I’ve collected scattered notes from my iPhone ‘Notes’ app below. I open the app when I have a reference or a thought or a question to write and I’m without my notebook. Sometimes I write comments or replies intended for social media or text before pasting the text onto its target.
Notes
TRUE democracy means validating popular sentiment, not treating it with contempt or attempting to suppress or manipulate it.
Is democracy your highest value? If American voters decisively turns against legal abortion or public education (example?) would you honor that result? Would you assent to those changes being implemented? If no, then democracy is not your highest value. It’s rather a rhetorical weapon used hypocritically and inconsistently against your enemies and opponents…
The Reign of Subjectivity - we’re the first human culture to emphasize personal feelings and experiences… it’s not going well
On Being Wrong
1.) account for the change
2.) own the harms of error (if none: does this even need to be annnounced?)
3.) explain compelling evidence & implications for worldview and practice
Wokeness is perhaps nowhere as defective as in its moral philosophy
—————————-
Wokeness: Matthew 24:10
Malachi 3:6 ‘I am the Lord, I change not… ‘
—————————-
Verbalize my questions about RNA, ribosomes… cellular biology…
——————————
“We’re living in what Robert Anton Wilson called Chapel Perilous – a liminal conceptual twilight in which we can never be quite certain whether what we see is natural, supernatural, or a product of our own fevered imaginations.” - John Carter
——————————-
(Unsent text)
It’s funny… I’ve talked to dozens of people (mostly women) who believe that therapy is really helping them. There’s way more therapy being performed than ever before and yet our mental health continues to get worse and worse. Young women are BY far the worst in terms of anxiety and depression. Social media use seems to be extremely bad for the mental health of adolescent girls especially. The current decline began around 2011-2012.
———————
I make that claim academic generalizations will NEVER give a person a complete understanding of a real-world situation involving millions of people. It can give a person a general understanding and that could even suffice for policy-making but it could never address all of the factors at play in THIS situation and it simply can’t ever lead a person to say, with certainty, ‘false’, when confronted with a claim like: millions of border crossings on the US-Mexico border last year have fueled misery and death. Of course they have, and any border patrol agent will know more about THAT situation than the most brilliant academics who studied every immigration and border issue in the 20th century… but never THAT one. There are different levels of resolution and different applications for general and specific knowledge. In every subject I have real-world experience with (business, crime, poverty, sociology, war, homelessness) EVERY academic work I’ve ever read would be insufficient to understand the real, daily demands of the pursuits and circumstances themselves. Can you give me one example (sports, combat, dating… anything) where an academic treatise would be sufficient to understand an entire range of human activity? I can say that, if they have no personal experience with cartel activities or homelessness, their knowledge is incomplete, because it’s (by definition) academic and general. I imagine even the authors of these books would grant that.
——————————-
Mickey Rourke Films:
Buffalo 66
Homeboy
Spun
————————————
Prediction:
A fragmenting and proliferation of identity categories
- - - - - - -
We are extremely careful not to ‘contaminate’ other planets or moons with our biota… but why?! Why not send life outwards in every direction?
- - - - - - -
Dark forest hypothesis
———————————-
(Definition of ‘woke’, reply to people who claim this is a meaningless adjective):
it’s a political movement which uses concepts like safety and emotional support to police the words and concepts used by others. Identity groups are more important than merit or intelligence or individual traits. They believe that everything in society is based on invisible oppression and they use concepts like this to gain power for themselves. It’s basically Critical Theory meets 21st century safety culture.
————————————-
Satire: embracing fatness as self-care
————————————
Brothers Karamazov
“… begin to love the whole world with an all-embracing love”
————————————-
If anyone faces an idle afternoon or needs a 15-minute distraction i recommend this DUI stop video. It's as if someone wrote a skit satirizing all of the absurdities of Gen Z. Unfortunately this is a real person and unfortunately for her all of the group identities and irrelevant self-described conditions don't change her situation. Her reaction (near the end) of surprise and indignation and fear is a great example of fragility 😂
———————————-
@d****r**** awhile back there was this whole frenzy about Rihanna’s ‘pregnancy’ but that had to have been prosthesis and digital rendering. Rihanna is simply too valuable to the corporate machine for her to be allowed to use her own body to produce children. The entertainment and consumer goods industries would never accept that kind of risk to such a blue chip asset. If Rihanna DOES have a child (if!) then that child was borne by some robust Caribbean girl who has agreed to a life of captivity and medical supervision in return for a stipend for her family or something. I don’t think this is the same thing but idk… I’m not an expert 🤷🏻♂️. I hope Rihanna doesn’t have a child tbh. The idea of a child living a life that scrutinized and privileged and unnatural depresses me. When Rihanna is placed in her cryosleep chamber every night does the child go with her? Does it have its own smaller tube? It’s a rather sad thing to think about
——————————-
This, however, is accusatory: if you’re on the Left as it exists now then neither you nor your movement really cares about the health and happiness of ‘BIPOC’ people (how are the Reservations doing under the Biden administration? 🤔). Additionally, if you believe the toxic new doctrines of privilege; marginalization, decolonization, sustainability, queer theory (basically the tenets of Critical Theory, which I urge you to read about) and you’re still playing this American game of college admissions, job interviews, television, Instagram, brunch. Etc then you have wandered into a very grave hypocrisy. If leveling privilege and disassembling power structures is your goal then get to it! You don’t need an organization to make great strides in these areas TODAY. I have found that Critical Theory uses the pain and alienation of certain groups to achieve power with no actual concern or consideration for those groups (and when it takes power those groups are always ruthlessly oppressed). I’m disappointed to say that a similar critique could be made against many progressives. What privileges or comforts have YOU surrendered in the clause of equity or climate Justice or whatever? I’m going to guess ‘none’. I know social media turns the world of political belief and policy into a childish fun-house mirror but ideology matters. Ideas matter, especially revolutionary ideas. You can drift away from your ideology and focus more on being a decent and productive person but then you are no longer part of the vision of the modern Left. The Left is very explicitly against that course. Ideology isnt about gender studies or micro aggressions or any of that nonsense. It has always been about making social changes with a group. If you subscribe to an ideology (Marxism, feminism, LDS Church, Muslim Brotherhood) and you wouldn’t die for it, push come to shove, then you need to find another fucking ideology. Or maybe just try to stop filling voids in our collective life with debate and jargon and belief. My current working definition of ‘Progressive’ is a person who has adopted dozens of disparate causes and beliefs out of concern for everyone (and status) while they personally lead the most self-centered lives of any human beings ever. Remember your level of concern is directly equivalent to your willingness to sacrifice. Sadly, protests squares and likes and retweets do not suffice.💪🏼
———————————
The eerie silence & the dark forest
Interrogating humanity’s placement and our cosmological safety
With the recent congressional hearings concerning UAPs (UFOs) and craft and materials of ‘non-human’ origin I wanted to spend a bit of time downloading my knowledge on the subject. As usual, it is scattered and shallow and diverse. This is a free-writing exercise, so no references or sources will be used. There may (will) be inaccuracies, since I’m not a cosmologist. I will go through after I’m finished and include links so that you can fact check my data and easily explore the subjects on your own. I will edit this for precision and correctness and post the edited version later.
SETI is a program using dozens of global radio arrays and transmission/detection infrastructure sites across the globe. It is the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence and it has been extant since the 1970’s. In all of that time we’ve detected many anomalies. These include periodic and patterned radio bursts, revealed to be quasars (which are super dense neutron star-type objects where the pressure of a late-stage star has collapsed it’s matter into a dense and HIGHLY radioactive atomic lattice, which shoot plumes of radioactivity and radio waves hundreds of light years into space; objects dozens or hundreds of miles in circumference rotating up to hundreds of times PER SECOND and therefore producing powerful pulses of radio activity detectable on our instruments).
WOW Signal
The Drake Equation & The Fermi Paradox
The Dark Forest
———-
Directed Panspermia hypothesis
Silurian hypothesis
————————————-
(Message to IG interlocutor):
I think that the status quo is pretty good and our traditions were instantiated for reasons and should be respected and our economic system is the most successful in human history! I’m surprised that you have a rosier view of our condition than that. I was under the impression that you thought that the power structure should be radically re-ordered and our economic system had unacceptable externalities and our society was full of violence and bigotry… where did I go wrong?
———————————
Hinge promotes narcissism and psychopathology and leverages insecurities and decision paralyses to keep people in a pattern of compulsive use. The rapacious and dishonest men treat shallow women badly (and they attract more women than the average, especially young women). Those wounded women then treat decent men badly (as a defense mechanism and a means of displaced vengeance) and those decent men treat deep and interesting women badly (for the same reason)… and around and around we go. An anonymous buffet of options with no consequences for bad behavior is a terrible social model.
———————————-
Coming soon: A review, synopsis and thematic inquiry of ‘The Parable of the Sower’ by the matriarch of Afro-futurism, Octavia E. Butler.
The novel is a dystopian coming-of-age story about a black teenager living on America’s West coast in a near future of general social collapse.
Check out today’s thread for more about this excellent story, and (of course) some political and psychological implications of Ms. Butler’s masterful imagining of one possible future…
- - - - - - - - - -
Police only come when they’re paid a hefty fee. Unemployment is in the high double-digits. Exotic new street drugs fuel a wave of terrible new anti-social behaviors. Los Angeles is bounded by highways empty of cars but thick with refugees who regard each other with hunger and distrust. Inflation is bad and getting worse every year. There are still institutions (the protagonist’s father is a faculty member at a local university) and there are corporations who can afford motor transport and hardened private security. The book is an excellent depiction of a community and a family and a group and finally an individual trying to chart a course through a dark and collapsing social reality. Should we create go bags and designate rally points even though we live in a fortified cul-de-sac? Should a girl trust her friend to prepare for danger with her? Is there any salvation in the North, in Oregon or Washington? How can she brave the roads thick with murderous travelers?
The protagonist is Lauren, a quiet and capable and clearly brilliant girl. Her mother abused drugs while she
————————————-
This is an article by Michael Shellenberger, a SUPER-liberal journalist (mostly a homeless and green energy advocate):
————————————-
Academic Cowardice
Colleges and universities are sites of extreme timidity, conformity, and cowardice.I don’t have a fulsome explanation for this but I can speculate. Academia is a rigidly scheduled environment, without a great deal of stress or risk or surprise. You do your your work, finish your theses, attend your 4-8 classes per week, publish your several research papers, get tenure (which, if this did originate as a mechanism for protecting academic integrity and freedom of inquiry, it should be scrapped post haste. With or without tenure academia has largely lost its freedoms and it skeptical and inquisitive bent). Once you have tenure, you’re free to do nearly anything, other than complete negligence of your duties, serious criminal acts, or publicly releasing any work or statement that could be interpreted as accepting of any of the ideological components of conservatism or libertarianism. This model, of work deadlines scheduled months or years in advances, a common kind of ‘bare minimum’ ethic (grade inflation being one facet), and a falsely modest hierarchy seems to select for the timid, or perhaps it strengthens that tendency. Academics generally start their progression at the very beginning of adulthood and they seldom do much else (like start a business or move suddenly just because or join the army reserve or the local volunteer fire department; they certainly marry and have kids but I bet they’re even laggards in terms of family metrics, as a group. There’s also the fact that academics have a kind of soft and bookish image. The stereotype is of a slightly rotund older man wearing a pAtched blazer or a spectacled older woman in a cardigan. They rent a unit near campus, they’re urbane but not wealthy, cultured but not especially social
——-/
—————————————
We might have access to more data and more tools for digital creation than ever before but the verbosity and vision of the English romantic poets make our current crop of writers and poets and screenwriters resemble a herd of cowardly dullards. We have more diversity and more cosmopolitan habits and more education than these men… yet most of our well-educated beneficiaries eagerly queue up to promote nonsense and spent a great deal of time playing status games. When is all of this progress going to pay off in another James Baldwin, another Marie Pasteur, another Ayn Rand, another W. B. Years? I truly hope I’m wrong but creativity requires more than education. It requires suffering and painful nonconformity and earned resilience and I estimate that my succeeding generation has these qualities in extremely short supply. The mission of our age seems to be to get everyone to believe the same things on the important questions (and if not to stay silent). The attainment of this goal would mean the quiet death of free inquiry, comedy… and art.
————————————-
Our world has changed at a dizzying rate, and that rate is probably accelerating. Where does that put us in 10 years? I couldn’t guess, but I think it’s a safe bet that we will collectively feel even more confused and uneasy than we do now.
When I was younger, society was different. 2001 was a calamitous year but after ISIS and AI and COVID-19 Al-Qaeda seems almost quaint. George W. Bush seems like a beloved and sincere and fairly admirable man. Despite two major ground wars and the worst recession in 50 years his tenure really does feel… simpler. Some of this is the nostalgia and rosy glasses of retrospective reflection I’m sure.
Most of the changes of the past two decades have been driven by technology. Geopolitics is in a second to consumer technologies. That technology is overwhelmingly concerned with the generation and collection and use of information. As our world becomes more computerized and more of our reality is constructed digitally the memory of our old way of life-homo sapiens sapiens at the beginning of the millennium, changing but still existing almost entirely in a material reality checkered with place memories and interpersonal connections-slips farther in our species’ rearview mirror.
A digital hybrid, information-rich space oriented toward 9 billion increasingly comfortable but lonely humans is not a picture of the future I’m excited to inhabit. I think there will be some good developments and plenty of bad ones but the sense of anomie and of being unmoored; I don’t think those will fade. Ultimately my feelings about the future are moot; it’s hurtling towards us and the path of acceleration is so deeply worn and the vehicle so massive that no one can slow or redirect its course, even a bit.
One aspect of our strange and nascent semi-digital lives is our engagement with news, celebrity gossip, current events, trends. Our lives became saturated with curated, unrepresentative bits of data about ‘the real world’ gradually enough that we barely noticed but I imagine if you brought a regular citizen from 2005 to the present he might find our relationship with phones and apps and algorithms jarring.
We should keep this in mind though: this customized data isn’t being fed to us to inform or improve us. Those goals are completely irrelevant to the systems which do the feeding. If we end up becoming wiser or kinder people, well that’s a gain of zero from the perspective of the algorithms. If we become wiser, kinder people who spend a gradually increasing share of our day communing with our phones THEN the algorithm is pleased. In actuality it’s often our character and mood which tend to wither, while our daily screen time continue to rise. I have zero data but I suspect that dramatic personal improvement usually correlates with LESS time before the screen, not more. All of the news and app tools and social networks you access and use every day don’t really exist to perform their functions. They perform their functions to keep you engaged but their real raison d’etre is the monetization of advertising and user data. They exist to keep you staring at your phone and helplessly inputting every iota of personal information that could be useful to the profit-making machine.
Too many people are still consuming news and current events content like they’re watching a CNN correspondent reporting from Kuwait in the early 1990’s. They’re assuming that the news stories are not only mostly accurate (which is usually, but not always, still the case) but are created to inform the viewer, to lay out a complete picture of the issue without any glaring or intentional omissions. This is now often incorrect. To be sure, there are still many journalists who consider some balance and reality part of their ethical obligation. The field has shifted, though, and the new coin of the realm isn’t the quality of reporting or writing. It’s simply the same blind imperative which drives YouTube and Facebook: to keep you looking at the images on the platform as much and as intently as possible. Unfortunately, well-written and incisive essays just don’t generate that much user interaction. Neither do carefully edited updates on major domestic issues. Celebrities do, of course. Anything with that hint of parasocial attachment and sex is excellent for the algorithm, although less so for our cumulative mental health. Money, sports, beauty products, hobbies are all decent. More than anything, though, is indignation.
We’re social animals and we view our days and our lives and every human event through the lens of narrative. We are a species that reflexively creates stories for ourselves and our fellows. We can’t help it. The old dictates of the print journalist have been eroded and what’s left is a younger, wealthier, better-educated (but less stable or resilient), more connected and online worker. Instead of chasing down leads and haunting tow hall meetings they spend the bulk of their time working from home. Twitter usually consumes a truly insane percentage of their workday. Their occupation has been changed by technology and structural economic shifts, certainly. They’re now producing clickbait, essentially. They still have some control over the quality, but it’s not just that the profit incentives have changed. The journalists themselves are different and see the world much differently. Journalists used to be blue-collar everymen. They were scrappy and scruffy and verbose but they were not acolytes or missionaries. Modern journalists, by contrast have a strong and rigid moral sense which was inculcated in college. They consider a prime objective of their work to promote social change. To this end they have often (along with their editors) engaged in more and more brazen examples of omission, distortion, deception. Rather than giving everyone the facts and letting them make up their minds the journalists now consider themselves to be gatekeepers of information. Apparently many kinds of information shouldn’t be released to the public (for their own good). That’s why you’ll find (even now) dozens of encouraging articles about the ‘racial justice’ mission of 2020 but virtually none about the catastrophically risen rates of crime and violence in the black community. You won’t find many articles about the large and growing racial achievement gap created by our public schools. You’ll NOW encounter some articles about the ‘lab leak theory’ (since the evidence is increasingly overwhelming) but that wouldn’t have been the case for the past 3 years. Years after a global pandemic and our media is totally incurious about where the virus originated and how it infected humans and the wisdom and efficacy of our anti-contagion public policies. They’ve collectively decided to absolve politicians, tech moguls, unions, and scientists of any scrutiny over the consequences of their decisions and the honesty and helpfulness of their public statements. They’ve collectively chosen to studiously ignore the strange fact that adolescent girls are now being treated with male hormones at rates dozens of times higher than was the case 15 years ago. The possibility that infectious Tik Tok content and social acclaim is fueling another social contagion among vulnerable girls seems quite plausible but you won’t find that hypothesis (or even the barest hint) in almost any piece of contemporary mainstream journalism. The issue exists and is discussed but has been declared ‘verboten’ by the intelligentsia.
15 years ago different people and different parties had different values and assumptions and perspectives, but the facts on offer were widely agreed upon. Only Noam Chomsky or Alex Jones would dismiss public consensus. Such people used to be rare, and they used to be generally wrong. These days I’m not so sure.
Now there is no public consensus. There are several-to-many narrative streams for the larger public (depending on the issue) and there’s an elite consensus. That set of ideas is reflected in our journalism today but it is woefully out of touch with reality and with a huge share of the reading public.
I say all of that as context and background for this curious fact: there are things happening publicly in the US today that no one defends, yet they continue to occur and many people on the Left treat proposals to STOP such things as divisive or reactionary or cynical.
No one defends sexually explicit drag shows or adult performances in front of small children. No one defends explicit text and illustrations in elementary school public libraries. No one defends teaching children that ‘whiteness’ is a historic affliction that is still harming American society. These are things that no one would publicly advocate.
There’s a similar category: sincere but SECRET values and goals. Things that certain people WANT but will not claim professionally or publicly, to avoid negative attention. This is the tendency of some teachers and counselors and content creators and activists. They have very fervent beliefs, about gender or sexuality or identity. They believe these propositions not only as factual statements but also as moral imperatives. If you were a teacher who believed that the US was a patriarchal heteronormative power cabal whose norms and lessons had damaged children for generations and continued to damage them, you would dissent and resist and possibly leaven some of your office hours or lessons with these beliefs. If you recognize that your beliefs are very unpopular with local parents you will do this instruction in secret (as much as possible). You’ll exercise discretion but total compliance to society’s status quo is barely acceptable. It is, according to your worldview, wrong and your efforts to educate some students in confidence will seem to be the courageous and right choice. It doesn’t take many testimonials and confessions from self-described schoolteachers on Libs of TikTok before some parents begin to worry. That is how the term ‘Groomer’ arose: parents and Twitter users weren’t actually alleging any intended sexual abuse (that I saw). They were using a slur to highlight concern that some teachers might be having personal and ideological conversations with their children, in private, about gender or sex (or race, or policing, etc.) to shift their worldviews and values.
For every indefensible act I just listed, I can say with a high level of certainty that such things have happened recently. I can’t tell you how common they are but I suspect they’re infrequent. Nevertheless, they are inappropriate and shouldn’t be controversial when a certain group pushes for policy against them. Is it an overreaction? Possibly, in some cases. Is this a big problem? No, I don’t think so. But IF a municipality bans childhood attendance at sexually explicit events why would anyone object?!
Modern progressives are stuck in their custom-made information silos (like all of us) and believe that pornographic books in elementary school libraries are a non-issue, that drag shows don’t expose children to adult material, and that teachers aren’t trying to subtly change the minds of students (or if they are it’s a good thing). Even when presented with video evidence (the collection of which was the animating cause of Libs of Tik Tok) they will studiously ignore the complaints. When laws or rules are written, even when they’re sexuality-neutral (as they all seem to be) the Left claims that the changes are just veiled homophobia (etc.).
I think this is another instance of two sides speaking past one another with no real communication possible, since they each ignore sincere claims by the other side. One side is protective of their children and is basically unconcerned with the lives or preferences of queer people. The other side sees homophobia as a serious social problem and considers it a precept of child-rearing to imbue kids with tolerant attitudes and expose them to queer people.
I have many questions about the youth drag show phenomenon. Drag began as a sexual subculture of gay performers for adults in special venues. It expanded into more consumer-friendly (and heterosexual) spaces (like Lips, a drag cabaret restaurant that I visited during a birthday party while living in Manhattan) but was always understood to be an adult scene centered around gay or trans people. I understand the urge to expose children to diverse people but drag queens aren’t real. They’re stage personas. Children will probably never, throughout their life, see a drag queen in the grocery store or waiting for a job interview. They’re actors. It would be a bit like wanting to familiarize children with black people, or Chinese Americans, and instead of inviting the black and Asian professionals or homemakers in the area you bring the Harlem GlobeTrotters, or Shen Yun. There is an abundance of medical doctors or police officers who are queer. I guess that’s the point though. Queerness is generally accepted and welcomed. Drag queens strike me as outliers, even within the gay community, and I can’t think of any good reason to take pains to bring them in and have them read picture books to toddlers. I don’t think it’s harmful but it’s probably somewhat distracting, and the value of read-along sessions is pretty scanty regardless. Bring a nurse or a social worker or a police officer… then let kids ask questions. They might gain a little comfort towards such authority figures and it’s also an opportunity for advertising help. Kids were completely ignored by the Left during COVID (public school kids were-private schools opened 6-12 months earlier; no doubt most of the parents involved in those schools are progressive). Public school children suffered more delays in learning, experienced higher rates of mental health symptoms and much diminished nutrition and social support. These were costs that progressives were willing to levy upon a huge group of students who were already disadvantaged and forgotten by the Left. Try improving the quality of public school teachers. Try proposing literally ANY idea to improve teaching: classroom metrics, merit pay, achievement bonuses, performance reviews, standardized testing… the unions oppose ALL of them. The unions now even oppose standardized testing as a basic concept. Their failure to educate the average black student to a satisfactory level for +50 years just became too unpleasant to confront I suppose. If the students aren’t tested does it matter if they’re undereducated?
My point is that there are lot of goals that schools need to begin making progress on before they earn the responsibility to develop kids’ worldviews and sensibilities or the prerogative to begin exploring the unscientific and bizarre ideas of gender ideology or anti-racism.
Since no one seems to actually support these kinds of childhood experiences let’s let them disappear, shall we? If children aren’t attending sexually explicit shows than a law against such events admitting children will just be dead letter and a waste of ink and floor time.
You can use the reactive ad hominem labels of ‘racist’ or ‘homophobe’ or ‘transphobe’ freely of course. It’s every person’s right. When it comes to people’s children you will find much less ambivalence and acquiescence though. If organizing drag shows is leading to concerns about violence or to public resistance or grumbling maybe the entire thing was a mistake?
Large national polling data has revealed that a backlash to some of the more unpopular demands of queer activists might be beginning. It’s telling that of the ‘anti-LGBTQ’ legislation around the United States nearly all of it is concerned with minors.
I hope that as the year passes I will encounter fewer and fewer videos of transvestites performing in front of a happy and confused crowd of toddlers. I hope that the question of exactly HOW many queer lib ideologues teach in public schools will barely occur to me. Our culture is a culture of unending culture war it seems but, as a general rule, children shouldn’t be enlisted or involved. A contemporary childhood in the United States already sounds strange enough.
——————————————
“Self love is a good thing… but self-awareness is more useful for the rest of us.” - Louis C. K.
—————————————-
Avatar and the Noble Savage
If you haven’t seen Avatar: The Way of water, don’t. Go watch 2-3 hours of Blue Planet, with its orchestral score and panoramic ocean vistas and David Attenborough narration. It will be time better spent and you will find better narrative craft and character development in the documentary.
James Cameron used to be a workable story writer: Titanic, Aliens, Terminator II, all had a narrative arc and sympathetic protagonists and challenging villains. As The Little Platoon (&LINK&), a YouTube critic and commentator who I highly recommend has already explained better than I can, Cameron’s real speciality is the ‘preternatural’ variety of villain-not a human driven by twisted motivations or bad ideas but a kind of animate natural force, a stand-in for the brutality of nature which is represented in our earliest stories, in Tiamat’s personification of nature’s fickle chaos and in the fable of the serpent in the garden.
Such an inhuman, driving force creates opportunities for a lesser variety of human evil of course. Carter Burke in Aliens and Caledon Hockley in Titanic both represent baser human instincts, the former for status and power and the latter for selfish safety during times that call for masculine courage.
Go re-view either of those movies if you’re interested… THEY are decent films with solid writing and an engaging story. Avatar: The Way of Water is not. Avatar’s original incarnation was the biggest cinematic earner in human history… and is it remembered? Are any of the characters cliched? Can anyone REALLY claim that they found themselves considering the theme or story of the film in the months after its release?
There were apparently some forlorn souls so entranced by the spectacular CGI forest planet that Cameron created that they experienced a kind of depressive malaise in their return to reality (allegedly) but that phenomenon (if it is real) doesn’t undercut the claims of this review. Avatar and it’s sequel WERE both visually stunning naturalistic marvels of computer rendering technology. They showed the promise of the technology (and it’s limitations-a hundred rendered Na’avi faces that all appear basically similar) better perhaps than any other film and that is a huge accomplishment which no one can nullify.
That is not the purpose or function of cinema, though. If Avatar’s two releases just took the viewer on a comprehensive tour of a beautiful imaginary planet generated in Cameron’s mind it would be an honest (and strangely formatted) experience that would have probably earned less money but would not have the glaring flaws of the current releases.
The real shortcomings of Avatar and it’s sequel lie in its story- and character-building, which are, at best, shallow and, at worst, discordant and nonsensical. Many better film critics than I have already analyzed the nearly SIX HOURS of runtime of both films combined and pointed out the plot holes and non sequiturs. That isn’t my purpose here.
Instead I want to cast a critical gaze at Avatar’s THEME (for they are unchanged in the first film and it’s sequel). There are secondary themes, certainly. In Avatar there is a theme of change and reinvention overcoming injury and in ‘…The Way of Water’ themes of family and of the protective role of fathers runs through the entire story. The fact that a theme promoting a healthy family unit and the protective role of a father has been seized upon by conservatives as featured to celebrate perhaps shows just how bankrupt and culturally distant Hollywood’s writers have become.
There is a stronger, more central theme in both films, though. This is the theme of The Noble Savage and the corruption of civilization. Other films have explored this theme with more skill and emotional heft (Dances With Wolves, especially, and Disney’s animated Pocahontas and Fern Gully, to name a few) [\\examples?\\] but this IS the central theme of the Avatar franchise.
Lewis H. Morgan was an influential 19th-century social scientist who divided the stages of complex human social development into a trifold scheme: savagery, barbarism, civilization. While his terminology is clearly too normative and unfashionable he did have a number of interesting insights into the development of human societies. One of his best was the idea that collective self-conception was a defining characteristic of social groups. Savages were usually only in contact with a few neighboring groups, at most, and took their superiority and central placement for granted. Barbaric tribes created religious mythology (usually pantheistic or animist) which celebrated values like loyalty and courage and therefore gave them the OPPORTUNITY to win renown and primary placement in the estimation of the gods. Civilizations embraced universal mores which prioritized pacific and gentle qualities (useful in state-level civilization where the proscribed uses of violence were limited to rare cases of civil and personal defense). The final stage of civilization is decadence, in which the civilization loses confidence in its foundational myths and values.
Revolutionaries are generally self-selected from the ruling class
Is there a better example of decadence than our modern civilization? Keep in mind, the tripartite model assigns no value to the specific beliefs and mores of any society. It’s value-neutral in that regard. The specific cherished myths and values of a society are mainly irrelevant in their details; their utility is in being shared narratives that unify a society and define its self-image.
——————————-
They have not created any institutions or movements. The progressivism of the 1930’s was a vibrant, working class phenomenon. The progressivism of today is a theoretical cousin of the French academic radicals of 50 years ago. It was created in classrooms by people who’ve never done a hard day of work or spent a day in jai in their lives, and is taught to kids hungry for purpose. It imagines a world of evil, capitalist white American men oppressing a unified, angelic movement of queer, black, fat activists working for Social Justice. This is a mirage that would be dangerous if its acolytes were not so sensitive and coddled and inept.
Progressives in the US these days are, in my experience, characterized by a shocking level of privilege. Their obsession with privilege betrays their own insecurities, I suspect. They were raised in the richest country of all time by loving parents and went to great schools… but they want to fight for something! (Not actually fight, and not actually sacrifice… but to enjoy the FEELING of doing it). Their concern for poor black Americans doesn’t mean they actually know any (nor will they live in their neighborhoods). Their concern for the environment doesn’t mean they’ll limit their purchase of clothes or phones or air conditioning. On those rare occasions when they encounter the people in whose name they’re ‘fighting’ they are often uneasy. These people are not progressive! They actually have more agency and wisdom (and certainly more street smarts and resilience) than their white saviors and they are definitely NOT part of some righteous rebel alliance of the dispossessed.
Thanks for reading! Please like, comment, subscribe, and SHARE.