Enter the MetaModern-verse (Part 2)

Do you think you’re given the freedom to say what you want in your school, or at work? That you’re allowed to use critical thinking and share your opinions? (Maybe to a certain extent, but I bet you’re being conditioned to behave otherwise.)

If you’re still a student, look carefully at how your assignments are worded, especially the essays. They’re almost always designed to guide you toward a specific opinion. If not, the article you were asked to read most likely presupposes a “Current Year truth”, and your job, 9 times out of 10, is to explain why they’re right.

“Explain why Frida Kahlo was so influential not only as an artist, but to the women’s movement in general.”

“Read the celebrated essay, ‘Diversity as a Learning Imperative’ and share insights as to why companies that do not embrace diversity are at a severe disadvantage.”

Those are just a few examples of essays assigned to me ten years ago.

And now here we are. It’s been Current Year for more than a decade. Pop music remains unchanged, delivering the same hollow messages to the same repetitive synth-y beats as before. People are dressing the same, acting the same, and talking largely the same as they did in 2013. The college paper topics you’re allowed to talk about and the opinions you’re supposed to hold today? Exactly the same as they were in 2013. This is what “Progress” looks like.

Only now, Gen Y doesn’t exist, every day is a “holiday”, we often use “they” to refer to a single person, and we have to tailor our pronouns around people’s whimsy, as if constantly walking on ice.

Well, at least we have Chat-GPT to write our papers, now.

The Search for Meaning

If you want to experience something with real heart, you have to put in the effort to seek it out. There’s great music and talent out there waiting to be discovered. But none of it gets any airplay, and some of it even gets censored or ranked down so it’s that much harder to find. Same goes for comic books, movies, novels, and so much more. The indie scene is stifled because it’s a threat not only to the establishment, but to the established dogma.

Major publishers give entertainment the green light only if it’s specifically “status quo”. Mainstream stories are not breaking any molds. It’s anything but stunning and brave to echo Current Year dogma, the exact same opinions that major companies and the government hold.

Yet young artists are groomed to believe that they’re somehow being “bold” with these works of art and are “sticking it to the man”. Quite a trick.

Something to Say

If you want to be a writer of substance who finds fulfillment not only in life, but in the works you create, you must have Something to Say. Something people need to see and hear, but maybe never realized. Something they haven’t heard in a long time and could use a stark, timely reminder. Something that reflects truth.

Having a message like that can be the most powerful thing in the world.

So your Something to Say can’t be spoon-fed to you by everyone else. It can’t be an opinion every rube on the street already has. Can’t be mere propaganda, something we all wrote papers about during our freshman years at college.

Stagnation in the Echo Chamber

It may feel good at first to read an opinion that perfectly mirrors yours, but it doesn’t engage the thought process or encourage debate. It doesn’t give you something mental to chew on, doesn’t provide a new angle to challenge you, and therefore doesn’t help you formulate new ideas. It instead stifles creativity itself, reinforcing the ideas you’re already supposed to have. It encourages a monkey see, monkey do style of writing.

Maybe it takes awhile. But eventually, it all gets predictable. You might start to realize the opposition in these stories aren’t real characters, but strawmen. Maybe caricatures of existing politicians you’re supposed to hate, or famous people who have recently fallen out of favor. Maybe they’re parodies of the church or of an Evil Business Owner, paper dolls in a morality play on paper stages, in scenarios all carefully chosen to prop up the existing Popular Opinion.

What you see is what you get. It’s so literal. There’s no depth to these stories. No deeper meaning. They just show you what’s supposed to already be your opinion, hoping you nod along and clap like a seal at all the “cool factor” moments, “lol-so-random” references, and “grrl power” improbabilities, all while shifting narrative beats so fast that you don’t have time to reflect on what just happened and realize none of it makes sense, that there’s no actual substance beneath the page.

Shattering the Mirror with a Little a Priori

That’s why you need Something to Say. It has to be something unique to you and your life experiences. A blind spot that has eluded too many others. A truth that shatters the false mirror each of us look into every day. The stories that best stood the test of time all have these qualities.

So how is one supposed to have Something to Say when the entire system is rigged against us, forcing us to hold a particular opinion? Well, alongside Critical Thinking is a priori. It’s the technique many of the greatest thinkers of all-time used, such as Plato and Aristotle. And it’s something that was encouraged for thousands of years… until roughly the 1960s.

The first step is to acknowledge that we don’t know everything and never will. Science doesn’t have all the answers, and we should be taking everything told to us with a grain of salt. Being skeptical, looking for motives, following the money, and looking for logical inconsistencies will get you a long way.

“Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see.”

-from The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether by Edgar Allen Poe, 1845

Once you’ve done that, you can at least reintroduce metaphysics in the discussion–and don’t let that word scare you! Metaphysics simply means “behind the physical”. Current Year thinkers are not allowed to believe there’s anything behind the physical, so naturally, they’re trying to make that word verboten.

But not long ago–prior to the postmodern age–metaphysical thinking was encouraged to help us arrive at truths using a priori. We could talk about the science of anything, including metaphysics, and Science-Fiction was a far wider genre bursting with creativity. A priori gave us an angle to theorize about things we do not yet know. It let us explore possibilities we have not yet experienced and apply reason to it, taking things we know to be true in order to arrive at possible conclusions about the yet unknown.

What Fantasy is All About (And Why It’s Dying)

That’s what fantasy as a genre has always been about: exploring the unknowns of our own world, restoring a sense of wonder in God’s creation. But we’ve sawn that limb off of our culture. No wonder none have been able to follow up on Tolkien’s legacy.

Fantasy isn’t about a “diverse group” of “morally gray empowered adventures” running around a thinly veiled copy of our world, interacting with scenarios specifically meant to reflect Current Year politics. It can be more. So much more.

Riddle me this: How can fantasy as a genre be used as an escape from a morally bankrupt world when most of the stories published today are echoing the same morally bankrupt Current Year sentiments that one can find in the daily newspaper? Answer: It can’t.

Do you think, 100 years from now, anyone’s going to care about today’s popular authors who have nothing to more add to the conversation beyond what your typical Bud Lite commercial has to say?

Probably not. Unless somehow 100 years from now we’re still locked in this prison known as “Current Year”.

Just as philosophy and our ability to debate has stagnated, fantasy struggles as a genre due to this stagnation of thought. The shackles of a hedonistic, nihilistic, atheistic world hold us back, hold back our creativity, keep us away from philosophical breakthroughs.

Without Fantasy, without acknowledging that there’s something more, all we’re doing is writing hard science fiction masquerading as fantasy. We’re not offering escapism. By echoing the consensus we’re telling readers, “There is no escape.”

(The “Sandersonian” trend toward hard magic systems, while not necessarily bad on its own, reflects this trend. We’ve turned our magic into Natural Science, into technology, into science fiction.)

At any rate, I’m certain that without meaning, without original ideas, and without a little a priori, the genre will continue to stagnate until it’s gone the way of the Western.