, Plato & Manufactured Scarcity
28:00 Ozymandias & the Tyrant Cycle
30:00 Final Thoughts

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#Ren #TheMoneyGame #RenReaction #MusicReaction #Literature #Dante #Shakespeare #Yeats #ParadiseLost #GreatGatsby