Market Mythos & Programming

An incredibly powerful series of Tweets graced my eyes today that I felt like commenting on -- these were brought to us by Mr. Cyrillic Name. It hits on multiple levels in such a short space, making it delicious. 

Before we begin, it is important to remember that, in the same way that a dominant subconscious may exist to push people towards passive acts of racism, as is popularly believed by the left, people on the right see an anti-family, pro-consumer bias that is driving our culture away from traditional values and into sterilized & atomized living. 

"Aspirational mythos" is an incredibly important concept for us -- we should not view what is on television or in the media ever as a sort of reality, but as a virtue signal. Every story has within it some moral that is being presented, and often times, when it is most hidden and buried in the content, it is the most important message of the times. 

The aspirational mythos is not something that is just given to us in our films, sit coms, novellas, and BuzzFeed, but is also presented to us in short commercials and minor social transactions that we are not so conscious of. This sort of advocacy is also something that does not exist on the surface -- the surface, that we often think of as the "content," is really just a series of vapors that obfuscate the real plot and the virtues that are being presented.

For instance, it is the Leave It to Beaver imagery is what stands out to all of us -- the plots were all forgettable, but the clean home, loving and competent parents, rascally kids that are causing a hubbub but are always duly fixing it & looking slick doing so is what really stays with us. This is a series of tropes that all tell us, but not so explicitly, how to align our behaviors and values with our proper stations in life, and how these stations are rewarding. 

In a sense, sit coms and TV dramas are our real value drivers. Films are often more story than substance, for they are only with us a short time and cannot build up a whole system of values in our head. But the TV shows that we will spend dozens of hours watching, many of which interconnect by having the same themes, producers, and writers, are more about the tropes, and the stories are just ways to get the tropes to interact with each other. While its primary function truly is entertainment and the average writer and producer is not necessarily seeking to program anyone, but to simply be a reflection of life, it invariably results in broadcasting their interpretation of life to the world.

Like all interpretations, the story is viewed from the perspective of the heroes who interact and tell the story, and who these heroes are, and how they view the story, becomes the way that average people who watch the show begin to interpret their own lives. 

The heroes are the archetypes and tropes, and the stories that they navigate are simply a structure through which the audience laughs & cries with whilst becoming indoctrinated, in part or in full, by what is being advocated. 

It is through these aspirational archetypes found in the social mythos that we are largely programmed. Unlike previous mythos, which is based upon virtue and centered around ideals, the social mythos of today is economical and practical. The secular world itself has stripped it of virtue because we now longer function as nations, but as markets, and in Market World you get Market Mythos.

Market Mythos wants you to think about the next few years and your consumer & career options. It wants you to choose smartly. 

Nation Mythos wants you to think about history and community and your relationship to both. It wants you to choose wisely. 

Let's focus more on what is really being advocated in TV and sexual education. 

The prevailing spirit of sexuality has proven to be exponentially beneficial to the ruling class. We are basically told to endlessly prolong our high-consumption youth and avoid saving up for the future which stunts reproduction in general. 

This is because having children is very costly to the state when compared to foreign immigration because of the amount of government resources sunk into a single child as they proceed through all of the steps of formal education. Migration is instant gratification -- a worker that produces and pays taxes without having ever sucked up as much as the native class, and they are also a full grown adult making a lot of self-centered consumption decisions. 

The DINK model is also ideal for a wide range of corporations that focus on you living immaturely forever. 

While this series of Tweets does make this model sound conspiratorial, it does not have to be that way. As I hinted at before, there does not have to literally be a cabal of business interests & politicians consciously discussing and making these decisions together. There's already the ingrained bias of the people who are used to interacting with the world as consumers and product pushers, who think like marketers, that are writing all of our entertainment, or who simply find themselves in positions where they are writing public policy while trying to think of themselves as in the shoes of their neighbor, who they view as a consumer. 

In the case of sexual education, it is the case of simply wanting to stop unplanned pregnancies through informing kids, and the result is simply overshooting the target. They think they are doing their Fellow Consumers who are likely aiming for bright futures with new cars and jet-setting vacations by teaching them to delay pregnancy and marriage, but the kids are scared not just through their teens, but through their twenties and beyond. 

Moreover...

The point about an atomized dater versus a mom/dad with accumulated interest & stakes goes back nicely to the point that you would frequently hear from Weimerica Weekly back in the day -- the concept of skin in the game. When the average person has more & more investment in the future of America as a place for family and community building, the consumption patterns will change and the very way that they vote will likewise morph. They no longer think in terms of the next several years, but in terms of decades, in terms of grandchildren, in terms of nation. They are more reflective about right and wrong, not just concerning pleasure and thinking of everything as delineated. 

They are more sensitive to the fact that everything interpenetrates. They become more zen. 

Even though there is an industry based around child rearing that benefits from people having more kids, this is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of capital. Moreover, in terms of the labor market, your boss doesn't want a dedicated mom as his head of marketing, nor does he want a worker that is less dependable due to familial ties -- they want a sterile cubicle dweller committed to a career-path who views his/her workplace as their source of independence, and has little interest branching out into something else. 

To some degree, this can be intentional. I am sure there are those who are at the top that crunch numbers and consider things in these cold of terms. However, again, this is not dependent upon a conspiracy that you're literally being Psy Opped by Coca-Cola: the initial push of promoting consumer culture is all that is necessary for this to become normalized, and it is within this framework that these sorts of conclusions write themselves.

Once it is normalized and the next stages are clear, it becomes something that is more consciously advocated for. Never will you really quite see the point where it is crammed down your throat, but the fact that most people feel childlessness is a respectable and admirable option, something which was historically viewed as living with a hole in one's life, shows how consumer culture can ensorcell an entire generation. 

Hyperreality & Bigotry

The first time that I can remember running across the word 'bigot' I was in my early teens. I cannot remember the definition exactly, but it was something along the lines of the very most common one:

a prejudiced person who is intolerant of any opinions differing from his own

WordNet via Wordnik 

Bigot has become one of the most common words used these days, and rarely does it actually refer to someone who is prejudiced (holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions - American Heritage) or one who is intolerant (Unwilling to tolerate differences in opinions, practices, or beliefs, especially religious beliefs - American Heritage), but it is almost always the opening salvo in a discussion toward somebody who holds socially conservative views.

If we are unfortunate to be discussing something in real life, these words are uttered even before the argument is presented.

My absolute favorite aspect of all of this is what I call the argumentum ad bigotum. in which the person will say even though you may not be racist/sexist/homophobe for thinking this because you have nuanced beliefs, the majority of people who DO think this way ARE bigots, as if this sheds any light on the situation instead of further muddying the waters.

We all know that the true test of your honesty and commitment to a position is if it will work n reverse... If I were to tell a "Democratic Socialist" that, while their positions and arguments may be valid, the majority of people who have them are simply the terminally lazy and jealous types who only think & vote that way because of their vices. Why, if I made such an argument, I might even be called a... BIGOT.

Yet it is possible for somebody to unironically insist that holding onto certain beliefs means that you (or at least everybody else besides you who is in your camp) is prejudiced and intolerant. The hypocrisy of such a position is often lost on people: they throw the blanket accusation of bigotry on entire groups of people because of their memories of select people and, what is more interesting to me, the false memories and narratives given to them by TV.

Jean Baudrillard referred to this concept as hyperreality. 

In our culture, Baudrillard argues that we take ‘maps’ of reality television and film as more real than our actual lives. These simulacra or hyperreal copies precede our lives, such that our television friends may seem more ‘alive’ to us than the real person playing that character. He also began studying how media affected our perception of reality and the world. Here he found that in a post-modern media-laden society we encounter “the death of the real”, where one lives in a hyperreal realm by connecting more and more deeply with things like television sitcoms, music videos, virtual reality games or Disneyland, things that have come to simulate reality. He argues that in a post-modern culture dominated by TV, films, the Internet and media all that exists are simulations of reality, which aren’t any more or less ‘real’ than the reality they simulate.

Enter Hyperreality

Jean Baudrillard, creator of the concept of hyperreality

People's new concept of right and wrong are very much formed by the messages that they interface with on television, and I believe it is as this point that they use the tidbits they come across in their daily lives to bolster the ideas that they have received from TV. We cannot blame anyone for this -- it is something that we all do. We all suffer from a sort of confirmation bias, but now the bias is working in a funny way: instead of actively criticizing what we see on TV or the Internet, we are more likely to accept the truth we get from the TV & Internet (which very much constitutes hyperreality in the way that I wish to talk about it) and we actually begin to reject reality.

Reality plays second fiddle to the digital world. This is not so much because we have actually prioritized the digital above real interactions, but it is because we spend so much time with the digital, and the time that we spend with flesh & blood reality is far more clearly interlaced with digital culture than it is with the unfiltered and naked realities that we share with other humans.

I think it may even be true for many people here that the cumulative amount of words that they communicate to people via text on digital screens or across other digital mediums over a week is actually greater than the amount of communications that they have in reality.

TV & Infotainment, the Directors of Hyperreality

TV (and this can refer to Netflix) and film have taught us that Southerners are racists, alpha male types are sexists, Christians are bigots and narrow-minded, and that those who have faced prejudice toward their sexual inclination are all angels on the receiving end of the late 20th century's greatest injustices. Of course, TV et al allows these tropes to be broken: if the Southerner is, in fact, allied against all of the paper tiger racists that the TV show has created, and if it is the one Christian in the episode who has a modicum of nuance or, far more likely, is presented as somebody with a mega-meta analysis in which Christian concepts of morality are actually thrown out the window.

The news & infotainment industries also back this up in their own quaint way by focusing on the very same issues that are usually important to TV-world. They are eager to report on any kind of incident of racism, sexism, or homophobia because it feeds directly into the themes that they want to use to mold the opinions of the country, but will ignore far more impactful news that actually deals with death, huge sums of money, or emerging legal precedents. To be entirely fair, this is not something that the media is doing solely to practice narrative crafting: they also do it because it is these types of silly stories that involve race, gender, or sexuality that end up being the focal points of far greater ideological discussions. But let us remember: the stories that are picked are carefully curated, and they are meant to serve the point.

There is a reason why Michael Brown was a lot bigger story than Micah Xavier Jones.

Of course, as stated above, hyperreality does include exceptions. The media is not entirely "black & white," but let us not pretend that the existence of some amount of gray area actually means that the industry, as a whole, is telling an unbiased and respectable story. For it is the exceptions that are always used not to break the rule and render it irrelevant, but to prove the rule. Nearly all men are born with two functioning eyes. The men who are born without two functioning eyes are anomalous, and they are viewed as having some sort of extenuating circumstance. Thus the alpha-male who is not a sexist on TV is an exception that validates the trope: he would not be a friendly character with a name and a role to play if he was like the others.

The only time that people use the exception to break a rule is when they are trying to argue against you. In reality, we all understand this concept: we simply choose to ignore it when it suits us. 

It is because of this that we can say that everything is actually set up in a way to promote a unified truth of everything. There is the Light and the Dark, and the Gray are the ones that exist as plot tools to either write a story of them coming to the light or going to the dark. 

Hyperreality & NPCs

Hyperreality ultimately fuels bigotry by creating narratives consumed by the masses, and the masses then go into the world and act upon these realities. The broadcasters, more than anyone else, shape hyperreality, and so it is the media and infotainment industry as a whole which feed the people their world view.

This is why the NPC meme hit home so well: it implied that there are loads of people that do not think for themselves but actually function as Non-Player Characters. One could state, simply, that an NPC is programmed -- they are somebody who functions only in terms of the hyperreality that is dictated to them, and they come off as impervious to change, unreachable, robotic.

There is also something pathetic about the way that they will even bring out the tropes from their TV shows when discussing things. They are Dumbledore's Army; they are Jedi Knights; we are followers of Sauron  and if you don't know it, my sweet summer child, you are in for a rude awakening.

The world is now understood in a way that has been programmed. The mind is full of fake characters and fake memories that create tropes and themes which people believe play out constantly in the real world. People no longer deal with one another as people, but deal with them as if they are characters from a TV show who are symbols and stand-ins for some kind of ultimate reality being fed to them by media.

Hyperreality itself creates a system of bigotry: everybody becomes biased, prejudiced, indoctrinated, and unwilling to change. They also become unreachable.

Can the word "bigotry" have meaning when it comes from people who are slavishly devoted to a media-driven narrative of the world?

Can the word "bigotry" ever have any meaning when it is said without thought for whether or not the person is actually displaying an actual ignorance of the topic and a manifested intolerance for the object of criticism?

In hyperreality, these things do not need to be thought about anymore. People believe that they saw it all on a TV show or in a movie; they read the article about the man who called the police on a black man for wanting to use a Starbucks bathroom. They watched the movie about Matthew Shepherd.

It'll never actually matter to them what you think. The important truths have already been decided on the screens that they look at. Even if you aren't a bigot, the characters like you on TV are bigots, and that is enough of an argument against you to dismiss anything you could say.

Maybe you're not a bigot -- but if you were on TV, you would be. Case closed.