As the modern world tumbles down around us we can only wonder more and more when it will finally hit rock bottom. Surely even the wasteland has its limits, right?
Well, maybe it does.
The worst aspect of lying is trying to not only the act of attempting to lie to others, but also attempting to make them believe said lie, especially when you, at the heart of it, don't actually believe what you're saying to begin with. We do this every day, but nowhere is this attitude more prevalent than with those who attempt to enforce morality from a place of authority they do not have. What is worse is when said folk will admit they do not believe objective morality even exists in the first place, but will still enforce it on others despite their admittance they have no right to do this. In effect, you must bow to them because they said so and no other reason. Otherwise you are the Enemy.
Confused? I'll bet. It is a very confusing attitude to deal with, and yet it happens all the time. It has only become more prevalent over the years.
And it's a problem that needs to be addressed.
One of the defining aspects of the post-Cultural Ground Zero era of the West has been embracing unreality as reality, and forcing or shaming and framing anyone who believes in actual reality as some kind of immoral ghoul or evil monster who is okay to destroy. You even have corporations and some supposed religious organizations joining in to weaponize unreality as club to beat down anyone who disagrees. All in the name of "inclusivity" or something. Nothing more welcoming than threatening others to stay in line or casting them out to die in the dark, I suppose. Then again, this IS unreality. Backwards insanity is what it has always been.
What is worse is that all of these immoral moralists know, by their own philosophy and belief system, that what they speak is wrong and not true, but they will enforce it on everyone else anyway. All for a crumb of control over the lessers. They wish to be king of the world they hate so much.
Yes, this ties in to modern Fanaticism once again. The root of all of this is subversive obsession with turning up in to down, black into white, left into right, and vice versa. It comes from the mind of one who does not only doesn't understand reality but hates it.
It goes without saying that such thinking has invaded the arts and all sectors of entertainment, but it has also obviously entered every facet of our lives from politics to general discourse (the Daily Show, as an example, thrived of dehumanizing those who disagreed with them under the guise that it was "just joking"... until you see how the people behind the "joking" act and treat their opponents today), and has just generally made the social climate a worse place to live in over the years. Even worse is that this lot has convinced a lot of Gen Z and younger kids that this festering dung heap of hatred has always been this way so get used to it. No one has ever loved their family! No one has ever self-sacrificed for others! No one has ever been happy!
They have convinced so many people that the world has always been bad, so you have no right to complain about it being bad now.
Let us put aside the fact that history is not a straight line and progress does not exist. Every era has its ups and downs, innovations and failures, saints and sinners, but we typically only focus on one or the other when examining them. If anyone is trying to sell the past as either being Eden or Hell they are trying to sell you something. And this crowd very much wants you to believe the latter so they can prescribe their snake oil.
The truth is that we are refusing to learn or carry anything over from the past and it is stunting everything. We cannot grow because our roots are not planted in anything.
But it was not always as bad as it is now. We did once respect those who came before us. Instead of making everyone fear Armageddon at every moment of every day, people once put their faith in things like religion and community that the bigger problems, problems they could not control in the first place and were out of their hands, would eventually be solved by those more confident in the area than they were. You can trust someone other than yourself.
Not only do you not need to vote a government in who can force your community to act the way you want it to, you can learn and grow from those you do not understand. This stands to reason that it beats demonizing your neighbor, but you also cannot connect with someone you have absolutely nothing in common with.
Hence the mess we have today.
There is nothing modern cultists hate more than the idea of someone who acts outside their preapproved checklist. In other words, such people are incapable of living in an ordinary community, something that has existed since the start of humanity itself. They were trained specifically to trust authority they don't even believe exists over all else.
Truth is, things are always better when you can live in a neighborhood without having to lock your door and when you know the name of everyone on your street. And their are now swaths of people who were taught and wholeheartedly believe that such things were never real to begin with.
You might consider such thinking naïve, but there is truth to the forgotten adage of "Think Globally, Act Locally" that knows the common man is not one who can carry infinite worries and anxieties on his back. It is the same with having faith in a higher purpose or plan for the way things are--it allows you to focus instead on the smaller things that one can control and leave the rest to Someone who can shoulder the burden with you. The loss of both of those things has created a social climate where suicide is now one of the top killers, alienation and atomization is the new normal, and social trust is at an all-time low.
This is the exact inverse of how a healthy society should be. In addition to that, instead of fixing any of this we make excuses for those in charge leading the charge in this societal decay. Once again, up is down, left is right, black is white, and if you attempt to say otherwise: the truth, you will be Canceled, or whatever the slang word will be in the years to come. Do not rock the boat. Let the rot win for times to improve. Unreality thrives off this meaningless conflict.
It's a very predictable game.
Clearly this is not the way things should be, and they were not like this before. But we have somehow been convinced we've always been at war with "X"-ist Uncle Jerry down the street who is the one ruining the world. If we browbeat everyone into believing government doctrine that didn't exist five minutes ago, we will achieve peace. Destroy your enemies for the cause. This has been the law of the land for at least a decade now, and it has done little but led to increased depression and self-harm. But still you will find many unwilling to second guess themselves or change their ways instead of trying to change others. Flood therapist offices and live off pills while enforcing on others that you know the secret to achieve Eden.
Never let it be said that anyone is immune to propaganda.
And yet despite all of this nonsense, there are those who insist on a bland positivity towards the future when they can see just how bad things truly are right now. We are at a low and they believe we can achieve a high, but not for any real reason.
There is nothing wrong with holding a good outlook towards life and hoping things will get better; but there is plenty wrong with pretending everything is okay and outright dismissing any concerns with the current state of things. That is not positivity; it is delusion.
So it is with the current state of entertainment.
There are those convinced we are in a dark age because of the advent of AI in every aspect and corner of the industry. Things will be better if we ban it and blacklist anyone who engages with the process, destroying anyone who even so much as played around with it for a joke. How can you treat the mechanization of art as a mere joke?! Don't you realize what is at stake!
All of this is ignoring the fact that the reason AI algorithms exist at all in the field of art to begin with is because we have spent decades formulizing and standardizing every aspect of creation into belt-line factory methods of pumping out banal product for as little effort as possible. Why would an AI not be able to copy that? This is what we proudly thumped our chests at wanting! "As long as it is easier for the artists" was the slogan, remember? We are the ones who made it that easy to do such a thing in the first place. Why are we complaining that we dumbed down expectations and creativity to the point that a machine can easily satisfy what we want?
"Well," you may say. "At least there was human involvement beforehand! There isn't any now."
Unfortunately, this is meaningless. The whole act of "making it easier for the artists" implies lowering standards for creation and using methods objectively inferior to what came before. It infers that "advancements" in technology weren't made to mechanize art in the first place (and conveniently giving those in charge less overhead on pesky things like covers, posters, illustrations, and even different types of story lengths) and strip humanity out of it. You don't get to complain about the bottom of the slippery slope you foolishly trumpeted climbing when no one made you climb it in the first place. It was always going to end this way.
I was there when the rock bands were kicked off the major labels so the execs could hire a "creative team" centered around pre-picked singers who had their voices warped by computers to sound "perfect" and such people were pushed by the mainstream for decades. No one fought this, just as no one fought Clear Channel buying up the entire radio industry. So there was only one way it could end. The result of letting things be mechanized has led to a dead industry that has nothing to offer artists or audiences. It is so bad that, guess what, the industry is now being taken over by AI. How is any of this a surprise to anyone?
What is there to be an optimist over if you are involved in this industry? There hasn't been anything worth being hopeful for in easily over a quarter of a century. This is the inevitable end of the anti-art and entertainment attitude of the art and entertainment industry. They have killed themselves, and they deserve their fate.
You don't drink poison then complain of stomach pains. And yet that is what we keep seeing time and time again. Unreality is everywhere.
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| The world's smallest violin for those getting what they deserve. |
But to speak more generally, blind positivity and negativity does no one any good. You can't pretend to be something you're not and you can't pretend things are not as they are. Much like the teenage nihilists who think nothing matters because mom and dad told them smoking weed is bad, it is all childish in the worst ways.
None of these types believe in a meaning for art in the first place, therefore they don't care when the meaning is stripped from it. You cannot rage at the water flooding the kitchen when you are the one who refused to fix the pipes. You can indulge in anger all you want, but it is entirely your own fault. We should stop pretending otherwise. Until we address why those pipes are there in the first place, and what they are meant to do, we are destined for the flood to continue indefinitely until the floors are entirely ruined.
And this is exactly where we are today.
The truth is that if you don't believe things have a purpose, you objectively do not have a positive outlook on life. You are not a rational optimist, because there is nothing rational about your optimism. It is entirely fake and built on a foundation of sand. And because it is not real, it allows actual problems to never get fixed because "this isn't the hill to die on" or "it's not that bad" when the passage of time has shown that just about every slippery slope is real and easily probable with a human race that has no depths they won't sink to if left unattended. Things either have meaning, or they don't. If they do then it is imperative that the meaning is never lost, or everything else will be. As one can see, we are currently in the middle of losing large amounts of art and methods for creation as we speak. And there is no justifiable reason that should be happening.
I can say that many of the things I was told growing up that would never happen because of some "slippery slope fallacy" all ended up happening anyway. And all those people who were mindlessly positive about it "never going to happen" now either pretend they never said it or embrace said decay wholeheartedly now. In no scenario is there any self-reflection or accepting error, it is just moving on to being "positive" about the next stupid issue. These are the people currently blocking real efforts at advancement or preservation because they do not understand the purpose of what is being created in the first place. They merely consume and move on to the next product.
It never gets better because positivists are too positive about their delusions which, ironically, ends up creating more pessimists who can see how full of it said optimists really are. This continues a needless cycle of unopposed decay staved off by name-calling and excuses from folks with entirely too much undeserved ego. That anyone still believes in "progress" today is amazing as it requires an incredible amount of confidence in your betters who haven't earned said confidence at all. Don't ever say psyops do not exist. Modernists prove they do every single day with the garbage they continually excuse and the decay they defend as progress.
If you have been alive since the 20th century and you are still under the belief that things are still "getting better" then you are either coping and in need of a sanitarium, or actively evil and complicit in decay and treating it as progress. The "optimist" mask no longer works, and is no longer fooling anyone. Hence the increase in suicides, depression, and alienation, and the loss of societal trust and local community. No one trusts you anymore, just as no one trusts anyone at all. This is the result of flipping everything upside down.
Ironic that "rational" optimism would be undone by itself, but it was always destined to fail. There was never anything to it but willful ignorance.
So why do we keep lying to ourselves? What is it that prevents us from just accepting the way things are and looking for things to better them? Why the insistence on forcing a mood or a view on something?
This is a long way of saying that optimism doesn't really exist, and neither does pessimism. They are cartoonish views of reality frequently used to justify or excuse decay and rot instead of spurring those on to fix the issues in question.
It doesn't matter the industry or the space. All of modernity is now pretending truth is untruth and vice versa. No longer does it exist to build anything or to grow. We are made to accept decline and fool ourselves into calling it progress, and that can never lead to anything good. It very clearly has not.
Part of the reason we keep circling the drain is our inability to call a spade a spade and face the present we have allowed ourselves to fall into. We can no longer keep ignoring pain and pretending it is pleasure. Wounds must be cleaned and patched up.
If what you believe isn't built on real hope, it is a falsehood masquerading as truth. What is it those who don't believe what they preach end up doing? They lie.
They lie because they do not believe there is value in truth. They do not ultimately believe there is value in anything at all.
The first step is to stop accepting lies as truth.
What we need now, more than anything, is hope. And we can only get there by finally moving on from the mistakes of the 20th century that led us here.
Until we do that, we will be trapped in an endless cycle of backwards thinking and table flipping as everything falls apart. We can do better than that, and we have done so before. Just have hope that we can work our way out of this mess.
We're about due for a miracle! Let us hope we get one.
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