There are those who describe the fandom phenomenon as the circuses part of the bread and circuses of our age. That’s not entirely accurate. Ancient Roman plebs didn’t worship the gladiators sent out to distract them from their empire’s fall.
In the crumbling American Empire, geek culture has been deployed to fill a different void than hunger or the need for entertainment. Modern comics, movies, and games superficially resemble entertainment, but they’re actually filling the role once served by religion in Americans’ lives.
The Big Men with Screwdrivers and the Nu Atheists were wrong after all. Kicking Christianity out of public life didn’t usher in a bright, sexy chrome utopia. Instead of directing their pious energies into scientific pursuits, America did what everyone does absent Christianity: They turned pagan.
Human beings are wired for worship. If social pressure discourages worshiping God, those with less fortitude will worship trees, rocks, or even plastic figurines.
Religious identity was the engine that built the West, and it’s still a major motivating force elsewhere in the world. What has happened in the American Empire is that Christian identity has shattered, and the pieces have been scattered throughout various hobbies.
Which was precisely what the main players in the Enlightenment wanted–to reduce religion to a hobby indulged in the home with no effect on public life.
People had hobbies back when the Church was allowed to matter. The sane ones didn’t let their hobbies consume their identities. You might’ve liked gardening or stamp collecting, but you largely kept it to yourself outside the company of fellow hobbyists or unless asked.
The proper order of faith and entertainment has been inverted. Honk. Honk.
To see how people’s identities have gotten mixed up in their hobbies, take a quick glance at the ‘gate controversies popping up among various fandoms on a more or less daily basis. #GamerGate was the big one, but it failed due to infiltration by controlled opposition and exploitation by online grifters.
It’s telling that every subsequent fandom revolt has enjoyed a brief honeymoon period before skipping straight to the “milked by grifters” stage. “If a man loses faith in God, he doesn’t believe nothing, he’ll believe anything,” is illustrative here.
Few now can imagine–by design–a time when popular culture wasn’t partitioned into myriad fractured fandoms. Sure, people had different tastes, but there were cultural touchstones everybody shared, and more of them.
Everybody tuned in to The Shadow. Everybody read Edgar Rice Burroughs. Everybody saw Gone with the Wind.
But a people with a shared culture and a strong identity is hard to conquer, so universal popular culture had to go. Fandom was the murder weapon used to kill Western culture.
This series of posts by author JD Cowan explores the subject in much greater detail. It’s a lengthy read but well worth your time if you want to understand the massive snow job pulled on science fiction fans by elite snobs who thought they knew better.
Instead of putting up a united front, the scattered fandoms are isolated and relatively powerless. Hollywood learned the hard way that catering to fans alone isn’t enough to make a film successful.
Fandom killed popular culture. It was a textbook case of divide and conquer.
Fortunately, there are creators laboring to forge new culture in the tradition of our ancestors. For a refreshing take on the mecha genre that clears away all the stale cliche cobwebs, check out my new martial thriller Combat Frame XSeed.
