Once again, intemperate behaviour has broken out in the comments overnight, and I've awoken to people unsubscribing thanks to it. Please keep it civil, or those with a cosmic dose of the rudes will be removed - by me!
Hi Lorenzo, I really enjoyed this post. Regarding gnosticism, you wrote that what it teaches is ultimately "deeply demoralising and disenchanting". This is a true statement, but regardless of its demoralization or disenchantisement, does it match or not match up with the nature of reality? The fundamental, core nature of reality is one of predation; every living thing only survives by consuming other living beings. Even a plant is alive and struggling to fulfill its will to power: https://munewsarchives.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/0701-plants-respond-to-leaf-vibrations-caused-by-insects%E2%80%99-chewing-mu-study-finds/
As a result, this fundamentally predatory reality appears to be both malevolent, cold, and deeply uncaring. On top of that, society appears (and has always appeared) to be ruled by sociopaths who use force and, especially in the modern era, propaganda to grift off the lower classes, who are mostly NPC automatons without critical thinking facilities and who just do what they're told.
Sure, we've had a lot of technological innovation since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but look what we've done with it; we've consumed a tremendous amount of natural resources completely unsustainably, raised the world population to approaching 10+ billion, upcoming CBDCs, a drastically lowering quality of life, etc, which is all going to have disastrous upcoming effects: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental
This world appears to me at least to be some kind of Hell.
A few years ago I watched The Wandering Earth, a Chinese sci-fi disaster movie based on a story by Cixin Liu, author of the phenomenal Three Body Problem trilogy. The premise was mildly goofy but the effects were great and the production values high. What I found most striking however was the cultural confidence that positively suffused the film. It was an expression of a can-do attitude, in which of course it is the Chinese who take the lead in saving the Earth from certain destruction. There was no victim morality, no girlbossing, no wallowing in oppression. It was just a fun, engaging movie.
I watched that and thought, Hollywood can't make movies like this anymore, and China is going to eat America's soft power lunch.
Another very fine and well-reasoned piece of work Lorenzo.
As speculative fiction is something like a window into the subconscious, by examining pop cultural artifacts we can get an at least an outline of the zeitgeist. And as we now have multimedia franchises that have existed for decades even generations, we can track specific developments over time.
I find it very significant that Tolkien served on the western front in WWI and participated in some of the most horrific events imaginable and that Gene Roddenberry flew 86 combat missions in the Pacific theater in WWII. Those men created very different fantasy worlds, but they were both inhabited by characters OF character, so to speak.
The Critical Drinker, who you linked to, has another very good take on this; "Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Written By Children",
Aug 17, 2023·edited Aug 17, 2023Liked by Helen Dale, Lorenzo Warby
I clicked on the video of that young actress who played Snow White, who was sort of nervously listing all the reasons why Snow White was "problematic" and in desperate need of an ideological makeover.
It really felt like a cross between a hostage being forced to read a letter by her kidnappers and a Soviet show speech where a sweaty commissar just wants to check the right rhetorical boxes (Praise Stalin!) to save themselves from Siberian cancellation.
It's really amazing and disturbing how our Lite Cultural Revolution has transformed what used to be something simple and fun (Snow White, pretty young actress on red carpet) into a moral-ideological minefield where the tribal gods are always watching and judging and where every word must land perfectly so as not to cause unspecified harms to the historically marginalized.
The ideological takeover of art and culture is always disastrous, but this one is even worse because the Crit Theorists started in academia with the destruction of the literary canon and their entire program is dedicated to getting on the Deconstruction steamroller and flattening every piece of culture into indistinguishable rubble. Only when nothing is considered better than anything else, only when things like beauty, rigor, excellence and achievement are consigned to the dustbin of history, will we arrive at their utopia of "socialist liberation". Or as a prior generation of Nihilists put it: "Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned..."
I feel deep sadness for the children of the 21st-century, born inside the digital panopticon: They have been sold dispossession in a package labeled Liberation.
You know there is a point I've reached with this poisoning the well, destroying the stories where I don't care. I wish them luck with it. The sooner they destroy their inheritance, the sooner we're rid of them. And I'm old enough not to care. I can retreat to books and poetry and imagination and choose not to spend my money on their dross.
I love K-dramas for exactly this reason. People are good and bad, right and wrong, they work with each other and learn to be forgiving or vengeful in accordance with their character, not some checklist of appropriate narrative frames. Go watch Business Proposal and Uncanny Counter, they're better than any live action dramatic TV produced in America.
It’s hard to imagine a greater example of “cultural appropriation” than the conquest and vandalization of American popular culture over the past decade by uncreative, untalented, intersectional ideologues. Yeah, oodles on this has already been written, but this essay must be one of the most thorough and powerful investigations of the movement’s underlying psychological and political motivations.
Sorry to have missed this post. British tv drama serials can teach Hollywood a thing or two about non-binary, race hustling forms of 'entertainment'.
To pick just one example: 'Collateral' was a 2018 BBC fictionalised expose of Britain's dark underbelly in which human-trafficking is orchestrated not by shady foreign mafias but by quintessentially British businessmen and ex-military types. Illegal immigrants are mostly nice people whereas it is hard to find any decent and sane white people in Britain apart from a few who have the courage to spout some much needed left/liberal outrage at the state of this “nasty little country”. And as for decent and likeable people; these are most likely to be found in the ‘lgbt community’.
Tv schedules are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick....Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick...Gay Couple included – Tick.... (Post 2017 update: transgender characters urgently needed). More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course). By its final episode Collateral had ticked every box." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining
Once again, intemperate behaviour has broken out in the comments overnight, and I've awoken to people unsubscribing thanks to it. Please keep it civil, or those with a cosmic dose of the rudes will be removed - by me!
The intemperate individual has been perma-banned.
Hi Lorenzo, I really enjoyed this post. Regarding gnosticism, you wrote that what it teaches is ultimately "deeply demoralising and disenchanting". This is a true statement, but regardless of its demoralization or disenchantisement, does it match or not match up with the nature of reality? The fundamental, core nature of reality is one of predation; every living thing only survives by consuming other living beings. Even a plant is alive and struggling to fulfill its will to power: https://munewsarchives.missouri.edu/news-releases/2014/0701-plants-respond-to-leaf-vibrations-caused-by-insects%E2%80%99-chewing-mu-study-finds/
As a result, this fundamentally predatory reality appears to be both malevolent, cold, and deeply uncaring. On top of that, society appears (and has always appeared) to be ruled by sociopaths who use force and, especially in the modern era, propaganda to grift off the lower classes, who are mostly NPC automatons without critical thinking facilities and who just do what they're told.
Sure, we've had a lot of technological innovation since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but look what we've done with it; we've consumed a tremendous amount of natural resources completely unsustainably, raised the world population to approaching 10+ billion, upcoming CBDCs, a drastically lowering quality of life, etc, which is all going to have disastrous upcoming effects: https://neofeudalreview.substack.com/p/the-sad-skinsuiting-of-the-environmental
This world appears to me at least to be some kind of Hell.
A few years ago I watched The Wandering Earth, a Chinese sci-fi disaster movie based on a story by Cixin Liu, author of the phenomenal Three Body Problem trilogy. The premise was mildly goofy but the effects were great and the production values high. What I found most striking however was the cultural confidence that positively suffused the film. It was an expression of a can-do attitude, in which of course it is the Chinese who take the lead in saving the Earth from certain destruction. There was no victim morality, no girlbossing, no wallowing in oppression. It was just a fun, engaging movie.
I watched that and thought, Hollywood can't make movies like this anymore, and China is going to eat America's soft power lunch.
Another very fine and well-reasoned piece of work Lorenzo.
As speculative fiction is something like a window into the subconscious, by examining pop cultural artifacts we can get an at least an outline of the zeitgeist. And as we now have multimedia franchises that have existed for decades even generations, we can track specific developments over time.
I find it very significant that Tolkien served on the western front in WWI and participated in some of the most horrific events imaginable and that Gene Roddenberry flew 86 combat missions in the Pacific theater in WWII. Those men created very different fantasy worlds, but they were both inhabited by characters OF character, so to speak.
The Critical Drinker, who you linked to, has another very good take on this; "Why Modern Movies Suck - They're Written By Children",
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ92cggLMx8
He says the crew of the Starship Enterprise now has the level of professionalism and discipline of a liberal arts college, too true.
The Chinese C-dramas will be an interesting area to keep an eye on, the supernatural is back in but girly-men and dope smoking rappers are firmly out.
I'm looking forward to your next piece.
I clicked on the video of that young actress who played Snow White, who was sort of nervously listing all the reasons why Snow White was "problematic" and in desperate need of an ideological makeover.
It really felt like a cross between a hostage being forced to read a letter by her kidnappers and a Soviet show speech where a sweaty commissar just wants to check the right rhetorical boxes (Praise Stalin!) to save themselves from Siberian cancellation.
It's really amazing and disturbing how our Lite Cultural Revolution has transformed what used to be something simple and fun (Snow White, pretty young actress on red carpet) into a moral-ideological minefield where the tribal gods are always watching and judging and where every word must land perfectly so as not to cause unspecified harms to the historically marginalized.
The ideological takeover of art and culture is always disastrous, but this one is even worse because the Crit Theorists started in academia with the destruction of the literary canon and their entire program is dedicated to getting on the Deconstruction steamroller and flattening every piece of culture into indistinguishable rubble. Only when nothing is considered better than anything else, only when things like beauty, rigor, excellence and achievement are consigned to the dustbin of history, will we arrive at their utopia of "socialist liberation". Or as a prior generation of Nihilists put it: "Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned..."
I feel deep sadness for the children of the 21st-century, born inside the digital panopticon: They have been sold dispossession in a package labeled Liberation.
How much of all the drama and woe are striver’s fighting for a lifeboat off the sinking ship of Liberalism?
This question must be contemplated.
This doesn’t mean ignore the problems or give in, it means study the enemy.
You know there is a point I've reached with this poisoning the well, destroying the stories where I don't care. I wish them luck with it. The sooner they destroy their inheritance, the sooner we're rid of them. And I'm old enough not to care. I can retreat to books and poetry and imagination and choose not to spend my money on their dross.
I love K-dramas for exactly this reason. People are good and bad, right and wrong, they work with each other and learn to be forgiving or vengeful in accordance with their character, not some checklist of appropriate narrative frames. Go watch Business Proposal and Uncanny Counter, they're better than any live action dramatic TV produced in America.
It’s hard to imagine a greater example of “cultural appropriation” than the conquest and vandalization of American popular culture over the past decade by uncreative, untalented, intersectional ideologues. Yeah, oodles on this has already been written, but this essay must be one of the most thorough and powerful investigations of the movement’s underlying psychological and political motivations.
Sorry to have missed this post. British tv drama serials can teach Hollywood a thing or two about non-binary, race hustling forms of 'entertainment'.
To pick just one example: 'Collateral' was a 2018 BBC fictionalised expose of Britain's dark underbelly in which human-trafficking is orchestrated not by shady foreign mafias but by quintessentially British businessmen and ex-military types. Illegal immigrants are mostly nice people whereas it is hard to find any decent and sane white people in Britain apart from a few who have the courage to spout some much needed left/liberal outrage at the state of this “nasty little country”. And as for decent and likeable people; these are most likely to be found in the ‘lgbt community’.
Tv schedules are awash with drama serials of this kind, conforming to a formulaic scriptwriter’s tick-box: Non white person traduced but eventually revealed to be a surprisingly decent sort – Tick....Middle class white person eventually revealed to have a sinister dark side – Tick...Gay Couple included – Tick.... (Post 2017 update: transgender characters urgently needed). More recently it has become an integral part of the story that ‘lgbt’ people are abundant and everywhere. They are bound to be nice as well. Curiously though there is another box to be ticked: there needs to be some graphic depiction of violence especially towards attractive young women (by white men of course). By its final episode Collateral had ticked every box." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/non-binary-sibling-is-entertaining