I was wandering around wondering what an alternative, more culturally and emotionally satisfying community space might look like.
What if all of us had everything we needed for life? What if robots did not ruin us but created the conditions where none of us had to work? What then? What to do with the time?
And this is a larger, even cosmic question I’ve been contemplating, but don’t feel like discussing in more depth right now.
But as I think I’ve commented more than once, I think Stranger Things really hit on some resonant mythic themes. And specifically, the shopping mall–which was newly destroying downtown Smallville (whatever the town was called) and the climactic scene in which the people who have been subsumed into the blob confront the protagonists.
Just looking quickly, and throwing something out there, punk feels like a primal scream before a sort of collective submersion of much of America some time in the 80’s into a compliant, servile, unimaginative, hostile, emotionally needy mediocrity. This applies no matter which side of the manufactured political divide you fell on, although the Left certainly promised more in terms of moral hauteur and unwarranted grandiosity.
The really good music seems like it was done by 1985, doesn’t it? The music where people threw some part of their real selves into it? For me, the last Bruce Springsteen album I enjoyed in its entirety was “Born in the USA”. I think all of AC/DC’s best albums were done by then. Same with Rush.
And the malls sprang up, and the pod people starting waiting for their iPod’s.
This is of course overly generalizing. But I can now that that is how I felt then. And all these years later, I can’t say definitively I was wrong.
I don’t know where my people are. I don’t know where my tribe is, and I think many people feel like that. Me, I’m normal in my emotional needs, but painfully perspicacious with respect to the bullshit people throw out and don’t even realize it. Most people do not even realize it when they are being inauthentic, because they have never been any other way, because nobody has ever been any other way with them. Malls and TV. Cars and sex. Booze, drugs and rock and roll.
And probably 100,000 plus deaths of despair in 2020. I think you could safely bet a good sum on that.
All of this is sketch work from 20,000 feet. But I sketch. That’s what I do. Any portraits I build come from prior study. I suppose it would be reasonable for me to assert that the mental images, the ideas, the arguments, the psychosocial gestalts of various sorts I build, constitute for me my own creative work, my art.
A perception is never the reality, is it? The reality is multifaceted, and quite possibly includes facets whose existence we don’t even suspect. What if Thetans are real? I don’t believe that, but I’m not God, so I can’t definitively say what there is to see that I am not seeing. The brightest human who ever lived may have missed two thirds of what matters. We don’t know.
But a good perception allows us to plug it into our plans, and then see what happens. Add two parts This Idea to one part That idea, then see what happens in the real world. That is where politics and economics become science. In theory, history consists in a long succession of experiments too, but “history” has become victim to people who want to conquer the present by reconquering the past with a different flag.