Strong Female Lead

For this blog post, let me offer short and long versions of the assertion and argument, of which one of Caitlin Johnstone’s many aphorisms is the short one:

Short version: Modern mainstream feminism is just one big celebration of the idea that women can murder, predate, oppress, and exploit for power and profit just as well as any man.

Long version: Depicting strength in terms of quintessential masculine characteristics is ruining (fictional) storytelling. (Offenders in contemporary cinema and streaming will go unnamed, but examples abound now that the strong-female-lead meme has overwhelmed characters, plots, and stories. Gawd, I tire of it.) One could survey the past few decades to identify ostensibly strong women basically behaving like asshole men just to — what? — show that it can be done? Is this somehow better than misogynist depictions of characters using feminine wiles (euphemism alert) to get what they want? These options coexist today, plus some mixture of the two. However, the main reason the strong female lead fails as storytelling — punching, fighting, and shooting toe-to-toe with men — is that it bears little resemblance to reality.

In sports (combat sports especially), men and women are simply not equally equipped for reasons physiological, not ideological. Running, jumping, throwing, swinging, and punching in any sport where speed and power are principal attributes favors male physiology. Exceptions under extraordinary conditions (i.e., ultradistance running) only demonstrate the rule. Sure, a well-trained and -conditioned female in her prime can beat and/or defeat an untrained and poorly conditioned male. If one of those MMA females came after me, I’d be toast because I’m entirely untrained and I’m well beyond the age of a cage fighter. But that’s not what’s usually depicted onscreen. Instead, it’s one badass going up against another badass, trading blows until a victor emerges. If the female is understood as the righteous one, she is typically shown victorious despite the egregious mismatch.

Nonadherence to reality can be entertaining, I suppose, which might explain why the past two decades have delivered so many overpowered superheroes and strong female leads, both of which are quickly becoming jokes and producing backlash. Do others share my concern that, as fiction bleeds into reality, credulous women might be influenced by what they see onscreen to engage recklessly in fights with men (or for that matter, other women)? Undoubtedly, a gallant or chivalrous man would take a few shots before fighting back, but if not felled quickly, my expectation is that the fight is far more likely to go very badly for the female. Moreover, what sort of message does it communicate to have females engaging in violence and inflicting their will on others, whether in the service of justice or otherwise? That’s the patriarchy in a nutshell. Rebranding matriarchal social norms in terms of negative male characteristics, even for entertainment purposes, serves no one particularly well. I wonder if hindsight will prompt the questions “what on Earth were we thinking?” Considering how human culture is stuck in permanent adolescence, I rather doubt it.

Impulse Control

I’ve quoted Caitlin Johnstone numerous times, usually her clever aphorisms. Her takes on geopolitics also ring fundamentally true to me, but then, I find it simple and obvious to be against empire, needless war, and wanton destruction just as she is. That’s not the position of most warmongers important decision makers driving cultural and political narratives, who are reflexively imperial, excited by war, self-aggrandizing, and reckless in their pursuits no matter who suffers (it’s rarely them). Anyway, I had not checked her blog for a while, which for me is too much like staring at the sun. Indeed, that same reason is why I stopped reading TomDispatch and have mostly backed away from Bracing Views. Geopolitics is just too ugly, too incoherent, too raving insane to be believed. However, these paragraphs (from here) caught my attention:

Humanity’s major problems arise from the impulse to control. Ecocide arises from the impulse to control nature. Empire arises from the impulse to control civilizations. Oligarchy arises from the impulse to control political outcomes. Ego arises from the impulse to control life.

A healthy humanity would be free of the impulse to manipulate and exert control: over life, over people, over nature. But it would be so different from the humanity we know now that falling into that way of functioning would be a kind of death. And it would feel like a death.

Sometimes it seems like people want the world to end, want humanity to go extinct. I’d suggest that this may be a confused expression of an intuited truth: that there’s something good on the other side of ending all this. But it’s the end of our dysfunction, not of our species.

I initially misread the first sentence as “Humanity’s major problems arise from lack of impulse control.” Self-restraint (also self-abnegation?) is the quality I find most lacking in everyone, especially our species-level consumption, whether for nourishment, enrichment, or meaningless status. Writ large, we just can’t seem to stop our gluttony, or put another way, suffer the inability to recognize when enough is enough. Johnstone’s remarks that giving up control feels like death echo others who have described the leaders of industrial civilization, politicians and corporate CEOs alike, as members of a global death cult driving everyone ineluctably toward early extinction. While safety, security, and profit are ostensible near-term goals, mechanisms developed to achieve those goals involve no small amount of death dealing. And because civilizational dynamics (observed many times over by those who study such things) demonstrate ebb and flow over time (centuries and millennia) — e.g., the inevitable collapse of industrial civilization and knowing destruction of the planet (specifically, the biosphere habitable by humans and other species) — the willingness to pursue and perpetuate a destructive way of life is maniacal and insane. Whereas Johnstone believes giving up (illusory) control passes as eventual release from earthly torments or at least an opportunity to create something smarter, wiser, and perhaps more restrained than the outright energy binge we’ve been on for the past two centuries, my expectation is that self-annihilation will be total and complete. No one gets out alive; there is nothing beyond.

Peace on Earth (for a day)

In the spirit of today’s holiday, let me wish everyone on Earth a bit of peace, albeit temporary. Take a brief respite from the ongoing storm of bad news and propaganda. I know that I throw out that word, propaganda, with too much frequency these days, but it’s nearly always the appropriate term. Leading up to the holiday, folks have been told not to enjoy ourselves, not to celebrate (what to celebrate in this sacred-secular amalgam is highly selective and individual), and to fear and avoid family gatherings because, well, pestilence will invade every hearth and kill all inhabitants. It’s quite ridiculous on even a moment’s consideration. Yet that’s the message of the leading emissaries of official wisdom, many of whom seem to believe they are commandants exercising unlimited power over cities, states, and nations as though running prison camps. They’re spreading Christmas fear rather than Christmas cheer. Near as I can tell, most people are saying, sensibly, “bah, humbug” to cowering alone at home.

Also offering here one of Caitlin Johnstone’s many aphorisms, which I often find darkly funny:

Coming up next on CBS News, the uplifting story of a little girl who is constantly being kicked in the head by government officials and the small town that raised money to buy her a helmet.

Tab Dump 04

I simply can’t keep up with all the reading, viewing, and listening in my queue. Waking hours are too few, and concentration dissipates long before sleep overtakes. Accordingly, it’s much easier to settle into couch-potato mode and watch some mindless drivel, such as the Netflix hit Bridgerton binged in two sittings. (Unlike cinema critics, I’m not bothered especially by continuity errors, plot holes, clunky dialogue, weak character motivation, gaps of logic, or glossy decadence of the fictional worlds. I am bothered by the Kafka trap sprung on anyone who notices casting decisions that defy time and place — an ill-advised but now commonplace historical revisionism like editing Mark Twain.) As a result, blog posts are less frequent than they might perhaps be as I pronounce upon American (or more broadly, Western) culture, trying vainly to absorb it as a continuously moving target. Calls to mind the phrase Après moi, le déluge, except that there is no need to wait. A deluge of entertainment, news, analysis, punditry, and trolling has buried everyone already. So rather than the more careful consideration I prefer to post, here are some hot takes.

The Irregular Aphorist. Caitlin Johnstone offers many trenchant observations in the form of aphorisms (some of which I’ve quoted before), all gathered under the subtitle Notes From The Edge Of The Narrative Matrix. The modifier irregular only means that aphorisms are a regular but not constant feature. Her site doesn’t have a tag to that effect but probably ought to. Here’s one in particular that caught my attention:

Everything our species has tried has led us to a dying world and a society that is stark raving mad, so nobody is in any position to tell you that you are wrong.

Twin truths here are (1) the dying world and (2) societal madness, both of which I’ve been describing for some time. Glad when others recognize them, too.

Piling on. Though few still are willing to admit it, nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs, e.g., distancing, masks, and lockdowns) to stall or reduce the spread of the virus failed to achieve their objectives according to this study. Instead, NPIs piled on suffering no one could forestall. I read somewhere (no link) that the world is approaching half of total, cumulative deaths/infections predicted had nothing been done to impede the pandemic running its course. Adding in deaths of despair (numbers not entirely up to date), we’re using the wrong tools to fight the wrong battle. Of course, interventions opened up giant opportunities for power grabs and vulture capitalism, so the cynic in me shrugs and wonders half aloud “what did you expect, really?”

Growth of the Managerial Bureaucracy. A blog called Easily Distracted by Timothy Burke (never on my blogroll) publishes only a few times per year, but his analysis is terrific — at least when it doesn’t wind up being overlong and inconclusive. Since a student debt jubilee is back in the news (plenty of arguments pro and con), unintended consequences are anticipated in this quote:

When you set out to create elaborate tiers that segregate the deserving poor from the comfortable middle-class and the truly wealthy, you create a system that requires a massive bureaucracy to administer and a process that forces people into petitionary humiliation in order to verify their eligibility. You create byzantine cutoff points that become business opportunities for predatory rentiers.

Something similar may well be occurring with stimulus checks being issued pro rata (has anyone actually gotten one?), but at least we’re spared any petitionary humiliations. We get whatever the algorithms (byzantine cutoff points) dictate. How those funds will be gamed and attached is not yet clear. Stay alert.

No Defense of Free Speech. Alan Jacobs often recommends deleting, unsubscribing, and/or ignoring social media accounts (after his own long love-hate relationship with them) considering how they have become wholly toxic to a balanced psyche as well as principal enablers of surveillance capitalism and narrative control. However, in an article about the manorial elite, he’s completely lost the plot that absolutism is required in defense of free speech. It’s not sufficient to be blasé or even relieved when 45 is kicked off Twitter permanently or when multiple parties conspire to kill Parler. Establishing your own turf beyond the reach of Silicon Valley censors is a nice idea but frankly impractical. Isn’t that what whoever ran Parler (or posted there) must have thought? And besides, fencing off the digital commons these very entities created has catapulted them into the unenviable position of undemocratic, unelected wielders of monopolistic power and co-conspirators to boot. That’s what needs to be curtailed, not free speech.

The Taxonomic Apocalypse. Although drawn from fiction and thus largely hypothetical, a new book (coming late 2021) by Adam Roberts called It’s the End of the World: But What Are We Really Afraid Of? surveys doomsday stories and categorizes different versions of how it all ends. Alan Jacobs (yeah, him again — must have an advance copy of the manuscript) recommends it as “a delightful and provocative little book” but fails to grok two things: (1) these stories are rehearsals-cum-preparations for the real thing, and (2) the real thing really is bearing down on us implacably and so is no longer a mere hypothetical to contemplate and categorize for shits and grins. Despite acceptance of the eventualities that await all of us, reading Roberts’ taxonomy is not something I would expect to find delightful. Skip.

Narrative Collapse. Ran Prier (no link) sometimes makes statements revealing an unexpected god’s-eye view:

[45] is a mean rich kid who figured out that if he does a good Archie Bunker impression, every lost soul with an authoritarian father will think he’s the messiah. We’re lucky that he cares only about himself, instead of having some crazy utopian agenda. But the power, and the agency, is with the disaffected citizens of a declining empire, tasting barbarism.

This is all about people wanting to be part of a group that’s part of a story. Lately, some of the big group-stories have been dying: sky father religion, American supremacy, the conquest of nature, the virtue of wealth-seeking. In their place, young and clumsy group-stories struggle and rise.

Collapse of certain fundamental stories that animate our thinking is at the core of The Spiral Staircase (see About Brutus at top), though it’s often couched in terms of consciousness in transition. Getting through the transition (only temporarily, see previous item in list) probably means completion of the Counter-Enlightenment historical arc, which necessarily includes further descent into barbarism.

Hail Mary for Individualism. I always take special notice when someone cites Allan Bloom. Alan Jacobs (um, yeah, he’s prolific and I’m using his ideas again — sue me) cites Bloom to argue that individualism or the sovereign self, a product of the Enlightenment, is already dead. No doubt, the thought-world described so ably by Bloom no longer exists, but individualism has not yet died out by attrition or been fully dissolved in nonduality. Many of us born before the advent of the Internet retain selfhood and authenticity not yet coopted by or incorporated into mass mind. Moreover, ongoing struggles over identity (e.g., gender, sexual orientation, and race that are often used improperly to define the self) result from an inchoate sense that individualism is eroding precipitously, not that it’s already passé. Defiant attempts to (re)establish an authentic self (contravening all logic and becoming critical theory of one sort or another) in the face of this loss may well be a last-ditch effort to save the self, but it’s failing.

Deploying Stupidity

Supporting the Vietnam war was dumb. Supporting the Iraq invasion after being lied
to about Vietnam was an order of magnitude dumber. Supporting any US war agendas
after being lied to about Iraq is an order of magnitude even dumber than that.
—Caitlin Johnstone

Upon rereading, and with the advantage of modest hindsight, I think I got it exactly correct in this 5-year-old blog post. Even the two brief comments are correct. More specifically, the United States is understood to be the sole remaining military superpower following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Never mind that numerous countries count themselves members of the nuclear club (cue Groucho Marx joke) and thus possess sufficient power to destroy the world. Never mind that the U.S. failed to win the Korean War or the Vietnam War (the two major U.S. military involvements post-WWII), or in fact any of numerous 21st-century wars (undeclared, de facto, continuing). Never mind that the U.S. has been successful at multiple smaller regime-change actions, often on the back of a civil war instigated by the U.S. and purposefully designed to install a puppet leader. And never mind that the capitalist competition for control of economic resources and capture of perpetual growth is being won handily by China. Nope, the U.S. is no longer the only superpower but is instead busy transitioning from superpower (military and economic) to failed state. Or in the language of that old blog post, the U.S. is now a geopolitical Strong/Stupid hybrid but is actively deploying stupidity in a feverish play to be merely Stupid. The weirdest aspect, perhaps, is that it’s being done right in front of god and everybody, yet few bother to take notice.

It’s no stretch to assert that in the U.S. in particular (but also true of nearly every regime across the world), we’re piling stupidity upon stupidity. If I were inclined to go full conspiracy like some QAnon fool, I’d have to say that the power elite have adopted a deep, 3D-chess strategy that means one of two possible things using the Rock-Paper-Scissors power dynamic algorithm (which, unlike tic-tac-toe, produces a winner) modified and inverted to Strong-Stupid-Smart: it’s either (1) very Smart of them to appear so Stupid, granting victory (against all appearances) over Strong (but only Strong in a three-legged contest), or (2) they reject the algorithm entirely in the misguided belief that nuthin’ beats stoopid. That second option would indeed be entirely consistent with Stupid.

Take for instance three looming issues: the pandemic (and its follow-on effects), the U.S. presidential election (ugh, sorry, it’s unavoidable), and climate change. They loom threateningly despite being well underway already. But with each, we’ve acted and behaved very stupidly, stunningly so I would argue, boxing ourselves in and doing worse damage over time than if we had taken proper steps early on. But as suggested in a previous blog post, the truth is that decision-makers haven’t really even tried to address these issues with the purpose of solving, resolving, winning, remedying, or ameliorating entirely predictable outcomes. Rather, issues are being either swept under the rug (ignored with the futile hope that they will go away or resolve themselves on their own) or displaced in time for someone else to handle. This second option occurs quite a lot, which is also known as kicking the can down the road or stealing from the future (as with sovereign debt). What happens when there’s no more future (for humans and their institutions, anyway) because it’s been squandered in the present? You already know the answer(s) to that question.

Running a Failed State

Our society fixates on Nazi Germany with such masturbatory fascination because it allows
us to pretend that horrific mass-scale evil is just something that was inflicted in the past, by someone
else, in another part of the world, and not right here and now by our own government.
—Caitlin Johnstone

Johnstone continues to impress with her ability to concentrate a variety of ideological traits and behaviors into a succinct aphorism, though the one above isn’t especially short. Nazis are the canonical example of fixation, of course, but perusal of recent history indicates any number of others standing in today for yesteryear’s Nazis, e.g., Soviets/Russians, Islamofascists, and Chinese. U.S. thought leaders are sloppy that way. Fixation on others functions as an acute distancing (from ourselves) and distraction mechanism to avoid any discomfiting self-examination we might undertake, as well as to provide scapegoats for negative identity that drives American psychosis. We’re not alone in that regard.

National identity is not the primary subject of this blog post, however. It’s how the United States (in particular, but the rest of the world in the wake of its example) has become a shit show of mismanagement and dysfunction, or put another way, how the U.S. has become a failed state. Quite an accomplishment considering that, for at least a little while longer, the U.S. is the world’s hegemon.

Have a look at this list of the federal executive departments and their chiefs:

• Dept. of State — Secretary Mike Pompeo
• Dept. of Treasury — Secretary Steven Mnuchin
• Dept. of Defense — Secretary Dr. Mark T. Esper
• Dept. of Justice — Attorney General William P. Barr
• Dept. of Interior — Secretary David Bernhardt
• Dept. of Agriculture (USDA) — Secretary Sonny Perdue III
• Dept. of Commerce — Secretary Wilbur L. Ross, Jr.
• Dept. of Labor — Secretary Eugene Scalia
• Dept. of Health and Human Services (HHS) — Secretary Alex Azar
• Dept. of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) — Secretary Ben Carson
• Dept. of Transportation (DOT) — Secretary Elaine Chao
• Dept. of Energy (DOE) — Secretary Rick Perry
• Dept. of Education — Secretary Betsy DeVos
• Dept. of Veterans Affairs (VA) — Secretary Robert Wilkie
• Dept. of Homeland Security — Acting Secretary Chad Wolf

Budgets for these departments range from just under $10 billion to nearly $1.3 trillion, covering most of areas of American life outside of entertainment (including the arts, sports, games, and what some argue is the preeminent art form during lockdown, streaming TV). Of those chiefs above, the most infamous ones are known because they’re embroiled in ongoing controversy or were appointed to dismantle the department itself — a cynical Republican strategy to ruin, not run, various government activities. A blurb behind each one demonstrating its most abject failure would be relatively easy to compile, but I demur. Instead, here’s a cogent example: James Howard Kunstler’s assessment of the death of education. Another example is a YouTube video called “Seattle is Dying,” a local news documentary from March 2019 (well before the pandemic) about how homelessness is ruining Seattle. People literally living and dying in the streets had been in mind when this was published a couple days ago:

Clearly, the situation in Seattle (and indeed, every American city) is poised to get very much worse. The U.S. is a failed state, yet our elected government is driving it further into the ground. As bad as everything is now, amidst a global pandemic, unemployment and homelessness spiking unprecedentedly, debt being piled onto taxpayers to keep asset prices high (read: to keep the wealthy whole), and what Caitlin Johnstone calls a slo-mo war against those few countries not yet absorbed into the U.S. empire’s power nexus, there is still that other looming catastrophe going largely ignored: climate change. Xray Mike came back to life at his blog (where I used to post as well) to remind that things around the world are still every bit as awful (and worsening) as one could imagine:

As governments stared glass-eyed at what was unfolding in China earlier this year, the fragility of modern life’s interconnectedness was soon to be laid bare by a microscopic organism. Within a couple months of the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, airline travel from China had spread the novel virus to more than 60 countries. Despite decades of warnings about the inevitability of such an event, politicians had paid about as much lip service to preventing the next pandemic as they had to dealing with climate change. As has been warned by health experts, the best we can hope for is to blunt the effects of the COVID-19 disease on the global population; eradicating it will be futile. Something similar could be said of the legacy effects of our CO2 emissions which will haunt life on Earth for time immemorial. [underlying links removed]

We are not just a failed state but a failed civilization. But hey, vote for one of the two stooges offered by the failed two-party system in the sham presidential election in two months. How could it possibly get any worse?

All Cats are Girls, All Dogs are Boys (redux)

Years ago, I broke with my usual themes and styles to offer a listicle, mostly inanities and hyper-irony, which began as follows:

• All cats are girls, all dogs are boys. Everyone knows this from childhood. Additional discussion is moot.

I’m not a good writer of aphorisms, so I haven’t returned to that brief experiment until now. For inspiration, I’m quoting numerous examples by Caitlin Johnstone, who is a frequent and fantastic writer of aphorisms under the repeated subtitle “Notes from the Edge of the Narrative Matrix.” The long-running theme we share is that we are all being programmed and propagandized continuously through the shaping of narrative by folks with obvious agendas. Johnstone believes we are collectively waking up — as if from a nightmare — to the dark realization that our minds have been colonized (my term) and that a worldwide transformation of consciousness is currently taking place. I don’t quite see it yet, but I’m sympathetic to the possibility that, as in the famous rant from the 1976 movie Network, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”

• The essential character relationship of the 1% to the rest of us is predator/prey or strong/weak. Strong predators behave precisely as one would expect.
• Trying to restore peace using the same violent police force whose violence disrupted the peace in the first place is a bit like trying to put out a fire using lighter fluid. The same lighter fluid that was used to start it. (Johnstone)
• Rioting and looting are not constructive responses to society’s ills, but then, neither have various nonviolent forms of protest and dissent been effective at petitioning government for redress of grievance. Packing up and going home merely cedes the field of play to bad actors already stuffing everyone down.
• Believing cold war is no big deal because nuclear war hasn’t happened yet is the same as believing your game of Russian roulette is safe because the gun hasn’t gone off yet. (Johnstone)
• According to the movies, realizing one’s potential is achieved by developing punching/fighting/domination skills sufficient to force your will upon others, which is true for criminals, saints (good guys), men, and women alike.
• Ecocide will be a problem as long as ecocide remains profitable. War will be a problem as long as war remains profitable. Politicians will cater to profit-seeking sociopaths as long as profit determines what drives human behavior. (Johnstone)
• The most influential news outlets in the western world uncritically parrot whatever they’re told to say by the most powerful and depraved intelligence agencies on the planet, then tell you that Russia and China are bad because they have state media. (Johnstone)
• Wanting Biden because he’s not Trump is the same as wanting cancer because it’s not heart disease. (Johnstone)
• Capitalism will let you starve to death while sitting meters away from food. (Johnstone)

I wish more of them were my own, but the opportunity to choose some of Johnstone’s best was too good to pass up.

Fiction Intrudes on Reality

Purpose behind consumption of different genres of fiction varies. For most of us, it’s about responding to stimuli and experiencing emotions vicariously, which is to say, safely. For instance, tragedy and horror can be enjoyed, if that’s the right word, in a fictional context to tweak one’s sensibilities without significant effect outside the story frame. Similarly, fighting crime, prosecuting war, or repelling an alien invasion in a video game can be fun but is far removed from actually doing those things in real life (not fun). For less explicit narrative forms, such as music, feelings evoked are aesthetic and artistic in nature, which makes a sad song or tragic symphony enjoyable on its own merits without bleeding far into real sadness or tragedy. Cinema (now blurred with broadcast TV and streaming services) is the preeminent storytelling medium that provokes all manner of emotional response. After reaching a certain age (middle to late teens), emotional detachment from depiction of sexuality and violent mayhem makes possible digestion of such stimulation for the purpose of entertainment — except in cases where prior personal trauma is triggered. Before that age, nightmare-prone children are prohibited.

Dramatic conflict is central to driving plot and story forward, and naturally, folks are drawn to some stories while avoiding others. Although I’m detached enough not to be upset by, say, zombie films where people and zombies alike are dispatched horrifically, I wouldn’t say I enjoy gore or splatter. Similarly, realistic portrayals of war (e.g., Saving Private Ryan) are not especially enjoyable for me despite the larger story, whether based on true events or entirely made up. The primary reason I leave behind a movie or TV show partway through is because I simply don’t enjoy watching suffering.

Another category bugs me even more: when fiction intrudes on reality to remind me too clearly of actual horrors (or is it the reverse: reality intruding on fiction?). It doesn’t happen often. One of the first instances I recall was in Star Trek: The Next Generation when the story observed that (fictional) warp travel produced some sort of residue akin to pollution. The reminder that we humans are destroying the actual environment registered heavily on me and ruined my enjoyment of the fictional story. (I also much prefer the exploration and discovery aspects of Star Trek that hew closer to Gene Roddenberry’s original vision than the militaristic approach now central to Star Trek.) A much more recent intrusion occurs in the rather adolescent TV show The 100, where a global nuclear exchange launched by an artificial intelligence has the follow-on effect a century later of remaining nuclear sites going critical, melting down, and irradiating the Earth, making it uninhabitable. This bothers me because that’s my expectation what happens in reality, probably not too long (decades) after industrial civilization collapses and most or all of us are dead. This prospect served up as fiction is simply too close to reality for me to enjoy vicariously.

Another example of fiction intruding too heavily on my doomer appreciation of reality occurred retroactively. As high-concept science fiction, I especially enjoyed the first Matrix movie. Like Star Trek, the sequels degraded into run-of-the-mill war stories. But what was provocative about the original was the matrix itself: a computer-generated fiction situated within a larger reality. Inside the matrix was pleasant enough (though not without conflict), but reality outside the matrix was truly awful. It was a supremely interesting narrative and thought experiment when it came out in 1999. Now twenty-one years later, it’s increasingly clear that we are living in a matrix-like, narrative-driven hyperreality intent on deluding ourselves with a pleasant equilibrium that simply isn’t in evidence. In fact, as societies and as a civilization, we’re careening out of control, no brakes, no steering. Caitlin Johnstone explores this startling after-the-fact realization in an article at Medium.com, which I found only a couple days ago. Reality is in fact far worse than the constructed hyperreality. No wonder no one wants to look at it.