[P2P-F] Fwd: Making the Universe Great Again

[Michel Bauwens]

contrarian review of the avengers

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From: Tikkun & the Network of Spiritual Progressives <miriam at tikkun.org>
Date: Wed, Jul 24, 2019 at 3:07 AM
Subject: Making the Universe Great Again
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>


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Making the Universe Great Again
<https://default.salsalabs.org/Teaf92077-9c2c-43a3-8916-fdbcbe8a7c50/c02a8189-8f6d-41ef-94fe-7ef8c2c49d3d>
Thoughts on
<https://default.salsalabs.org/T2440dc96-dac6-44f1-8808-0cef1f7a6200/c02a8189-8f6d-41ef-94fe-7ef8c2c49d3d>*Avengers:
Endgame
<https://default.salsalabs.org/Te24bc847-1e07-475b-934d-dcb58073181e/c02a8189-8f6d-41ef-94fe-7ef8c2c49d3d>*

by Charles Eisenstein

*Image courtesy of Pixabay.*

Two-thirds of the way through the interminable *Avengers: Endgame*, I
leaned over to Stella and whispered, “They say a shared ordeal makes a
marriage stronger.” Gaping plot holes, characters that were more like
self-caricatures, scenes that seemed as if they were grafted in from
another movie, and concatenations of vapid one-liners that served as dialog
made the film nearly unwatchable.

Unwatchable to me, anyway. When I offered my complaints to my teenage son,
he gave me quite a passionate schooling. My incomprehension of the movie
was due largely to my having somehow missed most of the other 22 films in
the *Avengers* franchise. No matter. Philip is right that it is unfair to
pick on *Avengers*. Most of what I am about to say applies to countless
other Hollywood action movies of recent years.

At this point it is customary to issue a spoiler alert. I am going to
reveal pretty much the entire plot. That won’t matter though, because if
you have followed the series you have already seen this film. If you
haven’t, you will find the plot so contrived and the characters so flimsy
that you won’t care what happens.

Walking out of the theater, I felt something else besides the smug glee of
ridicule and the annoyance of three hours squandered. I felt alarm, even
dread. Aesthetics are inseparable from other dimensions of human creation
and human relating. They are political, they are economic, they are
ecological. That such a film even exists, especially with large budget and
resounding commercial success, is diagnostic of a severely diseased
civilization.

The aesthetic shortcomings of *Avengers: Endgame* reflect disturbing trends
in politics and society. Worse, the film is a propaganda and indoctrination
vehicle for those trends.

I’ll explore three of them here: the shattering of causal connections and
holistic understanding; escapism into delusions of restoring a heroic past;
and the descent into a virtual reality of image that seems to excuse us
from the laws of material reality. All of these have profound political
implications.

*Restoring the Past*

*Avengers: Endgame* is the sequel to *Avengers: Infinity War*, in which the
arch-villain, Thanos, succeeds in his evil plan to collect all six infinity
stones and kill half of all living beings in the universe. (Along with
them, he kills half of the superhero Avengers, including Spiderman.) His
rationale is, amusingly, humanitarian and ecological: to alleviate the
suffering caused by overpopulation. Refreshingly, the villain wins complete
victory in that film, which ends with Thanos retiring to a remote planet,
enjoying the sunset as he rests after a job well done.

A few minutes into the new film, a squad of the remaining Avengers find him
on his remote planet. He is occupied in his garden, and has destroyed the
infinity stones so that no one will ever be tempted again by their power.
Unmoved by Thanos’s transformation into an organic gardener and unswayed by
what appears to be his stirrings of regret or at least doubt, they chop off
his head and return home, avenged.

The rest of the movie is occupied with their use of time travel technology
to go back in time, collect the infinity stones from the past, and use them
to undo Thanos’s handiwork. What the stones can do, they can undo. It is
not only the stones that they bring back from the past though, it is also
Thanos himself, and along with him the familiar dramatic engine of heroes
versus arch-villain. Moreover, the Thanos they bring back is not the
nuanced, evolving Thanos in his garden, but an old, unregenerate version,
purely malevolent and unproblematically worth killing.

Neither the filmmakers nor the superheroes knew what to do without him.
Their identity cannot stand without an evil to define them as good, as
heroes. Without Thanos, Thor becomes a drunken oaf, Ironman becomes a
suburban dad, Hawkeye becomes a vigilante assassin, and Hulk becomes a
giant green scientist. Their superpowers are as superfluous as the MX
missile became with the demise of the USSR.

In the milieu of geopolitics, the last truly credible good-versus-evil
story died with the Soviet Union, a signal event that inaugurated the slow
dissolution of the good-versus-evil storyline altogether. Despite various
attempts to resuscitate its corpse, the succession of candidates for the
New Evil – Colombian drug cartels, radical Islam, the ‘axis of evil,” and
so forth – inspires little dread. These puny opponents are inadequate to
incite war fever or justify the continuation of the military-industrial
complex. Imagine an *Avengers* sequel with a smaller, weaker Thanos.

Failing to find a new foe as mighty and diabolical as the old Soviet
Thanos, we try to bring it back from the past in the form of Vladimir
Putin’s Russia. But this is not the movies. No amount of narrative
management, psyops, or political prestidigitation can inflate today’s
Russia into anything as scary as the Soviet Union, with its ideology of
global communist revolution, its totalitarian police state, its Gulag
Archipelago, and its Iron Curtain.

Before the Avengers (and the filmmakers) brought back Thanos, evil had
essentially retired. The Avengers and their powers were, like the military
hardware in the American arsenal, obsolete. It is still obsolete; unable to
win a decisive victory over puny opponents like Afghanistan or Iraq, the
United States military succeeds only in sowing chaos wherever it strikes.
It is as if the Avengers themselves have become the new evil.

To Make America Great Again requires some kind of reference point. Great in
respect to what? What exactly is it about the past that Trump and other
national chauvinists around the world seek to restore? While Trump might
harbor erratic non-interventionist tendencies, these necessarily collide
with the ugly truth of “greatness” in an imperial system, where great
equals dominant. Supremicism requires someone to vanquish and subjugate.

Here is a plot summary of the *Avengers* series to date. A bad guy appears,
the fate of the world or galaxy is at stake, and the hero(es) destroy him.
Then another bad guy appears, the fate of the world is at stake again, and
the heroes destroy him. Then another, and another.... What is the reason
they keep appearing? There isn’t one, except that they are bad. Maintaining
a livable world, then, requires an endless series of fights. Does that
remind you at all of American foreign policy? Establishing evil as
elemental, the cause of our troubles, the *Avengers* series elevates a
simplified Hero archetype, promotes a puerile conception of greatness, and
writes a prescription for endless war.

The *Avengers* plotline expresses and, I fear, validates a political
nostalgia, suggesting to the public that greatness might be resurrected,
and that the hero-state is still a viable national identity. Like most
action movies, it harks as well to another kind of nostalgia: for the days
when problems could be solved by force. Wanting to become again “the
greatest” – Trump’s version of the neocons’ “full spectrum dominance” –
makes sense only in a world where dominating the Other brought benefit to
the self, a world where progress meant more effective ways of killing,
conquering, and controlling, where the next antibiotic, the next
weedkiller, the next weapon would bring happily-ever-after victory. It is a
nostalgia for a time when our arsenals were actually useful for something,
when humanity could escape ecology, and when unfettered capitalism brought
prosperity for all. It is doubtful whether such a time ever existed (in any
case, nostalgia usually recalls an imagined past), but at least the
illusion seemed true at the time. Judging by the success of *Avengers*,
part of us holds to that story still.

*Making Nonsense of the World*

The reader might attribute my dislike for this movie to my
over-intellectual resistance to a bit of mindless summer fun. If so, my
highbrow disdain was shared by an eight-year-old boy and his sister who,
along with their bewildered mother, were the only other occupants of the
theater. Meandering around the aisles and paying only sporadic attention to
the movie (which, admittedly, is just as watchable in random ten-second
chunks as in its entirety), they brought to mind a similarly jaded and
inattentive American public.

Take a few days’ or weeks’ break from watching the news, and you may
discover upon your return that current events make no less sense in
sporadic bursts than they do in one continual stream. The media makes
little attempt to connect events to each other or to larger historical and
economic processes, offering the thinnest of plotlines, or none at all, for
the seemingly senseless barrage of shootings, wars, scandals, coups,
election results, and so on. In the film as well as the news media, it is
not as if events are wholly unexplained; it is that the explanations cannot
bear scrutiny. Juvenile metanarratives, simplistic motives, and ad hoc
explanations pass without question. As with *Avengers*, if you have
immersed yourself in the stories and become attached to the fictional world
of the mainstream news narrative, what is senseless to the newcomer makes
sense. Only by pulling back is the nonsense manifest.

The problem with *Avengers* is not that it conflicts with reality – it is,
after all, fantasy – it is that its internal reality seems so contrived.
Why are Pim Particles necessary for time travel? How does Thanos transport
an entire army though time using a one-person supply of them? Why, despite
its high technology, does that army rely on hand-to-hand combat? Why, if
the whole universe is involved, are nearly all the superheroes from one
tiny planet, Earth? The viewer automatically lets such questions slide,
accepting the inconsistencies and ad hoc explanations because he knows it
is necessary for the plot to proceed. This goes beyond a willing suspension
of disbelief; it is a willing suspension of rational thought. Any
explanation is good enough as long as the narrative requires it.

Outside the theater, what thoughts daren’t we think? What questions and
inconsistencies do we let slide, so that the show might go on?

Above I referred to gaping plot holes, and while there are a few, what
disturbs me more aesthetically and politically are the unbelievable patches
used to hold the fabric of the plot together. The contrived explanations of
how and why in *Avengers: Endgame* eerily parallel the way the news media
present current events to the public. Some rationale is needed for why
multiple trips to the past are impossible, so the Pim Particles, in limited
supply, are called in. Some rationale is necessary for bombing Syria, so
poison gas attacks are called in. In the movie, the flimsiest pretext – or
sometimes none at all – is sufficient to motivate a character’s action. The
viewer endures a cacophony of loosely connected events. Usually I could
fill in the gaps with a stretch of imagination; other times my imagination
snapped in disbelief. To perform these imaginatory calisthenics requires a
certain degree of buy-in to the drama, a willingness to suspend disbelief,
give the narrator the benefit of the doubt, and fill in the gaps. This film
was practice in accepting absurd premises to collude with the storytellers
in upholding a narrative.

The story of the world that established power offers us, in both its
liberal and conservative variants, is not much more coherent than *Avengers:
Endgame*. In the real world, so attached is the public to a political
mythology that preserves its national and cultural identity, that it
ignores gaping plot holes and logical incoherencies. Venezuela’s economic
crisis can be blamed on “economic mismanagement” even after years of
crushing sanctions. Pariah states like Iran and Cuba can be excoriated for
their human rights violations even as allies like Saudi Arabia and
Guatemala commit worse ones. Neoliberal austerity is prescribed for
financial crises caused, self-evidently, by past austerity policies. The
political class complains loudly of Russian interference in elections,
while the United States has egregiously interfered in elections for the
last seventy years, and mounted coups and invasions when the interference
doesn’t work. And the very same politicians and journalists who used
obviously fraudulent claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a
pretext for war now offer equally flimsy claims about Assad’s poison gas
attacks and Iranian plots to attack US forces and Russia’s plans to disable
the US power grid, claims which reverberate through the mainstream media as
if the Iraqi WMD fiasco and all the other frauds had never happened.

Conditioned by films like *Avengers*, the public accepts without much
question thin and incoherent plotlines like the Mad Dictator, America the
Exceptional Nation, and the Bloodthirsty Other. Political leaders can ply
their base with infantile stories demonizing the other side, as if the
other side comprised comic book characters with debased, cartoonish
emotions and motivations. I am afraid that it is not only the xenophobic,
bigoted sectors of the political right that deploy this tactic. Limited to
the vocabulary of fighting, campaigns, and struggles, activists and
dissidents on the Left often mirror the system they hope to change.
Disagreeing on the identity of the bad guy, they agree on the fundamental
good-versus-evil paradigm. Evil takes the form of “corporate greed,” “white
supremacy,” and so on, embodied in caricatures of real human beings like
the “racist cop,” the “entitled frat boy,” or the demented “climate
denier.” Here are the people to hate! My point here is not to argue that
racism or misogyny are just so much storytelling. It is to warn of the trap
of a simple but false narrative that locates blame for these evils on Evil,
that reduces human beings to cartoons, and offers false solutions (defeat
the bad guy) accordingly.

The Avengers films are, of course, live-action renditions of what was
originally a comic book; it is to be expected that the emotions,
relationships, and psychology of the characters remain cartoonish. That
reviewers saw fit to describe the film’s trite emotionality with words like
“pathos,” “somber,” “intimate,” and “devastating” bespeaks either very low
expectations, or, worse, a coarsening of emotional perception.

Instead of bringing comic book characters to life, it was as if the
screenwriters were flattening the characters into cartoons. (Again, it is
unfair to pick on *Avengers* – nearly all action movies do the same.) This
conditions the public to accept the dehumanized versions of world actors
that are necessary to maintain dominant political narratives. Thus
stupefied, the public passively acquiesces to the cartoon version of world
affairs presented for its consumption, content never to search for a more
coherent story that would account for the choices and conditions of real,
full human beings, embedded in complex historical, social, and economic
conditions. So used are we to senselessness, that we (the collective
public) seldom pause to say, “Wait, that doesn’t make sense. Let’s get to
the bottom of this. Who stands to gain here? How are these decisions made?
Where is this information coming from? What assumptions are taken for
granted?”

Blithe acceptance of superficial narratives forestalls deeper investigation
into causes. For example, blaming terrorism on diabolical fanatics who
“hate our freedoms” or on the vague shibboleth of “radical Islam” bypasses
any discussion of decades of neoliberal extraction, covert support for
dictators, subversion of democracy, and military violence, all of which
create conditions for desperation and hate. Even that list is dangerously
reductive, simplifying a long, complicated history to four bullet points,
but it is a start.

One cannot really blame the public for their ready acceptance of the
spurious, contrived narratives of politics and entertainment. It is hard to
engage in critical thinking when we are barraged by one luridly urgent
crisis after another. In both film and reality, the hyperbolic shrillness
of the action distracts us from the incoherency of the plot. There is no
time to think – the crisis is now! It is urgent! Time is running out! It’s
a matter of life and death! Failure in this moment brings dire consequences!

In such circumstances, normal rules of civil order do not apply. We must
allow those with power to use that power to intervene, urgently, and do
whatever it takes to save the day.

It is not that urgent crises are illusory. Right now, there are people on
the verge of starvation, execution, expulsion, torture, dispossession of
land, unjust detention, ebola, death squads, floods, fires, etc. who will
suffer or perish without quick intervention. But these events are like the
pinnacles of a vast, structured iceberg. Looking only above the surface,
they look random, disconnected. Only by directing our attention beneath the
surface of mainstream media consciousness can we see the structural causes
of these horrors.

Films like Avengers condition us to be satisfied with incoherency. Unlike
in the film, though, in the real world, underneath the cacophony of the
news, which has shattered reality into disconnected fragments, there is a
deeper story. A couple levels down, there is a story of dollar hegemony,
the ideology of development, and the role of corporations and finance in
serving the compulsion of economy to grow in a debt-based system. That
story brings some order to the chaotic appearance of world affairs; it also
gives birth to new questions, new why’s, which in turn open a portal to a
deeper story still.: Separation, humanity separate from nature, individuals
separate from the world, an objective reality outside ourselves to dominate
and control. To perceive that story, we must become intolerant of the
senselessness born from it.

*Society of the Spectacle*

An odd thing has happened with the development to near-perfection of CGI
(computer generated image) technology: as the verisimilitude of the images
increases, so does the unreality of the story the images tell. This might
exemplify a more general principle: the more control one has over the
representation of reality, the farther from reality one strays.

The Marxist philosopher Guy Debord described something quite similar in his
1967 classic
<https://default.salsalabs.org/T521e9efb-724c-48bb-94ab-e1f3a849cdf2/c02a8189-8f6d-41ef-94fe-7ef8c2c49d3d>,
*The Society of the Spectacle*. He wrote:

When ideology, having become absolute through the possession of absolute
power, changes from partial knowledge into totalitarian falsehood, the
thought of history is so perfectly annihilated that history itself, even at
the level of the most empirical knowledge, can no longer exist. The
totalitarian bureaucratic society lives in a perpetual present where
everything that happened exists for it only as a place accessible to its
police. The project already formulated by Napoleon of “the ruler directing
the energy of memory” has found its total concretization in a permanent
manipulation of the past, not only of meanings but of facts as well. But
the price paid for this emancipation from all historical reality is the
loss of the rational reference which is indispensable to the historical
society, capitalism. It is known how much the scientific application of
insane ideology has cost the Russian economy, if only through the imposture
of Lysenko. The contradiction of the totalitarian bureaucracy administering
an industrialized society, caught between its need for rationality and its
rejection of the rational, is one of its main deficiencies with regard to
normal capitalist development. Just as the bureaucracy cannot resolve the
question of agriculture the way capitalism had done, it is ultimately
inferior to capitalism in industrial production, planned from the top and
based on unreality and generalized falsehood.

The 3D animation of CGI technology exacerbates this tendency by suggesting
that reality can be whatever we declare it to be. It exemplifies the
divergence between what we portray, and what actually is, a key
characteristic of Debord’s spectacle. We live, he said, in a spectacle, a
show, performing the roles of consumer and producer, occupying a job
description, alienated from the totality of the production process of
commodities (which themselves are real things rendered into economic
things, defined in terms of human convention, stripped of uniqueness and
relatedness, abstracted from the matrix of being; i.e. part of the show).
As commodity production takes over the world, we plunge into a world of
representations, a spectacle masquerading as the real and, through our
immersion in it, becoming the real. The digital world, increasingly
realistic thanks to CGI and VR, is just one of its manifestations.

By a “totalitarian bureaucratic society,” Debord was referring primarily to
the Soviet Union. Fifty-two years later, it is hard not to notice how our
own society has gelled into the same mold, as it assumes more and more the
character of a totalitarian state, particularly in its use of surveillance
and its control of narratives. Who would not give a start of recognition at
the phrase, “...the permanent manipulation of the past, not only of meaning
but of facts as well.” The past means, “That which has happened. That which
is already real.” We live at a time when the authorities seem simply to
declare reality into existence. When, some years or decades thereafter,
their declarations are revealed as arrant lies, no one much notices, at
least not enough to stop them from doing it again.

Today’s cinematic CGI is also very much a declaration of something into
reality. To the eye, it looks real. There it is happening before us. Yet as
I said already, despite (or perhaps because of) its verisimilitude, the
story the images tell is increasingly ridiculous. Much the same could be
said for the political stories fed to the public, which grow increasingly
unmoored from both common sense and lived experience.

The same digital technology that allows the cinematic declaration of
something into seeming reality also allows the altering of existing
records: text, audio, and video. We cannot necessarily return to a website
to verify that so-and-so actually said what we remember. Orwell imagined a
cumbersome process by which past newspaper articles were modified or
replaced, and the newspapers reprinted for the archives, to keep them
current with the official narrative of the day. Now that is possible with a
few keystrokes. Articles and video footage can be excised from the record,
or modified to fit the current “reality.” I am told that many of the
original TV broadcasts in the hours and days after the 9/11 attacks
substantially contradict the official narrative, but have been expunged
from the Internet. More commonly, heterodox “meanings and facts” are
squeezed to the margins of Internet reality through manipulation of search
engine algorithms to give greater weight to “reputable” sources. Thus it is
that in the last year, anti-war websites, anti-vaccine websites, anti-GMO
websites, and sites discussing unconventional cancer cures have become
harder to find on Google and Facebook.

It would be unfair to pick on *Avengers: Endgame* for its reliance on CGI
to create its pretend reality. It is far from the most extreme example in
film. I mention it here because it complements the rest of the film’s
unrealism: the contrived and flimsy plot, the cartoonish characters, the
simplistic good-versus-evil storyline. It is as if by making the images
loud and lurid enough, the filmmakers could force the viewers to accept the
story, aid their suspension of disbelief, overcome their resistance to poor
screenwriting. That is why CGI is an enabler of lazy and arrogant
filmmaking. Instead of acting or plot drawing us into an alternate reality,
the filmmaker can rely on mere image.

The corollary powers of image manipulation in the political sphere are used
in the same way, to overcome the inconsistencies and absurdity of official
narration of reality. At the gross level, there are faked photographs and
staged videos used to support questionable storylines. These are in
addition to the more subtle “camera tricks” of the pre-digital era: for
example, featuring a tiny violent minority of an otherwise non-violent
gathering of protestors. As technology progresses, it is becoming possible
to fabricate fake “recordings” out of whole cloth. “Deep fake” videos can
depict a public figure, or anyone actually, speaking words that he never
said. As on the movie screen, we can no longer judge what is credible and
what is not by the realism of the images that present it.

*Return to Reality*

*Avengers* may seem to offer a gloomy diagnosis of American political
consciousness, but the extremity of its aesthetic shortcomings also
suggests the end of an era. I think again of the bored children who shared
the theater with us. Despite the lurid CGI special effects, despite the
awesomest badass monsters, despite the jaring, attention-grabbing sound
effects (we wore ear protection), despite the hyperinflated threat level
(the fate of the universe is at stake), and despite scene after scene of
superheroic exertion, we the audience did not much care what was happening.

Just as monetary hyperinflation precedes economic collapse, so does the
hyperinflation of sounds, images, and threat levels portend a crisis in
blockbuster cinema. Its tools, however intensified, are not working
anymore. The campy asides in Avengers are an admission by the filmmakers of
their incapacity to create an absorbing dramatic reality. The characters’
quips and jests amid dire circumstances signal, “We don’t actually believe
this is happening.” We the audience don’t believe it either, so we join
them in their remove, holding a cynical distance from the scenes.

Perhaps there are people out there who were emotionally devastated by the
death of Ironman or touched and inspired by Black Widow’s noble sacrifice.
I hypothesize, though, that most people observe the cues of what they are
supposed to feel, and narrate themselves as having felt it, without really
feeling it. There just isn’t a compelling story or characters within which
we can lose ourselves.

On the political scene a parallel situation prevails: watching the talking
heads on TV, one gets the impression that they too do not actually feel
what they narrate themselves as feeling. So immersed are they in world of
spin, PR, optics, and “messaging” – in another word, lying – that they have
lost their mooring to any underlying real convictions. It is all a game
now, the game of power. They are not actually afraid of Russia (not like we
were of the Soviet Union in my youth). They are not really outraged about
the suffering of the Venezuelan people. And they are most certainly not
actually indignant when they pillory one of their number for some ethical
transgression.

The indifference of the children (and even the actors and screenwriters) to
the characters and events of *Avengers: Endgame* stirred within me an
irrational hope. Perhaps the American public too is growing inured to the
spectacle we are offered. Perhaps it too has become so conditioned to image
masquerading as reality, that it automatically discounts all images as
unreal. Maybe the gaping plot holes in today’s dominant political
storylines are endowing us with a prophylactic resistance to all such
storylines. Maybe years of threat inflation has deafened us to those who
are crying wolf. Perhaps the fundamental trope of good versus evil that
drives war narratives is losing its grip, even as its narrators expand it,
as in *Avengers*, to cosmic, apocalyptic proportions.

Recently we have seen several failures of the manufacture of consent: to a
ground war in Syria, armed intervention in Venezuela, and the bombing of
Iran. It isn’t that the general public overtly disbelieves the narratives
or could cogently rebut them. It is simply that they no longer pay much
attention. The stories have lost their hypnotic effect. In tandem with
rising distrust in mainstream media, the authorities’ declarations of
reality are losing traction. Whatever techniques of VR (virtual reality)
and AR (augmented reality) they apply – in fact, all the more as we see the
capabilities of these technologies – we come to doubt reality as it has
been presented us. In days gone by we accepted the photograph and the video
recording as proof of what was real, oblivious to how their selection and
framing could powerfully manipulate the viewer. One would think that
photoshop and deep fake videos would magnify this manipulative power, but
it is perhaps becoming the opposite as we learn to distrust these key
instruments of the spectacle.

The public’s distrust of official portraits of reality will spread even as
the means to produce them become more powerful. Until recently, most people
trusted the portrait of reality called Google search results, assuming it
to be an unbiased catalog of what was actually on the Web. Then, as Google
and the major social media platforms suppressed first hate speech sites,
and then conspiracy sites, and now more and more sites that diverge from
official narratives (the aforementioned anti-war, anti-vaccine, and
holistic health sites, to name a few), people are starting to distrust the
dominant Internet players; hence the move by the technological avant garde
toward alternative search engines like duckduckgo and, more fundamentally,
toward decentralized and distributed internet architecture. This is not to
say that internet censorship and narrative management is not working. It
still is, to a degree, although the recent failures to manufacture consent
for war are significant. Rather, as people recognize that it is happening,
it works less well even as the techniques advance, in the same way as CGI
images, despite their verisimilitude, make the overall film, the show, the
spectacle, less believable.

As we lose faith in the show, where are we to turn for truth? Without a
commonly agreed source of truth, society breaks up into mutual exclusive
realities: red and blue, left and right, pro and anti, each with their own
disjoint “meanings and facts.” It is as if each lives in its own universe,
its own spectacle that apes the dominant one in its methods and mindsets
even if it rejects some of its meanings and facts. Whichever side prevails,
it too wanders into delusion, unmoored from the reality that it ultimately
must draw from to exist. So it is that the spectacle is killing the planet:
when the abstraction called money or GDP becomes more real to us than the
earth, water, and life from which it springs, our pretense that we can
actually declare reality into existence dissolves into humiliation. So it
is, inevitably, with every castle of lies.

In the context of theater or fiction, the audience must collude with the
storyteller in order to uphold the story. The same is true with the
Spectacle put on by the dominant powers of civilization today: the public
has an interest in suspending its disbelief. In particular, the affluent
classes in affluent societies do not want to know what their affluence is
built upon. They have a vested interest in a narrative that obscures the
real workings of the world: the exploitation and ruin of people, places,
cultures, and ecosystems, even the planet itself. The world we live in
today is tolerable only because so much of it is hidden from view. In the
political realm as in the personal, the dupe gains temporary benefit from
the liar’s lies. The parent unconsciously agrees to believe that the
teenager is indeed studying with her friends. Liar and dupe collude in
maintaining the lie.

Do we really want to know the truth?

It is understandable why many people would not. Newly revealed truth is
certain to bring discomfort, the shattering of familiar certainties, and
the disruption of existing social arrangements. Fearing all that, the
public and the elites join in a vast game of let’s pretend. The elites tell
the lies, the public pretends to believe them, and everyone pretends the
pretense isn’t happening. That is how we get lost in the spectacle.

To transcend this matrix of image, representation, hype, spin, and
narrative, we have to want the truth more than we want to maintain a
comfortable, familiar story-of-the-world. That story is already becoming
less comfortable, both because of social and ecological breakdown and
because of an evolution of consciousness from separation, competition, and
scarcity toward cooperation, compassion, and empathy. Yet still, fear of
the unknown keeps us there, as a society and, more than many of us would
like to admit, as individuals.

*Avengers: Endgame* clings to familiar storylines, resisting that step into
the borderlands of a new story. I imagined an entirely different endgame.
The Avengers find Thanos on his retirement planet and find him in his
vegetable garden. Thoughts of vengeance flee them as they realize both its
futility and, more important, that Thanos the cosmic criminal is undergoing
a change of heart. The Avengers decide to nourish that change of heart by
showing Thanos that his plan to improve the universe through total
dominating power has produced the opposite result. And it dawns then on the
Avengers themselves that maybe they are not so different from Thanos,
sharing with him what Walter Wink called the “myth of redemptive violence”
– the improving of the world through force. Their violent superpowers
rendered useless with the retirement of their arch-nemesis, they put them
aside so that they may discover other kinds of gifts.

Wouldn’t that be a better formula for our future?

To move into that new story, we would have to cease our collusion with the
old one. We have to release the grip of nostalgia for an imaginary time
when superior force could solve our problems by destroying our enemies. We
have to be dissatisfied with the contrived, cartoonish plotlines and
dehumanized actors of the political narrative we are offered. We have to
doubt the spectacle presented to us as reality, and understand that faked
photographs and staged events are just the most overt level of a grand
deception and self-deception that encompasses not only politics, but
psychology too. Most of the political observations in this essay could
equally apply to me and maybe to you. Do you have a personal narrative in
which you are the good guy? Do you weave flimsy storylines (called
rationalizations and justifications) that maintain a certain meaning to
your life? Do you project images onto other people and the world that are
every bit as fake as movie CGI?

This is not to suggest that we put an end to the human drama. We are
story-making animals. Stories and symbols, that say who we are and what is
real, are a fundamental way that human beings create the world together.
Today though, we are stuck collectively in a story that does not serve us
and does not serve life. For many this is true on the personal level too.
At such times as today, we are repelled by inauthenticity, posturing, and
pretense, and we want to come back to the real.

*__*

*Charles Eisenstein* *is a speaker and writer. His most recent books
are *Sacred
Economics* and *The More Beautiful World our Hearts Know is Possible.

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