Tag: revitalizing the culture

The Coalescence of the Not-Stupid

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Movie Reviews, Music Reviews, Reviews , ,

So, what if it’s true that Hollywood as an industry is more or less done?  Suppose that there won’t be ten or twenty somewhat-good movies coming out every year anymore.  What if instead there are a couple of decent mini-series by Netflix and Amazon and maybe one or two summer “blockbuster” fantasies and all the rest is just low budget dreck?  How would that affect the entertainment habits of the population?

Well, let’s think about what the population is.  Currently the populace is divided into several different divisions.  But overall, there is a demarcation into two larger groups.  First there are the boomers and GenX contingents.  They both grew up when entertainment was big business and they are used to paying for entertainment that they consider “good.”  They would go to a good movie or buy a music album if they consider it worthwhile.  These are the people who are most distressed by the current state of American entertainment.  Someone my age looks at television or what is currently considered good cinema or popular music and is horrified by the low quality and overall stupidity of the art.

The second grouping is everyone younger; millennials and the Zoomers.  For the most part these people don’t buy music or pay for movies.  They stream everything and are willing to watch and listen to low quality content if they can pay next to nothing for it.  Not being part of this group I’m not completely sure whether this strategy is a byproduct of their poverty or whether they simply don’t care what kind of entertainment product they consume.  Nevertheless, the outcome either way is that the future will be determined by this paradigm.  Entertainment businesses will not be making the kinds of profits they made from the boomers and GenX from the new kids.  Okay, that’s what we are seeing.  Entertainment will become mass marketing of the lowest common denominator at the lowest price.  In other words; garbage.

But that will not be the whole story.  The bell curve is a fact of nature.  Most of humanity is very average, and lately that average seems to have sunk a bit.  But the right side of the curve exists.  There is a segment of the population that is intelligent and they need entertainment that isn’t always the lowest common denominator.  And they tend to be more prosperous than their less intelligent brethren.  And whereas they will join with everyone else to celebrate whatever moronic pop star or whatever mindless video game happens to be in vogue this month, they will occasionally need something more nutritious for the mind and soul.  And how will this work?  After all there isn’t a pipeline for intelligent entertainment.

What I think will happen is organizations; whether corporate or individuals, will spring up to curate what’s out there and arrange for venues and opportunities for these people to enjoy this better entertainment together.  Now maybe the “together” isn’t physical.  Maybe they’ll be doing this over the internet with chat functions used to allow the patrons to share their reactions to the content.  But I think renting a theater to play old movies (or new movies that have been made expressly for a specialized audience) would make perfect sense.

The power of the internet to connect smaller but focused groups is already very well known.  What still needs to happen is for a larger group of intelligent people to coalesce around a commercial entity that is willing to provide them with entertainment that exceeds the lowest common denominator on a consistent basis.  But I think it will happen.  Some day soon, the not-stupid will band together and find out just how strong they are.

Stopping the Left is Not Enough

photog Current Events, Reclaiming the Family , , ,

If you look at all the crazy things going on in our country you would be excused for thinking that all that is necessary to fix our problems is removing all of the leftists from power.  You might think that if we had fifty Governor DeSantises and people like him running our cities and in Congress that everything would go back to normal.  I think I used to believe that either consciously or unconsciously.  All we needed was good leaders and everything would revert to a normal world.  I no longer believe that to be the case.

Our world has drifted very far from a healthy pattern.  We could probably spend eternity debating what were the causes of this drift.  Some people would point all the way back to the Enlightenment and the dethroning of religion as the center of human life in the West.  Maybe that’s true.  Other people point to the emancipation of women as the spark that destroyed the family and led us to the place we are now.  I think cases could be made for a number of causes for what has happened to our world.

The point I want to make is that some kind of change is going to have to happen.  And either we are going to make these changes ourselves or nature will fix them for us.  An example of what happens when you let your society degenerate would be the end of the classical world.  The Western Roman Empire was toppled by German tribesmen who realized just how feeble the Roman state had become.  And a few hundred years later the Eastern Roman Empire was almost completely swept away by the armies of Arabia galvanized by a fundamentalist religion that gave meaning and order to their lives.

Something very similar will happen to our world unless we step back and restore sanity to the way we live.  Our institutions have to stop propagandizing our youth as to the value and desirability of living a secularized and sterile existence that eschews marriage and children.  The idea that it is acceptable and even preferred to adopt an identity that puts you at odds with biological reality is madness.  And all the other LGBTQ lifestyles must also be identified as deviancy that doesn’t merit celebration but at most pity and possibly tolerance if it isn’t allowed to corrupt the youth.

And these are just the negative aspects of our society that must be addressed.  At the same time, changes must be enacted to amplify society’s effect on the positive behaviors we want to encourage.  Our government must support the formation and flourishing of families.  If a man and a woman are raising up children the government should be doing everything it can to maximize the odds that they will create good, well-adjusted and productive people.  The tax laws and the social safety net should be primarily focused on these people.  Everything should be done to allow young women to stay home with their children during those formative years.  And this shouldn’t be done just because it is helpful to the child-rearing task but also because raising a family is the most fulfilling occupation that two people can hope to have.  And a young mother at home with her young children is the necessary center of such a family.  Without her it is an incomplete and confused fragment of what a family should be.  A poor family with a mother at home has its struggles.  But even a rich family without a mother at home is unbalanced and often unhappy.  The children feel the lack but don’t know what they’re missing.

And there are so many things about our society that are unhealthy and dangerous.  The complete disappearance of religion from our daily life and the normalizing of unhealthy obsessions like drugs and pornography have destroyed countless young lives.  All of these things are justified by our fetish with freedom.  A re-evaluation on the limits of freedom is painfully overdue.

And if society doesn’t start making these changes very soon, then as I said at the beginning of this rant, nature will do it for us.  Or more accurately, do it for our successors that live in healthier cultures.