Caution: The following article deals with world events and society. If you enjoy games like Metal Gear Solid or Deus Ex with heavy social commentary about conspiracies and global elites controlling mankind, you may like it.
Living In Fiction
Humanity has always lived within grand stories. We are trapped in them. They are passed down by our ancestors, and by our current rulers. Breaking free from all stories and looking at the world with new eyes is almost impossible. These stories can be very true, but never absolute. They always compete for supremacy and invalidate each other. Whichever story holds up longer becomes more true — even if it used to be fiction.
Hideo Kojima beautifully explored the digital war to control reality through narratives. He framed it as a contest of memes. He explained how stories compete for survival just like genes; a view based on the theories of Richard Dawkins. The idea that an invisible cabal of social engineers are trying to steer humanity through stories was powerful, and it has only multiplied in relevance since the innocent days of 2001. As evidence, look at the reaction of one of the best analysts of framing tactics today: Scott Adams. He’s most famous for being the creator of Dilbert, but has become a bestselling author on the subject of persuasion and how reality is being bent today.
When Scott Adams was shown a YouTube video analyzing the meaning behind the famous “GW” conversation in MGS2, he had this to say about it:
Being familiar with his books I can assure you that the “mind-bending” part for him was how accurate and powerful this old video game was. Many authors and artists have commented on false realities before, but it becomes necessary to reinvent that lesson constantly. Each generation thinks it has successfully escaped old stories, but they never realize they have fallen into to new ones that are just as false. History itself is little more than debunking old “realities”, but unfortunately it’s very difficult to debunk the present. Today is always dynamic and fluid in our minds. It can’t possibly be fake, scripted, or engineered. Because right now is Real™. The illusion paradigm has been exposed all the way back in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave”, but very few manage to provoke and equip their audience to overcome the fiction of their own time.
The allegory was brilliant and still is. Shadow puppets on the wall, created by hidden groups. Being chained to a single lowly position, where you can only see the projections, not the projectors. Stories being shown to the ignorant, so that no matter what they conclude, it is based on false reality. Living inside a fiction.
Clown World
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised at the rise of the “Clown World” meme that exploded in the last few months. It is a perfectly natural evolution of concepts, but it is unlike anything in modern history.
Clown World is a nothing more than a meme. It isn’t a political movement, an activist organization, or a real thing. It came out of nowhere and has become viral — reproducing and taking over rapidly. It’s a story; an emotionally-driven fiction. And yet fiction can often be more real than “reality”. When trapped inside a false fiction, we must adopt a new fiction to escape it, and Clown World is an escape hatch. A tragic recognition (and celebration) of how implausible and backwards the stories of today are.
I warned you years ago that things were going to get weirder as the establishment collapsed. The establishment dictates reality, so when it gets humiliated it doesn’t mean they’re losers and they need to learn their lesson — it means that reality itself is can no longer be correct.
From last year’s Desperate Times article
Remember my discussion of Critical Theory? The key to its effectiveness is that it never promotes a real or consistent ideology; it only “critiques” other ideologies. And because it never builds anything up, it can never be torn down. It is an amorphous, shape-shifting agenda that simply corrodes traditional systems and weakens them until they collapse. Clown World is like an antidote to Critical Theory. This is an intellectual stalemate.
Critical Theory says that “heteronormative paradigms” are “problematic”. Clown World then documents and exposes the pathology, mania, and byproducts of those who attack heteronormative paradigms, but without actually defending the root issue. It’s a critique of a critique. It sabotages the saboteurs. It doesn’t promote anything except awareness. Trying to destroy the Clown World meme is therefore like trying to clean bleach.
How is any of this sustainable? Can a culture even exist in this state? Our reality is falling apart around us, but nothing is replacing it. The clownish world we live in cannot survive, but the Clown World meme cannot replace it. You can’t live inside an escape hatch. So if it’s not sustainable, what is the plan of the powerful storytellers today? Are they really losing the meme war? Or are they setting up a story we’re not looking for?