Part of the effort to prevent democracy and social justice in the US has taken the form of creating a timeless cultural environment. Kurt Andersen in “Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America” observes this in detail.
Fashions used to change more frequently, as did technology (think electronics and cars), in the latter decades of the twentieth century. EPCOT is an acronym. What happened to the Tomorrowland Disney used to lead with?
David Graeber mentions in some of his talks how Sci Fi used to posit a radically different future because of technology, just around the corner.
Those are facts many of us can also recall from the latter half of the twentieth century: “A great, big, beautiful tomorrow, shining at the end of every day” was the lyric from that show at Disneyland about the great future coming soon in our lifetimes.
In the 1970s and 1980s, things started going the other way. Nostalgia for the past in entertainment burgeoned. Also, science fiction began trending towards fantasy, not just with Star Wars, but even Star Trek became more fanciful with elements of mysticism and magic.
Dystopic futures also replaced optimistic outlooks. “Blade Runner” is only one example.
Now sci fi is less about technological improvements that will free humans from having to trade time and labor for the means to survive and more about translations of the same old ideas, many of them biblical or mythical or weird versions of those same old frameworks from comic books.
People continue to use the same ancient stories as their way of understanding their lives, even while they use technologies they don’t bother to understand beyond “how to.”
Education lags similarly behind in many other areas. Even before all the help Republicans and Evangelicals are offering now, there were problems, obstacles, to keep anyone from learning anything about the technology we use every day or about the medical advances most of us take advantage of when we need them.
The main result has been a general ignorance about how insights from scientific discoveries must change how we view ourselves and how we live, if we are going to survive.
We don’t know how to talk about politics or political economy effectively with each other, especially with those who do not subscribe, often mindlessly, to the same conclusions and not always examined values we do.
Many of us are stuck believing the ideas of eighteenth-century thinkers (Descartes’ Dualism comes to mind) are still critically relevant to our discussions, rather than something to touch on briefly in contrast to what we all ought to know and be using daily when we look at what’s happening and what we ought to do.
As an example, I spend time thinking about what I wear. I participate in the kind of thinking I find both informative and laughable on YouTube from style and dating “influencers” because I need to move in a world in which those concepts have meaning.
But I am also aware I buy clothes I don’t need because it makes me feel good. I actively, consciously behave in ways in order to make impressions on others within those same silly sets of social evaluations, knowing full well it is all nonsensical and wasteful.
I’m walking down the sidewalk wearing white sneakers, black jeans, a dark blazer over a Moreno wool zippered shirt, past homeless people of varying ages, men and women, different ethnic backgrounds.
In an elevator on my way to see the oncologist a woman goes out of her way, “I like this look you’ve got going on.” “I like your liking my look,” I reply.
At the mall another day, wearing something else, another similarly consciously selected outfit, as I am picking up black slacks I don’t really need, newly hemmed, I walk in a way, unhurried and focused, taking longer, slower strides than I have to. I get similar attention from the young folks helping me and from random strangers in or waiting for the elevator.
As I am leaving, a man with his family in the parking garage walks over to my car to give me his card, in case I or anyone I know needs solar. This guy and his wife and kids were in the elevator only minutes before. I was entertaining them with small talk, mostly about the elevator’s logic.
This led to what anyone would see as a normal conversation about other matters, mostly trivial, framed by a great many assumptions on both sides.
Also, the details of what department stores, of this family’s racial background, their clothing and car, all might be interesting but I choose to leave these details out here.
I present myself as an example of someone wasting time and attention, even if I am doing so because I understand the social context and how I have been led to believe I need to behave in order to gain a certain social effectiveness.
The solutions are literally at our fingertips most of the time. But for similar reasons to those I’ve outlined in my case, most of us seem mesmerized by virtual reality and AI or similar distractions.
Videogames are apparently quite popular for people my age and younger. I prefer YouTube for lectures and the “influencers” who want to share their “wisdom.” These both strike me as less than optimal ways to spend time.
Games have always been a pretext, an artificial context for engaging in conversations. At some point in my own life I found I could skip the artifice of games and go right to conversations.
Now, however, because of everything I’ve brought up here, the chasms we face, differences in values and identity, can seem too great to overcome in conversation.
Differences in our knowledge about science, and more its significance, the very real impact on what our lives are actually about, make communication difficult.
Nevertheless, despite these challenges, I guess what I am getting at is that I for one am going to persist in my sociability.
Ironically, the solution I see for myself is to distance who I am from my social persona. Who I am feels more and more hollow in ways others apparently need to fill with a dead serious identity.
I prefer to strive for a nothingness in myself in order to see nothing that it is not there: What is there socially first, and thereafter also, in other dimensions of existence, and in the reality beyond even our shared human experience.
I Dwell In Possibility 