May 19, 2024
On the Deconstruction of Fallen Stars
Issac Young over at Trantor Publishing has been publishing essays on the erosion and corruption of our culture as well as the formidable (and often overlooked or mocked) issues that young people are facing.
In this thoughtful essay he gets down to brass tacks on WHY so many of the "wokefied" changes to beloved I.P.s are so egregiously, bewilderingly bad...to the point of being jarring and hurtful to the bottom line. This seems particularly confusing in cases where adding representation would not normally be controversial in the least (such as Star Trek, where one of the THEMES of T.O.S is Infinite Diversity Through Infinite Combinations) and in franchises like Warhammer 40,000 where there WAS representation but the new examples shatter canon.
Put simply, diversity and inclusion are humiliation rituals. If they happen to fit in the established canon, then so much better. It’s plausible deniability to gaslight those who don’t know any better. But as the internet autists rush to say whether the representation does or does not fit in the lore, the rest of us know the real reason behind these changes.
It’s to flex.
It’s to say this thing that you love is no longer yours. It’s ours, and there is nothing you can do about it. And it isn’t a mistake or a well-meaning push for a broader audience. It’s to cause outrage. It’s to scorn the people the Left despise. It’s civilizational trolling, and it’s done because not only won’t they face consequences, they know they’ll be rewarded for it.
I confess I've come to much the same conclusion. I suspect that a good deal of this dynamic is related to Yuri Bezmenov's thesis on demoralization.
The way forward is often proposed to be to get new, more traditionally themed franchises off the ground, but this runs into a few issues. First, "message fiction" is tendentious and generally unenjoyable, whether it is woke gay space commie propaganda, or a preachy After School Special. Attempts to do counter-programming are frequently just as big a turn off to audiences as Mary Sue Triumphalism, but, without the huge advantage in infrastructure/marketing/financing that the big media companies enjoy, more individualistic entertainment endeavors just flop. Another issue is Conquest's Law "Any organization not explicitly right wing soon becomes leftist" This is likely due to the inherent tendency towards social parasitism that is manifest in those with a mindset that thrives in a bureaucracy.
Young notes another hurdle in a very long, but literate essay.
Video Games are actually the medium of all literature and culture nowadays. Forget getting the younger generations to read, their minds can't process a film let alone a multi-episode series. This is due to the neurology that these people have developed s a result of social media, smart phones, and the risk averse, mental-illness-inducing education these people have had inflicted on them.
The myriad problems that young people face are different from the very real issues that many of us and our parent's generation had to overcome. but because of the structural nature of some of these challenges and the important cultural and family based tools that the younger generations are missing, these issues are not fully appreciated. These issues feed into the larger cultural problem exacerbating those dynamics, reinforcing them.
We were outmaneuvered in a two pronged assault. The first is that reality has steadily become less meaningful, while the second is that simulacra has become more addicting. In my lifetime, I know I will see the rise of sexdolls not unlike what is in Blade Runner 2049. And that will probably be the genetic bottleneck which will crush anyone who isn’t some sort of fanatic. I guess the silver lining in all of this is that only true believers will inherit the Earth. They get to live in the ruins because everyone else sterilized themselves.
Later in his essay, he delves into the importance of basket weaving....
I urge you to read the whole thing because I would not have thought that digression could actually make sense...and yet it does.
Not only because we'll still need baskets after a civilizational collapse, (he doesn't mention that, but we will) but because we have to do something to create an IRL space to socialize people.
These issues are going to be very tough nuts to crack. There will be some debate about why we should...
After all, old farts like me have been ranting and raving about "THESE HERE KIDS TODAY" since Aristotle.
However, a failure of cultural continuity IS a thing that sometimes happens historically, and it can lead to societies collapsing, either through decadence or a lack of cultural competency. This is the GOAL for the left, who are quite confident that they will sculpt a Utopia from the rough clay of man....but if one looks at the past societies where these self assured technocrats have succeeded, one will shudder in terror at the suffering, both physical and psychic that always seems to result.
Thus we should take this threat seriously and that means to take the challenges that young people today face with thoughtful consideration, for they did not create the absolutely insane world in which they find themselves, and they did not chose to be trained by their educators to make only the wrong decisions.
President Reagan noted that freedom is a fragile thing that is never more than one generation away from extinction He further noted that it is not inherited, but must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation. That ability to fight and defend something depends on knowing what it is, on one having values that were passed down from one's forbearers.....We have denied our youth the tools and the skillset to do what they must.
Some have, like Cassandra warned us:
"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.” -C.S. Lewis
We have our work cut out for us.
Posted by: The Brickmuppet at
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