Y to Z

There's been a lot of talk recently about the lack of hope for the future. This has been reflected in modern art and entertainment quite a good deal. We see much about the destruction of the world or people, but not a whole lot about how things would look if they improved. In fact, we've been living in the remains of the twentieth century for two decades now.

To be honest, all one has to do is go on social media or turn on the television and be greeted by an onslaught of fashions, worldviews, aesthetics, and entertainment, that more or less feel as if they were ripped from the twentieth century, just decayed. And they look and feel more decayed every time you look at them. It's fairly morbid stuff.

This isn't to say there is nothing worth indulging in these days: there is actually quite a lot. The point is more that there is no real hopeful look towards the future of the world, or any real view of what is to come that isn't merely about full collapse or yet more of the same continuing indefinitely. The days of looking forward to cheap rockets to the moon are long over. What has replaced them is . . . nothing, really.

We can't really seem to imagine anything beyond the "modern" (in a mid-twentieth century sense) world continuing forever without end. Which is weird, considering that we all know it won't. It can't. History doesn't work like that. But there are no visions being presented from the greater culture as to what could possibly come next that isn't just rehashed and reheated mush left over from the previous century. 

We aren't going back to anything; humanity doesn't work like that. We're moving into uncharted territory, as we always have. What the twentieth-first century will have in store for us is yet unknown! 

So why does it feel like no one even wants to guess at what that future might be like? Why do we only imagine destruction or an even more hedonistic version of late twentieth century first world life? Is there nothing beyond that?

There was a post made recently at The Dacian by author Alexandru Constantin about the lack of anything aside from pastiche from his generation. It was as if we all arrived late to a party that had already been abandoned and have no idea what we're supposed to do next. 

We don't have anything to build on. There is no vision of the future being made in the wider culture. It is just more of the same.

"We are twenty-one years into the 21st Century but culturally we are trapped in a nostalgic pastiche of the 20th. Our current seems incapable of articulating the present. Everything is referential to the ghosts of the past. Our social and political commentary is trapped in the mystified history of World War II seen understood through the lens of superhero movies and Tarantino infantilism. Endless performative stupidity.

"We live in a state of dyschronia, a disoriented, out-of-time sensation of vertigo. Bug World is main street Disneyland, a non-place of interchangeable Starbucks disguised as nostalgia. Remember Star Wars guys, how quaint, slap a Spider-Man on it! Boy oh boy the past is now, then, and forever. You too can have a childhood just like your father did, but this America is extra good 4k resolution."

The brand is love, the brand is life. It was made in the 20th century, and that makes it to be worshiped. Why have something new that builds on it, when you can have the same thing rehashed forever? Remember that copyright logo? Doesn't it make you feel warm inside? Hey, you don't need that physical collection, do you? Trade in and give the corporation your credit card number so they can charge you indefinitely for the right to rent things digitally. Why do you need to own anything when you can trust us to own it for you?

Surely this is the future your ancestors fought so hard for.

But the other point is that it's stale. This is all the same crap we had back in the 1990s, only now filtered through high definition screens and tacky brands that were obnoxious even at the time they were new. We were already seeing a downgrade at the time of the '90s, and now they expect you to celebrate the downgrade with endlessly rereleased and repainted toys that you already had, only now they're made worse. And you most likely will buy them again and again, judging by how the endless reboot culture is still supported by people who peaked back in 1999 and are incapable of thinking of a brighter future beyond consuming product.

Who cares that Blockbuster destroyed an entire superior industry; don't you remember the smell of store brand popcorn and the feel of cheap the laminate rental cards in your hand when you walked in to rent The Matrix for the first time? That's what really matters! Hey, did you hear they're making a new Matrix soon? I remember that lobby scene from nearly thirty years ago like it was yesterday! Seeing the new one will make me feel like I did back then. Boy, I wonder what will happen when they make another Matrix in twenty years again. Remember Blockbuster? I could sure go for some popcorn. Oh hey, it looks like Blockbuster is getting its own popcorn brand. Isn't that cool? It reminds me of when I was a kid and rented The Matrix.

But what is being made that reminds you of what it means to be an adult? What is trying to pull you forward with a fresh vision of what is to come instead of pushing you into reliving what has already passed? What is there to look forward to? Why are you constantly called to relive the past instead of shaping a future?

Why aren't we answering those questions anymore?

"The truth is we failed. We were given the internet and instead of creating groundbreaking art or revolutionary culture we reverted into nostalgic infantilism. We turned our back on the future and retreated into a never-ending Comic-Con, cheering for children’s entertainment created before our parents were born. Endless remakes, endless re-imagining. We can’t imagine a future, so we just borrow previous versions. Bladerunner again, Dune again, Matrix again, endless Terminators, endless Alien’s."

It doesn't even matter if you like these things. The simple point is that we're reliant on reheated corporate product for our art and entertainment when such things used to come secondary. 

Yes, Hollywood has always created remakes. But they also constantly pumped out new things. We had a B-movie industry that, before it was choked out by the big boys and corporate chains, used to try and present that. There was new with the old. Now you get old things repackaged as new without any of the charm, care, or craft, that made the old things what they were to begin with. It's a tailspin of corporate meddling and hopes for easy money disguised as giving the customer what they want. And it isn't really working anymore.

However, the greater point is that storytelling doesn't exist so that we can see the same corporate owned intellectual properties be sold to us over and over indefinitely amen. It exists to lift us up and show us a place much different than here--one that opens up possibilities. Now the only possibilities is the same cracked world spinning onward forever.

What is the purpose of storytelling? To tell the exact same story over and over, but change the undesirable parts for our ever-mutating "modern" sensibilities? Is it just to mindlessly consume product and wait for next product? For what end do we consume them?

Is storytelling just soma? Is escapism really bad for you? No, that can't be the case, simply given how effective it was for hundreds of years before the modern mess we live in. Stories have a greater purpose than to lull you back into a diabetic, comfy coma. They exist to push you onward. But we seem to have forgotten that.

Stories are made to give voice to things we feel and experience internally, not to be endlessly rehashed as brand names that remind you of other times from long ago. They are meant to give us the strength to get up and continue forward into new horizons.

So why are they being used to keep us in the past? Why indeed.

This world is gone, and it's not coming back.

One could easily point to Cultural Ground Zero as some sort of cause to this, but CGZ is not a cause; it is a result. Allowing corporate monopolies to run roughshod over the little guys, choosing not to address serious issues that needed addressing for decades, and deliberately demonizing the past has left us adrift in a counterfeit existence, unable to find the way back out. We were already done long before CGZ hit.

The reason we can't find the way back out is because getting into this situation took a lot of finagling by generations much older than us--deviating us from a natural progression as a species into a sort of bottleneck fashioned from errors about humanity that came out of the industrial revolution. Remember, Utopia is coming every day now because we have electricity and cures for diseases we didn't have centuries ago. It'll just happen! All you have to do is pretend human nature can be perfected and improved, even though actual evidence proved it can't be. We are what we are; but we if we can pretend we're not? This backwards thinking is why we live in a backwards world. 

We still live in a society that still sees the same crimes and tragedies play out time and time again, decade after decade, solemnly shake our heads, and wonder when will the Other Idiots finally Evolve and get with whatever is fashionable this year like we have. We do this over and over and wonder why nothing changes.

Because it won't. It never will.

Human beings don't really change. We can't, and we won't, no matter how much we wish we could. We are fundamentally imperfect and flawed beings capable of just as many horrific acts as we are noble ones. We can funnel crippling pain into unreal strength and turn core virtues into poisonous vices. We can achieve anything, but one thing we are good at above all is convincing ourselves to follow a single track. Sometimes this can be a good thing, especially when working on or creating something, but it can also lead to terrible thought processes planted from our ancestors that bear evil fruit long after the ones who started it have passed on.

And that is basically where we are today.

Essentially our problems come from being locked in the wrong frame of mind from those a few generations back. It was this mentality that never had a plan except that Things Would Work Out at some point. That's about it, really. Does that sort of thinking make sense? I don't know, does it look like it's Working Out to you? Yet we refuse to turn back despite its proven failure.

Maybe if we keep getting mad at reality for reasserting itself every time we try to defy it eventually reality will change for us. Seems as good a plan as any. After all, why else would we continue to smash our heads against the same brick wall repeatedly for decade after decade, expecting different results from the exact same decisions that failed before? The 20th century is over. Perhaps we should stop living with 20th century expectations and blind hopes. Those times are long gone, and they're not coming back.

It's over.

Nonetheless, we are locked where we are because choose to be. Until we break the cycle, we will be rehashing this same tired fugue state indefinitely, or at least until we are forced out of it by outside factors. Either way, it isn't going to always be like this. We would be better off making the choice to move on before it is made for us.

However, that doesn't help the expression issues. How do we express things when our imagination has been so stunted? Well, we first have think outside of the box, as hard as that might be. If you can't imagine a better world than you can't imagine a brighter future. Everyone should be able to imagine something beyond their own present state. Otherwise you will be little more than a prisoner to the whims of outside forces to get what they want.

We internally know all of this, but we are, right now at least, unable to express what will come next. It's a shame, but one day it will be different. As long as we push against the tide we can find a break in it. And if it kills us? Well, at least we attempted it.

A second sort of related post on this subject of endless circling the drain came from author Alexander Hellene. He touches on a subject close to it, but there are a few choice passages to highlight. You can find the post here.

"What is American culture in the early twenty-first century? An endless spiral of revivalism and nostalgia. Replicating chunks of a relatively recent past we cannot escape because nobody can imagine a future any different, any better, than this.

"The more scholarly among us like current events to the past. This is just like Ancient Rome . . . it’s 1939 all over again . . . you know who else drank water? This helps explain recurring patterns of human behavior, but pointing out similarities and recommending solutions without taking what is actually happening in the present into account does nothing to solve the very real, very deep problems we face."

Why do we need to be constantly reminded of our childhood? Why can we not instead be reminded of a better future we can aim for? Why is this culture more obsessed with the latter than the former? It is because we are incapable of thinking of anything aside from what we already know of. This is how we were educated to be. If the best you can imagine is 1987 or 1995, then that's all you can hope for.

And neither of those years was all that great, in the grand scheme of things. But it's all we have as a reference. We were taught to expect it to last forever as long as we just kept our heads down and did what we were told. We didn't expect it wouldn't be sustainable, and it turns out that it wasn't.

This misplaced nostalgia also degrades the past era as we attempt to constantly relive those times. You just take more and more from it, distorting the memories with every piece you pillage, misremember, rearrange, and subvert for your own selfish gain. When those memories are gone and destroyed, what remains? 

At the end, you are left with nothing. Hence, what we are currently seeing after an endless 1997 on repeat. We can't imagine anything beyond the faded memories of a forgotten time currently and rapidly fading out of sight. 

This isn't going to go on forever, but we want to pretend it will.

"But the fact remains that we are trapped in a bizarre Frankenstein’s monster of World War II nostalgia and 1980s geopolitical thinking and artistic aesthetics, a paradigm stuck in those two decades, with no end in sight. A culture of pastiche. Take bits of the past to make something that’s kind of like the past. It’s like a road trip without a map or an idea of where you want to go: you decide to just pull off in some pretty residential development and just do circles around the cul-de-sac for hours, driving a lot but going nowhere.

"There’s a glitch in humanity’s code. The present is a broken record we cannot unskip. In the end, I shouldn’t be so surprised that robots can imitate us so convincingly."

No wonder Hollywood has been working on AI scriptwriting to replace their rapidly collapsing talent pool. It's only going to get easier the more we try to dumb ourselves down to match what we consume, just as we do with every single modern reboot, reimagining, relaunch, and unnecessary sequel. We're back to ignoring reality again.

Unfortunately, as mentioned earlier, the trapped nature we find ourselves in has a lot to do with the self-mythicization we have engaged in since at least the Enlightenment. Our ego has us stuck. We think we figured it out, but it turns out we didn't. We broke from tradition, and we've been steadily sliding downhill since despite our understanding of technology and medicine improving. Happiness alludes us still.

Unhappiness has steadily grown to the point that depression and suicide is an epidemic in the modern world. This also leads to other health problems such as obesity or hard drug and alcohol use. We are killing ourselves to fill a hole and numb the pain. None of this ever gets addressed because it is just assumed these issues will Get Fixed one day. They will be repaired Scientifically. We just need to get there!

So how much longer are we supposed to wait?

Since that's how we were taught the future is supposed to work, and have been told for hundreds of years, it is unfathomable that this direction could be wrong. It is even more impossible that those before our enlightened ideas came to fruition might have had something right that we got wrong. After all, things just naturally Get Better, remember? Despite evidence to the contrary that you can easily gleam by seeing how the '20s has been shaping up so far. Aside from that.

It hasn't been great, and probably won't be for awhile. The 2020s are probably going to be a rough ride for everyone involved. Nonetheless, we still need hope for a better future--just not the empty hope based on nothing we relied on before. That was what lead us here to begin with.

Mindless worship of "the future" has led to nothing but empty consumerism as a replacement for ethos or hope. We exist to consume soma, and nothing else.

At some point we must admit there is no future here. We were sold a lie.

An example of ahistorical nonsense disguised as "Hope"

Another example. You can read this article here.

And where has this materialist mentality of mindless hope led us? Nowhere at all. In fact, it has left us without any vision of the future or bearing on what to do next when the above paradise we were promised never came true. It never came true because it can't come true.

We need something beyond a future of spinning our wheels through fields of broken down dreams and empty hopes. You aren't going to find water in the desert, and you aren't going to find a future where there is nothing but a past built on sand.

Now, don't take this as a blind condemnation of the past. This isn't anything of the sort. We need the past. We need what our ancestors put down for us in order to forge ahead in the world. We need people who keep old traditions alive, unsoiled by the ambitions of those who wish to selfishly destroy them for clout and an improved social score created by those who hate them. We need the old ways to keep our bearings straight.

But we also need those visionaries willing to forge new trails and help us look at eternal things in a new way. It doesn't mean abandoning tradition. Quite the opposite: it means building onto it and expanding. Growing new branches and allowing us to stretch our wings, all this while the roots are still tended to in order to make sure we are still sturdy enough to handle it. There is much we must do; much we haven't been doing at all. 

There isn't a perfect formula for this problem, but we need to be able to have a hopeful glance ahead in order to have a direction to build towards.

The future awaits regardless of what we want. It always does.

An example of something we can learn from the past.

This is a reason I have taken to calling the next generation the Last Generation, while the mainstream attempts to call them Generation Alpha. This is an assumption that things will just Start Over with them, when that is simply not the case. They are the last to live in this dried out husk of twentieth century scraps. with them comes the end.

What comes next? That's the pertinent question.

Admittedly, this post is really just a very long way of saying that I don't really have a solution to this problem. I've always been more of a traditionalist, bordering on Luddite. I'm the wrong person to supply a solution to this quandary. The importance of the past can't be understated, nor be as hated as it is by those in the mainstream. We can't afford to lose our only links out of this trap we are stuck in. You need the past to move into the future.

That said, we do need a vision of the future beyond the same one, or mutations on the same one, we have had for far too long. That world doesn't exist, will never exist, and can't exist. We have more than enough modern examples to prove that much. It is time for new ways.

But, again, things are changing at a rapid rate. While the '00s were a big load of nothing, the '10s proved just how much things had changed despite not seeming as if they did on the surface before. And within 2 years of the '20s we have seen a total upheaval of the way things were. Whether we like it or not, the old days are definitely over. We are entering a new era. Better strap in, because it's going to be a rough ride going forward.

Now, will we use this change to our advantage and finally press towards a new, shining future, or will we continue to let ourselves degrade into nothing, clinging to the dead twentieth century forever? Right now there's no way to tell what we'll do, but I'd like to think humanity's capability to adapt will at the very least help us to find a new angle on this old problem, and see it for what it is. We're about due. Then we can find a way out again.

What comes next? Who knows. Perhaps it will be a better way forward. All we can do is hope for the best.

An adventure into the dark world of nightmares!