Fire burn and cauldron bubble, Part II
Fuming about the far-right? The dangerous pitchfork-wielding mob lies much closer than you think.
This follows the previous update, where I gave testimony about a vexatious situation that is worryingly becoming too familiar in these censorious times — being on the receiving end of GroupThink prejudice, and scorned as guilty for ‘thought crime’.
As we approach the festivities of the hopefully benign yuletide season (regardless of it being hijacked by consumerism), I wonder about the more sinister consequences of putting people’s names on the ‘Naughty or Nice’ list.
Beware, the slippery ease in which others are labelled with an -IST, and how seductive it is to passively play consenting members of the popular party with convicting pointy fingers. For indeed as per that poem by a German pastor:
“Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.”
— Martin Niemöller
Ink & Watercolour by F. BORGHESI https://www.instagram.com/fredborghesi
Not all heroes wear capes
On 5th November 2024, current events showcased yet more historical rhymes of cultural paradox and political plot.
️🔥 It was the best of times…
There is an innate pyromaniac glee when humans set things alight in the dark of night, feeling the warmth of thermal radiation, entranced by the flickering flames and ambience of glowing embers. Whether or not people cared to really remember who Guido Fawkes or what Pope Night was all about, banging fireworks were launched and roaring bonfires were lit.
Only a week prior, millions finished celebrating the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness, as new beginnings were ushered by lantern parades for Diwali, the Festival of Lights. The hospitality industry was also happily hungover from numerous profitable Halloween-themed costume parties, and kids were still binge-eating their way through their candy sugar stash from Trick-or-Treating.
️🔥 It was the worst of times…
The calls to remember Día de los Muertos went unabated, in respectful revelry for authentic cultural heritage and fashionable touristic contexts, as well as the outrage porn of newsfeeds displaying blood & gore of dead bodies from war-torn lands. Many were devastated and in despair about Donald Trump’s return as president. The endless doomscrolling continued, while the heat maps of the global cartography of crisis remains unchanged. Oh the dreaded winter of discontent!️
️🔥 “What is to give light must endure burning.”
We’re all tired of vanities and insanities… yet many strive to persist, resist, and insist that there are less detrimental ways to exist. Pick your favourite therapeutic songs, that feed the yearning for liberation and deliverance from evil.
Where have all the good men gone
And where are all the gods?
Where's the streetwise Hercules
To fight the rising odds?
Isn't there a white knight upon a fiery steed?
Late at night, I toss and I turn
And I dream of what I need
Ah, and what people need… there’s the rub.
People will hold on to what they’ve got, and those that have-not, will desire to.
The most expedient ‘must have’ that’s available to hand, which constantly serves emotional payoffs, are the portable machines of reassurance - the mobile phones with all its can’t-live-without-apps, as extensions of our life styles and management of material commodities.
We are participating in what Tracey Follows designates as Identity Century & the Age of Profilicity — populations are intensely having to navigate through the biological, psychological and technological dimensions of The Self as Selves.
“We ‘curate’ our profiles with the idea they will be seen and evaluated not by individual people, but by what they call the ‘general peer’. We will never actually meet this ‘peer’ — it doesn’t really exist… We are thus constantly shaping our identities on the basis of how we might be perceived by an amorphous and abstract being.”1
🔴 Take notes from this episode by The Future of You - it delves into the complexities of identity manipulation, through profiling, persuasion techniques, propaganda as public relations, and the growing Bystander Effect - where people are less likely to help someone in need when others are present.
The evil that men do, lives after them, and the good, is oft, interred with the bones. This is what I want to pick from the skeleton graves of history. Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil refers to ‘remoteness from reality’ and 'sheer thoughtlessness’ as indicators of how common people exercise herd mentality. Alas, there’s both courage and cowardice in numbers.
Media entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk recently stated that “we are now in the interest media era” - and though unpleasantly Machiavellian, all too frequently, humans conveniently justify their questionable means for their controversial ends.
The caricatured monsters are not under your bed, they might be disguised behind the smiling faces that greet you a good day. Evil -isms gain the momentum to sweep through cities and towns, not merely because antagonistic hating brutes dress in scary official outfits. It is ordinary folk, who continue to allow Othering to occur, because there are social rewards of Belonging for compliance and what is deemed to be civic uniformity. Tragically, it is beloved community members, next-door associates, relatives and friends, who are equally capable of terrible betrayal and becoming your persecutors.2
For instance, it was hypocritical how my former neighbours socially bragged about their alliance badges in supporting human rights of minorities and campaigning for ceasefires abroad, and yet also committed the same transgressions of acquiescent scapegoating, spreading rumours, and treating someone they don’t know or like too much, as expendable persona non grata.
“You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.”
— George Carlin
Activists often quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it's the only thing that ever has." — but the curse of such presupposition, is that there’s no guarantee of benevolence. People do have hidden agendas and devise plans. Those who have the gold, are able to procure the guns and the goons to enforce their will. If you add gods to the mix, then rulers and authorities secure principalities and powers.
🔴 I recommend this very important lecture by Eric Drass: The Truth, Post-Truth, and Nothing like the Truth. We have no direct access to reality, what we get served is ‘machine perception’ and amplification of biased data sets. Audience Capture by Algo Culture.
The devil makes work for idle hands
What if ‘the world’ is, and has been for some time now, embroiled in a prolonged and non-linear warfare? In 1999, The Artist (Prince) warned us that there is definitely a war going on, the battle field is in the mind, and the prize is the soul. In various indigenous and traditional contexts, this concept of eternal postlapserian spiritual battles is a tale as old as time.
Those who play the game of Mafia/Werewolf will understand the insight of how a small village gets into peril, when an informed minority conspire against the uninformed majority. People lie and manipulate in order to survive. Knowledge is power, ergo those in power will control knowledge. This is not conspiracy theory, it is cultural hegemony.
Again, the Culture Wars seem to emanate from Identity Politics - possibly because “Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful.”3 This is probably why people are wondering what has happened to ‘common sense’, in that people are demanding to be heard, seen and represented, but “as electric media proliferate, whole societies at a time become discarnate, detached from mere bodily or physical ‘reality’ and relieved of any allegiance to or a sense of responsibility for it.”
Weapons of Mass Distraction and Division? No kidding. I declare a thumb war.
Radical changes of identity, happening suddenly and in very brief intervals of time, have proved more deadly and destructive of human values than wars fought with hardware weapons.
— Laws of Media: The New Science (with Eric McLuhan), 1988
The Play’s The Thing
I’m reconsidering the story of Pandora’s box, not buried in lore of yore as just ancient Greek myth, but as a very real artefact that keep resurfacing in the form of advanced mirrors, magic screens and black ops gadgetry. Perception is reality, ‘any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic’, and humans seem to have an addiction for conjuring a variety of ocular productions.
It’s standard vocabulary for Art historians to refer to ‘The Gaze’, and one can add other ingredients to this cultural cauldron of entertainment: bread and circuses, The Spectacle, immersive experiences, Audience Capture, content is king, engagement, etc. The world has always been a stage, and mobile broadcasting has turned personalised realities into home-made movies. Optical technologies are iterations of Plato’s Cave — Lights! Camera! Action!
The existential question that anchors many ‘main character energies’ is how they/we want things To Be or Not To Be. In a delightful Shakespeare Live comedy sketch from 2016, different actors take turns in performing the famous line from Hamlet, each having varied choices in enunciating words, and therefore presenting a range in delivery of emphasis, and meaning.
Whether or not you have hypothesised if life is but a simulation, those with appreciation for the Arts might recognise how experience of counter-environments - which is to say, a range of varied narratives - trains our faculties for crafting and comprehending more dynamic scenes, despite whatever deplorable diegesis and diabolical devices are in development.
The daily t/ask is — which characteristics will you act out and display? What effects do you wish to elicit from your interactions with others?
Two observations worth noting about our inescapable entanglements with online dramas:
🔴 “There are no spectators with global theatre - only actors. Under electric conditions of speed, all forms of work have to become creative in order to function at all. The present demand is for role playing...” — Marshall McLuhan, 1970
🔴 “[In] the age of show… the eye becomes dependent on interface rather than imagination.” — Ivan Illich, 19964
It is less stressful to sense cyberspace situations beyond bifurcations. Instead of the hackneyed dichotomy, of typecasting the heroic against villainy, our mental moods might be more mollified by associating multiple personalities into more diversified archetypes. If you’re hesitant about behavioural patterns according to 12 Jungian categories, perhaps you could be more receptive to the Dungeons & Dragons alignment chart.
Life is a Live Action Role Play (LARP), and more than polarisation, there are options for embodying pluralism. Supposedly, ‘everyone has a book in them’, and if so, our contents cannot be scanned by its cover. Certainly, one person can contain multitudes, and perhaps people should approach each other more like walking human libraries.
I wrote about Perception Checking as a necessary skill - used by DnD players to scope out one’s understanding of a message or situation, to gain further insight and information about other potential motivations or intentions, before an initiative with consequences is taken.
My Mischief Brings all the Dead to the Yard
To conclude… “How did things, erm, end, with the neighbours?”
As the founder of Rogue Futures Initiatives, I chose to embrace the providence of being a misfit. I created a temporary WhatsApp group, to garner moral support from trusted IRL friends, and request for assistance with the house move and exit. Weirdly, this is what the tradition of bayanihan is for Filipinos, the spirit of communal unity and cooperation physically manifesting in the literal moving of a home.
It was also a fun opportune reason for hosting an appropriately themed Leaving Party, whilst simultaneously publicly airing out the two-faced plasticity of the resident in-group with a poster notice. In another timeline, perhaps I’d have been subjected to some show trial and burnt as a witch. I suppose there are always historically worse ways of being ostracized. I made the best of the situation, and turned the other cheek, with cheeky enthusiasm.
As observes:
“In an era of increasing information technological and social polarization it is unlikely that anyone will escape from dramatic accusations. Perhaps it is time to begin preparing to feel okay when that happens?
For serious though, if people abstain from being so damn triggered, maybe we’d have fewer casualties?
If you’re a fan of Wicked the book, musical, and newly released movie adaptation, then you’ll agree It's Not Easy Bein' Green, and in reality, most people would identify with the crowd pleasing Ozian mob bullying the strange outsider.
There will still be plenty of trouble ahead.
Let’s face the music, and dance.
Oh, and if you’re too nerd school for cool, please STAY WEIRD.
Hi, I’m Rina and I set brains on fire. As Cultural Ecologist, I study the relationships between living organisms (humans + other species) and their various multimedia environments. I’m on a mission to usher in the revival of the Humanities, asking for more soulful ways of creative flourishing.
I’m actively scheming about playful ventures rooted in community building and educational innovations. Please do get in touch!
“We live in an age of curated profilicity” by Jemima Kelly - Financial Times, 13 October 2021
Have you seen the film The Zone of Interest? Also see article ‘Chilling photo album of smiling Nazis relaxing at resort built by Auschwitz prisoners revealed’
Marshall McLuhan interview: “Violence as a Quest for Identity” - The Mike McManus Show, 1977
Worth tagging Elizabeth Oldfield's recent post related to this theme here:
https://morefullyalive.substack.com/p/difference-ophobia-and-how-to-cure
"The daily t/ask is — which characteristics will you act out and display? What effects do you wish to elicit from your interactions with others?" YES! This, for me, gets to the heart of it – at least, the characteristics part. Eliciting effects... that involves calculations too complex for my socially-inept mind.
That leaving party poster - WOW! Love it.