Almost exactly 5 years ago I lamented about pop-morality

It was essentially a call for:

-not making morality a fashion accessory

-starting to take seriously morality by first quietly doing the right thing in one’s own life, rather than running one’s mouth about it and parading it to the world, like a fashion accessory indeed

 

how sadly prophetic it was

 

You kept watching fucking TV, listening to songs,

asking “artists” for their opinions,

including even outright gangsters and lowlifes who graduated into the label of a “rapper”,

and of course most of all — you kept engaging the social media

Sampling opinions of “experts” there

Or anti-experts, because you’re such an enlightened sceptic

 

Politics was bad before all of that,

And TV is old, obviously,

Netflix though, and the garbage there, and Youtube, is less old,

but all that is old,

politics was bad for a long time

A person “interested in politics” was often a tedious, presumptuous, self-righteous bore, ruining the party

With few exceptions of people who actually knew what they were talking about,

And the rest sparingly finding themselves captured by some boring debate,

So it was always bad,

Anything but cool, curious, open-minded, non-dogmatic and intellectually serious engagement of politics runs the risk of quickly becoming both toxic and fucking retarded

I like saying it got worse now

It can get better later, then worse again,

Civilisations, societies, evolve and devolve

Right now I think it’s a bit lower

 

The answer to what the endgame of pop-culture is — is quite right in front of us

It’s making every idea so shallow so as to lose all its meaning

We thought we could separate simplistic worlds we viewed on the TV, on a NETFLIX show, from the real world, but maybe we coudln’t

 

And again, we though we could use social media, but of course we couldn’t

We thought we could do without gatekeepers — but of course we couldn’t

Religion is older than all of that and it teaches the single lesson: that of dogma over reason, blind faith over uncertainty and ignorance (with a chance of discovering actual reality, not a fairy tale)

Why would this be different?

Let’s invite priests into all fields and then follow them, on social media

Let’s all choose what we believe in, anytime we’re too confused to figure it out ourselves, or too self-indulgent to accept the truth

Let’s just choose our own truth, and then find someone who agrees with it

 

I said it used to be this political bore who would ruin the evening,

But when politics ruin the evening — that is actually a good sign

It means the politics is boring

It means the system is working

When the politics become so important again so that even I waste my fucking time writing about it — that means something has been fucking up

 

Returning to morality, the seeds have been sown,

Now they blossom

The pinnacle of our ethics and morality is:

-we’re in a middle of a BATTLE, of a WAR!

-the plot is of course GOOD VS EVIL

-anything less but a triumph, and a happy ending is evil

-there are no compromises because compromise involves imperfect solution, and imperfection is evil and inequitable

-the main characters are all making serious and passionate faces, because that’s what being a serious person means

-the characters are also both simultaneously virtuously weak, and prodigiously innately affirmatively strong

-or the converse from the other side of the aisle: the underdog, the protagonist, is the rebel against the conspiracy of the elites and authority

-likewise the enemy is caricaturally strong, but also caricaturally weak, go figure

-I suppose his weakness is morality, which in turn is your strength

-either way his strength is evil because if he wasn’t stronger than you — the movie would be over

-which again is some permutation of a class thing: whether it’s the oppressor, or the establishment, or whatever. Side-of-the-isle-agnostic

-also shit is good because accepting shit is pinnacle of acceptance

-and unacceptable is also good because owning it is “based”

 

We can explain this mentality through many lenses

We could say that it’s politics which coloured the culture, not the other way around

Or that it’s a circle

But

The political explanation is the common one, so why not forego it

Why not go cultural

And I’m not talking about the overtly political garbage,

I’m talking about how proliferation of pop-culture, with it’s shallow take on every problem — has gradually replaced our mental models with such simplistic and naive ideas

Again, nothing new

The new thing is observing that MAYBE it has not been slowing down — but instead accelerating

That the anti-pop-culture alarmists weren’t wrong… they were just early

That people still used to read serious books, to at least pretend they were somewhat respectable, and not utterly ignorant and insular

 

Of course it’s all difficult to quantify

The level of political polarisation in the ENTIRE WEST is NOT unprecedented historically — merely unprecedented in our lifetimes, I suppose

The social media thing is utterly unprecedented, and perhaps best comparable to previous explosions in information technologies, like printing press, then radio, then TV, then at last the internet, and finally antisocial media

And the dissemination of garbage pop culture I suppose is also unprecedented, in terms of it’s amount, and relative imbalance to higher culture

I do not know

 

I do not know

 

Therefore I would only call for becoming aware of the problem

Attempting to contextualise it

Consider the options and perspectives with that context in mind

And perhaps inoculate oneself

Not by stupidly rebelling into whatever thing you declared “evil”, today

But by getting a broader view

By observing the precondition of the ideas that we’re having

 

Or you know, maybe it’s not so complicated, after all?

Maybe all it takes is to develop distaste for:

-fast information

-artificial dopamine

-bad takes

-hot takes

-cheap opinions

-all social media altogether, bar their strategic use

-what looks good and impressive and sounds good

-what cannot be tested and proven true, or disproven (is unfalsifiable)

 

Indeed,

Equipping oneself with such epistemic hygiene would be to one’s advantage in ANY environment

It should suffice even in this fucking hell

ESPECIALLY as it is facilitated by yet new generation of epistemic progress = ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

If it’s used as a super robust fact-checker and logic-checker — it will be of tremendous help

But of course if the attention economy incentives and the brain-rot will continue progressing — then perhaps only some major catastrophe stands a chance of realigning the civilisation