By now anyone who’s not trapped in an epistemic closure bubble is aware of two facts:
- The West is caught in a death spiral toward a new Dark Age
- Voting harder won’t pull us out of it.
Yet despite the severity of the crisis, nothing is being done about it – or at least, not nearly enough.
The reason for this inaction on the part of those who have the pull to make a difference stems from the epistemic closure alluded to above.
As friend of the blog William M. Briggs is fond of saying, love of theory is the root of all evil. And theory is appealing; intoxicating, even. It promises simple answers to complex questions.
So it is that we find many trapped in the tenets of ideologies that stopped corresponding to the real world a century ago. That was, not coincidentally, when the totalizing juggernaut known as the Death Cult began its long march through the institutions.
To be sure, the Cult is one group enslaved to a nonsensical – and apocalyptic – ideology. Their beliefs bear no resemblance to reality. The problem is, they’ve got most of the money and all of the power, so they can keep forcing participation in their public rituals and unholy sacraments until the system collapses. Whether anyone will survive that collapse remains to be seen.
Most commenters on our ruling Cult stop there. But the facts of our dire situation raise the inherent question “How did it come to this?”
The answer lies in another group suffering from ideology-induced delusions: the Conservatives who are the closest thing the Death Cult has to organized opposition.
If you’re asking, “Wait, doesn’t saying Conservatives are deluded mean you agree with the Death Cult?” then you are locked in the same mind prison as most Conservatives.
True, Conservatism is less dissonant with reality than Death Cultism, but that’s not saying much. Conservatism in its current state espouses a fundamental option for practicality over speculative reason and a penchant for reducing all problems to economic considerations.
Do you get how the Death Cult was able to take control of the culture away from Conservatives like a witch stealing candy from a baby?
If not, the walls of a practical mind prison may be blocking your view.
Because the Death Cult didn’t gain dominance by winning elections.
Nor did they conquer by taking over academia – though there’s no question they’re in firm charge there.
The one locus of control without which the Death Cult couldn’t have achieved anything close to the near-total victory they’ve won is the arts.
Because the Cult understands one reality that Conservatives just cannot get through their heads …
People aren’t convinced by logic and reason.
They’re convinced by emotion.
And art speaks directly to the emotions.
Instead of coming to terms with that fact, Conservatives vacillate between insisting that art isn’t real – unlike money! – and forking over their cash to consume the latest corporate agitprop made by people who hate them.
It’s not like the Cult churns out woke movies with no purpose in mind. And unlike some assume, that purpose is not to effect cultural change by themselves, though Cult media do move that needle. The main utility of corrupting the arts is to buttress policies enacted through government (usually the courts) which are informed by witches in the academy.
For a demonstration of how the process works, let’s pretend the decree comes down from the Cult’s high priesthood instructing that cannibalism is the new sacrament. The Cultists don’t rush to draft legislation enshrining cannibals as a protected class. Not yet. First, academics update the Cult’s canon with new ritual cant. That’s when mid-level priests in New York and Hollywood come in, weaving the new dogmatic formulas into rhetoric spells for use on the general public.
So what you see first is a a goofy but lovable character on a Netflix comedy doing a bit wherein he unwittingly samples human flesh. The punchline comes when he learns what – or who – he’s really eating but decides he likes it. His exotic appetite becomes a running gag, while his character is portrayed as normal and relatable.
Meanwhile, the Cult hirelings in government will start floating trial balloons to decriminalize human flesh consumption. They’ll stress that it’ll be purely voluntary – from corpses donated for use as food. You can be certain that a main selling point will be cannibalism’s efficacy at fighting climate change. The initial bills and court cases will go down to defeat, but after the Netflix show is reinforced by Captain America coming out as a cannibal (a taste he developed out of grim necessity while stranded at sea after the Germans torpedoed his destroyer) and a stunning and bold new cookbook from Big Five publishing, the opinion polls will hit critical mass.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean a majority – just the tipping point for a preference cascade. Then the first bills decriminalizing Human-sourced Meat™ will pass into law. There will be a public outcry, but it will soon fade to a murmur as America’s legal positivist tendencies push support for cannibalism higher.
And when public support for eating human flesh hits 51%, hu-meat will be pushed in your face at all times from all directions. And not just at your local mega-mart, but online, on TV, and at the cinema. Because it’s propaganda delivered through the arts that locks the leftward ratchet turn.
So what’s to be done?
Can we get rid of artists?
That proposal sounds absurd on its face. And it is. Making art is intrinsic to human nature. It’s no accident that cave paintings are some of the oldest human artifacts we have. Yet some people have seriously called for removing artists from society.
OK, let’s play with that idea.
Despite having been handed control of every branch of government, Conservatives have proven incapable of expelling foreigners who are breaking the law by their presence here. Deporting millions of natural born, law-abiding citizens would be harder by orders of magnitude.
And it’s a nonstarter since it runs into the perennial dissident paradox of proposing to gain political power by means that would require you to already have complete political power.
So instead of eliminating the arts, the sane – and possible – solution is to create and foster a parallel arts ecosystem.
Starting a parallel cinema scene might be the best option. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to make your own movie. An enterprising director could feasibly crowdfund a slick little indie film. Professional grade editing software; even high-end hardware like a RED cam, is within a guerrilla production’s budget.
The real question is how to craft movies that effectively counter the Cult’s message.
Conservatives will argue that right-wing message fic is no different than left-wing message fic, and it’s film makers’ duty to simply tell a fun story.
This objection misses the point because it assumes that the Death Cult spread its message through heavy-handed propagandizing. That’s just the frog finally noticing the water is boiling. Hollywood has been a Death Cult vector since at least the late 60s, yet most people are only being turned off now.
The second mistake Conservatives make is to start from the false premise that overt message fic is how the Cult delivers its propaganda. Then they rush straight into the equal but opposite error of deliberately making their own message fic.
Both approaches fail to understand how the enemy indoctrinated multiple generations without anyone noticing till it was too late. Their current overt skinsuiting is just a victory lap. Hollywood reached this point by using subtle storytelling techniques to erode audiences’ defenses.
To understand this method, one need only understand the archetypal trope of the protagonist. This is the character who drives the story by setting out on a quest to achieve a concrete goal against opposition.
Hollywood learned through long trial and error to make the protagonist as likeable and relatable to audiences as possible. The idea is to make audiences identify with the hero.
Nowadays, the studios have turned this approach on its head. The contemporary movie protagonist is an utterly inhuman Mary Sue with no compelling reason to pursue a goal since she’s already said to be perfect. Instead, she uses her screen time to deliver a series of lectures on Death Cult pieties.
Again, that is not the conditioning. That is a humiliation ritual meant to rub the remaining fans’ noses in it.
The conditioning came before that. And the way it happened was by Hollywood churning out decades of movies wherein heroes whom audiences identified with achieved their goals by acting according to the Death Cult’s morals.
That point bears repeating. To bring movie audiences around to your way of thinking, show characters they like being successful by acting in line with your moral standard.
Contrary to what anti-message fic purists say, this method does not have to involve hamfisted preaching. In fact, the subtler the delivery is, the better.
Ironically, the last movies to even halfway subtly counter the Death Cult’s conditioning were 80s slasher flicks. Contemporary feminist types love to gripe about how anybody who fornicated or lit up a joint received a death sentence, while only the virginal girl survived.
The slasher genre died out in the early 90s. If you look at teen sex and drug use statistics, both declined from their peak in 1980 and only started rising again in the 90s. That’s not to give all the credit for the reduction in degeneracy to slasher flicks, but it’s undeniable that those movies exerted considerable influence on the youth culture of the time.
To renew the culture, tell stories with appealing heroes who win using Christian moral principles.
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One thing I’ve noticed from Zoomers recently is that most of them interested in film seem far more interested in 1970s/80s b-movies (horror and action) if they’re interested at all. They instinctively know and are drawn to pieces that reflect truth. They go into this stuff more than any mainstream Hollywood piece.
I look at it this way: Hollywood just told the truth, but with enough lie baked into it. This has the effect of working for the time, however the poison is less potent as time goes on. Eventually you get to the point that only those who were marinated it as children still go on about it. Find any young person who cares about the Jurassic Park movie, for instance. It’s rare.
To counteract this, you need to tell the pure truth without being condescending or weak.
Think of how Hollywood treats Christianity. They simply portray ever believer as evil or stupid without outright saying the religion is wrong (that’s what the implications of the plot revelations do) and show the noble secularists as objective paragons because they are capable of the correct thoughts. That terrible Midnight Mass thing on Netflix is a perfect example. It has no idea about religion beyond stereotypes but it fools people into thinking its smart by giving the Good characters all the Correct conclusions. That isn’t how reality works, but it is how the lie does.
If you want to portray Christianity as correct, you simply show it as correct. You do not need to have characters having speeches about how dumb non-believers are and how believing in Jesus gives you free stuff (an insidious message). You simply portray the world as it actually is. This has a chance of throwing people off–I’ve had people call my stories nihilistic, but there is little to be done about those who can’t read between the lines. What you do is treat it as normal and expected–not something that needs to be justified.
Regardless of the subject, this is how it is done. A story is meant to show the world as it is, reflecting truth through the work. You don’t make excuses for truth. It is what it is.
Many are still operating on the back foot against a foe that is too busy fighting itself to properly defend itself against attack anymore. Now is the best time to produce–there has never been a better opportunity to make art and share it with others. We need to take advantage of it now.
The climate is changing, and it isn’t going back the way it was again. Those days are gone. Act accordingly.
My work sometimes draws flak from Christian Conservatives for being too dark., as well. Chalk it up to folks raised on Christian™ books, films, radio, etc. that paints a saccharine view of the world as one big Thomas Kinkade painting. No wonder folks who’ve worn that pastel blindfold since childhood can’t tell the difference between tragedy and nihilism.
File under: When the Worst Person in the World Makes a Good Point, but Stephen King once said, “We’re all gonna die. I’m just trying to make it interesting.”
His problem is that more and more, he’s failing. Because nothing makes mortality more interesting than the prospect of eternal damnation or salvation.
While you’re not wrong to call the current batch of ‘art’ a victory lap, it might be more broadly accurate to call it the final exam. Over the last 3+ years, we’ve been tested. Here are some of the questions and answers:
1. Will you do whatever we tell you to do, no matter how ridiculous? Answer: yes. See: COVID response.
2. Will you believe whatever we tell you to believe, no matter how obviously false? Answer: yes. See: transgenderism.
3. Will you hate whoever we tell you to hate? Answer: yes. See: anti-white bigotry, whatever-phobia, and on and on.
The most interesting thing for me has been that much, maybe even most, of the class failed some of these tests, despite Death Cult control of education and media for at least 60 years. But, as a whole, the Cult was successful in promoting their answers as the only socially acceptable ones.
Afterthought: one of the most brilliant examples of the Cult propaganda I’ve ever seen was the lobby slaughter scene in the Matrix. The protagonists are really cool; the slo-mo killings to the throbbing soundtrack were weirdly beautiful – and cool! But we were just told the scene before that those people who were killed were innocent of any actual crime, but were victims of the Matrix – but it’s OK to kill them because they are being used by the Matrix to do its bidding. The people cast as the cannon fodder were all very normal looking, and shown just doing their boring jobs, right up until they were gunned down in cold blood.
Since Marxism and related forms of insanity can be boiled down to an end time fantasy where Paradise will automatically arise once enough of the bad people have been killed, it’s important to establish that the Bad People What Need Killing may look like normal people just doing their jobs who have personally done no wrong. But they can still need killing, and it is right to kill them.
The Final Exam. Now that’s fitting.
Recently I’ve been thinking of how scenes in churches have all but vanished from modern media. Through the mid-2000s or so scenes of characters going to a weekly service were pretty common in both TV and movies, even those that were largely hostile to Christianity. If someone needed advice, it very well might come from a priest. It’s not that these shows were particularly religious, but that they acknowledged that going to church was simply part of normal American life.
Now churches simply do not exist in entertainment as a place where you go for regular services. There might be a wedding or funeral there, or something might occur in a rented space that happens to be a church (ex. alcoholic anonymous meetings) but you don’t have characters discussing how its Sunday so they need to go to church. I remember the tail end of King of the Hill feeling like an outlier for continuing to treat this topic seriously, so we must have gotten to this point sometime in the mid-2000s, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend started at cultural ground zero.
The Simpsons were notorious as the last prime time TV family to be shown regularly attending Sunday services.
“So what you see first is a a goofy but lovable character on a Netflix comedy doing a bit wherein he unwittingly samples human flesh. The punchline comes when he learns what – or who – he’s really eating but decides he likes it. His exotic appetite becomes a running gag, while his character is portrayed as normal and relatable.”
That sounds like the 2017 Netflix series “Santa Clarita Diet”.
Here’s a brief synopsis from a mainstream reviewer:
““Santa Clarita Diet,” out today on the streaming service, finds Drew Barrymore opposite Timothy Olyphant as a mom, wife and, as it happens, cannibal. Though the last of those might suggest a shield-your-eyes gore fest, the series is actually a comedy. And Barrymore’s cannibalistic moments make for most of the fun.”
The justification the show gives is that Barrymore’s character dies at the beginning and comes back as a zombie, leading to her taste for human flesh.
Now, I like a good dark comedy (I’d especially recommend “Theatre of Blood” starring Vincent Price if you’ve never seen it), but everything I’ve heard about “Santa Clarita Diet” makes it sound like the cannibalism is portrayed in a cutesy, endearing way. It sounds less like traditional horror-comedy and more like something meant to make cannibalism look almost acceptable.
There was also a company called BiteLabs about a decade ago that wanted to clone meat from celebrity tissue samples and make expensive artisanal salami from a mixture of the cloned human meat with rabbit and pork. They wanted to make salami from Kanye West, James Franco, Jennifer Lawrence, and Ellen Degeneres. Fortunately, it never got off the ground.
Our cultural commissars treating Poe’s Law as a creative guideline yet again.
Mad props for the Theatre of Blood shout out.
Hollywood has been like this since day 1. The Hayes Code existed because they couldn’t keep degeneracy out of their films from the earliest days.
Thomas Edison invented the film industry in New York. The reason studios sprang up in what is in fact a desert was royalty dodgers running as far across the country as possible to commit what was essentially piracy.