Transience Trapped

wibbles, originally uploaded by Erroneous Mousse.

Let Them Ingest Saccharine

Reality tellingvision 'talent' shows, aside from being another hastily buffed facet of the bread and circus, alpha-wave inducing media triviosphere, also I believe, serve to substantiate and maintain an ugly and inevitably destructive cultural and social paradigm. The Celebritocrats lean over us from their polished pedestals, purporting to be our salvation, overseeing the next chosen one's ascent into their domain, casting aside all those deemed unworthy to be stood before their vapid (pay no heed to the man behond the mirror) visage. How easily the discomforting pornography of schadenfreude that parades in the initial stages of these shows seems forgotten; contestants disposed of, 'deleted', mercilessly and without recourse, culturally guillotined whilst the baying hoardes jeer and mock.

The first myth that these events promulgate is that of audience (electorate) participation in outcome, that is bolstered by the temporary feeling of belonging that comes from a large (in this case discomfortingly vicarious) social event. When the babblers return to their workstations in the morning, in thrall to the egregore of the collective experience; the party; the club; the rally, the social rewards of collective experience manifest; jokes, taunts, desires, communications, only now ironically combined with the sense of strength and self determined identity that comes from taking sides. The truth however is that such limited participation detracts from genuine choice and opinion, and undermines the value of the thought and effort that are required to make such, and much like our stately 'democratic' politics, one is voting between what has already been chosen/provided.

The second myth which has become deeply pernicious in our post-boomer age of financial clemency is that of meritocracy, and its cousin aspirationalism; the jovial notion that you get what you are 'entitled' to, that your talent will be recognised despite any impediments, that you can rise to the 'top'. On the surface it seems a madness to argue with such concepts, what could be more reasonable than wanting to do well in your life and being rewarded for gumptive observance, but when analysised we discover a deeply selfish, pathological philosophy, mascarading as fairness under reason and even morality. It is in fact much closer to the lottery; that other manipulator of social and aquisitional hope; taxing dreams.

Merit is always awarded and administered by a subjective higher agency in this paradigm, conferred onto a candidate by an 'expert' adjudicator, and as such merit is determined by an adherent promiximity to the predetermined notion of excellence, a conformity to a limited 'usefulness'. In this highly managed heirarchical caste/clique system that we are indentured to, the ladders are few and greasy, the waiting lists are long, and the parameters demanding; the adjudicating experts being more often than not venal, self-serving and dogmatically ossified.

The Celebritocrats themselves are lifted into their guilded positions and held there only so long as they are useful/beautiful/interesting, by thems lurking higher up the media pyramid than they, even though their own fevered egos would decry it. Half-wittingly they are using these shows as a platform to substantiate the carosel of their own image, but more importantly the very notion of the validiy of the Celebritocratic class itself. At least Strictly doesn't piss about and removes the public from the performance altogether, literally feeding off their fantasies without shame. They are a small caste but they saturate the mediasphere with their tales of woe, abs, petty wants and rags to riches fantasies, distracting the eager, drooling, expectant from anything of import, nevermind concern, whilst undermining the real achievements that people can and have made. Let them ingest saccharine.

Contrary to Expectations

Contrary to Expectations, originally uploaded by Erroneous Mousse.

Pay No Heed To The Man Behind The Curtain (or are we blundering blindly?)

Politics, like any other institution, relies on rigourous paradigm maintainence and a collective acquiesence to authority and expertise, with their inherited and unquestioned assumptions and game rules. The game will run so long as everyone agrees to acknowledge the validity and value of those rules, or until they get hungry. Platitudes and cliches are typically the first line of attack against dissent, which act to mollify the other players, and serve to denigrate the opines of dissent through ad hominen association and dogmatic reitteration, rather than by an genuine act of communicatory progress. Classic binary 'debate'.

Dæmoncracy, assuming a philosophical purity, requires that the citizens (which the elected are supposed to be representative of) have information available to them to serve sufficient in the mediation and actuation of their votive decision. Secondly, they must not only be able to accurately parse that information but subsequently construct a 'realistic' temporal understanding from it.

Neither of those two conditons exists in our current (S)tate (and perhaps cannot), nevertheless the memegineers promolgate the notion of our dæmoncracy as THE historical endpoint, almost as a moral attainment, whilst only paying the most basic lip service to what such an ideal democracy genuinely requires. In parallel, people typically behave according to the expectations of their cultural background, socio-economic circumstance and intellectual pretensions, whilst drowning in the noise of manipulative emotives and vapid mis/disinformations that crowd out the signal of necessary information (obviously in the absolute sense this is a naivete, in that information always has bias).

These observations exist external to the darker awareness that the (usually) polar, side-shifting political mafias (at least the ones that have any kind of real power), whilst feigning ideological concerns, are in fact self-serving egotists and servant brokers (even when unknowing) for non-local, amorphous, essentially globalised, financial mafias and shadowed aristocracies. These are the inevitable by-products of our usurious currencies, that fix wealth and power to the vested interests of entrenched historical institutions and privilege.

It is very difficult for a person to make an accurate assessment because we are so heavily embedded in the game, through lifelong indoctrinations and the necessities of survival. We find it very hard to look at it from an external perspective, because to find that perspective unfortunately(?) one has to have become alienated from it to a greater extent. We typically avoid such alienation and such personalities because they often lead to social apoptosis. Confronting the myth of the 'good'  will always get one into to trouble, because the mass of people have associated with that myth and take any dissent, essentially, as a personal affront to their character and a threat to the integrity of their 'reality'.