it turns out that social media, smart phones, overwork, weakened family structures, sensory overload, and an obsession with speed and specific efficiencies have all made Americans stupid.
I would say in general that speed makes stupid. You have to have time to smell the roses. If you don’t, you forget what roses smell like, or why you would want to smell them. This, in turn, makes your brain shrink. Curiosity is essential for well being, and curiosity often involves time. People in general have the time but the habit is encouraged early and often to run around like a chicken with your head cut off. You may have nowhere to go and nothing to do, but still feel an obsessive need to pass the person who is merely going the speed limit. I’ve done it many times.
And I was pondering a concept of Hyperreality/Subreality. Hyperreality was written about by someone. Whatever they wrote, I have not read.
But in my meditations I will sometimes find myself reliving moments in video games. Is that not odd? I often also find myself reliving movies.
In important ways–even before Virtual Reality, which will make all this much worse–did many of us not have a duality between our “normal” world, and our virtual world? Is it not reasonable, as I have proposed, to view the gigantic TV most people have in a central place in their home as the closest thing to an altar and object of honest religious worship they have?
And video games can be played on that same TV, but they are interactive. And you “relive” the same moments over and over, as you try and get through some particular challenge. Back when I played video games–it’s been 3-4 years now that I have not–I would sometimes go through the same scene 100 times before I managed to get through.
I think it was this that U2 was singing about in “even better than the real thing”. Is it not possible some people would prefer the recorded sound of rain to the actual thing? I remember someone telling me many years ago about a group of kindergartners in front of whom a man with a guitar performed. They fidgeted continually. But when a recording similar to his music was played, they listened raptly.
Are we conditioning people to be more comfortable with things than people, with simulacra rather than the real thing?
Movies feel more real than our real lives, for a time, do they not? That is their point, is it not, to pull us out of our lives, to make us forget our lives, to take us to some distant place and time and to a completely different set of problems which are solved (in most American movies) in front of us.
But obviously they feel more real, but they are less real. They are played out in two dimensions, and will play precisely the same a million years from now, if that technology and people to view it last that long. There is nothing organic, adaptive, vulnerable and changing in it. There is no life and death. It is literally a projection on a screen of a seeming time involved media, but one which has already been determined in its totality.
Now, that may be how life works too. Certainly, many have argued it. I had a premonitory dream the other day which was quite odd. I have had others too. Nothing worth talking about here.
But lived life is interactive, our self and the world. I believe they are energetically interconnected, that we are star stuff and in movement with it.
And I feel intuitively like there is a profound difference between a movie, which will always be the same, and for example live theater, where good actors are consistent, but never perfectly so. Every performance differs in subtle ways, and mistakes are always possible. No mistake, other than a mechanical malfunction, is possible with a film or video game.
How does all this make people less vibrant, less aware, less willing to take risks, less willing to think for themselves? Perhaps it is the twin features of passivity and having defined worlds which cannot be altered.
I’m not sure what I mean by that. Ponder it yourself, and see what you get.
But I do think most people are overwhelmed. There is too much. This is another thing. I think they want someone to tell them what is TRUE, and they want to believe it. There are too many kinds of ketchup.
This would again be the latent attachment to the masks. Masks are a simple, easily comprehended narrative. They fend off chaos.
And in that regard, when I was thinking about that yesterday, I kept having Rene Girard’s phrase “mimetic contagion” appear. I read most of his books, but cannot say for sure I ever felt confident I understood him. I am not sure he understood him. I think he talked out loud, in the hope that sense would eventually emerge. Certainly, I do that.
But in this context, it would mean “alternative ideas”. For rigid personalities, alternatives seem like attacks, don’t they? Alternatives, other ways of being and thinking and doing, risk throwing the person into an existential crisis, into acute panic and confusion and terror, and thus must be protected against.
This is most likely the root of Fascism, in all its forms, including the Communistic variety. This would make masks–when worn by the zealots–more or less directly and literally Fascistic symbols.
I will make one last comment regarding Girard. I have likely made it before, but shit, every post I make may be a repeat by now. But as I say, even if my “performance” is derivative relative to past performances, it will never be a precisely repetitive act.
A guy I knew at Chicago who had audited a class briefly with Girard when he was still teaching at Stanford, said that Girard once pronounced (in his view pompously and incoherently) that “The Rejection of the Rejection of the Other has begun.”
He had no idea what he meant. He thought it was nonsense. But it is really pretty obvious, I think. For most of human history–as most modern academics in the Humanities are eager and even desperate to point out ad nauseum–most societies had an in-group and an out-group. As should be familiar, the term the “Other”–with a capital letter of course–became a sort of coin of that realm perhaps three decades ago. In a book I would have needed to read to pass my Doctoral qualifying exams, Johannes Fabian referenced it in “Time and the Other”. It was likely old even then though.
But the idea was that the same aggressive, irrational, exclusionary energy that was once devoted to making sure blacks used the “correct” drinking fountains in the Jim Crow South was now being dedicated to excluding, demonizing and attacking anyone who might be thought to support that sort of thing.
In other words, that was roughly the period when the usual lunatics started calling racist everyone who disagreed with them about anything. They were in their view the certified keepers of black destiny and well being, and ipso facto anything anyone said against them meant they supported lynchings and white supremacy.
As we are seeing, this is not even remotely hyperbole. It SHOULD be. No one should be that emotionally disconnected and stupid, but most of our “best” academics in fact are. And most politicians are happy to use these narratives for their own enjoyment, power and profit.
I continue to believe we need formal methods for redeveloping emotional intelligence, methods which are organic, honest, and widespread. I have my ideas, but this does not feel like the time.
I continue to pray daily that the System, writ large, does not fail us badly yet again, that all the death and misery spent protecting this nation from irrational tyranny is not wasted by people with soft hands, weak minds, and an utter contempt for the people they claim they want to help.