theintrinsicperspective.com
Submission statement:
Erik Hoel argues that 2012 was a cultural inflection point. Just as 1968 signalled the peak of the 1960s cultural revolution that would set the stage for the next few decades of social change, 2012 represents the beginning of the (spoiler) smartphone era and a new round of social change.
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Notes -
I think honestly the things that I see in the culture now that weren’t when I was a kid (for reference I graduated high school in 1996) is a couple of really big “zeitgeist” changes. First, was the idea that everything was awful in some way, and that no amount of effort was actually going to help matters. People made fun of the Hope and Change Obama campaign poster. If you believed in a better world, you were a naive person. It was all cynicism all the time. Everyone knew problems were unsolvable, the climate was fucked and we were at peak oil and nobody cared.
At the same or similar time, therapeutic culture (probably through over diagnosis of mental disorders) entered the mainstream of discourse. I believe this kind of ideology is ultimately disastrous because it gives answers that are meant for a population already severely broken and who need to be treated gently and pushed this same bubble-wrapped feelings first idea onto normal people. This created two affects: it gave cultural scolds the language and legitimacy to curtail speech, and it created a culture full of wimps who can do little for themselves and thus break much more easily than their ancestors. Cultural scolds have always been around, but until therapeutic culture entered the mainstream, the idea that people suffered harm from reading things they disagreed with didn’t have much traction. Once everyone started feeling trauma, and their body started keeping score and so on, it became the job of everyone to protect the weakest from trauma and the resulting mental illness. Which means that if you say something wrong in public, you’ve committed violence and inflicted trauma. And thus venues that allow that are now participating in creating trauma. The second is that people themselves are much weaker simply for being taught to be that way. They can’t handle loss or defeat, they can’t handle not getting what they want, and are unwilling to put forth effort into getting those things.
If you put those things together, you create a sort of grim dark world. Everything is awful, you’re weak and will be harmed by mere words. When you live in grim dark, you don’t see much to look forward to. Why work hard when you aren’t going to get anything much for it and the world will boil to death? Why have kids? Why make art with heart and soul? Why challenge people to do great things when it doesn’t matter?
I think this is the problem for a lot of bastardized media franchises as well. Woke (the cultural scolds) are definitely a part of it, but I think the unstated part of it is that we no longer believe in heroes or heroism. It’s impossible to make a serious hero movie in a culture that no longer believes in that sort of thing. Or at least impossible to play it straight without it feeling naive to the deconstructionist writers and producers who find those stories to be kid stuff. The Jedi cannot be a force for good, because in 2023 everyone knows that everyone with power is oppressive. You cannot have a government that isn’t secretly evil or broken by infighting because everyone knows that doesn’t happen. If you for some reason try it, you have to play it for laughs, either by frenetic action or absolute farce, because hope, change, and belief in a better future are silly.
Those things are true, though. There is no such thing as pure uncomplicated good, only good enough.
What I liked about the prequel trilogy is that (even though Lucas stubbornly denies this) it portrays the Jedi as incredibly flawed, but still obviously better than the Sith. They take children from their families at as young an age as possible and forbid them from starting their own families so that they never form loyalty to anything above the Jedi order. The novelizations go even further in creating a sympathetic defense for the Sith, to the point that they're not obviously better than the Jedi until Order 66 happens.
I've always thought that a sequel trilogy should be about Luke starting his own Jedi order that is less oppressive than the original one, but running into the same problems that those harsh rules were created to solve. (Kids missing their families, questioning the Jedi ways, potentially creating new Anakins.) I haven't read the Harry Potter books, but based on what my friend has told me of them, the Wizarding World is similarly morally flawed, despite meaning well and being the good guys of their universe.
But back on topic: to me, the problem with our popular culture is the exact opposite of what you're describing. The issue isn't that people don't believe in pure, uncomplicated good. The issue is that believe it exists and that they represent it, while their enemies do not. This is why before JK Rowling became a "TERF", leftists would compare themselves to the Wizards and their political enemies to Voldemort. It's why they describe themselves as the Jedi, and their enemies as the Sith. It's why their definition of "fascist" always boils down to "cartoon supervillain who is obviously evil".
When a self-identified socialist disparages tankies, what they're saying is "I want to do exactly what the Soviet Union did, but it'll work this time, because we'll put a Snowball in charge instead of a Napoleon. We learned from our mistake and won't trust obviously evil people like Stalin, only obviously good people like Lenin or Trotsky."
I don't know if popular culture influences the way people see the world, reflects the way people see the world, or merely gives them a vocabulary to discuss their experiences. Regardless, I think we need more depictions of moral ambiguity, not less.
I'm with you on therapy culture, though.
I think there is a hopeless/nihilistic/no-heroes streak in some parts of contemporary culture, but mostly surrounding climate activism. (It's a narrative that flatters my prejudices to suggest that it's a cautionary tale about distorting the truth for rhetorical power "for the greater good": the exaggerated claims that global warming will end the world, rather than just be very bad, didn't galvanise people to action but created a kind of numbing despair.) "Only we are the heroes" might be a better phrasing of the problem.
For what it's worth, the old Expanded Universe novels were exactly this. Luke's New Jedi Order is founded on a much healthier basis and succeeds in bringing together a new Republic and creating some of the greatest Jedi in history... and also runs into some spectacular disasters, because solving problems is hard actually.
Ooooh! I've only read the prequel trilogy novelizations. I didn't read any other EU stuff. Your pitch intrigues me, but my understanding is that specifics of how the Jedi order functioned and how it related to Anakin's fall weren't solidified until the prequel trilogy, and the New Jedi Order stuff predates it. Let me Google this..
Huh, they were published during the release period for Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones. Do the books directly reference the prequels?
The new Jedi order takes place after the refounding of the Jedi order and the EU books dealing most with the force and Jedi stuff are usually a) written before it and b) not known for their quality in relation to the rest of the EU.
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