I’m used to railing about society being taken over by a Malthusian death cult, but this is a refreshing and well-balanced take haha.
I know a number of people who are genuinely good people, but they have adopted the idea that having children and a family is a burden on the planet, and that humankind is ultimately a net negative for the planet. A very strange take for a human being to have…
If people start off with that kind of dark axiomatic worldview, the rest is all just a logical consequence of that closed system thinking.
Over the last decades, our society has been conditioned to think in terms of closed systems and scarcity, despite the fact that life and the universe, and human creativity, suggest the universe is fundamentally characterized by open systems and an abundance of creativity.
I think I am one of those people. I have (kinda) the opinion that humanity is a net negative on the planet, and I don't think I will have children, but I'm not 100% on that.
I don't believe you really can be optimistic if you try to dive deep into what makes people tick. You notice that we have lot of negative tendencies. And I'm sure these go really deep evolutionary. I was recently in a zoo where they had an attraction where you feed lemurs. You got a bowl of fruit and could hand it to them. There was one meek lemur which I gave a bit of the bowl to, and an other aggressive one came up and starting punching that one. Now, I got the idea that I could split the food and give the aggresive one the half, and while he is eating, feed the meek one, which did work, but it just shows how far ignorance and aggression runs in life.
I notice the same in humans. How we treat other life, be it human or non-human. Notice all the ugly buildings that ruin natural landscapes and cultures around the world. Notice how easily we can dehumanize people just a few roads ahead provided someone on the big screen tells us they are our enemies. Even once I saw a truck carrying chickens in cages. All stuck together in a freezing weather. If you can allow that kind of suffering to little creatures, you can just as well allow that kind of suffering to humans. There really is not much difference between us.
In the end I think humanity can finds it's path if it takes a honest look at itself and has a desire to change, but I am doubtful if that will happen. People don't really learn. Most don't. We like to think we are intelligent because we got lot of technology now, but how we live hasn't changed much. We still are the same cavemen that we were before, now just a bit more dangerous. And all that technology we have is mostly here to manipulate the world. You know, we shower so called educated people with praise cause they finished some difficult studies and got technical talent, but seeing that talent goes to making more efficient weapons to kill people, I think we might be the most delusional and crazy animal that ever lived on this planet. This isn't intelligence at all, this is just crazy and delusional.
When you really look at humans holistically and our past antecedents coupled with current observations of our fellow species, one does not much have hope for the future
Humans need to look inwards and try to individually clean up themselves instead of pointing fingers at others. If each human cleans up his/her act individually, doesn't that mean we have cleaned up humanity collectively?
Agree with your comment to a point. My question is, who gets to define what 'cleans up his/her act' looks like in practice? For good or ill at various points and places in history groups of people have had a shared vision of what that meant. Today the highest form of good is professed to be that everyone gets to live their own reality (whatever that means). That every human is different means, in this framing, that every reality is different with all the flaws humans bring to the table. Perhaps we all need to compromise our reality a bit so we can create a generally accepted reality that is a guideline to use when we 'clean up our act'.
While I doubt anyone could come up with a step by step plan on what you need to do, there have been various people over the years who thought about this. And I think there's a direction where they have been pointing to.
I think it points to mindfulness and compassion. Lot of people go wrong because they get swayed by their "negative" emotion without being aware of the causes their actions will have. From my own experience I think one of the most destructive thing that can happen to people is not accepting a loss of something. To give an example I have a friend who wrote to me that she's not feeling great about her relationship, and after a bit of talking I got what her issue was. She wanted a soulmate, and she had an idea of what kind of person that would be and what he would do, but her boyfriend didn't fit that. While resenting that, she also really believed he is her soulmate and someone she has to stay with. A loss of him would be traumatic, but so is the loss of her fantasy.
The thing is that her boyfriend is not a fantasy character but a real person. And you won't ever find your fantasy person because they only exist in your head. I've explained to her that she has found a person with his own wishes and plans in life, and if they both want to build something great together they can, but you can't just transform your rigid fantasies onto reality because that denies things their own nature. By doing that she was creating friction as her boyfriend couldn't possibly have known what she wanted.
Now this story has a happy ending, last I heard of them they were still together and doing good, but it just shows how an her aversion to loss and fixation on fantasy caused cracks in the relationship.
Now, don't take me wrong, I'm not saying you should bend yourself for others and sacrifice your own needs. That causes it's own misery and you need to have backbone in life. But be aware of what actions your thoughts are causing. And realize the world doesn't revolve around you and find ways of "negotiating" with others.
Lot of suffering comes from the denial of others. Like the thought parents might have that they own their children, or partners who believe they own the other one in a relationship, or the view of nature as livestock. Once you see things as yours to control and own you stop caring about needs of others. Which might feel good if you are the one doing it, but sooner or later you are going to be on the receiving end of this if we won't stop playing these games.
Your last paragraph and last line really drives the point home. Humans have to stop playing these very harmful games and face reality for ultimately we are just furthering the collective punishment of our species and the time for healing has long been upon us but we have refused to heal and just keep on hurting one another
To get a proper reading of human nature and reality, I think we’d have to first account for the sheer level of distortion created by both modern and ancient forms of propaganda, narrative control, and a perverse oligarchical system overseeing the whole thing. Whether the priests of Babylon or modern social engineers, both ancient and modern myths/narratives have the effect of influencing one’s own self image, and consequently how we think and operate, and view others in turn.
Unless a person is willing to take a beat, zoom out and see how that machine actually works, why wouldn’t they simply get sucked into playing out what the constant feedback loops are churning out?
I’d say much of humankind’s story is a battle between oligarchical systems and those more Promethean-minded folks who recognize how much work goes into suppressing the natural creative spark in people.
It’s there in every child, so no one can say they don’t see it. But the question is what happens as they’re exposed to very unnatural conditions? The modern Cybernetic feedback loops have a very real effect, as this article brilliantly demonstrates with the case of pop culture.
As a Aristotle once said, "show me the child and I'll show you the man."
Only a few Prometheans tend to escape the programming. But that’s not really new. However, we’re seeing quite a lot of people breaking out of narrative control right now, arguably more than in any other period in recent history, in my opinion.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln: “you can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
Kindness and understanding seems to be so lacking in our societies now and I will admit, it gets to a point where I will just give up, even momentarily, and just lash out at others because of the wilful ignorance or at times, the need of others to be edgy. The problem is, far too many people don't understand satire and sarcasm and people act on their assumptions.
The more the Malthusians are proven wrong - we've had a 20 percent global food surplus the last few years - the more they double down. The bigger question is why anyone pays them any heed?
It's actually SATANIC and the music industry has been taken over by a death cult. I'm reading right now about how those repetitive rhythms and the low vibrations (I'm not into science) are the ones used in brainwashing and torture and affect our brains. Also I'm reading how all those early and often strange deaths of artists (right back to Elvis Presley) can be seen in a different way.
Bullsh*t. You need to look (probably via a streaming service) and listen to the many musicians younger people love who don't fit into your "death cult" criteria. That would be at least 90% of the music available via streaming services.
I think young people are facing very painful realities and I wonder if maybe talking to some teens would clarify their POVs for you? Adolescence is so difficult. I rebelled via psychedelic rock - and adults were so terrified by it that they labeled it as evil. It wasn't.
We're in a very unsettled and unsettling time - and Elvis has nothing to do with it. Apart from sociopolitical factors, there's an epidemic of meth and street "fentanyl" abuse that's been going on (in the US, anyway) since the mid-late 90s. That's truly dark. It's stuff *humans* are doing, not supernatural entities, and most definitely not various conspiracy theories.
Guys, we are not under any satanic attack. You are under a satanic attack when you lose your temper, for example, or when you are tempted to cheat on your taxes. To do something that is against the nature of God, of whom you are a child. You know what I'm saying? That's actually what the Bible talks about as a spiritual struggle. It's about PERSONAL holiness, it's about policing yourself. The idea that there's some society wide satanic attack that you have to fight against is harmful and can actually cause you to do some unloving things and things that don't reflect well on God, whom you are meant to be representing:)
People like to stop and stare at car crashes. Those that consider why this is learn something; those that do not walk like zombies stopping to occasionally gnaw at the pleasure of others.
The planet is a closed system. We can literally not leave it and survive. We're locked in here, with all it's beauty. Resources are scarce.
Maybe what has happened over the last few decades is the we abandoned the delusion of abundance and have adopted a more realistic understanding of our role in the universe.
The 1958-63 era of those Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies was also the era of atomic doom movies like Doctor Strangelove and On the Beach, as well as an endless string of monster movies like The Blob. And the early James Bond movies were thick with cynicism and nihilistic violence. I won’t disagree that the present moment is dark and grim, but there’s a lot more going on here than a simple duality.
Cory Panshin - you betcha! Geez - the Cold War, the terror of nuclear attacks by the "evil godless" Soviets! "Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love thr Bomb," "Hiroshima Mon Amour," Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, every US and British spy show you can name, the ,pamphlets given to people by the Civil Defense Agency on how to survive a nuclear holocaust, "duck and cover" drills (like today's drills in case of mass shootings), how Civil Rights movement protesters were treated, (going a bit further back) what was done to 14 y.o Emmett Till, the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL + the 4 tween girls who died when the bomb went off...
There was sunny optimism living with profound emptiness and pessimism, not least for those who fought in all of the wars the US engaged in post-WWII. It was *not* an optimistic time.
Watergate, anyone? And now, school shootings? Cops with cuffs and nightsticks in elementary schools?
We're facing some of the worst crises our society has ever encountered. The polarization is like the runup to the Civil War. *That's* where the "dark" stuff (which isn't new, just becoming more mainstream) comes in.
I remember those days, and those movies and the music. In keeping with what Ted said about Bond, it tended to be 'camp'. Dr. Strangelove was satirical comedy. The Blob was tame and not very frightening compared to Freddy Kruger.
There is no point when it all changed. But I think we came out of WWII feeling like we were the good guys. We came out of Vietnam feeling like we were the bad guys. Neither assessment is entirely right. Hopefully, we've all had enough of kicking our own ass.
A different discussion, but this aspect of the Bond films is all of a piece with the rest. Now, Sean Connery's statements about domestic violence *are* a different topic - though his attitudes were a part of him, and he brought them to his work, too.
I think part of the reason for the dark turn in popular culture is the increase in wealth disparity. Many people feel powerless and perceive society as becoming worse, so a dark figure becomes more relatable than a playful character/ hero.
Also, we've become a more left brained society because of STEM. That has an impact on diminished playfulness.
We do need a change in psychology. If we have a more balanced right brain with left brain, and more playfulness, then we can have a change in art. If we want another Renaissance, we have to move away from self-loathing in culture and society.
Interesting comment about STEM. I don't have kids but as I understand they don't have recess from a very young age. We don't have play time for them and their testing testing testing no child left behind thing. I understand in some Scandinavian countries they don't have much structure to the school until a much later age. I think another comment about the wealth gap is informative. The pitchfork era may be coming and not fast enough!
I just can't seem to write or draw anymore. Most of my life, I've written about people escaping dystopian societies, and weirdo outsiders fighting to maintain their independence from them. It's become harder and harder to foster those dreams... I used to believe that for all the world's problems, hey, you could just run away and become an artist in some run-down but vibrant bohemian village. But where are all the adventures? Where are the sexy ghettos? Where are all those cool interesting people I've been dying to meet all my life? There's no fiction in fiction. The people I wanted to get away from called my stories escapism - but it was just the opposite while hope was something real.
But THEY now own the vibrant bohemian villages,and monetized them. The perfect example is in the city I live,all my life,Bristol in the UK. An area called Stokes Croft has been bought up,cleaned up,stripped off all atmosphere and made into city apartments designed to appeal to those folks who've read in the latest Lonely Planet Guide that this neighbourhood is the second coolest on the planet! But now all the artists,creatives, the drunks and deadbeats have moved down the road so that "edginess" you're paying for has been tidied away even bougie shops starting to appear. But,for old times sake,just a few panhandlers still knocking around.
Think "gay quarter," or "red light district." Places that have historically mixed social marginalization with sexual liberality, mixed poverty with bustling entrepreneurialism, and mixed danger with a community standing together in common cause.
Today, most such places have become a sort of rainbow flag DIsneyland - a place for middle class mothers to shop for lingerie that might include PVC, dance clubs for college students to prove they're down with the queers. and bookstores for nerds to grab an old-time slash-fic zine. Gentrification has run it's course to its absurd conclusion. Perhaps a friendly neighborhood cop who actually enjoyed the banal sensitivity training will greet you with a smile, glad for the easy job of community outreach - he's there to deliver platitudes like, "there's a lot of work to be done" when minorities explain they're less afraid of the dead-beats and drug addicts than they are the cops.
Sure, sexual promiscuity and it's attendant drama still exist, but thanks to social media it leans more and more onto the latter, especially the gossip and public accusations. There's less of the good old-fashioned licentiousness. There aren't affordable slums ripe for underground communities to take refuge in, because the housing crisis has already pushed the straights (in all sense of the word) into theme. Underground communities are forced, like everyone else, to take the first drab and dreary high-rise apartment they can afford or couch-surf into, far, far distance from any sort of thriving street-level action with their own people. They have to be stingy about bus fair, and can't afford the cafe. When they're desperate, they can make the pilgrimage to gay Disneyland to have sex in a night-club bathroom without ever making a friend along the way, but mostly, it's just Grindr. Sex worker's too, might go three to an apartment and invite in clients they met on an app, with the girls in the other room listening in, and maybe some guy they pay to intervene in case of a serious problem.
There's a long history of sexy ghettos because ghetto's of all sorts stand outside the influence and even practicality of bourgeoise social values.
I remember thinking about this a few years back when I was watching Daniel Craig as James Bond, being horribly tortured. I was thinking, what happened to Bond in a tuxedo 🤵♂️ bantering in the casino in Monte Carlo??
There was an essay on Bond a few years back and how his working life as a spy paralleled the working life of so many back then. Consider the life of a salesman. The salesman gets a company car, probably a Ford Falcon. Bond had an Aston-Martin with machine guns. The salesman has an expense account to treat clients at lunch counters. Bond has an expense account for five star restaurants. Bond is living the luxe life, but it is relatable. His employer watches out for him if only because he is an asset.
For a more modern take, look at Jason Bourne. Bourne can't trust his employer. His job has been outsourced to foreigners who charge less and ask fewer questions. Bourne doesn't have a pension. He has a Swiss bank account he hopes he has hidden from his employer. Bourne relies on his own education and skills - he can hotwire a car, handle himself in a fight, duck a surveillance tail - but he had to develop those skills on his own nickel.
Bourne's vision is much darker than Bond's, but so is life for so many of us.
Read the books. James Bond was never a lighthearted carefree soul. He built a hard drinking fast life persona around himself as he knew he would die before he turned 36. Until Daniel Craig came along the Bond persona in the movies is a caricature of the Bond in the books. This, of course, doesn't negate your point - or Goioa's point - as the movies were much more broadly influential than the books.
Just yesterday I heard someone say that the Band franchise people Barbara Broccoli and her colleagues are being very slow in casting the new Bond. Slower than ever before it seems. I don't personally care but it occurred to me that Bond,James Bond.,DIED in the last film . He pegged out. It was like FINIS. I think the now (NOW) holders of our popular culture are using this to SAY SOMETHING. And it's not a very nice something. It's akin to "give up hope all ye who enter here". James Bond is not coming back,even as Jane Bond,even as Brutha Bond. He's dead. There is no RESSURECTION. Get It. No resurrection. It's a SATANIC MESSAGE. And what does it say about ME that I get it. But to be fair I have only just noticed. Maybe it's a GOOD THING I've noticed. The pop songs of the 197Os are mostly very affirmative it must have been in the late 1970s to early 1980s when popular culture began to get properly infiltrated and taken control of by the dark forces. In fact the more one thinks about various artists the more you question the accepted narrative.
If one wanted to focus just on the sociopathic trend I would throw out the dangerous driver conundrum:
When maniac drivers go lurching at deadly speeds from lane to lane (and shoulder) of the freeway, snapping off lane changes like gunshots and terrifying the rest of us, remember that those drivers would all be dead were it not for the rest of us driving steady and straight. The psychodrivers are utterly dependent on us not doing anything unexpected. They exist only because we are holding up our end of the "all in this together" bargain.
I could argue that the rational, cool and calm among us are the only thing that has kept humanity from dying out millenia ago, but you get the point. Some of us will keep on keeping on, and even the psycho will benefit from that.
I think art is the most appropriate place for a society to express and examine negativity and darkness. I think making art of this kind is actually the most PLAYFUL way to interact with these sorts of thoughts, feelings and characters. They are no longer in the shadows because we are bringing them into the light of the silver screen. We are portraying these characters in greater depth, giving them more humanity. Joker is a prime example and played by one of our greatest living actors. Wednesday Addams in the Netflix show Wednesday is also getting portrayed in greater depth than ever before. Eminem is an example in music. It’s more honest to portray 007 as a sociopath. You have to be on that spectrum to do that job. I think all this is our society’s way of beginning to better understand sociopathy and psychopathy so we can begin to deal with it and integrate it in a positive way. I see this trend as “shadow work.” We’re turning “monsters” into humans to better understand them and examine ourselves to see if we find any parts of us reflected. From what I’ve read, psychopaths are more likely to become CEOs and politicians. We need to begin to integrate these pathologies and tendencies better than we are. I think art is part of that process.
I see nothing playful at all about the trend. I started noticing it when the bad-guys-are-good-guys thing first took root, with shows like the Sopranos and Breaking Bad and countless others. Your point is true as far as it goes, and I agree that a certain amount of it can be healing and humanizing, but ultimately a story should embody a certain universality. Stories that humanize psychopathy can of course portray them as human and embue some empathy, but ultimately there needs to be a final note of “… but this isn’t a good way to be”, whereas what I see (or used to, until I mostly gave up on modern pop culture), “…. And aren’t we all like that? Let’s embrace it!”
A healthy culture needs both - the bad asses, psychopaths and boundary breakers AND the fuddy duddies, squares and killjoys.
Yes,because we did not defeat the Nazi ideology in 1945 when we ended the War in Europe. That's the mistake we are all encouraged by the media to make. The two don't ally. The Nazi ideology scuttled off to hide in a dark place. That dark place was Academia. The Satanic Mills that William Blake references in Jerusalem,yes,relating them to the dark monstrous factories then cropping up all over England,factories of oppression with Blood in the Machine. It took 15 years but in the early 1960s the Nazi ideology was re-released and presented to the world in a new guide,a disguise of choice and freedom.
You can't really defeat an ideology. The best you can do is render it less popular and less powerful, even better irrelevant. The Nazi ideology has been around for centuries, though it took its more modern, more secular form in the 19th century. It has never been popular in academia, and especially not since World War II. If it hid anywhere, it hid in evangelical churches. If you compare their doctrine and politics over the years, they have moved increasingly towards the Nazi philosophy and program since the war, accelerating in the 1970s.
I know you are trying to say that the very people Nazis loathed, exiled and murdered are now the Nazis for espousing values antithetical to those of the actual Nazis. It's a popular rhetorical ruse. Unfortunately, it isn't very realistic or effective. The Nazis wrote everything down. They made sure that everyone knew what they were and what they did. The Nazis were never, ever about choice and freedom save in its violent suppression.
Hi Jim. I appreciate this well articulated response. I’ve never seen Sopranos and have had enough of what little mafia themed things I have seen. I did watch Breaking Bad. I don’t consider this trend to be “bad-guys-are-good-guys,” but rather, bad guys aren’t one-dimensional and hardly anything is ever pure good or evil, black and white etc. I don’t celebrate Walter White from Breaking Bad. Though, I thought it was well-written. I’m a proponent of balance and agree a healthy society also needs main characters who are more on the positive end of the spectrum while still being human and multi-dimensional.
It's hard not to think of Joan Didion's comment, “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.” It's probably just me, but when there's a good front story, I never feel a need for a back story.
Everything Joan Didion wrote... like Slouching Toward Bethlehem. (Yeats' "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," etc.)
I'm not sure about the Sopranos, but Breaking Bad is not a "bad guys are good" story by any stretch of the imagination. (Walter White is not good, and from what it sounded like in the last episode, he wasn't even doing bad for the sake of a good end, but just his own desires)
I think you are wrong and you have unknowingly and unthinkingly taken on board the SATANIC mindset. It's one thing to explore the nature of evil but it's another thing to promote the enjoyment of it.
Hi Jane. Enjoyment would not describe how I personally feel watching these darker themes and characters. I’m more seeking to understand. I suppose it’s up to the viewer what they choose to get from it. I think the positive opportunity with these things is to learn and gain greater insight and even empathy for humanity.
I think the positive opportunity is great in concept. Problem with that is that vice sells, and the positive spin is unnecessary to such a lucrative enterprise. What you suggest sounds akin to putting broccoli on a bacon cheeseburger to make it healthy.
Also, there odd a very fine line between showing empathy for a corrupted character and explained their behaviors away. “Ah well, we’re all like that aren’t we?” Or “See how society/parenting/circumstance caused this behavior? They are actually a victim”.
Regarding Breaking Bad, I hold to my opinion. Sure he suffers, but how many of us were really rooting for Walter white to get caught all along? I submit very few. Additionally, for all its attention to detail and nuance and character, the show utterly ignored the ruined lives of the anonymous end users Walter’s drugs were affecting. Because doing so would shift our empathy away from Walter.
Psychology is one thing, but we need a moral dimension too, and perhaps especially, which is why Crime and Punishment is a better work of fiction than The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.
Thank you. So very well said. I feel the same way about this issue. This is a fascinating article, yet does anyone want those happy sunny movies back a.k.a. Doris Day and Rock Hudson? I think of this era - the 50ies and early 60ies also as an era of concealment and cover-up in people’s personal lives, where many people could not live as their true selves. See Rock Hudson, being in the closet making these films. And also an era, where many problems people are having psychologically TODAY stem from. At that time, pop culture reflected back a shiny happy prosperous future and upheld picture perfect standards of how your life was supposed to look like and yet so many people’s realities weren’t acknowledged and recognized. I think it’s also true, that society might be more on its way to acknowledge the issues at play in these dark movies. Maybe we need to get through this to really see ourselves before it can get better.
David Campbell - about Bond... John Le Carre's novels portrayed the truth of what espionage is really like, including the kinds of people who were recruited. Sociopaths, etc. "The Americans" was another great representation of that world, albeit originally drawn from a post-Soviet spy operation in the DC area. The writers had the world of espionsge and that of terrorism overlap from time to time. The Soviet spies are ruthless, yet there are other sides to them. That dimension makes the show extremely compelling.
If the culture is getting gloomier, might it not be because commercialism has EATEN culture, and because the number one premise of sales is to create DISSATISFACTION? Salesmen invent the need the product satisfies.
Perhaps unhappiness and gloom and dystopian nightmares dominate culture, I’m suggesting, because that makes consumers generally hungry for some fix. It’s the psychic condition best suited to a population of consumers, a mindset most advantageous to business, which is, after all, still the business of America.
Look at your own substack for Christ’s sake! It’s more than 90 percent built on a PROBLEM that the honest broker is here to identify, diagnose, and help solve. It’s why your artistic-type readers come back again and again: to bemoan the state of the culture together and get some clarity as to the cause of their own dissatisfaction.
The question is: how much is your own work posited on the gloom you identify, and how much is that sense of gloom baked into our commercial culture’s monetization of everything?
Example: so many gifted musicians and composers issue their own music now. It's definitely available, and purchaseable - but it requires some time and effort spent looking for it.
Check out Bandcamp and similar sites for musicians who are doing a lot of beautiful, challenging work, in all genres. You all might be in for some very pleasant suprises, in this time when our country is basically dancing on the edge of an active volcanic caldera.
P.S. Years ago, I was a music journalist. I didn't cover anything that was even remotely mainstream, yet I found so much good music in doing so. I still spend time hunting for the kinds of music that I love + new music I need to give a chance to. There are plenty of resources available, if we avail ourselves of them. Do enough searches and the dreaded algorithms start showing us (well, me) something entirely different. Though honestly, a lot of this requires a willingness to listen to lyrics in many other languages + a desire to explore musical cultures that aren't even remotely North American. We can look South, look East ( or West, on the Left Coast), even to non-Anglophone Europe.
Part of the equation is surely all the doomsday scaremongering about all-things climate / environment related. The activist tendencies of the mainstream media (who justify scare tactics in order to prompt action) is essentially the present-day version of trying to promote good behaviour by threatening people with hellfire. The problem is that, by making people depressed, it makes them less likely to be effective actors, not more.
I’m certainly not denying our capacity to hurt ourselves, to hurt others, and to harm creation, in often serious ways. In the Christian worldview this was simply known as our fallen condition. Ironically, as we collectively discarded the concept of Original Sin as being hopelessly negative and harmful, we have become far more self-loathing and indeed scrupulous than ever.
A cheery, shallow positivity about the human creature is not the answer to the current self-loathing. This world *is* passing away. Our individual lives are short, and our collective span on this globe is likewise comparatively short in the grand scheme of things. But goodness lasts. Faith, hope and love will endure beyond this world. Nothing good in this life is ever done in vain. No love is ever wasted. We are broken, but capable of forgiveness.
The facts have a stubborn way of asserting themselves. Did you see the hurricane that just hit North Carolina?!
I don't think it's scaremongering to understand that human behavior has caused mass extinction and we're on our way to mass extinguishing ourselves. That doesn't make me unhappy at all! Not the fact of that itself but I can maintain happiness in the face of challenges. Not sure why everyone can't do the same!
That hurricane is just the latest extreme weather even whipped up by Bill Gates tame scientists,he has a stable of them,they use 5G and blocks of electricity to control the weather.
Given your honorific and dress sense, I cannot fathom the hypocrisy of your post given your membership of one of history’s biggest doomsday cults. Unlike your chosen dogma, climate science is arrived at from a position of reason rather than faith. What is depressing: people clinging to the faith that everything will be fine, rather than responding to known fact and conserving the only home we have. My atheism doesn’t provide me with the deluded comfort of a plan b (heaven apparently) for when we mess up the actual world we live on. Forgiveness in the face of future generations’ futures being compromised…not from me!
From someone who would claim to have an imaginary friend, calling me juvenile and childlike is a bit silly don’t you think. I don’t _need_ to have faith in climate science, because it is based on theories that have yet to be disproven via the scientific method. Note the nuance there if your mind can expand that far. Science is the antithesis of dogma.
Just to clarify, I’m not denying the seriousness of various environmental concerns (as I alluded to in my second paragraph), but I have heard first-hand from a few journalists the tendency to disproportionately emphasise “bad news” stories and ignore “good news” stories regarding climate, etc. out of a desire to encourage action. Sorry also for slipping into sermon mode at the end (occupational hazard!).
Let us all be more goofy, affable, and literate in face-to-face interactions. It's my prayer for the day.
Yesterday my wife and I started talking about Missouri executing Marcelus Williams three days ago, despite evidence he didn't do it, prosecutors and the victim's family against his execution, etc...and that led us on to a couple of hours of us - at least in the West - as a species of technologically determined robots who are programmed to just follow orders. Even if it goes against common sense. Even if we KNOW it's insane. I mean, what can lil ol' me do about anything?
It was a spirited conversation. We agree on almost everything, so we were improvising complementary rants on the other's prior riffs. Perhaps you've had similar experiences.
Indulge me here on a brief tangent?:
I can't get away from...I'm haunted by...the phrase "get a life." It had apparently been used in the early 1980s, but blew up around the time of the SNL bit - written, IIRC, by Robert Smigel - in which Trekkies at a convention bombarded William Shatner with questions of Star Trek minutiae before he explodes with "Get a life!" It was funny, but I think people heavily into Star Trek like those folks (I have never understood the phenomenon: the show was about the militarization of space, etc)...these Trekkies did have a life. If only everyone got obsessive about one cultural/arty thing they love and kept pursuing it down whatever path it took them. 'Cuz to get obsessive about something from art/creative culture that sparks yer fancy: requires attention.
Zen student: Zen master, what is Zen?
Zen master: ATTENTION!
By the time of, oh, let's say around November of 2016, I realized "getting a life" was apparently beyond the grasp of most people. This felt fascinating but oh-so-bleak to me. Why is it so difficult to "get a life"?
We're all reading this online, but I submit, largely for all the reasons Ted Gioia has brought up in post after post: the algorithms and psychological knowledge that keeps people glued to the infinitude of CRAP that makes them miserable - while they think it's the people they just read about on their gadget that are making them miserable - need to be IGNORED. Log the eff off. As an exercise, spend no more than 30 minutes online for a week and see if your life was improved during the past 7 days. Just a thought.
We get away from this insanity by not participating in it. My gawd: use your damned library card. Make a list of 5 things that interest you and you want to know more about, and go get some dead-tree books and sit quietly, by yourself, eyes moving left-to-right across the page, decoding 26 letters and some punctuation that purport to be able to "say" any possible thought. And take notes. Reflect on what you've read. Notice your body cells seem to have slowed down. Note that new questions have come up and you NEED to pursue those ones, too. Talk or write to other humans you know about your reading. Pay attention to how you feel having read in books rather than on a screen.
You say: well, reading online and reading books: wass the diff? It turns out there's a huge difference. And depth and demands of attentional space is only the tip of the iceberg. There's mounting data on this (online! oy vey!) but you implicitly know reading BOOKS is superior to reading online, right? Sometimes the right hemisphere of your brain just knows this kinda stuff, and indeed it was confirmed that time you read in the WA Po about what Trump just said, then later read an Emily Dickinson poem. And you noted the differences in quality of experience.
Wife and I got to the point of Einstein and Oppenheimer, et.al creating a weapon that could end all humanity. Both of them were haunted by the (fascist) circumstances that led them to use their knowledge of physics in that way. And then: just because we humans CAN invent certain things, it doesn't mean that we must continue to invent these things and use them. "Hey, check it out: mustard gas! Those who are living under a different language and nationality and political system are gonna have to match us here! We'll teach them about...ideology?"
We're now inventing things and assuming we must use them. Like we're robots. Like the Missouri officials who, despite all reason, still murdered Marcelus Williams. A stone-age blood sacrifice in our "Enlightened" time. Hey, my hands were tied. I had no choice but to murder an innocent man. You understand the rules, don't ya? I am blameless.
Yea. We all are. (cough)
I assume the people who read Ted Gioia have lives. Rich ones. You're never bored. I'm never bored. If you're bored, you're BORING, as some counterculture figures from the 1960s told us. The question is: how do we turn on others so they can "get a life"? Any and all suggestions are welcome and just might save humanity. Thanks!
So enjoyed your post. I'm doing what you say,but oops,yes I'm.online right now! I've long thought that old put down was facile. But I get why Capt Bill might have exploded with it! I'm increasingly asking myself why this "need to be seen". We all have ego and desire to be SIGNIFICANT but too often we mistake that aim as a wish for Fame,Money,Power and the media controllers have long cultivated out inborn.ego.desire to those false ends. Im as guilty as anyone. But now I'm more seeing the virtue of the ancient idea of not being seen,of the obscure life.
Jane: thanks for your thoughtful reply. I'm online NOW! "D'oh!", to quote a famous TV dad. I wonder how much of our cultural gloom has to do with being online all the live-long day. I remember very gloomy, depressed people who sat around and watched TV all day before the Internet.
I'll type fast as I know you like to read fast (groan), so here goes:
Still: it seems we must get a life for ourselves. This seems to do with self-direction. We must (or so it seems to me) have those things we can cultivate, and not just Voltairean gardens. I have the romantic notion that they come from something divine and unique within ourselves. I learned to love reading, research, writing, and playing guitar as a teenager. This litany is not remarkable; it's what we DO with those skills. I thought everyone had such things as these. They give me great joy, are "free", are limitless, and seemingly available to everyone else. But it's abundantly clear most people don't have this. They are angry that others seem happy while they're not, and so are out for revenge or just the "lulz". <----do people still type that? I don't know.
How to get a life? I have a strong hunch that some sort of overall bodily pleasure turn-on experience - not just sex, although that could open a window - allows us a profound escape hatch from the Rat Race (Ted Gioia has discussed the work of John B. Calhoun in this regard). There seem to be certain embodied states we can get into in which we feel overwhelmingly to be okay with what others do as long as they're not hurting anyone else. (I once meditated so much I loved Dick Cheney, an extreme example, admittedly.) We then enjoy the vast array of ways of being in the world. Many of you have lives and skills I don't have and I know now to just LOVE and admire that you have your things, which are a huge part of having a life or maybe it's that life itself. Because you are a part of me, as I see it. I want everyone reading this to flourish. Of course! That sounds trite, but in this nasty gloomy social landscape, it needs to be said.
Apart from the profound feeling of pleasure and embodiment, we still need to get a life, but that feeling of being comfortable in our own skin seems to allow us to let others do their thing, which we don't need to do ourselves. We can find our own things, enjoy our own uniqueness and cultivate it, get the sense of joy from BUILDING ourselves - Nietzschean self-creation? - and you know, pay enough attention to the social and political world to be informed but not blame some other group because we're so damned miserable. Etc. I've always ended up voting for who I think will be the least cruel, because that's been the state of American politics since I've been a voter (first voted in 1980). If there's really not much I can do to lessen suffering, I must work, pay the bills, and continue with those things that give me pleasure: reading, writing, old films, conversation, bicycle riding, gardening, and a few other simple things. You'll have your items like these. These items might sound trite and boring, but they give me great pleasure and I will do them until I cannot due to physical limitations.
And lest anyone think, Jeez listen to this old dude: he's prolly rich. Naw. I don't have money. Never have. I'm really bad at making a lot of money, but I really don't care! (<---crikey: this guy is a Bad Murrkin! What about the economy? What about GDP? Pfffffft!)
I remember when Csikszentmihalyi published his book Flow:The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I thought, "this is what I've been thinking for a long time now!" If you find you're engaged in some activity in which you don't even notice "time" passing, and it's something you can get better at all the time, your only competition being against yourself, you're probably on to something really good. Never stop!
Some commenters here on this post by Ted have pointed to massive inequality, and they're right. But what do we do about it? I'd say: try to diagnose the problem. What led to this? What can be done? Why hasn't more been done? Why are there billionaires? What led people to think it's actually legitimate to have a billion dollars? Develop a nuanced, robust hypothesis/theory. This theory will improve all the time, using your library card. It's not "fun" but maybe it's a strong way to inform our overall civic thinking? To what extent and in what ways are we responsible to others in our community. How wide do we extend our own ideas of community? Etc...
The late, very great David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs also informs a lot of why people would be gloomy and have their dire dark violent feelings reflected back at them in popular culture, a truly vicious circle that Ted Gioia addressed in this piece, above.
Jane Baker's ideas about "ego" seem profound to me. The body-pleasure I'm-okay-in-my-skin thing I wrote about above seems to lessen ego a lot. I think we do need a healthy sense of "self" but that ego, if we don't develop introspection (via "getting a life"?), can get going like one of those tumors you read about in medical books: the "size of a grapefruit", etc. Imagine getting so good at making truckloads of money that you're a multimillionaire, but it's never quite enough. Some other guy has $100 million while you only have $10 million. My gawd what a hit to the Ego! (And how profoundly it misses the entire point of living a decent human life.)
I see my own ego as being like an albatross around my neck. It's a fiction. The ego is. Yet it's also a lot like the herpes simplex virus: once ya got it, it's always there and pops back into play at the worst moments, like a cold sore conspicuous on your lip when you're tryna flirt with someone. That's the ego. Oy! In an all-too-real way, we're fancy chimps wired for status hierarchy, but we also have these huge frontal lobes that can help us bootstrap our way out of the primate status games. We HAVE to laff at ourselves!
Okay, now I'm logging out and going back to re-reading Poe's "The Gold Bug" found in a fat, handsome Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe that I got used for $2 once. The world is not that bad!
Amen! (Atheistly) Nice writing, by the way. If you don't mind I'm going to edit it down to a short couple of paragraphs and print it out and remind myself to put down the damn phone! There's so much great material online that's tough to resist so many great writers that it wouldn't be able to read in paper print. I think I'm going to need more than 30 minutes a week. That might be a good detox but an hour a day might be more appropriate considering the wealth of information available online that's not available in print. Thanks again, take care
That's always been the case, no? Jack the Ripper was one of the biggest stories in 19th century England. Or you could back much further, to gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome.
I started working in bookstores back in 1981. "True crime" has *always* sold.
See In Cold Blood. Also Victorian and Edwardian- era tabloids from the UK that can be read online, plus the illustrations in those tabloids.
The Dance of Death pervades much Western European art post-Black Death. At least it's honest about our mortality. Macabre, yes - but very similar to the Mexican imagery surrounding the Day of the Dead, which is a *positive* holiday. They see our mortality and laugh at it while eating sugar skulls. They take time to remember friends and family who've passed - in a very uplifting way. I prefer all of that to what most Americans do around that time, though there are still people who emphasize positive things during Halloween. And it has candy! :)
Speaking as someone from a country ravaged by the British empire, I love love love seeing James Bond disappear up his own arsehole and have less fun. May the gummy old coot crawl inside a vodka bottle and never come out again.
You can't build an interesting culture on vindictive shaudenfreud without us all getting the acid burns. This is where art and God comes in and entertainment is meaningless to flaccid.
Bit of a stretch to consider fantasy assassin for the British crown James Bond interesting culture but you do you. Plus, my country has a long and colourful history of slagging off British invaders in song, verse and story so you'd probably have to understand us more to understand how meaningless and sanctimonious the comment you made is.
I wrote a couple of posts about a pop culture phenomenon I call the Dead-Eyed Sociopath, affectionately known as Des, where I reflect on the sociological meaning of this increasing obsession with implacable killers. I do not think it is a healthy sign.
Tim Dillon had a great rant a few episodes ago, “Dead Eyed Monsters.” It was a comedic rant about what society has done to its kids. Brilliant, hilarious, and darkly true all at the same time.
More satire like this is probably in order, to get people to distance themselves and laugh at their own folly, rather than playing it out to the very end.
No. I don't think so. We had satire in the 1960s. I'm in the UK. In the 1960s a generation of clever young men who got to Oxford or Cambridge universities thanks to the 1944 Butler Education Act that opened up access to higher education to the "working class' (it enabled The Beatles too)these witty and funny men,almost all men,savagely slashed down wealthy and privilege. They introduced a new society based on talent and merit. Never again would our country be ruled by the Hooray Henry's of the Old School. Now,our political administration and our mainstream media are all people who've been to exclusive private schools and have "connections". All the radio hosts on the big talk networks have been to fee paying schools. The BBC don't employ anyone as a presenter unless they have a degree (of some sort). Back in Weimar Germany the savage and telling satire of the Nazis was funny and popular - and changed NOTHING.
"But, of course, these same algorithms (and the organizations that control them) can also help turn the tide....But what if the corporate leaders who let these genies out of the bottle fail to take action? In that case, we may need to force their hands. There are ways for doing that, too."
I live in san francisco, ground zero for the tech culture's assault on humanity life art freedom and culture. The artists, all thinkers doers and humans, will have to defy the lanes and tracks we've been relegated to in order to defy the Nothingness and the artists and thinkers will have to lead the way out out of this. The ones in charge don't have the imagination or humility to see another way. They will concede nothing at their own peril, and our own peril.
Everyone's too embarrassed and afraid to be called out and exiled. It's a real thing.
I know some visual artists from the Bay Area. None of them have anything to do with techbros. Their work is very good - and I daresay, uplifting, though sometimes (as in 2020, facing the C19 catastrophe) a bit dark... but always returning to the light, metaphorically.
None of these people are Names. Very few ever become, or want to become, famous. Folks can look around on the internet for such work, and if they're fortunate enough to live in an area with an active gallery scene, they can see such work in person. But it does require some work from us. Seems like a better way to use our energy (physical and psychological) than bemoaning the state of popular culture - as presented by megacorps, not by human beings whom we can meet and talk with, you know?
somehow we have to make our own culture, meet in the real... but we're back to land and gentrification and lack of money and then we're wandering without a homeland like the Jews and you GET IT. how to make a culture on the run?
People are confused by goodness but they understand pain very well. When it comes to suspension of disbelief, they can follow evil anywhere (even into hell with Dante) but have no faith in the Paradiso. This is not a new problem. Art is dumber now because people are dumber about art. Even smart people think the internet or an audiobook can somehow substitute for reading.
Fascinating.
I’m used to railing about society being taken over by a Malthusian death cult, but this is a refreshing and well-balanced take haha.
I know a number of people who are genuinely good people, but they have adopted the idea that having children and a family is a burden on the planet, and that humankind is ultimately a net negative for the planet. A very strange take for a human being to have…
If people start off with that kind of dark axiomatic worldview, the rest is all just a logical consequence of that closed system thinking.
Over the last decades, our society has been conditioned to think in terms of closed systems and scarcity, despite the fact that life and the universe, and human creativity, suggest the universe is fundamentally characterized by open systems and an abundance of creativity.
I think I am one of those people. I have (kinda) the opinion that humanity is a net negative on the planet, and I don't think I will have children, but I'm not 100% on that.
I don't believe you really can be optimistic if you try to dive deep into what makes people tick. You notice that we have lot of negative tendencies. And I'm sure these go really deep evolutionary. I was recently in a zoo where they had an attraction where you feed lemurs. You got a bowl of fruit and could hand it to them. There was one meek lemur which I gave a bit of the bowl to, and an other aggressive one came up and starting punching that one. Now, I got the idea that I could split the food and give the aggresive one the half, and while he is eating, feed the meek one, which did work, but it just shows how far ignorance and aggression runs in life.
I notice the same in humans. How we treat other life, be it human or non-human. Notice all the ugly buildings that ruin natural landscapes and cultures around the world. Notice how easily we can dehumanize people just a few roads ahead provided someone on the big screen tells us they are our enemies. Even once I saw a truck carrying chickens in cages. All stuck together in a freezing weather. If you can allow that kind of suffering to little creatures, you can just as well allow that kind of suffering to humans. There really is not much difference between us.
In the end I think humanity can finds it's path if it takes a honest look at itself and has a desire to change, but I am doubtful if that will happen. People don't really learn. Most don't. We like to think we are intelligent because we got lot of technology now, but how we live hasn't changed much. We still are the same cavemen that we were before, now just a bit more dangerous. And all that technology we have is mostly here to manipulate the world. You know, we shower so called educated people with praise cause they finished some difficult studies and got technical talent, but seeing that talent goes to making more efficient weapons to kill people, I think we might be the most delusional and crazy animal that ever lived on this planet. This isn't intelligence at all, this is just crazy and delusional.
Mic Drop Comment 🎤
When you really look at humans holistically and our past antecedents coupled with current observations of our fellow species, one does not much have hope for the future
Humans need to look inwards and try to individually clean up themselves instead of pointing fingers at others. If each human cleans up his/her act individually, doesn't that mean we have cleaned up humanity collectively?
Simplistic I know, but you get my point
Agree with your comment to a point. My question is, who gets to define what 'cleans up his/her act' looks like in practice? For good or ill at various points and places in history groups of people have had a shared vision of what that meant. Today the highest form of good is professed to be that everyone gets to live their own reality (whatever that means). That every human is different means, in this framing, that every reality is different with all the flaws humans bring to the table. Perhaps we all need to compromise our reality a bit so we can create a generally accepted reality that is a guideline to use when we 'clean up our act'.
While I doubt anyone could come up with a step by step plan on what you need to do, there have been various people over the years who thought about this. And I think there's a direction where they have been pointing to.
I think it points to mindfulness and compassion. Lot of people go wrong because they get swayed by their "negative" emotion without being aware of the causes their actions will have. From my own experience I think one of the most destructive thing that can happen to people is not accepting a loss of something. To give an example I have a friend who wrote to me that she's not feeling great about her relationship, and after a bit of talking I got what her issue was. She wanted a soulmate, and she had an idea of what kind of person that would be and what he would do, but her boyfriend didn't fit that. While resenting that, she also really believed he is her soulmate and someone she has to stay with. A loss of him would be traumatic, but so is the loss of her fantasy.
The thing is that her boyfriend is not a fantasy character but a real person. And you won't ever find your fantasy person because they only exist in your head. I've explained to her that she has found a person with his own wishes and plans in life, and if they both want to build something great together they can, but you can't just transform your rigid fantasies onto reality because that denies things their own nature. By doing that she was creating friction as her boyfriend couldn't possibly have known what she wanted.
Now this story has a happy ending, last I heard of them they were still together and doing good, but it just shows how an her aversion to loss and fixation on fantasy caused cracks in the relationship.
Now, don't take me wrong, I'm not saying you should bend yourself for others and sacrifice your own needs. That causes it's own misery and you need to have backbone in life. But be aware of what actions your thoughts are causing. And realize the world doesn't revolve around you and find ways of "negotiating" with others.
Lot of suffering comes from the denial of others. Like the thought parents might have that they own their children, or partners who believe they own the other one in a relationship, or the view of nature as livestock. Once you see things as yours to control and own you stop caring about needs of others. Which might feel good if you are the one doing it, but sooner or later you are going to be on the receiving end of this if we won't stop playing these games.
Your last paragraph and last line really drives the point home. Humans have to stop playing these very harmful games and face reality for ultimately we are just furthering the collective punishment of our species and the time for healing has long been upon us but we have refused to heal and just keep on hurting one another
No wonder the world is in shambles right now
I live in a rural no hunting zone
Deer are a constant presence and are eager to be tossed a few carrots. There's a big 12 point who is always ready to bully the others away.
You have my sympathy. The cloven-footed locusts are on my property every night and almost every day.
To get a proper reading of human nature and reality, I think we’d have to first account for the sheer level of distortion created by both modern and ancient forms of propaganda, narrative control, and a perverse oligarchical system overseeing the whole thing. Whether the priests of Babylon or modern social engineers, both ancient and modern myths/narratives have the effect of influencing one’s own self image, and consequently how we think and operate, and view others in turn.
Unless a person is willing to take a beat, zoom out and see how that machine actually works, why wouldn’t they simply get sucked into playing out what the constant feedback loops are churning out?
I’d say much of humankind’s story is a battle between oligarchical systems and those more Promethean-minded folks who recognize how much work goes into suppressing the natural creative spark in people.
It’s there in every child, so no one can say they don’t see it. But the question is what happens as they’re exposed to very unnatural conditions? The modern Cybernetic feedback loops have a very real effect, as this article brilliantly demonstrates with the case of pop culture.
As a Aristotle once said, "show me the child and I'll show you the man."
Only a few Prometheans tend to escape the programming. But that’s not really new. However, we’re seeing quite a lot of people breaking out of narrative control right now, arguably more than in any other period in recent history, in my opinion.
In the words of Abraham Lincoln: “you can fool most of the people most of the time, but you can’t fool all the people all the time.”
I couldn't agree with this post more.
Kindness and understanding seems to be so lacking in our societies now and I will admit, it gets to a point where I will just give up, even momentarily, and just lash out at others because of the wilful ignorance or at times, the need of others to be edgy. The problem is, far too many people don't understand satire and sarcasm and people act on their assumptions.
The more the Malthusians are proven wrong - we've had a 20 percent global food surplus the last few years - the more they double down. The bigger question is why anyone pays them any heed?
It's actually SATANIC and the music industry has been taken over by a death cult. I'm reading right now about how those repetitive rhythms and the low vibrations (I'm not into science) are the ones used in brainwashing and torture and affect our brains. Also I'm reading how all those early and often strange deaths of artists (right back to Elvis Presley) can be seen in a different way.
Bullsh*t. You need to look (probably via a streaming service) and listen to the many musicians younger people love who don't fit into your "death cult" criteria. That would be at least 90% of the music available via streaming services.
I think young people are facing very painful realities and I wonder if maybe talking to some teens would clarify their POVs for you? Adolescence is so difficult. I rebelled via psychedelic rock - and adults were so terrified by it that they labeled it as evil. It wasn't.
We're in a very unsettled and unsettling time - and Elvis has nothing to do with it. Apart from sociopolitical factors, there's an epidemic of meth and street "fentanyl" abuse that's been going on (in the US, anyway) since the mid-late 90s. That's truly dark. It's stuff *humans* are doing, not supernatural entities, and most definitely not various conspiracy theories.
🙌😃 Thank you!
Jane, you’re spot on: I actually discuss in this archived podcast if we’re under a satanic attack: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/are-we-under-satanic-attack
But here’s a more recent article on how the Democratic Party actually has contributed to damaging society in this negative regard: https://unorthodoxy.substack.com/p/how-the-democrats-are-destroying
Guys, we are not under any satanic attack. You are under a satanic attack when you lose your temper, for example, or when you are tempted to cheat on your taxes. To do something that is against the nature of God, of whom you are a child. You know what I'm saying? That's actually what the Bible talks about as a spiritual struggle. It's about PERSONAL holiness, it's about policing yourself. The idea that there's some society wide satanic attack that you have to fight against is harmful and can actually cause you to do some unloving things and things that don't reflect well on God, whom you are meant to be representing:)
Nonsense.
Bookmarking this!
wow I’d never really thought about it like that before. fascinating information!
I was afraid of getting wiped out in a divorce, but I never tried to talk anyone else out of having kids.
People like to stop and stare at car crashes. Those that consider why this is learn something; those that do not walk like zombies stopping to occasionally gnaw at the pleasure of others.
The planet is a closed system. We can literally not leave it and survive. We're locked in here, with all it's beauty. Resources are scarce.
Maybe what has happened over the last few decades is the we abandoned the delusion of abundance and have adopted a more realistic understanding of our role in the universe.
The 1958-63 era of those Rock Hudson/Doris Day movies was also the era of atomic doom movies like Doctor Strangelove and On the Beach, as well as an endless string of monster movies like The Blob. And the early James Bond movies were thick with cynicism and nihilistic violence. I won’t disagree that the present moment is dark and grim, but there’s a lot more going on here than a simple duality.
The same with pop music of the 1930s: Gloomy Sunday, Brother Can You Spare a Dime, Ten Cents a Dance, etc.
Well, yeah. People were starving. See "They Shoot Horses, Don't They?," "Bonnie and Clyde," and so on.
Cory Panshin - you betcha! Geez - the Cold War, the terror of nuclear attacks by the "evil godless" Soviets! "Dr. Strangelove (Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love thr Bomb," "Hiroshima Mon Amour," Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, every US and British spy show you can name, the ,pamphlets given to people by the Civil Defense Agency on how to survive a nuclear holocaust, "duck and cover" drills (like today's drills in case of mass shootings), how Civil Rights movement protesters were treated, (going a bit further back) what was done to 14 y.o Emmett Till, the bombing of the 16th St. Baptist Church in Birmingham, AL + the 4 tween girls who died when the bomb went off...
There was sunny optimism living with profound emptiness and pessimism, not least for those who fought in all of the wars the US engaged in post-WWII. It was *not* an optimistic time.
Watergate, anyone? And now, school shootings? Cops with cuffs and nightsticks in elementary schools?
We're facing some of the worst crises our society has ever encountered. The polarization is like the runup to the Civil War. *That's* where the "dark" stuff (which isn't new, just becoming more mainstream) comes in.
There IS.
Yes, and the best screwball comedies were made in the 1930s and 1940s. Not exactly times of lightness and ease.
Cory - The Twilght Zone and Outer Limits were good social commentary. I think Rod Serling captured the Zeitgeist.
Also, re. movies, "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" is grim commentary on the atmosphere created by McCarthyism and books like The Organization Man.
I remember those days, and those movies and the music. In keeping with what Ted said about Bond, it tended to be 'camp'. Dr. Strangelove was satirical comedy. The Blob was tame and not very frightening compared to Freddy Kruger.
There is no point when it all changed. But I think we came out of WWII feeling like we were the good guys. We came out of Vietnam feeling like we were the bad guys. Neither assessment is entirely right. Hopefully, we've all had enough of kicking our own ass.
The early Bond films are very misogynistic.
Yes they are. That's a different topic.
A different discussion, but this aspect of the Bond films is all of a piece with the rest. Now, Sean Connery's statements about domestic violence *are* a different topic - though his attitudes were a part of him, and he brought them to his work, too.
Just my .02...
Oh come on leave the dead to rest
Very well said. Would like but Substack has a problem.
I think part of the reason for the dark turn in popular culture is the increase in wealth disparity. Many people feel powerless and perceive society as becoming worse, so a dark figure becomes more relatable than a playful character/ hero.
Also, we've become a more left brained society because of STEM. That has an impact on diminished playfulness.
We do need a change in psychology. If we have a more balanced right brain with left brain, and more playfulness, then we can have a change in art. If we want another Renaissance, we have to move away from self-loathing in culture and society.
Interesting comment about STEM. I don't have kids but as I understand they don't have recess from a very young age. We don't have play time for them and their testing testing testing no child left behind thing. I understand in some Scandinavian countries they don't have much structure to the school until a much later age. I think another comment about the wealth gap is informative. The pitchfork era may be coming and not fast enough!
I just can't seem to write or draw anymore. Most of my life, I've written about people escaping dystopian societies, and weirdo outsiders fighting to maintain their independence from them. It's become harder and harder to foster those dreams... I used to believe that for all the world's problems, hey, you could just run away and become an artist in some run-down but vibrant bohemian village. But where are all the adventures? Where are the sexy ghettos? Where are all those cool interesting people I've been dying to meet all my life? There's no fiction in fiction. The people I wanted to get away from called my stories escapism - but it was just the opposite while hope was something real.
But THEY now own the vibrant bohemian villages,and monetized them. The perfect example is in the city I live,all my life,Bristol in the UK. An area called Stokes Croft has been bought up,cleaned up,stripped off all atmosphere and made into city apartments designed to appeal to those folks who've read in the latest Lonely Planet Guide that this neighbourhood is the second coolest on the planet! But now all the artists,creatives, the drunks and deadbeats have moved down the road so that "edginess" you're paying for has been tidied away even bougie shops starting to appear. But,for old times sake,just a few panhandlers still knocking around.
Ah don’t tell me that 😆 I’m moving to Bristol next week!
Not cause I read about it in Lonely Planet though…
You'll love it here.
thanks Jane!
"Sexy ghettos"?!!
Think "gay quarter," or "red light district." Places that have historically mixed social marginalization with sexual liberality, mixed poverty with bustling entrepreneurialism, and mixed danger with a community standing together in common cause.
Today, most such places have become a sort of rainbow flag DIsneyland - a place for middle class mothers to shop for lingerie that might include PVC, dance clubs for college students to prove they're down with the queers. and bookstores for nerds to grab an old-time slash-fic zine. Gentrification has run it's course to its absurd conclusion. Perhaps a friendly neighborhood cop who actually enjoyed the banal sensitivity training will greet you with a smile, glad for the easy job of community outreach - he's there to deliver platitudes like, "there's a lot of work to be done" when minorities explain they're less afraid of the dead-beats and drug addicts than they are the cops.
Sure, sexual promiscuity and it's attendant drama still exist, but thanks to social media it leans more and more onto the latter, especially the gossip and public accusations. There's less of the good old-fashioned licentiousness. There aren't affordable slums ripe for underground communities to take refuge in, because the housing crisis has already pushed the straights (in all sense of the word) into theme. Underground communities are forced, like everyone else, to take the first drab and dreary high-rise apartment they can afford or couch-surf into, far, far distance from any sort of thriving street-level action with their own people. They have to be stingy about bus fair, and can't afford the cafe. When they're desperate, they can make the pilgrimage to gay Disneyland to have sex in a night-club bathroom without ever making a friend along the way, but mostly, it's just Grindr. Sex worker's too, might go three to an apartment and invite in clients they met on an app, with the girls in the other room listening in, and maybe some guy they pay to intervene in case of a serious problem.
There's a long history of sexy ghettos because ghetto's of all sorts stand outside the influence and even practicality of bourgeoise social values.
Limne - no.
Enjoy your sexless ghetto then.
Have you read Rivera Sun? Her Ari Ara and Dandelion Insurrection series are fun, moving and instructive. They are cheering me up and motivating me.
You're gonna be the pretty one any second now.
I've always been amongst the prettiest monsters.
Yes apparently this is true. I just love your take as you speak for me in words I don't have. And that's mad rare.
I remember thinking about this a few years back when I was watching Daniel Craig as James Bond, being horribly tortured. I was thinking, what happened to Bond in a tuxedo 🤵♂️ bantering in the casino in Monte Carlo??
There was an essay on Bond a few years back and how his working life as a spy paralleled the working life of so many back then. Consider the life of a salesman. The salesman gets a company car, probably a Ford Falcon. Bond had an Aston-Martin with machine guns. The salesman has an expense account to treat clients at lunch counters. Bond has an expense account for five star restaurants. Bond is living the luxe life, but it is relatable. His employer watches out for him if only because he is an asset.
For a more modern take, look at Jason Bourne. Bourne can't trust his employer. His job has been outsourced to foreigners who charge less and ask fewer questions. Bourne doesn't have a pension. He has a Swiss bank account he hopes he has hidden from his employer. Bourne relies on his own education and skills - he can hotwire a car, handle himself in a fight, duck a surveillance tail - but he had to develop those skills on his own nickel.
Bourne's vision is much darker than Bond's, but so is life for so many of us.
https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2015/09/20/bourne-aesthetic/
The original Bond was intensely camp. Camp, as a style, has been on a decline at least since the 1990s.
Not in some ways. Like all of the disposable women.
Read the books. James Bond was never a lighthearted carefree soul. He built a hard drinking fast life persona around himself as he knew he would die before he turned 36. Until Daniel Craig came along the Bond persona in the movies is a caricature of the Bond in the books. This, of course, doesn't negate your point - or Goioa's point - as the movies were much more broadly influential than the books.
In that same movie, Bond WAS in a casino, gambling (and winning), whilst wearing a tuxedo.
Just yesterday I heard someone say that the Band franchise people Barbara Broccoli and her colleagues are being very slow in casting the new Bond. Slower than ever before it seems. I don't personally care but it occurred to me that Bond,James Bond.,DIED in the last film . He pegged out. It was like FINIS. I think the now (NOW) holders of our popular culture are using this to SAY SOMETHING. And it's not a very nice something. It's akin to "give up hope all ye who enter here". James Bond is not coming back,even as Jane Bond,even as Brutha Bond. He's dead. There is no RESSURECTION. Get It. No resurrection. It's a SATANIC MESSAGE. And what does it say about ME that I get it. But to be fair I have only just noticed. Maybe it's a GOOD THING I've noticed. The pop songs of the 197Os are mostly very affirmative it must have been in the late 1970s to early 1980s when popular culture began to get properly infiltrated and taken control of by the dark forces. In fact the more one thinks about various artists the more you question the accepted narrative.
If one wanted to focus just on the sociopathic trend I would throw out the dangerous driver conundrum:
When maniac drivers go lurching at deadly speeds from lane to lane (and shoulder) of the freeway, snapping off lane changes like gunshots and terrifying the rest of us, remember that those drivers would all be dead were it not for the rest of us driving steady and straight. The psychodrivers are utterly dependent on us not doing anything unexpected. They exist only because we are holding up our end of the "all in this together" bargain.
I could argue that the rational, cool and calm among us are the only thing that has kept humanity from dying out millenia ago, but you get the point. Some of us will keep on keeping on, and even the psycho will benefit from that.
The price we pay...
Yes, that's a good point. For every "bad actor," you need some (large) number of "good actors." Otherwise, society simply breaks down.
I think art is the most appropriate place for a society to express and examine negativity and darkness. I think making art of this kind is actually the most PLAYFUL way to interact with these sorts of thoughts, feelings and characters. They are no longer in the shadows because we are bringing them into the light of the silver screen. We are portraying these characters in greater depth, giving them more humanity. Joker is a prime example and played by one of our greatest living actors. Wednesday Addams in the Netflix show Wednesday is also getting portrayed in greater depth than ever before. Eminem is an example in music. It’s more honest to portray 007 as a sociopath. You have to be on that spectrum to do that job. I think all this is our society’s way of beginning to better understand sociopathy and psychopathy so we can begin to deal with it and integrate it in a positive way. I see this trend as “shadow work.” We’re turning “monsters” into humans to better understand them and examine ourselves to see if we find any parts of us reflected. From what I’ve read, psychopaths are more likely to become CEOs and politicians. We need to begin to integrate these pathologies and tendencies better than we are. I think art is part of that process.
I see nothing playful at all about the trend. I started noticing it when the bad-guys-are-good-guys thing first took root, with shows like the Sopranos and Breaking Bad and countless others. Your point is true as far as it goes, and I agree that a certain amount of it can be healing and humanizing, but ultimately a story should embody a certain universality. Stories that humanize psychopathy can of course portray them as human and embue some empathy, but ultimately there needs to be a final note of “… but this isn’t a good way to be”, whereas what I see (or used to, until I mostly gave up on modern pop culture), “…. And aren’t we all like that? Let’s embrace it!”
A healthy culture needs both - the bad asses, psychopaths and boundary breakers AND the fuddy duddies, squares and killjoys.
They called them antiheroes in the 1960s, so it's older than that.
Yes,because we did not defeat the Nazi ideology in 1945 when we ended the War in Europe. That's the mistake we are all encouraged by the media to make. The two don't ally. The Nazi ideology scuttled off to hide in a dark place. That dark place was Academia. The Satanic Mills that William Blake references in Jerusalem,yes,relating them to the dark monstrous factories then cropping up all over England,factories of oppression with Blood in the Machine. It took 15 years but in the early 1960s the Nazi ideology was re-released and presented to the world in a new guide,a disguise of choice and freedom.
You can't really defeat an ideology. The best you can do is render it less popular and less powerful, even better irrelevant. The Nazi ideology has been around for centuries, though it took its more modern, more secular form in the 19th century. It has never been popular in academia, and especially not since World War II. If it hid anywhere, it hid in evangelical churches. If you compare their doctrine and politics over the years, they have moved increasingly towards the Nazi philosophy and program since the war, accelerating in the 1970s.
I know you are trying to say that the very people Nazis loathed, exiled and murdered are now the Nazis for espousing values antithetical to those of the actual Nazis. It's a popular rhetorical ruse. Unfortunately, it isn't very realistic or effective. The Nazis wrote everything down. They made sure that everyone knew what they were and what they did. The Nazis were never, ever about choice and freedom save in its violent suppression.
Another place besides Academia is the collective unconscious.
Kaleberg - yes. Like Lord Byron and the Beats.
Hi Jim. I appreciate this well articulated response. I’ve never seen Sopranos and have had enough of what little mafia themed things I have seen. I did watch Breaking Bad. I don’t consider this trend to be “bad-guys-are-good-guys,” but rather, bad guys aren’t one-dimensional and hardly anything is ever pure good or evil, black and white etc. I don’t celebrate Walter White from Breaking Bad. Though, I thought it was well-written. I’m a proponent of balance and agree a healthy society also needs main characters who are more on the positive end of the spectrum while still being human and multi-dimensional.
It's hard not to think of Joan Didion's comment, “What makes Iago evil? Some people ask. I never ask.” It's probably just me, but when there's a good front story, I never feel a need for a back story.
Everything Joan Didion wrote... like Slouching Toward Bethlehem. (Yeats' "Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, mere anarchy is loosed upon the world," etc.)
I'm not sure about the Sopranos, but Breaking Bad is not a "bad guys are good" story by any stretch of the imagination. (Walter White is not good, and from what it sounded like in the last episode, he wasn't even doing bad for the sake of a good end, but just his own desires)
I like your analysis David - I think you're on to something. I hope humanity can process our shadow work before it's too late!
I think you are wrong and you have unknowingly and unthinkingly taken on board the SATANIC mindset. It's one thing to explore the nature of evil but it's another thing to promote the enjoyment of it.
Hi Jane. Enjoyment would not describe how I personally feel watching these darker themes and characters. I’m more seeking to understand. I suppose it’s up to the viewer what they choose to get from it. I think the positive opportunity with these things is to learn and gain greater insight and even empathy for humanity.
I think the positive opportunity is great in concept. Problem with that is that vice sells, and the positive spin is unnecessary to such a lucrative enterprise. What you suggest sounds akin to putting broccoli on a bacon cheeseburger to make it healthy.
Also, there odd a very fine line between showing empathy for a corrupted character and explained their behaviors away. “Ah well, we’re all like that aren’t we?” Or “See how society/parenting/circumstance caused this behavior? They are actually a victim”.
Regarding Breaking Bad, I hold to my opinion. Sure he suffers, but how many of us were really rooting for Walter white to get caught all along? I submit very few. Additionally, for all its attention to detail and nuance and character, the show utterly ignored the ruined lives of the anonymous end users Walter’s drugs were affecting. Because doing so would shift our empathy away from Walter.
Psychology is one thing, but we need a moral dimension too, and perhaps especially, which is why Crime and Punishment is a better work of fiction than The Sopranos or Breaking Bad.
We could do with a few more jokes, though. Laughter is a healer too.
Thank you. So very well said. I feel the same way about this issue. This is a fascinating article, yet does anyone want those happy sunny movies back a.k.a. Doris Day and Rock Hudson? I think of this era - the 50ies and early 60ies also as an era of concealment and cover-up in people’s personal lives, where many people could not live as their true selves. See Rock Hudson, being in the closet making these films. And also an era, where many problems people are having psychologically TODAY stem from. At that time, pop culture reflected back a shiny happy prosperous future and upheld picture perfect standards of how your life was supposed to look like and yet so many people’s realities weren’t acknowledged and recognized. I think it’s also true, that society might be more on its way to acknowledge the issues at play in these dark movies. Maybe we need to get through this to really see ourselves before it can get better.
David Campbell - about Bond... John Le Carre's novels portrayed the truth of what espionage is really like, including the kinds of people who were recruited. Sociopaths, etc. "The Americans" was another great representation of that world, albeit originally drawn from a post-Soviet spy operation in the DC area. The writers had the world of espionsge and that of terrorism overlap from time to time. The Soviet spies are ruthless, yet there are other sides to them. That dimension makes the show extremely compelling.
If the culture is getting gloomier, might it not be because commercialism has EATEN culture, and because the number one premise of sales is to create DISSATISFACTION? Salesmen invent the need the product satisfies.
Perhaps unhappiness and gloom and dystopian nightmares dominate culture, I’m suggesting, because that makes consumers generally hungry for some fix. It’s the psychic condition best suited to a population of consumers, a mindset most advantageous to business, which is, after all, still the business of America.
Look at your own substack for Christ’s sake! It’s more than 90 percent built on a PROBLEM that the honest broker is here to identify, diagnose, and help solve. It’s why your artistic-type readers come back again and again: to bemoan the state of the culture together and get some clarity as to the cause of their own dissatisfaction.
The question is: how much is your own work posited on the gloom you identify, and how much is that sense of gloom baked into our commercial culture’s monetization of everything?
It's eaten *a part of* culture.
Example: so many gifted musicians and composers issue their own music now. It's definitely available, and purchaseable - but it requires some time and effort spent looking for it.
Check out Bandcamp and similar sites for musicians who are doing a lot of beautiful, challenging work, in all genres. You all might be in for some very pleasant suprises, in this time when our country is basically dancing on the edge of an active volcanic caldera.
P.S. Years ago, I was a music journalist. I didn't cover anything that was even remotely mainstream, yet I found so much good music in doing so. I still spend time hunting for the kinds of music that I love + new music I need to give a chance to. There are plenty of resources available, if we avail ourselves of them. Do enough searches and the dreaded algorithms start showing us (well, me) something entirely different. Though honestly, a lot of this requires a willingness to listen to lyrics in many other languages + a desire to explore musical cultures that aren't even remotely North American. We can look South, look East ( or West, on the Left Coast), even to non-Anglophone Europe.
You've got it in one. Nailed it. As I heard a Tory MP say on radio "Social unrest creates investment opportunities".
Part of the equation is surely all the doomsday scaremongering about all-things climate / environment related. The activist tendencies of the mainstream media (who justify scare tactics in order to prompt action) is essentially the present-day version of trying to promote good behaviour by threatening people with hellfire. The problem is that, by making people depressed, it makes them less likely to be effective actors, not more.
I’m certainly not denying our capacity to hurt ourselves, to hurt others, and to harm creation, in often serious ways. In the Christian worldview this was simply known as our fallen condition. Ironically, as we collectively discarded the concept of Original Sin as being hopelessly negative and harmful, we have become far more self-loathing and indeed scrupulous than ever.
A cheery, shallow positivity about the human creature is not the answer to the current self-loathing. This world *is* passing away. Our individual lives are short, and our collective span on this globe is likewise comparatively short in the grand scheme of things. But goodness lasts. Faith, hope and love will endure beyond this world. Nothing good in this life is ever done in vain. No love is ever wasted. We are broken, but capable of forgiveness.
The facts have a stubborn way of asserting themselves. Did you see the hurricane that just hit North Carolina?!
I don't think it's scaremongering to understand that human behavior has caused mass extinction and we're on our way to mass extinguishing ourselves. That doesn't make me unhappy at all! Not the fact of that itself but I can maintain happiness in the face of challenges. Not sure why everyone can't do the same!
That hurricane is just the latest extreme weather even whipped up by Bill Gates tame scientists,he has a stable of them,they use 5G and blocks of electricity to control the weather.
I truly hope this comment was meant as satire.
Given your honorific and dress sense, I cannot fathom the hypocrisy of your post given your membership of one of history’s biggest doomsday cults. Unlike your chosen dogma, climate science is arrived at from a position of reason rather than faith. What is depressing: people clinging to the faith that everything will be fine, rather than responding to known fact and conserving the only home we have. My atheism doesn’t provide me with the deluded comfort of a plan b (heaven apparently) for when we mess up the actual world we live on. Forgiveness in the face of future generations’ futures being compromised…not from me!
From someone who would claim to have an imaginary friend, calling me juvenile and childlike is a bit silly don’t you think. I don’t _need_ to have faith in climate science, because it is based on theories that have yet to be disproven via the scientific method. Note the nuance there if your mind can expand that far. Science is the antithesis of dogma.
It's not scaremongering if it actually does pose a mortal danger to human civilization as we know it.
Just to clarify, I’m not denying the seriousness of various environmental concerns (as I alluded to in my second paragraph), but I have heard first-hand from a few journalists the tendency to disproportionately emphasise “bad news” stories and ignore “good news” stories regarding climate, etc. out of a desire to encourage action. Sorry also for slipping into sermon mode at the end (occupational hazard!).
Let us all be more goofy, affable, and literate in face-to-face interactions. It's my prayer for the day.
Yesterday my wife and I started talking about Missouri executing Marcelus Williams three days ago, despite evidence he didn't do it, prosecutors and the victim's family against his execution, etc...and that led us on to a couple of hours of us - at least in the West - as a species of technologically determined robots who are programmed to just follow orders. Even if it goes against common sense. Even if we KNOW it's insane. I mean, what can lil ol' me do about anything?
It was a spirited conversation. We agree on almost everything, so we were improvising complementary rants on the other's prior riffs. Perhaps you've had similar experiences.
Indulge me here on a brief tangent?:
I can't get away from...I'm haunted by...the phrase "get a life." It had apparently been used in the early 1980s, but blew up around the time of the SNL bit - written, IIRC, by Robert Smigel - in which Trekkies at a convention bombarded William Shatner with questions of Star Trek minutiae before he explodes with "Get a life!" It was funny, but I think people heavily into Star Trek like those folks (I have never understood the phenomenon: the show was about the militarization of space, etc)...these Trekkies did have a life. If only everyone got obsessive about one cultural/arty thing they love and kept pursuing it down whatever path it took them. 'Cuz to get obsessive about something from art/creative culture that sparks yer fancy: requires attention.
Zen student: Zen master, what is Zen?
Zen master: ATTENTION!
By the time of, oh, let's say around November of 2016, I realized "getting a life" was apparently beyond the grasp of most people. This felt fascinating but oh-so-bleak to me. Why is it so difficult to "get a life"?
We're all reading this online, but I submit, largely for all the reasons Ted Gioia has brought up in post after post: the algorithms and psychological knowledge that keeps people glued to the infinitude of CRAP that makes them miserable - while they think it's the people they just read about on their gadget that are making them miserable - need to be IGNORED. Log the eff off. As an exercise, spend no more than 30 minutes online for a week and see if your life was improved during the past 7 days. Just a thought.
We get away from this insanity by not participating in it. My gawd: use your damned library card. Make a list of 5 things that interest you and you want to know more about, and go get some dead-tree books and sit quietly, by yourself, eyes moving left-to-right across the page, decoding 26 letters and some punctuation that purport to be able to "say" any possible thought. And take notes. Reflect on what you've read. Notice your body cells seem to have slowed down. Note that new questions have come up and you NEED to pursue those ones, too. Talk or write to other humans you know about your reading. Pay attention to how you feel having read in books rather than on a screen.
You say: well, reading online and reading books: wass the diff? It turns out there's a huge difference. And depth and demands of attentional space is only the tip of the iceberg. There's mounting data on this (online! oy vey!) but you implicitly know reading BOOKS is superior to reading online, right? Sometimes the right hemisphere of your brain just knows this kinda stuff, and indeed it was confirmed that time you read in the WA Po about what Trump just said, then later read an Emily Dickinson poem. And you noted the differences in quality of experience.
Wife and I got to the point of Einstein and Oppenheimer, et.al creating a weapon that could end all humanity. Both of them were haunted by the (fascist) circumstances that led them to use their knowledge of physics in that way. And then: just because we humans CAN invent certain things, it doesn't mean that we must continue to invent these things and use them. "Hey, check it out: mustard gas! Those who are living under a different language and nationality and political system are gonna have to match us here! We'll teach them about...ideology?"
We're now inventing things and assuming we must use them. Like we're robots. Like the Missouri officials who, despite all reason, still murdered Marcelus Williams. A stone-age blood sacrifice in our "Enlightened" time. Hey, my hands were tied. I had no choice but to murder an innocent man. You understand the rules, don't ya? I am blameless.
Yea. We all are. (cough)
I assume the people who read Ted Gioia have lives. Rich ones. You're never bored. I'm never bored. If you're bored, you're BORING, as some counterculture figures from the 1960s told us. The question is: how do we turn on others so they can "get a life"? Any and all suggestions are welcome and just might save humanity. Thanks!
May Goddess help us.
So enjoyed your post. I'm doing what you say,but oops,yes I'm.online right now! I've long thought that old put down was facile. But I get why Capt Bill might have exploded with it! I'm increasingly asking myself why this "need to be seen". We all have ego and desire to be SIGNIFICANT but too often we mistake that aim as a wish for Fame,Money,Power and the media controllers have long cultivated out inborn.ego.desire to those false ends. Im as guilty as anyone. But now I'm more seeing the virtue of the ancient idea of not being seen,of the obscure life.
Jane: thanks for your thoughtful reply. I'm online NOW! "D'oh!", to quote a famous TV dad. I wonder how much of our cultural gloom has to do with being online all the live-long day. I remember very gloomy, depressed people who sat around and watched TV all day before the Internet.
I'll type fast as I know you like to read fast (groan), so here goes:
Still: it seems we must get a life for ourselves. This seems to do with self-direction. We must (or so it seems to me) have those things we can cultivate, and not just Voltairean gardens. I have the romantic notion that they come from something divine and unique within ourselves. I learned to love reading, research, writing, and playing guitar as a teenager. This litany is not remarkable; it's what we DO with those skills. I thought everyone had such things as these. They give me great joy, are "free", are limitless, and seemingly available to everyone else. But it's abundantly clear most people don't have this. They are angry that others seem happy while they're not, and so are out for revenge or just the "lulz". <----do people still type that? I don't know.
How to get a life? I have a strong hunch that some sort of overall bodily pleasure turn-on experience - not just sex, although that could open a window - allows us a profound escape hatch from the Rat Race (Ted Gioia has discussed the work of John B. Calhoun in this regard). There seem to be certain embodied states we can get into in which we feel overwhelmingly to be okay with what others do as long as they're not hurting anyone else. (I once meditated so much I loved Dick Cheney, an extreme example, admittedly.) We then enjoy the vast array of ways of being in the world. Many of you have lives and skills I don't have and I know now to just LOVE and admire that you have your things, which are a huge part of having a life or maybe it's that life itself. Because you are a part of me, as I see it. I want everyone reading this to flourish. Of course! That sounds trite, but in this nasty gloomy social landscape, it needs to be said.
Apart from the profound feeling of pleasure and embodiment, we still need to get a life, but that feeling of being comfortable in our own skin seems to allow us to let others do their thing, which we don't need to do ourselves. We can find our own things, enjoy our own uniqueness and cultivate it, get the sense of joy from BUILDING ourselves - Nietzschean self-creation? - and you know, pay enough attention to the social and political world to be informed but not blame some other group because we're so damned miserable. Etc. I've always ended up voting for who I think will be the least cruel, because that's been the state of American politics since I've been a voter (first voted in 1980). If there's really not much I can do to lessen suffering, I must work, pay the bills, and continue with those things that give me pleasure: reading, writing, old films, conversation, bicycle riding, gardening, and a few other simple things. You'll have your items like these. These items might sound trite and boring, but they give me great pleasure and I will do them until I cannot due to physical limitations.
And lest anyone think, Jeez listen to this old dude: he's prolly rich. Naw. I don't have money. Never have. I'm really bad at making a lot of money, but I really don't care! (<---crikey: this guy is a Bad Murrkin! What about the economy? What about GDP? Pfffffft!)
I remember when Csikszentmihalyi published his book Flow:The Psychology of Optimal Experience, I thought, "this is what I've been thinking for a long time now!" If you find you're engaged in some activity in which you don't even notice "time" passing, and it's something you can get better at all the time, your only competition being against yourself, you're probably on to something really good. Never stop!
Some commenters here on this post by Ted have pointed to massive inequality, and they're right. But what do we do about it? I'd say: try to diagnose the problem. What led to this? What can be done? Why hasn't more been done? Why are there billionaires? What led people to think it's actually legitimate to have a billion dollars? Develop a nuanced, robust hypothesis/theory. This theory will improve all the time, using your library card. It's not "fun" but maybe it's a strong way to inform our overall civic thinking? To what extent and in what ways are we responsible to others in our community. How wide do we extend our own ideas of community? Etc...
The late, very great David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs also informs a lot of why people would be gloomy and have their dire dark violent feelings reflected back at them in popular culture, a truly vicious circle that Ted Gioia addressed in this piece, above.
Jane Baker's ideas about "ego" seem profound to me. The body-pleasure I'm-okay-in-my-skin thing I wrote about above seems to lessen ego a lot. I think we do need a healthy sense of "self" but that ego, if we don't develop introspection (via "getting a life"?), can get going like one of those tumors you read about in medical books: the "size of a grapefruit", etc. Imagine getting so good at making truckloads of money that you're a multimillionaire, but it's never quite enough. Some other guy has $100 million while you only have $10 million. My gawd what a hit to the Ego! (And how profoundly it misses the entire point of living a decent human life.)
I see my own ego as being like an albatross around my neck. It's a fiction. The ego is. Yet it's also a lot like the herpes simplex virus: once ya got it, it's always there and pops back into play at the worst moments, like a cold sore conspicuous on your lip when you're tryna flirt with someone. That's the ego. Oy! In an all-too-real way, we're fancy chimps wired for status hierarchy, but we also have these huge frontal lobes that can help us bootstrap our way out of the primate status games. We HAVE to laff at ourselves!
Okay, now I'm logging out and going back to re-reading Poe's "The Gold Bug" found in a fat, handsome Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe that I got used for $2 once. The world is not that bad!
Amen! (Atheistly) Nice writing, by the way. If you don't mind I'm going to edit it down to a short couple of paragraphs and print it out and remind myself to put down the damn phone! There's so much great material online that's tough to resist so many great writers that it wouldn't be able to read in paper print. I think I'm going to need more than 30 minutes a week. That might be a good detox but an hour a day might be more appropriate considering the wealth of information available online that's not available in print. Thanks again, take care
Look at the recent surge in murder docs flooding platforms. How is someone’s murder our go to entertainment?
Great question. Our entertainment now is seriously slanted toward watching people killing people. Nothing healthy can come of that that I can see.
That's always been the case, no? Jack the Ripper was one of the biggest stories in 19th century England. Or you could back much further, to gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome.
Yeah, you're right. It just seems more overwhelming to my eyes now. Maybe it's the algos following me.
I started working in bookstores back in 1981. "True crime" has *always* sold.
See In Cold Blood. Also Victorian and Edwardian- era tabloids from the UK that can be read online, plus the illustrations in those tabloids.
The Dance of Death pervades much Western European art post-Black Death. At least it's honest about our mortality. Macabre, yes - but very similar to the Mexican imagery surrounding the Day of the Dead, which is a *positive* holiday. They see our mortality and laugh at it while eating sugar skulls. They take time to remember friends and family who've passed - in a very uplifting way. I prefer all of that to what most Americans do around that time, though there are still people who emphasize positive things during Halloween. And it has candy! :)
Especially now we can watch Genocide live
Speaking as someone from a country ravaged by the British empire, I love love love seeing James Bond disappear up his own arsehole and have less fun. May the gummy old coot crawl inside a vodka bottle and never come out again.
You can't build an interesting culture on vindictive shaudenfreud without us all getting the acid burns. This is where art and God comes in and entertainment is meaningless to flaccid.
Bit of a stretch to consider fantasy assassin for the British crown James Bond interesting culture but you do you. Plus, my country has a long and colourful history of slagging off British invaders in song, verse and story so you'd probably have to understand us more to understand how meaningless and sanctimonious the comment you made is.
I wrote a couple of posts about a pop culture phenomenon I call the Dead-Eyed Sociopath, affectionately known as Des, where I reflect on the sociological meaning of this increasing obsession with implacable killers. I do not think it is a healthy sign.
Tim Dillon had a great rant a few episodes ago, “Dead Eyed Monsters.” It was a comedic rant about what society has done to its kids. Brilliant, hilarious, and darkly true all at the same time.
More satire like this is probably in order, to get people to distance themselves and laugh at their own folly, rather than playing it out to the very end.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2cq-rTDkSZ8&pp=ygUdRGVhZC13eWVkIG1vbnN0ZXJzIHRpbSBkaWxsb24%3D
No. I don't think so. We had satire in the 1960s. I'm in the UK. In the 1960s a generation of clever young men who got to Oxford or Cambridge universities thanks to the 1944 Butler Education Act that opened up access to higher education to the "working class' (it enabled The Beatles too)these witty and funny men,almost all men,savagely slashed down wealthy and privilege. They introduced a new society based on talent and merit. Never again would our country be ruled by the Hooray Henry's of the Old School. Now,our political administration and our mainstream media are all people who've been to exclusive private schools and have "connections". All the radio hosts on the big talk networks have been to fee paying schools. The BBC don't employ anyone as a presenter unless they have a degree (of some sort). Back in Weimar Germany the savage and telling satire of the Nazis was funny and popular - and changed NOTHING.
It's a problem when satire has to race to catch up with reality.
I, for one, don't miss the 1990s and 2000s-era obsession with serial killers. For a while, it felt like every other movie was about serial killers.
We do have the new phenomenon of regular mass shootings. Thankfully, that hasn't spawned any new genres (so far).
ITS SATANIC.
"But, of course, these same algorithms (and the organizations that control them) can also help turn the tide....But what if the corporate leaders who let these genies out of the bottle fail to take action? In that case, we may need to force their hands. There are ways for doing that, too."
I live in san francisco, ground zero for the tech culture's assault on humanity life art freedom and culture. The artists, all thinkers doers and humans, will have to defy the lanes and tracks we've been relegated to in order to defy the Nothingness and the artists and thinkers will have to lead the way out out of this. The ones in charge don't have the imagination or humility to see another way. They will concede nothing at their own peril, and our own peril.
Everyone's too embarrassed and afraid to be called out and exiled. It's a real thing.
I know some visual artists from the Bay Area. None of them have anything to do with techbros. Their work is very good - and I daresay, uplifting, though sometimes (as in 2020, facing the C19 catastrophe) a bit dark... but always returning to the light, metaphorically.
None of these people are Names. Very few ever become, or want to become, famous. Folks can look around on the internet for such work, and if they're fortunate enough to live in an area with an active gallery scene, they can see such work in person. But it does require some work from us. Seems like a better way to use our energy (physical and psychological) than bemoaning the state of popular culture - as presented by megacorps, not by human beings whom we can meet and talk with, you know?
you know the most interesting types of artists.
somehow we have to make our own culture, meet in the real... but we're back to land and gentrification and lack of money and then we're wandering without a homeland like the Jews and you GET IT. how to make a culture on the run?
yo no se.
With their sarky cleverness the misery merchants can make positivity wishers feel and LOOK stupid. So people cringe away.
Ted. Go see Megalopolis. It’ll do your heart good and might even inspire you
People are confused by goodness but they understand pain very well. When it comes to suspension of disbelief, they can follow evil anywhere (even into hell with Dante) but have no faith in the Paradiso. This is not a new problem. Art is dumber now because people are dumber about art. Even smart people think the internet or an audiobook can somehow substitute for reading.