There is a Feeling That

 From time to time, sometimes as I am in bed waiting for sleep to overcome me, I wonder what my purpose here on earth is, and if I am doing what I am supposed to be doing, according to the Creator's will, with the talents He gave me. In my youth my I believed my toolset of talents to be immense. As I've grown older, I see how small that toolset actually was, and one by one, I discarded the fantasies of indulging talents I did not actually possess.

Among the talents I still believe I possess is one I've been aware of since my childhood, when I was obsessed with current events and the news, which is the talent to step back from the cultural dialogue and say, with confidence, "there is a feeling that..." I am very bad at predicting the future, but I am much better at predicting what folks' reactions to various events will be, like watching a stream of floodwaters, and making a guess as to where it will head, based on the terrain.  I'm not one-percent accurate, but I have a good track record. Part of it, if I can be objective about myself, is my ability to step back from my own convictions and point of view, to see the world as others see it, even those with whom I have great disagreement.

When I was a liberal, I was accurately aware of how conservatives saw the world. I knew how they would react and filter events and news. I was rarely surprised by the trends of politics and events. Likewise I now retain a very good notion of how progressives and Leftists will react to any bit of events or news. These guesses are valid on the collective level. On an individual level, people always surprise you. In the collective, they rarely do.

Right now there are many feelings going on in the world. Has this always been true? Not really. For example in the Nineties, it seemed that few people cared much about world events. Ever since the rise of the web, we are a lot more concerned about things in general, and since 2020, we have a hyper-reactive awareness of events and their possible meanings.

Even in the communities I follow, there are overlapping feelings regarding events. For example, with the Hollywood debacle on Sunday night, about which I was just writing, there is a feeling among some that all of this entertainment is a distraction from the important things in the world, and that the less said about it, the better. Even my own blog posts here are contributing to the distraction. Such people sometimes scold those us who talk about the frivolous things such as what movie stars are doing.

Simultaneously there is a feeling that such supposedly frivolous entertainment-level things are a core part of the crafting of the narrative that we are supposed to believe, and that by studying it, we are deconstructing the methods of control that "they" have over us. 

As usual, I tend to sympathize with both points of view, and I try to strike a balance in my approach to these topics. Among the aspects of the compromise on this particular issue (Hollywood entertainment) is that while I no longer give direct attention to Hollywood because I no longer consume their products, I am a big fan of the countercultural commentators on Hollywood (such as Gary@Nerdrotic and others I've mentioned) who watch these products on behalf of folks like me, so that I don't have to watch them. 

Is it a good compromise? I don't know. I'm still giving attention to them, aren't I? But are we going to ignore the control-levers that are manipulating us? No I can't do that. I'm too much a believer that Postmodernity is essentially dramaturgical, and that theater is the most potent weapon our enemies possess. By extension, the awareness of the concepts of theater are the most important routes of liberation.

It was easier to do this when the cultural products of Hollywood were actually watchable, and had artistic merit. Nowadays their products are parodies of art. It took a great deal for me to do what I did in 2008-2010 when I started this blog, namely watching as many Hollywood movies as possible in actual movie theaters. I couldn't do this today, even just watching from home. It feels like drinking sewage. So I'll let Gary and the other folks don their protective hazmat gear and go into the cultural sewer for me.

Above all this Hollywood-level stuff, there is a feeling among many people that the entire world order is being held together by rubber bands and string, and that it may come apart at any moment. I would bet almost everyone knows what I am talking about it.

My assertion about this feeling is not an assertion that the feeling is true. I don't know if the world is being held together by rubber bands at the moment. That may be a big delusion. But I am one-percent confident that this is the feeling at the moment.

Part of this confidence on my part arises from the observation that a great many people are weary of the world, and want to see everything about it change. There is a feeling that we have been living out of sync with nature. We have been living in a way against the order of nature. We have been living on borrowed time. It was only a matter of time before we reached a reckoning, and it seems we could be facing it any moment.

Again, I don't know if any of what I just said is actually true, but there is certainly a feeling that it is true.