Humor, Ideologically Speaking

Responding to a thread of people I respect talking about humor and politics, very wrongly. (@baroquespiral, @balioc, @kontextmaschine)

https://balioc.tumblr.com/post/164632139706/punching-up-ruined-comedy

I’ll have to start at the basics, but this will get to the issues they were talking about like Dave Chappelle.

One of the key forms of humor is a punchline that takes advantage of something the audience knows but is unsaid within the joke, and so the punchline only makes sense if you know that unstated fact. For instance a joke that relies on “Oh, Italians are stupid” or “rich men are entitled.”

Two men are sitting drinking at a bar at the top of the Empire State Building, when the first man turns to the other and says “You know, last week I discovered that if you jump from the top of this building, the winds around the building are so intense that by the time you fall to the 10th floor, they carry you around the building and back into a window”. The bartender just shakes his head in disapproval while wiping the bar.
The second guy says, “What, are you nuts? There’s no way that could happen. “No, its true,” the first man says. “Let me prove it to you.” He gets up from the bar, jumps over the balcony, and plummets toward the street below. As he nears the 10th floor, the high winds whip him around the building and back into the 10th floor window and he takes the elevator back up to the bar.
He meets the second man, who looks quite astonished. “You know, I saw that with my own eyes, but that must have been a one time fluke.” “No, I’ll prove it again,” says the first man as he jumps again. Just as he is hurtling toward the street, the 10th floor wind gently carries him around the building and into the window. Once upstairs he urges his fellow drinker to try it.
“Well, why not.” the second guy says, “It works. I’ll try it.” He jumps over the balcony, plunges downward passes the 11th, 10th 9th, 8th, floors… . . and hits the sidewalk with a SPLAT.
Back upstairs the bartender turns to the other drinker and says, “You know Superman, you’re a real jerk when you’re drunk”.

This joke only makes you laugh if you know the various powers of Superman.

There are two important ways this can be used politically:

–To tell a joke that relies on ideological truths as the unstated assumption.

You ask a white guy who’s he votin’ for, like, “Hey, Bob, who you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave! Whoa, whoa, whoa! Take it easy. So I was fuckin’ my wife in her ass, right? And let me tell you, it was something else.” “Yeah, yeah, but who are you gonna vote for?” “Dave! Dave, come on with the voting! I’m trying to tell you about fucking my wife in the ass, and you’re asking me all these personal questions.”

–To tell a joke that uses the ideological truth as the facade, with the ways that ideology fails being the unstated assumption. The is known as an encounter with the Real.

Have you ever watched, like, a cartoon that you used to watch when you were little, as an adult? I was sittin’ there with my nephew. I turned it on Sesame Street. And I was, like, “Oh, good. Sesame Street. Now he’ll learn how to count and spell.” But now I’m watching it as an adult and I realize that Sesame Street teaches kids other things. It teaches kids how to judge people and label people. That’s right. They got this one character named Oscar. They treat this guy like shit the entire show. They judge him right to his face. “Oscar, you are so mean. Isn’t he, kids?” “Yeah. Oscar, you’re a grouch!” He’s, like, “Bitch, I live in a fucking trash can! I’m the poorest motherfucker on Sesame Street. Nobody’s helping me.” Now you wonder why your kids grow up and step over homeless people, like, “Get it together, grouch. Get a job, grouch.”

The two examples I gave were from Dave Chappelle, the person people are arguing over as a particular unspoiled strain of humor. He’s not. (Though at his best, like the gameshow “Who Knows Black People?” he emphasized the latter style of joke.)

The point is not to reliably identify which of these categories a joke falls into, and to “only do the good kind of joke” – but to understand why ideology will always find humor a threat and a useful weapon.

There is no such thing as a humorless ideologue. The humorless feminist, the humorless christian conservative, these are all fantasies. The more someone shows umbridge at a joke that’s “not funny” because of inappropriate content, the more they love jokes that play by the rules of their particular ideological system.

(This isn’t about target, so much as about “agrees with my rules about how the world operates.” Someone who says “jokes about rape are never funny,” likely will laugh at a joke whose punchline is “frat boys try to dope drinks to get laid.”)

***

So what’s bad about all this discussion of “punching up” is acting like this concept is a remotely new thing. Every powerful ideology has felt the need to clamp down on humor, AND to use humor as a sharp weapon that enforces social order in a way most people can’t defend themselves against (ie, it’s just a joke you big baby.)

And the mourned libertine consensus of “everyone can take a joke” was just as doctrinaire about how humor was used as well. Most of what libertarian cultural advocates are complaining about is, after all, people making mean jokes at their expense.

***

To be more clear, what made Chappelle special and particularly good was not that he “offended all targets.” I believe the original analysis upthread was fatally flawed because of that. Obviously you can find endless comics who took that attitude, the Jeremy Pivens of the world and PCU. “Oh wow, he made fun of black people AND white people” is nothing to write home about.

Instead, so much of Chappelle’s comedy was about deconstructing societal assumptions rather than reifying them. His funniest pieces were both positive and surprising, such as a white dowdy-looking cop being eloquent in urban African-American slang, which held the promise that there really could be communication across communities.

(Jamelle Bouie wrote a piece on an SNL skit with a similar theme that gets at the point I’m making, except Chappelle did it a decade earlier, and with an entire show not just one skit.)

The joke is that we are all human. This is the second half of the distinction I made.

Or other skits, like “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” were less about the clubgoing boi who is the butt of the joke, and more about the traumatic encounter with the Real, where norms about masculine aggression are crushed beneath the weight of a nihilistic universe that does not give a fuck about your personal identity.

I find nothing to be impressed with the PCU / Bill Maher humor of the nineties, and I do not mourn its (vastly overstated) passing. Yes, yes, it is a particular cruel double punch to be told you are the butt of the joke and that’s because you’re evil, which is what “punching up” entails -- but ideological humor was always morally charged that way. You don’t think Nazi jokes about Jews were both mean, and leveraged the belief that Jews were immoral so that made the meanness okay, even positive?

I am genuinely sad there is less Chappelle show in the world, and I find current controversies about his standup extremely interesting. He’s making jokes exploring his hero worship of Bill Cosby and OJ Simpson, while believing they are a rapist and a murderer, with all the awkward ambivalence that entails. That is hella edgy, in a way that making fun of purple haired college chicks is not.

The SMG Gamergate Thread

In 2014, when the geek internet was blowing up with the controversy Gamergate, the forums at SomethingAwful.com were no exception. It was such a toxic subject that it was confined to one thread. SA’s resident communist movie critic, SuperMechaGodzilla, entered the fray – condescendingly lecturing everyone on capitalism, the fun of videogames, Christianity, anti-semitism, and media studies.

It was fantastic, and extremely educational. A point of view on GamerGate that was neither social justice totality, nor liberal/libertarian defensiveness.

His posts from the thread have been copied here for posterity.

Everything below here is written by SMG, who is not me. Posts are separated by quote bubbles, or an asterisk.

What is Capitalism?

This is a long explanation of capitalist ideology, in response to threads like these.

And direct asks for clarification by @jadagul, @silver-and-ivory, @not-a-lizard, and @kenny-evitt

(And a nice coda here )

Okay so what is capitalism.

Well sometimes people are just talking about the economic system. Goods are distributed according to markets, people have control of their private property, and we manage a global financial network by means of far-flung capital deciding what seems like a wise investment. This can be described in the positive sense with no value judgments - although it’s a very complicated system that is usually drastically simplified by anyone without a degree in economics or relevant profession.

But, much more relevantly for discourse, capitalism refers to the thinking that this is for the best. As @jadagul proposes:

Like, if you asked me to define “capitalism”, I would point to the idea that the means of production should be owned privately, and most economic activity should be privately contracted and transacted. And secondarily, I might talk about the ideological underpinnings of divorcing personal, private views from public, economic considerations, which I wrote about here. (Though properly speaking that’s liberalism rather than capitalism, the two synergize).

Emphasis on the word “should.” Which is why we can talk about capitalism in America, and Sweden, and Singapore, all countries with every different economic models and results. In all of them the dominant ideological strain is that a complex system of private exchange is for the best.

Like any belief, there’s a lot of luggage that goes with it.

There are two fundamental arguments for capitalism:

1. People’s stuff is their stuff. They should be allowed to do whatever they want with it, which includes selling it to other people who want it for whatever price they can get. We’ll call this deontic reason.
2. Markets are the most efficient distribution mechanism for our current stuff, and encouraging more production of it. We’ll call this the consequentialist reason.

These are both compelling reasons, and many tumblrs have made persuasive arguments based on them. But putting them both up there next to each other, we notice something.

…they don’t play nicely together. Like you can’t accept both of these arguments. Either people deserve true control over what they own and it’s okay people starve in order to support this principle – or goods should be distributed based on who will benefit the most from them, and your own claim over them is ethically irrelevant.

(You can try to explain that in our world it just so happens that both of these things are true. That would be very convenient – especially, as noted, this is the dominant belief of those in power. This is extremely unlikely, and in general you should practice skepticism towards claims that sacred values also are practically optimal.)

It’s true that some iconoclasts will bite the bullet, and pick only one of these arguments. Rationalists are pretty good about putting primacy on argument #2, and there are principled libertarians who put #1 above all. But by and large, what do most ideologues say, including “every Republican politician and most of the Democratic ones?” They claim both arguments are true at once.

And when you think of this, especially in the context of “Republican politicians justifying something” you realize that it’s really… just fatuous rhetoric in defense of something. They don’t really care if it’s the most effective system, not enough to test that claim in a falsifiable setting. And they aren’t really committed to deontic property rights. It’s just these are two powerful arguments throw out to win the debate and defend something.

So, to defend what? The naive radical here says that they’re just making these spurious arguments to defend the rich and powerful, but I don’t buy it. No one can buy toadies that passionate, that ubiquitous. They’re defending capitalism the same way you’d expect them to defend American actions in the Vietnam War - ignorantly, but with innocent faith.

So that’s what capitalism is. Capitalist ideology is the thing that people are defending when they make bad, contradictory arguments for capitalism.

The market is not always the worst way of deciding things. But it’s not always the best either. And we need to be able to make reality-based decisions about whether it’s the right principle to follow in any particular policy – but the intellectual forces made to defend capitalism in general, will rear their head to argue that “taxation is theft” and “there’s no such thing as a free lunch” no matter how pragmatic and necessary the left-wing proposal under discussion is. You have to resist that.

You have to ask yourself “okay, but in this area, is mandatory licensing a useful idea? What does the evidence really say?”

***

This concern is not limited to the policy realm, which is why we (who have so little influence over policy) end up discussing capitalism so much.

The biggest area where this comes up is the value of people.

Under capitalism, we believe that the value of a person is based on how much money they have. Oh, sure we don’t say this straight out. Every life is equal, etc etc. But whose judgment do we trust?

Who are we more impressed by: our unemployed friend, or the one on a hot track career that affords her a house and fancy vacations, and always buys everyone dinner? What’s the common demand of Republicans: get successful business people into office so they can run government like a business? And when you see someone, how good are you at resisting making assumptions about them based on the niceness of their clothes, their general health and hygiene, and other signifiers associated with class?

Even our judgment of our own productive activities is dominated by this. Here’s an increasing scale we are all familiar with:

• Oh you’re an artist. That’s cool.
• Where you hired by someone to make your art?
• Does it pay?
• Does it offer benefits?
• Is it enough to raise a family on?

… and on and on into even higher scales. The central question of your art (or whatever you do) should be “is it good?” But instead we establish sources of external validation. And capitalism manages to subsume all those definitions of validation, boiling them down to “will someone give you money for them.”

Now, there is often some logic behind these conclusions. The friend who treats everyone to dinner is at least benefiting you. And people paying for your work sometimes means it’s popular which we think sometimes signifies whether it’s good. But these are often short-cuts our mind makes, without thinking about whether that chain of logic really is supported by evidence.

The person who inherited a lot of money, and parlayed that into CEO jobs in their 20’s, and then used that experience as the basis for future claims of expertise, has an opportunity no one else did. And a lot of the companies trying to create media these days are throwing darts in the dark, hoping something hits. There’s a lot of luck, personal connections, and outright immorality that can go into making money, but we still have that shortcut “gets money = valuable.”

So usually what I am getting at when I rail against capitalism, is that I firmly believe unemployed people are valuable too. Not just in some utilitarian calculus, but that their work is interesting, their effort is meaningful, and I enjoy their ideas and think they have a real contribution to society. The fact that at the moment the market won’t pay for it, does not concern me as to the value of their work.

***

Obviously central planning and government can also fuck up. Stalinism and Chavezism can convince people to judge everything based on what the dictator thinks, and that is just as wrong. And statistical evidence shows that a minimum wage boosts income at some levels, and reduces take home pay at higher levels, and efforts to ignore either result are sticking your head in the sand.

But we don’t live under Stalin or another communist dictator. We live in a world where the richest are the most powerful and highest status, and they determine the class ladder. So the ideology we have to be on the watch for is “this that justify the existing capitalist system.”

Regardless, in all such cases - judging policies, or people - we can’t delegate our decisions to ideological short cuts. We must do the hard work ourselves of reading situations and forming our own reactions to them.

Life Under Polyamory Ideology

There’s a lot of… dialogue about monogamy vs polyamory these days, in our cosmopolitan little bubble. No one wants to tell others which lifestyle you should choose so I wouldn’t call it a debate, but there’s a great deal of defending “how your lifestyle works, and why you’re happy with it” that can’t save itself from becoming discourse about the two main options.

This happens enough that we fail to recognize that no, polyamory just won. We all live in its world now.

Or more accurately, we all live free of monogamous ideology now.

Case in point. I have a friend, and she’s monogamously committed to her boyfriend. Sure, she hangs out with a lot of other boys. She even visits them by herself, and crashes in their bed. She’s generous with hugs and other mild displays of physical affection to men. And she kind of pines after some specific men, wishing for greater emotional attachment. This isn’t even hidden, it’s all openly acknowledged. But, this is the definition of monogamy she and her SO have worked out.

The reaction of people from her social circle, the people from our general social bubble is “fine. Whatever works for the two of you. If that’s what you call monogamy, I have no reason to disagree with you.” There’s no call for us to try to strictly define what monogamy should mean for them.

Let me assure you, this is not how it would work under monogamous ideology. In a society where monogamy was the reigning lifestyle choice, it includes a specific definition of monogamy, and “being too touchy with other men” would definitely violate that. Even with her partner’s consent, she would be found guilty of breaking social taboos. (Which is basically how her non-cosmopolitan co-workers react.)

But none of us (which I assume includes most of my readers) give a fuck. Call yourself polyamorous, monogamish, what the fuck ever. As long as you both are happy what business is it of mine? And that is the true spirit of polyamory - anarchism towards society wide definitions of romantic relationships.

You might individually choose to snuggle with just one person, and hopefully can get that special person to agree. But it’s very different when that’s a private agreement between two people (one which can be altered at any time they want), than when it’s an arrangement coded and enforced by the whole social world. And we just don’t have that in liberal cosmopolitania any more.

After all, one of the main benefits of monogamy was that you don’t have to negotiate shit. You’re together, you’re just dating each other, these are the default rules, and for people who don’t want to process and explicitly lay out their preferences, this is a lot easier. But that’s gone now - any couple does have to figure out whether they are poly or mono, and even if they are mono, where they feel those boundaries lie, because ain’t no one else doing that regulating for them.

***

The point is not “be monogamous or be polyamorous.”

The point is that ideology is a society wide phenomenon, and it is not located solely in the individual.

Under monogamous ideology, not only were most people monogamous (at least publicly), but what monogamy meant and enforcement of following this code was a public matter.

If you live in a bubble where polyamory is accepted now, then you also live in a bubble where no one is defining monogamy for you. You can make up the definition of monogamy to fit your relationship. It can include “cuddling other people is ok but no sex”, or hell, it can include “having sex with other people is okay but we still call it monogamy because we want to” and no one is really going to criticize you for that.

Guess what. This freedom is new. It’s a result of living under polyamory, which exists outside just the individual.

(It’s also a burden. It means when you start dating someone, you need to clarify whether your relationship is poly or mono, and if it’s mono what those boundaries are. You can no longer just assume the default rules. Some people understandably loathe this.)

Transitioning from “the rules of my romantic relationship are defined by the social structure around me” to “I get to / must choose the rules” is a big step. But it’s a culture-wide step, and can’t exist solely on the individual level, anymore than “I decide to have private property” is a decision solely by the individual. Both need the social structures that support them.

There’s no escaping this. It’s not saying “polyamory is an ideology yay”, but rather “your society is going to have an ideology about how much freedom people can expect in defining their relationships.” This has always been true, and will be true in the future.

You can say “FUCK OFF I’M NOT POLY” all you want, but I bet if your partner cheats on you none of your friends are going to immediately tell you (at least, as compared to how likely they were to under monogamy), because that’s now your business and not theirs to enforce. This is the anarchy I am talking about.

(And obviously, the current polyamory acceptance only exists in a few very specific bubbles, and monogamous ideology holds sway in most of America and the world still.)

***

WW: Partners were already non-monogamous unless that was specifically defended, the difference is now everyone knows about it.

Obviously.

One of the key things about ideology is that it’s a public performance. With any of these beliefs - monogamy, social justice, Trumpism, rationalism - everyone says in private “oh, I don’t believe all that stuff. I don’t go that far, I’m just reasonable about it. It’s other zealots who actually take this seriously.”

A communist experiences himself as simply an instrument whose function is to actualise a historical necessity. The people, the mythic people - whose instrument the totalitarian leader is - are never simply the actually existing individuals, groups of people and so on. It's some kind of imagined idealised point of reference which works even when, for example in rebellions against the communist rule like in Hungary '56, when the large majority of actually resisting people raises up, is opposed to the regime. They can still say: "No, these are just individuals, "they are not the true people. " When you are accused of: "My God, "how could you have been doing all of these horrible things?" You could have said, and this is the standard Stalinist excuse: "Of course my heart bleeds for all the poor victims, "I am not fully responsible for it. "I was only acting on behalf of the 'Big Other'". "As for myself, I like cats, "small children", whatever - this is always part of the iconography of a Stalinist leader.  

- Zizek, Pervert’s Guide to Ideology

So yeah, in private lots of people have been functionally polyamorous. But they still had to present the public face of monogamy, and would effectively enforce this. This is like the dozen Republican leaders who decided to try Bill Clinton on impeachment, when privately every single one of them was engaging in adultery or worse.


(This does not obviate that many people are not fucking around, and still have and have always had one partner. It’s just the transition from a system where society codifies and enforces that one-partnerhood for you, to one where you must manage it all yourself, is a big and real step that has happened.)

Cargo Cults: 17776 and Homestuck

Jon Bois' epic about the future of football, 17776 just finished. If you haven't read it, you should, or at least read the first page/chapter.

A number of commentators, both on tumblr and reddit have said it's very similar to Homestuck, the MSPA adventure, and there's definitely an overlap of fandom. Homestuck, remember, is a meta-textual experimental piece of outsider art about kids who find themselves going on fantastical quests in a computer game after the world has been destroyed.

They're not wrong, but they're not right either. And their comparisons are a great example of cargo cults.

The phrase "cargo cult" refers to island cultures that would make first contact with Western civilization, and would see all the material goods they brought, and so try to replicate this process of receiving cargo by building runways or statues of planes or whatever else looked like the Westerners.
So the term refers to worshiping the superficial aspects of something complex, and ignoring the true reasons it works.

The basic explanations for why Homestuck fans like 17776 is "they are chatlogs with different colored text and typing styles to represent different characters" and "JUICE is a lot like Dave" (sarcastic, mean, but so enthusiastic that he can't resist info dumping about things he cares about) and "it's a mix of video and bad, static html" and "it references pop culture."

Except this is a pretty bad explanation. Why? Well for one it's really easy. To make, that is. Like do you know how many Homestuck fan artists have made fanfic with "different colored text" and "someone who sounds like Dave?" It's not a hard thing to try. And yet "capturing the feeling of Homestuck, enough to enthrall fans" is much harder. Why is that? They're mistaking the tactile details for what is actually compelling. Cargo cults.

The first thing that really makes it work is the "rapid recontextualization." Already on chapter one, you have this slow dialogue happening between Nine and Ten over the course of years, slowly revealing stuff but mostly a) entertaining us with their dopishness and b) slowly doling out facts that explain the situation. It's agonizing. And then, on a dime, something unpredictable happens that accelerates the fuck out of the story, giving them instant communication and explaining who the satellites are, complete with dramatic screenshots of satellite related stuff. And after that point everything in the story is in this new context and new speed.

Hussie did that a lot too, with interminable dialogues between John and whoever, point and click hunts by John (or whoever), until a random thing happens and then bam, we know a whole lot more about the (much wider) world in one instant. This is frankly some kind of operant conditioning that addicts a non-negligible part of his audience. It's no surprise it would grab the same people.

Bois in particular does this with the video pieces. It's not just "it uses both static html and video", but the way it uses video. Which is to provide a sudden jump in information, showing the project exploding to a whole new scale. Compare the first video at the bottom of chapter one, with something like Act 2 End: Ascend. They are very similar feelings of suddenly "everything gets real now."

In this way "dialogue, dialogue, snarky/self aware dialogue -- eye opening video of sublime realization (followed by similar dialogue commenting on that video-enlightenment)" operates as a tandem pair, neither entirely working their full effect without the other. This is where Homestuck draws its power, not "someone is snarky like Dave."

Although it's not a coincidence the Dave voice repeats either.

I mean, the most important voice is not the Dave/JUICE voice, but John/Nine. They are, in Tarot terms "the Fool." They are the blank slate protagonist who is only just now learning everything about the world, along with us. Many critics would call this "the audience identification character", but it's not really who we see ourselves as, they are just the lens we can most easily learn about the world from.

Well, it makes sense that the Fool is first introduced to the world by someone smarter than us, but patient and benign. That is the Rose/Ten character. Only after we have the discoverer character, and the teacher character, can we have the third: the meta-aware character. That's Dave, that's JUICE, and that's our actual audience identification. We're genre-savvy, detached from the story, and prone to snarky comments. So both MSPA and 17776 have this same introductory tryptych: Fool, Teacher, Irony-master. It's a good combination for laying out a fictional universe (and explicitly stating to the audience the literary themes of this universe, as Dave/JUICE often does), and that's why people feel such similarity between the two.

Same with the pop culture references. Every work of art references pop culture these days. The key here is that 17776 and Homestuck both blatantly reference pop culture, and aspects that are not at all relevant. You get Con Air and Steely Dan coming up (but not Hillary Clinton or I lik cow or the Wire.) It's decidedly silly stuff, that tells us a lot more about the characters involved, than really makes us feel a connection to them.

Of course, both artworks explore a post-apocalyptic scenario. Homestuck deals with an Earth that has been destroyed, and what the relevant kids do beyond that, and 17776 deals with an apocalypse that ended all struggle and meaning to life, forcing people to discover new meaning. It's about what happened to our world after something major destablized everything important about it. Post-apocalypses are just commentaries on the world as it currently is, but laid bare. And with this tryptych we can get an accessible explanation: the Fool asks what's going on, the Teacher answers in the Watsonian sense, and the Ironist answers in the Doylist sense, explicitly telling us why the author is doing this here.

This works well with the middling desires of most of the audience: they are reading webfic because they want to explore something new, they want world building that is interesting and makes sense diagetically, but they want a little bit of thematic awareness that makes them knowledgable art critics.

Once we have gotten used to this trio (or rather, right before we have gotten used to them, and when we feel we are just getting the groove of the conversation,) both works then suddenly switch gears and add new voices. These are very down-to-earth voices, that assume a high degree of context to understand. (Often when switching scenes, you're coming in mid-scene to the next thing, and the first few lines of dialogue will be the reader trying to catch up to what's going on. It's mildly intellectually challenging, but more, it's constant and addictive.

Now in Homestuck, those new voices are eventually built up and worked into the diagetic plot, whereas in 17776 those voices are instead worked into the overall thematic message (often as explained by JUICE.) This split between emphasis on building plot, vs explaining its themes goes all the way through to the two very different endings (one of which was fulfilling, and the other of which... was really not.)

There are other thematic and mechanical parallels that make 17776 and Homestuck work similarly, and you can play around with them yourself.

**************

However, this obsessing about cargo cults can be a trap, like the old lady asked about what supported the turtle who carried the world on its back. "It's cargo cults all the way down."

The phrase cargo cult creates a dichotomy between that which is superficial and misleading, and that which is deep and the real meaning of the work.

But, breezy thematic analysis (like my own) can be just as cargo-cultish. You list off some words like genre-savvy, paganistic, or ironic detachment and at least some people will just nod along to how cool you sound. There's no guarantee you've found the real meaning, and haven't just found another idol to worship.

This is of course because there is no core, essential meaning to the work.

Holloway’s desire is to ask the alien-gods the meaning of life. This goal is utterly unobtainable, and the film establishes elsewhere that life has no inherent meaning (existence precedes essence) and, even if one could speak to the alien-gods, the message would be something unsatisfactory like 7*7=42 or horrific like Event Horizon’s ‘we don’t need eyes to see’.  

SMG on Prometheus

Especially in art. There is only the superficial.

One should thus invert the usual opposition within which true art is “deep” and commercial kitsch superficial: the problem with kitsch is that it is all too “profound,” manipulating deep libidinal and ideological forces, while genuine art knows how to remain at the surface, how to subtract its subject from the “deeper” context of historical reality. 

Zizek

So you're peeling back the layers of the onion. On the first layer is "different colored text, and sounds like Dave," and the next layer is "uses video as a climactic way to broaden the scope of the work." And in some ways that next layer can be more useful - in this case I think it explains affinity between these two works better, and offers a more reliable predictor of what else fans will like.

But it's still layers of the onion, and you'll never reach some inner kernel of pure meaning. You can never guarantee that you have found "what audiences want."

To address the original analogy, you could imagine some start-up entrepreneur who laughs at the cargo cults of Pacific Islands, and thinks the real idols you need to worship are the global supply chain, and synergy, and strengthening the free market. Now they might have a practical understanding of how to build their company, or they might just think that if they say enough buzzwords then investor capital will be drawn to them and they will get rich.

It's Good to Have Goals

Since @kenny-evitt is poking me about what I want, and @balioc is calling me out talking about tribalism here, this is a good opportunity to express some of my more positive vision, instead of complaining endlessly about capitalist ideology.

There’s an important distinction between utopian and practical goals, between long term and short term. If you talk your long term goals you get dismissed as irrelevant (or worse, a Leninist who will cruelly bend the world to your ill-thought out vision), and if you talk your short term goals you get dismissed as doing very little to fix things and leaving most of the underlying problems of the world intact, erasing whatever short-term progress you make. So it’s important to state clearly that you have both.

In the utopian sense, I am a Christian universalist. I really do believe in consensual anarchy and universal justice. Some day we can resolve all the major social problems that lead to fear and anxiety that cause us to do stupid, destructive things on a society wide scale.

I believe this will look like a humanist love towards every other person that exists. They are not just a commodity who can buy your stuff or sell their body to you, and they are not just a soldier who represents the threat of the Enemy. They are a person with their individual story, who cares about small things and big dreams, who can have effective dialogue, and be understood as a friend and a source of help. And it will be natural to share whatever we have with the, when it leads to overall higher enjoyment. This is taking all the good things about tribalism that balioc says

And – don’t get me wrong – there are many great things about families.  It is cool that, due to the power of collective identity, resources can be distributed in a literally final-stage-communist fashion with very little friction.  It is cool that you can get to know everyone super well, and keep an accurate map of all the relationships.  It is cool that people care about you, no fooling, they really care about you, they are not going to drop you just because you’ve become inconvenient or whatever.  

...applied to every other person who exists, not just one small group. This is the love of Christ (whether or not He exists.) It’s not just saying “you are a person so I guess you get this”, but seeing them as a full person, and because of that, wanting to share.

This is obviously very hard. I do not expect it in our lifetimes. But it remains that without this end-state, we’re basically never going to be happy on a wide scale. All other social utopias leave in place a lack, an anxiety, that this person may deceive you or be taking advantage of you, so you must remain ever on your guard against them.

Maybe it is even impossible. Maybe there will never, ever be universal justice. Humans are just too fallible, you know? What do we do if that’s the case?

Okay then, then we are not working on total solutions. We are just talking about harm reduction, acknowledging that any solution we come up with will still leave problems.

In that case, what I note is that in our current moment, our society’s ideology places way too much weight on the benefits of liberal individualism, and puts very little normative weight on the benefits of tribalism and communities. Tell someone you’re moving for a job or your spouse, ok. Tell them you’re moving for the weather/local culture, well you’re short sighted and hedonist but still reasonable. Tell them you’re moving for a non-spouse family member, or a group of friends, or some sort of club, and you get increasingly rattled looks asking are you insane???

(This is an exaggeration, but you take my point.)

Tribes - not just your family, but any time you’re thrown together with a group of people and all caring about something at the same time, and suddenly find yourself respecting the others as individuals because of that attachment - are a tremendous source of joy and support. But at the moment, rhetorically, they are mostly treated as a way conservative parents oppress their gay children, and as a cult if they are anything non-familial. (Rationalists, do you even know what they say about your Bay Area houses?)

It’s terrible. It scares people away from something that could make them happier and do all the things Balioc talks about. Sure, they aren’t perfect - there will be some abuses of power, some flakes and defectors who ruin it, some even terribly exploitative stories - but those stories happen under liberal capitalism too. We’ve just decided that the pains suffered because of individualist society are acceptable and due to “bad apples”, whereas the ones caused by tribes are reason to be wary of the whole concept.

(You can interact with people on the basis of what you know they actually like and can handle, and not on endlessly trying to find one-size-fits-all rules about what sort of approach is inappropriate or not. It’s so great!)

So my tribalism blog explores the short term solutions of embracing our tribal opportunities. It’s not a utopia, and there will always be problems in a society based on tribes. But there’s a source of happiness there that we can reach out to now, and take advantage of. And that seems a lot better than the impossible project of trying to refine liberalism and social justice and individualism into a contradictory morass of rules where no one ever gets hurt.

MGS5: Quiet Revulsion

The most controversial figure in video game auteur Hideo Kojima's last installment in the Metal Gear Solid franchise was the scantily clad sniper "Quiet."

It's even more disturbing in the game, with motion, and rain, and dancing, and Kojima's typical "in your face" blocking.

But we need to remember that when something is disturbing in art, that's truth. We need to move towards the discomfort, and find why we are so unsettled. So let's fully investigate this character.