By now anyone who’s not trapped in an epistemic closure bubble is aware of two facts:
- The West is caught in a death spiral toward a new Dark Age
- Voting harder won’t pull us out of it.
Yet despite the severity of the crisis, nothing is being done about it – or at least, not nearly enough.
The reason for this inaction on the part of those who have the pull to make a difference stems from the epistemic closure alluded to above.
As friend of the blog William M. Briggs is fond of saying, love of theory is the root of all evil. And theory is appealing; intoxicating, even. It promises simple answers to complex questions.
So it is that we find many trapped in the tenets of ideologies that stopped corresponding to the real world a century ago. That was, not coincidentally, when the totalizing juggernaut known as the Death Cult began its long march through the institutions.
To be sure, the Cult is one group enslaved to a nonsensical – and apocalyptic – ideology. Their beliefs bear no resemblance to reality. The problem is, they’ve got most of the money and all of the power, so they can keep forcing participation in their public rituals and unholy sacraments until the system collapses. Whether anyone will survive that collapse remains to be seen.
Most commenters on our ruling Cult stop there. But the facts of our dire situation raise the inherent question “How did it come to this?”
The answer lies in another group suffering from ideology-induced delusions: the Conservatives who are the closest thing the Death Cult has to organized opposition.
If you’re asking, “Wait, doesn’t saying Conservatives are deluded mean you agree with the Death Cult?” then you are locked in the same mind prison as most Conservatives.
True, Conservatism is less dissonant with reality than Death Cultism, but that’s not saying much. Conservatism in its current state espouses a fundamental option for practicality over speculative reason and a penchant for reducing all problems to economic considerations.
Do you get how the Death Cult was able to take control of the culture away from Conservatives like a witch stealing candy from a baby?
If not, the walls of a practical mind prison may be blocking your view.
Because the Death Cult didn’t gain dominance by winning elections.
Nor did they conquer by taking over academia – though there’s no question they’re in firm charge there.
The one locus of control without which the Death Cult couldn’t have achieved anything close to the near-total victory they’ve won is the arts.
Because the Cult understands one reality that Conservatives just cannot get through their heads …
People aren’t convinced by logic and reason.
They’re convinced by emotion.
And art speaks directly to the emotions.
Instead of coming to terms with that fact, Conservatives vacillate between insisting that art isn’t real – unlike money! – and forking over their cash to consume the latest corporate agitprop made by people who hate them.
It’s not like the Cult churns out woke movies with no purpose in mind. And unlike some assume, that purpose is not to effect cultural change by themselves, though Cult media do move that needle. The main utility of corrupting the arts is to buttress policies enacted through government (usually the courts) which are informed by witches in the academy.
For a demonstration of how the process works, let’s pretend the decree comes down from the Cult’s high priesthood instructing that cannibalism is the new sacrament. The Cultists don’t rush to draft legislation enshrining cannibals as a protected class. Not yet. First, academics update the Cult’s canon with new ritual cant. That’s when mid-level priests in New York and Hollywood come in, weaving the new dogmatic formulas into rhetoric spells for use on the general public.
So what you see first is a a goofy but lovable character on a Netflix comedy doing a bit wherein he unwittingly samples human flesh. The punchline comes when he learns what – or who – he’s really eating but decides he likes it. His exotic appetite becomes a running gag, while his character is portrayed as normal and relatable.
Meanwhile, the Cult hirelings in government will start floating trial balloons to decriminalize human flesh consumption. They’ll stress that it’ll be purely voluntary – from corpses donated for use as food. You can be certain that a main selling point will be cannibalism’s efficacy at fighting climate change. The initial bills and court cases will go down to defeat, but after the Netflix show is reinforced by Captain America coming out as a cannibal (a taste he developed out of grim necessity while stranded at sea after the Germans torpedoed his destroyer) and a stunning and bold new cookbook from Big Five publishing, the opinion polls will hit critical mass.
Mind you, that doesn’t mean a majority – just the tipping point for a preference cascade. Then the first bills decriminalizing Human-sourced Meat™ will pass into law. There will be a public outcry, but it will soon fade to a murmur as America’s legal positivist tendencies push support for cannibalism higher.
And when public support for eating human flesh hits 51%, hu-meat will be pushed in your face at all times from all directions. And not just at your local mega-mart, but online, on TV, and at the cinema. Because it’s propaganda delivered through the arts that locks the leftward ratchet turn.
So what’s to be done?
Can we get rid of artists?
That proposal sounds absurd on its face. And it is. Making art is intrinsic to human nature. It’s no accident that cave paintings are some of the oldest human artifacts we have. Yet some people have seriously called for removing artists from society.
OK, let’s play with that idea.
Despite having been handed control of every branch of government, Conservatives have proven incapable of expelling foreigners who are breaking the law by their presence here. Deporting millions of natural born, law-abiding citizens would be harder by orders of magnitude.
And it’s a nonstarter since it runs into the perennial dissident paradox of proposing to gain political power by means that would require you to already have complete political power.
So instead of eliminating the arts, the sane – and possible – solution is to create and foster a parallel arts ecosystem.
Starting a parallel cinema scene might be the best option. It’s easier and cheaper than ever to make your own movie. An enterprising director could feasibly crowdfund a slick little indie film. Professional grade editing software; even high-end hardware like a RED cam, is within a guerrilla production’s budget.
The real question is how to craft movies that effectively counter the Cult’s message.
Conservatives will argue that right-wing message fic is no different than left-wing message fic, and it’s film makers’ duty to simply tell a fun story.
This objection misses the point because it assumes that the Death Cult spread its message through heavy-handed propagandizing. That’s just the frog finally noticing the water is boiling. Hollywood has been a Death Cult vector since at least the late 60s, yet most people are only being turned off now.
The second mistake Conservatives make is to start from the false premise that overt message fic is how the Cult delivers its propaganda. Then they rush straight into the equal but opposite error of deliberately making their own message fic.
Both approaches fail to understand how the enemy indoctrinated multiple generations without anyone noticing till it was too late. Their current overt skinsuiting is just a victory lap. Hollywood reached this point by using subtle storytelling techniques to erode audiences’ defenses.
To understand this method, one need only understand the archetypal trope of the protagonist. This is the character who drives the story by setting out on a quest to achieve a concrete goal against opposition.
Hollywood learned through long trial and error to make the protagonist as likeable and relatable to audiences as possible. The idea is to make audiences identify with the hero.
Nowadays, the studios have turned this approach on its head. The contemporary movie protagonist is an utterly inhuman Mary Sue with no compelling reason to pursue a goal since she’s already said to be perfect. Instead, she uses her screen time to deliver a series of lectures on Death Cult pieties.
Again, that is not the conditioning. That is a humiliation ritual meant to rub the remaining fans’ noses in it.
The conditioning came before that. And the way it happened was by Hollywood churning out decades of movies wherein heroes whom audiences identified with achieved their goals by acting according to the Death Cult’s morals.
That point bears repeating. To bring movie audiences around to your way of thinking, show characters they like being successful by acting in line with your moral standard.
Contrary to what anti-message fic purists say, this method does not have to involve hamfisted preaching. In fact, the subtler the delivery is, the better.
Ironically, the last movies to even halfway subtly counter the Death Cult’s conditioning were 80s slasher flicks. Contemporary feminist types love to gripe about how anybody who fornicated or lit up a joint received a death sentence, while only the virginal girl survived.
The slasher genre died out in the early 90s. If you look at teen sex and drug use statistics, both declined from their peak in 1980 and only started rising again in the 90s. That’s not to give all the credit for the reduction in degeneracy to slasher flicks, but it’s undeniable that those movies exerted considerable influence on the youth culture of the time.
To renew the culture, tell stories with appealing heroes who win using Christian moral principles.
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