What Happened to You

Times change, but people don't. You've certainly heard this many times in your life, and maybe you even believe it. That's fine, there is a truth to it. Most people go through most of their lives without reflecting on what truly makes them tick and what they can do to fix it, clueless as to what is causing most of their ills. We've all been there, some more than others. In that sense, some people don't actually change.

This isn't a way to talk down on others, it's just observable reality. It is easier to remain how you are than to change yourself. We always look for ways to fix problems that involve fixing things other than ourselves. That's just how it goes.

However, there is also a phrase that Chesterton once said that is simultaneously true and yet misunderstood today:

"A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it."

There is a temptation to say he is referring to activism or politics, and how one must be skeptical and abrasive to truly be alive, but Chesterton never stopped at that level. He was referring to yourself, your inner self. In order to go against the stream, one has to be aware of what it is you are actually against. Mindless rebellion is the same as floating down the stream as it is equally as effective as doing nothing at all.

People don't always change, not because it's easier to go with the stream, but because it requires a deeper knowledge of oneself in order to understand why one is swimming at all. It requires a knowledge of just what your place in the universe actually is. You have a reason you do everything you do, even if you don't think about it all the time.

Swimming against the stream is about more than believing and protesting things because you learned it in school, but by knowing why you are even swimming to begin with. It's hard to do, so many don't even try. You can let others think for you instead, so just let them do it while you float with the stream. Believing rebellious things is not the same as rebelling, especially when you're letting someone else do all the heavy lifting for you. You might as well be doing nothing at all. Having others think for you is exactly the same as floating against the stream.

When you don't understand even something of that basic level you tend to let the stream overtake you. Suddenly words that have been used for hundreds of years are now not only off-limits, but people who continue to use them must be destroyed to make way for progress. New phrases are introduced to describe things that either don't exist or had much clearer definitions that worked before. Disagree? Then you are bad person who should be treated like a bad person should. Those who think like you did on issues even five years ago are suddenly irredeemably evil. When you're not allowed to get simple answers to simple questions, you are dealing with someone floating with the stream and letting others do the work for them.

It's understandable. We all tend to go with the flow, because the flow is simple. It requires no effort. We are also trained to trust and respect the people in charge, so when the people in charge drop the ball it causes internal distress and doubt. Should this doubt spread far enough among a populace it causes fracturing, societal decay. The worse the mistrust grows, the more fractures spring up. Short of divine intervention, there isn't any real way to bridge this gap without making an effort to. We cannot reconnect if we don't believe in the same basic truths, such as the simple definition of words. Things will only get worse the longer we float with the stream and allow it to go on. To think otherwise is to simply not be living in the real world.

This goes a long way to describing just what is wrong with a lot of today's art, as well as the combative attitude many of the urbanites and culturally clueless Hollywood residents who run most corporations and old industries indulge in. There is an enormous gap that can't be bridged because it isn't separated by distance, but by an entire universe. Those in charge of your industries think themselves above you, because they don't see you as people like they are. It's a problem of worldview, not liable to be changed as long as an entire populace of people continues to float with the stream and allow this to go on. These people are rewarded for floating with the stream, so why would they swim against it? To think otherwise is to not be paying attention.

Suffice to say, there are those who notice this and wish to do something about it. How do you bring together a smattering of smashed and shattered pieces into a cohesive whole again when nobody agrees if you should use glue or tape? It's a mystery, but it has been tried, many times. One of the less successful attempts, yet most influential to modern thought, is the movement now called New Sincerity.

Their answer to fixing the deepest roots of the problem with society was simple. Just pretend they are not there.

What is New Sincerity? Here is the wiki definition:

New Sincerity (closely related to and sometimes described as synonymous with post-postmodernism) is a trend in music, aesthetics, literary fiction, film criticism, poetry, literary criticism and philosophy that generally describes creative works that expand upon and break away from concepts of postmodernist irony and cynicism.

Its usage dates back to the mid-1980s; however, it was popularized in the 1990s by American author David Foster Wallace.

I'm not totally convinced this was a real movement but a gaggle of fractured post-modernists seeing the writing on the wall, and trying to do something about it. It should also be mentioned that postpostmodernism is the most ridiculous phrase ever invented by a modern mind, and that's saying something from the group that invented modern art.

Here is how the above Mr. Wallace described what he wanted:

"The next real literary "rebels" in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naive, anachronistic. Maybe that'll be the point. Maybe that's why they'll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today's risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the "Oh how banal". To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows."

As a critic stated of Mr. Wallace's book Infinite Jest:

"The theory is this: Infinite Jest is Wallace's attempt to both manifest and dramatize a revolutionary fiction style that he called for in his essay "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." The style is one in which a new sincerity will overturn the ironic detachment that hollowed out contemporary fiction towards the end of the 20th century. Wallace was trying to write an antidote to the cynicism that had pervaded and saddened so much of American culture in his lifetime. He was trying to create an entertainment that would get us talking again."

If this sounds like Superversive or the Pulp Revolution decades before either would be realized, you would be half right. That half is everything, however. The postmodernists were smart enough to see a problem on the road ahead. However, they were not forward enough in their thinking to see that postmodernism is not the cure for postmodernism. Postmodernism, after all, is just honest modernism. It's all the same thing. All of this was baked into the cake of the Enlightenment™, and the logical conclusion thereof. It's all baked into the same batter. If you say that everything is made up and therefore objectively pointless then eventually everyone starts to make their own everythings up, including morality and even a new version of sincerity.

No one really denies this is true, but few agree it is dangerously stupid. The answer to being set on fire is not to throw yourself into a furnace, but to put yourself out.

So how did this all come about? Why was "sincerity" needed in art of the time? You will have to go back in time and remember the climate of what was happening back in the mid-80s.

Putting this all together is not that difficult. It goes back to the youth of the time becoming young adults. Gen X was the first generation to be raised post-1960s and the first postmodern generation raised in the wake of a nihilistic culture living off hedonism and general vice. They knew something was wrong, but didn't have much of a clue what, since the past was regularly hidden from them from those in charge. Meanwhile they were also being washed over in postmodern media from New Wave writing to the pretty gloss of the morally vapid modern cinema. They rebelled against everything, including the fake sincerity of a world everyone was pretending wasn't broken. This group was coming of age by the late '80s as serious purveyors of art--art that annoyed a lot of hedonists. This is about the time you will see all those slacker teenager archetypes in media of the period, and portrayals of the youth as cynical and mean.

There was a lot of Gen X commentary of the time, some jokes, and some affectionate portrayals, but one thing was clear: no one could actually refute their arguments. Things were getting worse, as those of us in Gen Y were about to learn in a few years, and nobody in charge knew what to do about it except to let it crumble. 30 years removed and it looks like those Gen Xers were correct in their despair, while the older generations can't help but look out of touch. There is a reason a lot of art between the 1950s and 1980s is really hard to enjoy, even as a historical curiosity. Too much of it is mindless positivity or negativity all based on wishful thinking as to how the world should be run. It is all just modernism run amok. Gen X was simply showing it for what it really was.

What New Sincerity tried to do was find meaning and purpose in a way of life and thinking that had nothing under the surface level. Just as those who raved about Joyce's prose while oblivious to the fact that he had nothing of value to say in those pretty words and phrases, New Sincerity wanted to portray a pretty. glossy, and germ-free, world that simply sidesteps the problems that arise from ignoring the consequences of your own thought processes.

It's really just another attempt to hide the body.

"In his 2010 essay "David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction", Adam Kelly argues that Wallace's fiction, and that of his generation, is marked by a revival and theoretical reconception of sincerity, challenging the emphasis on authenticity that dominated twentieth-century literature and conceptions of the self."

Instead of answering sincere and authentic questions that were springing up, the answer was to redefine the meaning of what sincerity meant. Instead of swimming against the stream, they found a way to keep floating with it. In other words, they chose to reframe lies as truth. Such is the way of modernist, free-for-all thinking. It was always going to end this way.

The answer to the question "What is the meaning of life?" is apparently "What is meaning really?" to a purveyor of New Sincerity. A reframing that not only doesn't answer the very real questions a desperate generation has, but trivializes them and atomizes the disenfranchised even further.

It also mischaracterizes why the doom and gloom existed in the first place.

The reason irony and sarcasm became popular is because of a defeatism built into an entire generation of people due to life experience. You cannot just handwave their very real concerns away by pretending they have no point, yet that is what this "movement" did. Ironically, it was the defeatist sarcasm of the Gen Xers that was sincere, while the makeshift "sincerity" of these upper class urbanites was a white flag disguised as a sidestep.

Reframing words in order to win arguments. Where have we seen that before? Yes, it is precisely the problem happening in present day culture. You see it every single time Hollywood announces a terrible looking, creatively bankrupt movie. It is the normal people who are wrong while those who mindlessly consume Hollywood product are the smart ones. This attitude still exists in the 21st century.

In fact, New Sincerity is the root of all the worst ills currently assailing western culture. See for yourself if any of the below looks familiar.

Yes, this faux sincerity is what led to the bugman mentality and fragile "positivity" that infects modern men and women, particularly in "geek" circles. Every current problem in the arts can be traced to this make believe sincerity that simply sidestepped the past and pretends there is nothing to be learned from it. Reality is what you make of it!

For those unaware, a bugman is a term to refer to one who has about as much depth as a consuming locust to their personality. They live to devour, and little else. Their personalities don't go beyond consumption or empty moralizing based on platitudes they were taught in school or by the media. Because they were taught so ineptly by their boomer parents they simply drank the slop they were given by government-backed school system and use that is their sole personality. They were trained to float in the stream, and they do so with a smirking grin on their greasy faces.

This is why they all have the same beliefs on every subject and share the same empty morals that they try to enforce on others. New Sincerity was an attempt to make sure this new group of kids coming up after Gen X did not notice there was no man behind the green curtain. But it didn't quite work too well. You can see the wheels coming off of this train every day. Only momentum keeps the train rolling. The driver died and fell off long ago.

It's one thing to ask where the social justice sermonizing of the past decade came from, but it's another to ask how these Millennials were able to buy into it so easily whereas the nearby Gen X and Gen Y woke up one day to find themselves under its boot. The reason is because this "new" sincerity is what replaced the classical education and religious knowledge that was once ingrained in society. It happened so gradually that it was hardly noticed until it was too late. They attempted to replace the glue that held the west together with cheap paste, and that paste is now wearing thin and crusting to dust.

This isn't to say only one generation fell into the empty moralizing trap, there are plenty of those in older and younger generations than Millennials who fell into it, but it was those coming of age during the dour '00s that fell victim to this mindset the hardest. Because of this, you have people taught lies as truth attempting to destroy those who still believe truth as truth. It's a righteous mess that isn't going to end in a good place.

So what is so wrong with New Sincerity? Isn't it preferable to the Gen X irony and misery we were all living through back in the day? Shouldn't we have fun again and ignore the bad attitudes holding us back? Why is it wrong to not be miserable?

These aren't the questions to ask. The questions to ask is if they were based on truth or not. New Sincerity was deliberately not based on truth, but on wishful thinking. It's built on lies, well meaning or not. This makes it harmful, and in the 21st century is hard to see it as anything else.

The difference is that the Gen X malaise was based on observable reality by those who live through it. The bitterness and sarcasm as honesty, despite its flaws based on incomplete information. New Sincerity is nothing but lying. It is admitting what the Gen Xers said and then pretending it doesn't matter as an excuse to indulge in hedonism, both material and emotional, to avoid the truth of your own thought process. There is nothing sincere about a lie, no matter how much you wish it not to be one.

This nonsense is akin to taking LSD to break a Heroin addiction

A good chunk of the criticism of postmodernist thought is by moderns who don't like that their own beliefs lead down this empty road to nowhere. They just think others should stop thinking instead. Stop taking things to their logical conclusion and ignore the reality of your own ideas. Instead of reassessing and fighting against the stream, they deliberately misdiagnose the problem in order to continue their mindless drift. It's not fighting the stream at all, merely turning over to float on your stomach. All that does is help you drown faster.

I said before that one of the appeals to punk rock music was that it was made by the forgotten silents, and picked up by Gen X, and last really affecting Gen Y, before it phased out into nothing. It's music for a line of ostracized generations. This is a result of those incharge plugging their ears to the very real concerns of their youth. Since then, you've been dealing with a generation raised on false sincerity based on wishful thinking followed by a generation that only sees madness that needs blowing up. All of this would have been avoided if not for the modernist trap, but it is what it is. Now it's going to happen the hard way.

This oncoming disaster was predicted before, though it was routinely ignored. In fact, it was buried. From writers such as the above Chesterton to even pulp writers, many had guessed what was going to happen, so they were unpersoned as if they never existed and left out of print while degenerate material remained on store shelves, eventually leading to the sharp decline in sales that killed reading as a pastime among normal people. Yes, this hatred of reality has been around long. It happened far more recently than you would think.

Author Fritz Leiber was one of the old pulp masters credited with "moving" the genre towards modernism with his stories such as Smoke Ghost which abandoned the old villages, small towns, and graveyards, of old weird fiction, and created tales that took place in the modern city. Many credited him with doing this as a way of keeping the form fresh, or whatever nonsense they wanted to justify abandoning the old ways for the new, but that isn't why he did it. That isn't why writers write. What Mr. Leiber did was use this burgeoning modernism as a source for the horror itself.

Take the relatively unknown short novel You're All Alone. Originally written as his third novel in 1943, fits and starts in the market meant he had nowhere to submit it for near seven years, even writing an alternate version that nearly doubled its length and was eventually published under another title (with chopped up editing and spiced up sex-scenes against his will, because editors at the time were degenerates) years later. The original version of You're All Alone was published in Fantastic Adventures in 1950. It almost missed the pulp era entirely. This original 40,000 word novel, You're All Alone, tells the story of a clockwork universe eerily similar to our own. In this one, Leiber imagines what the world would be like if that old deist idea really was true.

The results show both a satire on modern city life and the horror of what atomization from existence really would feel like should one break their winded-up pattern. Carr, the main character, is just a normal man working a normal desk job, day and day out. One day he sees a woman acting strangely just outside. She comes into the office pretending she is there for a meeting and is somewhat surprised to see that he is interacting with her. Through a strange series of events, he learns that no one seems to see her or the weirdness going on around them, and slowly he begins being embroiled in her very real problems. The story is about this odd world just outside his own that he never knew existed. It's a modern twist on the weird tale, but no less as valid an approach.

The original Fantastic Adventures cover, reprinted

There will be some spoilers because the nature of this universe, which is incidental to the story, yet necessary, has to be discussed in at least some way. So be warned if you wish to go into You're All Alone spoiler-free.

Most people go with the flow because life contains a sort of hypnotic rhythm that keeps you in line, not unlike clockwork that clicks forward regardless of your whims. Most people are dead, fallen into this clockwork that lets the individual live for them, but some can feel this strange sensation and use it to live in it or fall out of it should they will it. However, becoming unstuck is dangerous as there are all sorts of dangers from doing so, such as roving gangs of deviants and men in black hats that run down those who cause problems. It is more of a risk to be outside the pattern than be in it, therefore it is safer to remain in it.

What you might be thinking, since it is a very modern cliché, is that the pattern is the horrific part of the story and falling out of it is paradise. The individual rises above the masses! It's not quite that simple. To fall out of the pattern, one must not only be aware of it, but want to do so--this means the majority who fall out of it are antisocial thugs, perverts, and violent criminals, looking to torture and destroy anyone they can, preferably those others who live outside of the pattern. They can't be caught or jailed, after all. The dog on the front cover is used by one such woman to hunt down and attack those she desires seeing hurt. In other words, those who hate and reject life itself are those who entirely reject the pattern and live for themselves. They prefer to live outside because they can do whatever they want without consequence and they desire victims to keep the pleasure train going. One can say that they live in a rhythm of their own.

As for the Black Hats, the enforcers of the pattern, they aren't given much focus until the end of the story since they only seem to show up throughout the tale to go after the main antagonists, but for obvious reasons our main characters are quite scared of them. It is only at the end of the story when these men thank someone in the shadows who they don't realize is actually dead that their intentions become clear. They are not chasing down those who deviate from the pattern, but those who break it and cause evil and distress. Those who fell out of the rhythm are not what was being prosecuted, but those disturbing the peace and hiding from justice.

So the conclusion Carr comes to is that slowly awakening people while living in the pattern is the best path to success. The rhythm exists as a guide, but to mindlessly fall into it is to risk your own health. You need to be able to see beyond what is directly in front of you. Carr knows that drifting in the stream is dangerous. It might take a long time to fully understand the pattern, but at least he now knows his station in life. Will his idea work? Who knows, but at least he is no longer floating with the stream and is willing to search for the truth.

Is You're All Alone meant to be a philosophical treatise on the meaning of life? No, it's a pulp thriller. It's not meant to be realistic at all. I severely doubt Mr. Leiber believed in his theory that would allow normal people to receive stab wounds out of thin air and not notice, or put their keys in a car that isn't there and not move because there is no car. He merely uses the premise to tell his story of a man who learns the purpose of life is more than mindless drudgery or hedonistic pleasures. It's a simple sort of pulp tale in the mold that made them so interesting.

But in its pages are some truth. There is a pattern we can find ourselves in to make getting through life easier and in the process lose our purpose. But rejecting life isn't the answer, through that path lies an entirely different type of death.

What Mr. Leiber noticed was that the modern world is built for living in a pattern. It incentivizes repetitive actions over adventure and mechanical thinking over wonder. It's not what existence is, but merely a vague facsimile of it. This is the urban life, same as it always was. One would have to wonder if it was made this way for this purpose.

But realizing that would have to require going against the stream, wouldn't it?

Ace printing from 1972

Real sincerity is admitting reality, not hiding from it. Art is about connections, including the artist's relationship with the truth. We are made to seek it out. Even if you get it wrong, the important part is that you want the truth enough to fight for it, enough to swim against the current.

All things must pass, which means the modern world is not going to last forever. However, it is not going to be broken or conquered with the same thoughts and ideas that led it into this mess to begin with. It's actually going to require going against the flow you were trained to float in. For most of us, maybe even all of us, that is going to be a feat far beyond what has been done in several generations. It requires rejecting falsities for truth.

But times are changing, whether we want them or not. We're not marching towards any pattern or progress, but onward as that is what time does. Should we continue to be asleep, to prescribe the same medicine that is currently causing ills, and refuse to look to the past in order to move forward, we will remain floating dead in the stream as everything collapses around us. Decay will only persist as entropy cannot be stopped by hopeful wishes from those who think reality can be altered by thoughts alone. It would be laughable if it wasn't such a prevalent thought process.

Modernism is done, finished. That path has been explored, and the rhythm it offers is not worth salvaging. We can no longer remain here where we know nothing good remains. It is time to answer those questions tossed off decades ago and accept where it leads us.

Once again, the answer is to go back in order to move forward. Reassess where we went wrong and work from there. The answer to alcoholism isn't to drink more alcohol, it's to stop drinking. We all need an intervention, before those in charge ban those next. Fighting to float is a worthless cause, but that is what is being foisted on us right now.

So start swimming. Who knows what lies at the end of this wild ride, but it has to be better than the cliff we are heading towards right now. It's going to take a revolution of thought, but we can get there. It just requires changing everything you know.

At least know you're not alone. There are many out there just like you, looking for the right way to swim. It's only a matter of time before we figure out the right direction.

For a revolution in art, check out the Pulp Mindset! The world is changing around you, so be sure you aren't caught unaware!