A striking phenomenon increasingly on display as the generation raised by Nickelodeon turns 40 is the redirection of man’s natural religious impulse to pop culture artifacts. A while back, I termed those who make idols of action figures, comics, and video games the Pop Cult.
The reason Generation Y is especially susceptible to recruitment by the Pop Cult is their upbringing in materialist consumerist households defined by transactional relationships. They may have gone to parochial schools as kids or to church services on Sunday. But their parents’ self-absorption, all too often manifested in divorce, scandalized them away from the God who made them and who alone can make them happy.
As a result, many Ys are spiritual nomads, left to wander the alien landscape that replaced the world they were raised to survive in. They were never taught the self-mastery or courage needed to fully engage with Clown World, so they cling to scraps of flotsam from the shipwreck of Cultural Ground Zero.
That’s not to mock or belittle Gen Y. Remember that they are the Mugged by Reality generation, raised in gilded pleasure domes only to be cast out of paradise into Purgatory without the tools to adapt.
If you think that’s an exaggeration, consider that more than two close Gen Y friends recently gave me almost identical accounts of their rude coming-of-age. In both cases, their transaction-minded Boomer parents kicked them out of the house at 18. Both lived in vermin-infested flophouses which required them to walk for miles to dead-end fast food jobs to pay rent. They endured that loathsome existence for years.
Today, both are successful, with families of their own. Their parents pat themselves on the back and say, “See? The school of hard knocks did you good!”
Both of my friends disagree. What the school of hard knocks did was nearly destroy their ability to trust anyone–including God. In reality, they credit the friends who banded together to lend them a hand when their own flesh and blood turned their backs.
Not all Ys found their way back to healthy relationships and a place in society. Not all found their way back to God.
If you want a perfect case study in what happens when a member of Gen Y is utterly consumed by the Pop Cult, watch the first three minutes of this video:
For the video-averse, here is a partial transcript:
Shooters weren’t just part of that era; they were that era. Watching Big Trouble in Little China on my living room floor on VHS, then popping in Life Force on the NES and playing it into the night, that was the 80s.
The video starts innocently, if a bit hyperbolically, enough. Only a plain mush-eating stick in the mud would deny that those products made for good fun and better times.
Shooters were part of the culture of the era. The peak of their popularity intertwined with our most cherished memories of a time we’ll never forget. There is no separating Gradius from Ghostbusters, Thunder Force from Thundercats, Soldier Blade from Spawn. It was all one experience.
Yes, those IPs were a lot of fun. Note, however, the gradual onset of wild-eyed snake-handling fervor of the kind Hollywood loves to caricature Christians with.
When Ripley yelled “Get away from her, you [bitch]!” we laughed and cheered. When Optimus Prime gave his life, we cried. Heck, I still do.
If you listen closely, you will hear a young boy crying out from the man he never wanted to become. He pleads for a solid rock to cling to in the tempest of pop ephemera that is his life.
And know that you live in a country where Ellen Ripley and Optimus Prime played foster mother and father to a lost generation. Now you understand everything.
The best wrestling rivalries, the weirdest sitcoms, the greatest cartoons and anime, legendary comic arcs, Dungeons and Dragons in the corner of every schoolyard, and yes, a golden generation of gaming. We were there for the very first Super Mario, Zelda, and Metroid, the first Castlevania, Contra, and of course, Ninja Gaiden, the first Gradius R-Type and Thunder Force.
Behold the litany of the Pop Cult saints!
Something grasping and desperate lies beneath the religious zeal on display above. It is the thirst of the addict, forever seeking his next fix and forever needing to consume more and more to get it.
An entire video game genre that references shooting up. This poor heathen’s channel couldn’t be more aptly named.
Do not despise him. Instead, take warning from the spiritual void of his life and offer prayers for his–and your–conversion.
Why people need to leave dead franchises
When people used to say and do these things back in the ’00s we used to chuckle and nod along. The ’80s and ’90s were good times, indeed. Much better than modern times.
Unfortunately, what was once lighthearted fun slowly warped into the substitute religion it is today. Where they were once winks and funny jokes is now frothing devotion to a dead era and a hope in times that are long gone. The future is dead and the present hates them. Where else are they to go?
There’s no point being mad at these people. This is really all they have left. Short of divine intervention or a massive societal shift, they’ll be trapped here until they die. It’s honestly just sad.
In my earlier treatment of the Pop Cult, I noted that unlike the Death Cult, the former lacks a coherent eschatology.
That SHMUP video may be evidence of an emerging Pop eschatology. “If we unquestioningly consoom product and get excited for next products, the holy brands will return in glory and usher us into a VR paradise!”
If that kind of promissory idealism takes hold, we will see headlines of cops raiding a compound filled with emaciated corpses in VR gear.
That sounds like a Philip K. Dick story. I’d write it…but I’m not sure I want to
I’d be surprised if it hadn’t been done already. Even *Adventure Time* featured it, and that’s not a series known for its startling ingenuity.
As if on cue, Facebook has announced a name change, and an ambition to make VR a way of life, because they’re trying to make “Ready Player One” happen, or something.
VR is their last attempt to escape reality. When it fails again, they are sure to try over and over.
JD
Yeah but in the meantime, we have put up with these neurodiverse who can’t properly process reality. Their flattening of the messiness, nuance and give and take with social communication bores me to death. So, we really need to force the nerds/geeks to stay in their lanes once again and let regular people handle reality.
xavier
@Xavier,
As a professional geek – I teach network security – I should object, but I can’t. As an occasionally socially awkward nerd, I should object, but I can’t. ‘Neurodiverse’ is just a politically correct way of saying, ‘my brain doesn’t work like most people’s.’ Compassion toward such folks requires that we value them as people while we name their dysfunctions as such, and help them heal or cope as well as possible. Justice toward society requires that we mitigate the impacts of their infirmity on others who don’t share it. In short, I agree. Nerds and geeks who can’t manage their own lives should not expect to manage anyone else’s either. This includes K Street policy wonks.
Andrew
You not have my compassion but my love for you as a brother in imago dei.
My view, it’s ok not to get social communications and feel overwhelmed. I do too. And the Lord gave you a different way of thinking and understanding the world that’s just a dignified and worthy.
I apologize if I came across a callous..
My beef towards the normals is we let ourselves be seduced by the technology and forgot to supervise more carefully nerds/geeks.
I use neurodiverse not a politically correct euphemism but as a concise descriptor for the diversity in mental outlooks.
xavier
@Xavier,
I appreciate that. I wasn’t hurt or offended, so please, have no worries on that account. My form of social awkwardness is very minor, in that I occasionally use the wrong pleasantries. I’m happily married and gainfully employed, so I’m much better off than folks who struggle daily to communicate or to manage their own minds and emotions.
I can see that the term does have some descriptive value. I suppose I am reacting to the nod to ‘diversity’ embedded in it, in part, as well as to the self-pitying way some of the folks I know who fall into this category talk about themselves. I can relate to some of their difficulties. What they need, and what I needed when I was living through similar difficulties, was a deep and personal compassion, founded on real love in personal relationship. Telling everyone one knows about one’s struggles, as some do, is probably a way of asking for help, but it’s not necessarily a good way to find it.
I am becoming more convinced that loving relationship is the soil in which people grow and heal mentally, emotionally and spiritually. Our mechanized culture can’t train or heal people, because machines can only stamp out other machines, while people grow uniquely and organically. Returning to the OT, SHMUP Junkie’s problem – shared with an unfortunate percentage of Gen Y – is that he has become personally invested in mass culture, which wasn’t crafted to meet his real needs and only reflects real people by accident. It’s industrialized gluttony. The difference between this and Christian Feasts like All Saints Day is stark. We celebrate real people, made really alive, by the power of Christ’s resurrection. This is also the culture of millions, but it is a culture that lives and calls others to life. We remember them, aspire to be like them, and hope to join them.
My money—the money that I don’t have—is on the corpses belonging to furries. There are already snapshots of gaming PCs with VR headsets attached despite the absence of standing space, and the tech tubers joke that they’re probably used for porn.
Imagine the smell.
I forgot to mention that the furries have already hosted conventions in VR because of the pandenic—and they’re naturally rendered in-simulation as their fursonas. I see VR’s future in a niche yet publicized market in which otherkin can pretend to be other species and BLM activists can tour Wakanda.
Mass VR adoption is up against the ticking clock of the diversity brain drain.
The thing that really crystalized was that the pop cult really is a cult and that I had left it was hearing someone rave about the new Spiderman movie. Apparently they’re going to add in villains from all previous Spiderman movies, explaining the jump between franchises by some multiverse nonsense.
Fifteen years ago my reaction probably would have been “that sounds really cool, I can’t wait to see the actors from my favorite movies again! I’m definitely watching that when it comes out!”
Five years ago my reaction probably would have been “that sounds really dumb and they will probably use this to retroactively ruin the plots of the old movies. I wonder if we can stop it from being made.”
Now my reaction is “that sounds really lazy and it’s hard for me to care about it at all. Seriously, who cares either way about them trying to make a ‘spiderman movie multiverse canon,’ it’s just an obvious cash grab that I hope never to think about again.”
You’ll know you’ve left the Pop Cult when your natural response to someone gushing about the latest Brand X skinsuit is a resounding “meh.”
You will know the person you’re talking to is a Pop Cultist if he responds to your disinterest with confusion and redoubled attempts to make you care.
Just the idea of caring about Hollywood IP crap one way or the other is already so exhausting to me, I don’t know how pop cultists do it. I literally cannot imagine any reaction from myself other than apathy
Here on the internet, it sounds bat guano crazy to give a toss about Brand X skinsuit #1,409,865. In the real world, normies still carry on like they did in 2013, but with muzzles on.
Sadly, the muzzles do not stop them from yammering about Brand X as the media high priests dictate.
This is why things must get much, much worse.
My exact response to Squid Game.
Exactly.
Don’t know what it is. Don’t care.
Multiverses are the laziest concept in modern writing. This is the sort of thing people used to make fun of fanfic writers for doing a decade ago, and now it’s mainstream and expected.
When you can’t conceive of anything larger than yourself, simply copypaste and add a goatee onto your donut steel OCs. It beats having to contemplate a larger existence or universal possibilities.
It’s no wonder it’s all Hollywood has these days.
The evidence for multiverses is sketchier than that for 11-dimensional String Theory. Unproved, and admitted by the Mathematical Physics priests to be unprovable. Mathematical myth making that is lapped up unalloyed by an unquestioning Pop Cult and the Neckbeard Atheist crowd.
Even if their theory were correct, it starts from a position of ontological ignorance. “Universe” means “the set of all contingent being,” so even if there were multiple dimensional strings, they would still be contained within the one universe.
“This is what we call le semantic fallacy. You fundie.”
If only Anglosphere fedora types could speak Parisian French. It’s the most pretentious language in Europe.