Part 5: Enter the PostModern-verse

If you tolerate this, your children will be next.

-title of a song by the Manic Street Preachers, circa 1999.

An evocative and thought-provoking song title to be sure.

Pity it’s attached to lyrics written in the PostModern era about a group of fascists who were organized by the Communist party to (ironically) fight fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

Fascists fighting fascists. Hm, sounds familiar. Almost like these violent outbursts in history aren’t always as “grassroots” as they seem. Organized violence for organized ends. Now there’s some food for thought.

Once you waft away the cigarette smoke of Modern society, you’re left with a PostModern society. Art and beauty have been redefined, the spiritual and abstract have been damaged, but not yet totally separated from the physical.

A few generations have been taught to make moral judgments from “somewhere within”, casting religion and other immeasurables to the wayside. They can feel the whispers of a utopia, a quiet promise they’re sure is just beyond the horizon, but if only everyone would recycle, everyone would stop doing drugs, those darn Republicans would embrace bipartisanship, and all would say “Namaste” to each other, there would be world peace.

What they don’t yet realize is, their religion has been replaced by another.

A Wonderworld of Distractions

To get through a PostModern era, the governing body needs to create a boiling frog effect: Keep turning up the heat at a slow and steady pace while providing what seems like limitless distractions.

With greed, gluttony, and lust in the bag, the demoralization must continue. With all these distractions, sloth’ll be easy. But the ultimate goal is the promotion of the worst sin of all: Pride.

Before the fall of Rome, they called it “bread and circuses”. After all, it’s difficult to get mad over the state of your country and organize a coup against a true oppressor when a good portion of the population is constantly being distracted by smartphones and streaming services.

No, just about the only way to get a bunch of distracted PostModern people together and dish out some kind of real, organized “justice”… is to have Communists step in and launch an advertising campaign telling them to do so. The idea of “revolution” needs to be in their movies, in their video games, and thus in their minds. “Freedom fighters” like Che Guevara need to be celebrated as heroes. Then it’ll happen, but only on their watch, and only to their ends. By the time these “freedom fighters” realize they’ve been used, it’ll be too late.

In other words, unless the burner is turned up too fast, if no revolution is wanted, no revolution will happen.

April O’Neil Doesn’t Exist Anymore, Either

Topics and events happen on an alarmingly periodic basis in the PostModern world that everyone has to be talking about or you’re not “in the know”. And the news always, always, always wants you to get angry at specific people by presenting caricatures of the people they want you to hate.

“Catastrophes” are often pushed into everyone’s view in order to encourage society to hand away their freedoms “for the children”.

The plucky journalist looking for a big scoop no longer exists…except in the movies to make you think there’s still real, good honest journalists out there fighting the good fight on your behalf. The real journalists memorize scripts and feature distraction puff-pieces while continuing to guide morality down a slippery path, continuing to abuse the trust that they earned during the Classic era. News media starts having slogans about “trust” to remind you to trust them.

Independent citizen journalists begin to emerge who do what the plucky journalists looking for a big scoop used to do in the Classic age, only to be marginalized, shamed, and humiliated by the mainstream media.

A Brave, New Nihilism

Wisdom is now “uncool”. Old people are portrayed as useless and inconvenient, and families slowly drift away from their elderly members as a result. Theories and law become so abstracted and convoluted that they start to approach infinite interpretations that can be bent to the will of compromised judges.

The vices are portrayed as “cool”, especially to the young, overwriting the virtues to create a new “moral” code.

Monetary notes are no longer held to a measurable, finite standard. The government continues to pretend like they’re working for the people but more and more often, the mask slips.

Objective truth is challenged, and challenged often. Objective reality is accused of being nothing more than a social construct caused by the culture who founded the successful society in the first place.

During the previous age, it was stated that Science Positivism caused people to detach themselves from religion and fascination with the world.

Enter Nihilism, an understanding that there’s nothing more to us than the sum of our parts. Enter despair, wrath, sloth, and envy. Living the longest, making the most money, being the strongest, looking the most beautiful, doing the most drugs, leaving the most beautiful corpse; These are the goals in such a world.

Nihilists are selfish and self-serving, but think they’re still good people because the virtues within them have been abstracted.

For example, instead of helping someone with a flat tire, or helping a friend who’s truly in need, they make themselves feel better by donating money to a “cause” through programs where their money will probably never be used to help anyone. But it still feels good.

That’s how you divert the power of virtue, by shipping off goodwill somewhere else in the world, someplace where you won’t see or feel the effects. Why help that old man cross the street when you can pay a faceless corporation just pennies a month to (presumably) help a faceless person on the other side of the globe?

Without people exercising virtues in everyday life, they cannot be observed regularly. Children, neighbors, friends, and society-at-large learn to stop doing them.

Meanwhile, censorship becomes more and more common, engineering what may and may not be said creating a docile, compliant society that’s easier to control. The internal, subjective emotions of the individual are placed on a pedestal to exacerbate greed and jealousy.

Children are encouraged to leave their “uncool” hometown and move away to college and/or the city, further driving yet another wedge into whatever core families managed to survive the Modern age intact.

They are taught through careful omissions, over-exaggeration, caricature portrayals, and lies to ignore the heritage and teachings of the past. Instead of learning from it like the previous generations did, they are taught to abhor the past and abhor their own country. They are taught to shirk tradition because it is steeped in the religious and cultural background that formed their “evil” society.

People are taught to reject their own agency, instead blaming outside factors for their problems. This rejection of agency creates strong feelings of self-entitlement. “I want my money, and I want it NOW!”

Differences are constantly pointed out between people, reinforced using stereotypes (under the guise of comedy, at first), to drive wedges between different cultures and subcultures. The resulting isolation ends in groups developing their own separate, and incompatible, moral codes until it’s no longer safe for children to play outside unsupervised, and neighbors no longer talk to one another.

With society this fragmented, citizens volunteering for the sake of giving back to society is probably the last thing on most peoples’ minds.

Sad Stories

It follows that stories take on a more nihilistic tone, often leaving the viewer with endings that are open to interpretation. These endings can be interpreted either as a religious miracle or with an alternative scientific explanation. This forces the reader/viewer to internalize their own answer based on the evidence presented to them (by the film) combined with their own internal, subjective emotions. In that way, the viewer becomes the cowboy of the Modern era. The stories, of course, are designed to manipulate emotional strings, leading the audience toward the same conclusions that Science Positivism did, so in the end they can pat themselves on the back for being such a good intellectual.

Santa Claus and Christmas stories resist this phenomenon for awhile, but even Old Saint Nick falls victim to Science Positivism in the end.

Broken families are commonplace in PostModern stories, encouraging both the mother and father to pursue life-guzzling careers while leaving the State to raise their children. The school system attempts to overwrite any virtues children may have been taught in their early childhood and has a high success rate in doing so. (If they don’t convince them by their high school years, it will most likely happen when they are isolated from their parents in a college dorm.)

Stories start portraying more “morally gray” characters, and people are taught that characters who aren’t at least morally gray are too one-dimensional to care about.

Stories that feature a metaverse have a clear and major “horror” element to them, because the thought of having infinite copies of yourself out there in alternate universes–the idea that all the choices you didn’t make were made somewhere else and that you don’t actually matter–is frightening. For example, in Jet Li’s The One, the main character is so horrified to find out there’s infinite copies of himself out there, he decides to seek out and murder all copies of himself, proving that he is “The One” and that his decisions do matter.

Then there are, of course, many stories about “heart” and “feelings” winning the day.

Time travel is overdone until it’s no longer a fascinating concept like it was in the previous two ages. Eventually, it’s used as a lazy crutch to revive dead characters and create false stakes.

Men are often portrayed as evil or absent from the family for selfish purposes.

Abortion is strongly encouraged, and is portrayed as a tough decision that should be kept secret from the family, but also as something the male should have no say in. Eventually, it’s portrayed as heroic.

Sexually suggestive “gateway” material, and eventually, straight-up pornography, is frequently shown to and strongly encouraged in teens and young adults.

Boiled Frogs

And through all this is toleration. It only takes the compliance of ~20% of the population to sway and influence the other 80%. They tolerate for the good of mankind. For the good of each other. For the “good of the children”. They tolerated, and now their children will be next.