Enter the MetaModern-verse (Part 1)

You can’t go back to the past, or so they say. “The only way is forward. Futurism!”

Most of us have rose-colored glasses for earlier eras, and rightfully so. Times really were better. They weren’t perfect, but our works had more meaning. A lot more. We were free to research, use critical thinking, and express our own opinions. Even in school. As a result, life was a more poignant, deeper experience.

If you can get past the cheesiness of the 80s for a moment, Steve Winwood’s Higher Love (1986) couldn’t have said it better:

“Think about it, there must be a higher love
Down in the heart or hidden in the stars above
Without it, life is wasted time
Look inside your heart, I’ll look deep inside mine”

Perhaps a bit on-the-nose, but hearing those words, did you feel a spark of inspiration? I certainly did. It’s a message that should resonate with everyone from every walk of life.

There’s something beyond this world, something that will always be beyond our grasp. And without striving for that something more, all we have is nihilism. But it’s up to each of us to decide. Not our schools, not popular opinion, not social media, not the news. -Us.-

Back in the 80s, each of our hearts mattered, and we used our lived experiences and something called a priori to figure out where we stood. Because we accepted that we didn’t know everything, we were encouraged to abstract our thoughts, extrapolate them, and bring them back to reality to draw conclusions of our own. We were given the freedom not only to do so, but to share our conclusions with others. We didn’t even have to say things like, “As a woman” or “As a person of color” to qualify our opinions. All of our experiences mattered. We understood we were in this together, all part of the discussion.

That’s not to say there weren’t hedonistic meaningless songs and stories back then; There were. But the culture had an undercurrent of meaning that even those works couldn’t deny. This meaning had since been diminished, censored, and outright removed everywhere it possibly could, ushering in a “New Normal”.

Compare Steve Winwood’s song with music today, endless repeated selfish hedonistic mantras auto-tuned to programmable drumbeats.

“I could have my Gucci on
I could wear my Louis Vuitton
But even with nothin’ on
Bet I made you look (I made you look)”

-from Meghan Trainor’s “Made You Look” (2022)

You’ll find no inspiration here. Nothing beyond the physical world. No richer meaning beyond a literal situation, literally described. There’s nothing mysterious to provide a sense of wonder, nothing to strive for. Nothing but “wasted time” as Winwood put it, or rather, a distraction to fill time. Materialism, hedonism, background noise without substance. That’s Funko Pop. That’s the Marvel movies. That’s modern Star Wars. That’s the Disney remakes. An infinite parade of derivative, meaningless distractions to help us forget that we lost something along the way.

If you’re too young to have been around for the 80s, you probably at least remember when Pixar was bucking the trend and making awe-inspiring, meaningful movies… that is, before their recent, tragic turn to nihilism. Imagine what life would be like if more companies, more bands, more writers, more neighbors, had that kind of heart while you were growing up, and you might start to understand what life may have been like in those earlier, rosier-colored times.

But watching television and movies now-a-days, you’d think otherwise. The 1980s are attacked almost as often as the 1950s were, misrepresenting what it was actually like over and over again. After all, if the youth figured out that they could’ve had the 80s, but it was robbed from them thanks to progressivism, they would be understandably upset.

So the media has no choice but to attack and cast aspersions on those better times as often as they can to make it look like nothing’s been lost, and make it look like Current Year is preferable. They’ve even been trying to pretend like Gen Y never existed.

For example, I once pointed out the “kids didn’t like Winston because he was black”-falsity featured in season 2 of Stranger Things.

(Re-reading it, I didn’t go into details beyond mentioning that the show intentionally misrepresented the 80s. So yeah, I’ll say it right here: 80s kids liked Winston, and just about every kid wanted the full playset of Ghostbusters toys. Case closed.)

Even the 90s isn’t immune. It, too, gets grossly misrepresented to people who weren’t there to experience it, such as in the very first episode of the recent TV show School Spirits (2023), where an overly flamboyant costar haunting “Split River High” has a Current Year mindset and injects Current Year talking points at every opportunity he can. He talks like a spoiled zoomer, acts like one, thinks like one, and speaks like one, yet claims to have died in that high school “in the 90s”. ?????!!!

I almost fell off my seat at that revelation. Nobody was like that in the 90s, not even the gayest and loudest of teens. (Not to mention the unnecessary high school shower scene that soon followed, with him gawking at underage dongs in a moment that even 90s Cinemax would have blushed at–If you value your soul, please don’t watch School Spirits.)

But zoomers who don’t know any better wouldn’t have that reaction. They’d just go with it, assuming there were kids with progressive Current Year mindsets in 1990s high schools, thus re-writing their interpretation of what the 90s must have been like.

The Problem with Futurism

The problem with futurism–any kind of futurism–is that it’s progressive by its very nature. If you think we can killdoze our way to the future; We can’t.

And to any progressives who may be reading this: You can’t erase or rewrite history and expect to learn from it. More to the point, you cannot deny reality and expect to move forward.

We’ve already gone too far beyond the nihilism line, strayed far away from meaning. The only way forward now is to somehow hit the proverbial rewind button and go back to before the batch was spoiled.

The way I see it, there are five ways there:

• One is MetaModernism, which is what the people in charge are trying to do right now. MetaModernism is supposed to be what ushers in a new utopia, but it never does. It always brings chaos, ruin, and death. Which would lead directly to #5 below.
• Two is a miracle, a mass rejection of the nihilistic society we have become, turning toward meaning once again, which would usher in #4, and possibly #3.
• Three is some kind of civil war won by the guys not in control of the establishment, which is highly unlikely. But it could lead to, or be the result of, #4.
• Four is a sudden takeover of mainstream media, ousting the people pushing nihilism and replacing them with artists, writers, and actors who wish to produce works with meaning once again. This would actually work because the masses are stupidly impressionable, but this scenario is also highly unlikely. However, it would help #2 happen.
• Five is a reboot, in which we struggle through MetaModernism and all the pain it may bring until the kingdom crumbles. Only then can we rebuild anew.