societal trespass: the demon in the design

how non-consensual imposition turns tolerance into culture war

the difference between visitation and trespassing is consent.

the difference between commerce and theft is consent.

the difference between sex and rape is consent.

i suspect you’d struggle to find much of anyone who would disagree that such ideas are both self-evident and axiomatic to civilizational and societal foundations.

and so perhaps it’s not so surprising that when large parts of society and identity become coercive that a great many people start to become uneasy and ultimately angry because “will you treat me in this manner that i would like to be treated?” and “may i treat you in this manner that i would like to treat you?” are very different situations than “you must treat me in this manner that i demand” or “you must allow me to encroach upon your space and agency as i mandate.”

the same objective acts take on new character because they cross the line from voluntary into non-consensual and coercive.

take this too far and societal trespassing, theft, and rape become the order of the day and even if the actual underlying actions in and of themselves are similar to actions taken before, they no longer feel the same and “simply taking an item off a shelf” carries different connotation depending upon the permission (or lack thereof) of the shopkeeper.

and this is how you turn what was once socially acceptable into assault. and grand theft self-determination grinds everyone’s gears.

the image below is apparently the act that represented ireland in the eurovision competition. i watched the video. my advice to you is: “don’t.”

it’s not even good enough to be awful.

it has no interest, no seeming point. it’s just the interpretive dance version of a word salad made from long expired produce.

and that was the pleasant one. some of these acts sound like a noise your garbage disposal makes when it fails.

but bad music has always been with us; it’s hardly a cause to cry about crisis.

and yet many seem upset.

so let’s take a bit of a look at what’s going on.

many seem obsessed with the idea that this is some satanic emergence, but we’ve been there before with febrile claims about heavy metal music in the 70’s and 80’s and it was basically nonsense then and remains so now.

these are “artists” and in the profound words of one of my favorite playwrites

“We're actors — we're the opposite of people!”

-Tom Stoppard

it’s not like we’re supposed to presume that they are all “just like us” or not realize that much or even most of this is an act or an ostentation.

some subset of art has always been bizarre and pushed boundaries and so have artists.

david bowie.

marilyn manson.

lady gaga.

motley crue.

sometimes shock or transgression is the message. and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. holding up the world to funhouse mirrors can enlighten as well as enrage. obviously, this is also a practice that can go too far or drift into derangement, but art is often about sidling up to the line on issues of importance and pushing overton windows. some foot faults are to be expected, perhaps even welcomed.

it’s how you build the lanes and bumpers around the roads upon which societies travel.

but sometimes, it just stinks.

and sometimes, it gets oppressive.

consider the possibility that the difference today is not that this new batch of alleged artists are somehow extra demonic in and of themselves, it’s that they have been possessed by that most inimical and destructive of infernal influences:

authoritarian politics.

the difference is everything.

radical and unusual identity is fine.

pushing boundaries is fine.

we’ve been there before and it was fine.

we had this all 80’s and, wait for it, no one cared. construction workers from pittsburgh listened to motley crue and poison and bon jovi. no one cared.

you be you. you wanna sing hard rock with big hair while dressed like you’re going to ru paul’s drag race? do it. fans loved it. sure, some elders got the vapors, but as the saying went: if the music’s too loud, you’re too old.

political music was about real politics, not about identity proselytization.

i had some truly epic “flock of seagulls/duran duran” style hair. my parents said “you’re gonna look back on these pictures one day in horror.” but i don’t. they were awesome. i’d rock it again if i still had the plumage for it.

loads of this dates back to the 60’s and 70’s, (even people pretending to be cats!)

hell, there was probably some version of this 1000 years ago.

there is nothing new about these ideas, what’s new (or at least back into vogue) is what is being done with them and how politicized and totalitarian they have become.

what’s new is the coercion.

what’s new is the lack of consent or agency.

it’s easy to turn that which could be great into something awful and autocratic by making it involuntary. a room in which you might otherwise like to sit becomes a prison if you are forced to remain there and prevented from leaving.

these distinctions matter.

personal expression is not personal demand.

“hey, check me out!” is not “obey and validate me!”

it’s the difference between conversation and ultimatum, between consent and coercion.

“accept me?” is very different from “accept me!”

and i think that back in the 80’s and 90’s we had shown as a society that we were ready for quite a wide range of acceptance until it all went rancid through political possession and identity became not a canvas but a cudgel, not a source and expression of self, but a grievance and a basis for demands.

authoritarian politics breaks everything.

it took the artistic vanguard from being something interesting and strong and explorative and made it into something broken and demanding and oppressive. it became soviet regime art gussied up as rebel rock. and it just plain sucks.

we’re no longer being invited on journeys but rather being frog marched into malevolent morasses of mores that no one really wants or likes.

it turns into “submit to and praise us or be shunned and attacked.”

“bow before our flag” is not art.

that’s assault.

that’s subjugation.

mother of being a drag.

we took all the maladjusted misfits and rendered them holy and sacrosanct and allowed them to ascend to the political and cultural commanding heights from which to carpet bomb the rest of us into exhausted cultural acquiescence.

and the art is as putrid as it is vapid.

it’s neither stunning nor brave. it’s not even interesting. it’s just tiresome.

worse, it has destroyed the place where tolerance and acceptance once resided and replaced it with horizon to horizon culture war, all encompassing and all effacing.

we took the joy of difference and exploration and made it pain. because that’s what authoritarian politics does.

we took the tendency toward acceptance and made it into resentment, because that’s what coercion does.

we broke the societal substrate of “we” and shattered it into 1000 “us” and “them” factions competing to wield the whip hand because that is how ideologically totalitarian systems always go.

culture became a struggle session and differences became a source of strife instead of a source of perspective.

simple jokes about gender roles or racial differences that were once the bedrock of commonality and understanding were rendered apostasy and this sort of reality denial renders each and all trapped in a sort of solipsistic existential echo chamber: alone and deracinated, lacking commonality, and feeling like there must be something wrong with us.

but there isn’t.

it’s this system of politicalizing everything and robbing it of joy and connection that’s wrong.

and it’s not the identities we need to attack, because they are (mostly) not the problem.

it’s the politicization of identity and the malefactors it ennobles and encourages to prey as sacred wolves upon the rest of us. it’s the addition of force to the equation.

that’s the demon in the design.

and that is what we must exorcize.

our enemy is not heterogeneity of self conception.

our enemy are the ideologues, the thieves of joy and perspective, the coercers and the faux moralizers.

our foe is not the people who are a different race or gender or peaceful proclivity than we are, it’s the people who presume to tell us who we must be and what we must bow to.

peaceable people having a dialogue about who we all are and aspire to be IS civilization.

the ant farm purity of “obey and identify all as i tell you as you pledge involuntary allegiance to hopelessly convoluted flags increasingly standing for a societal scupper of cluster B aficionados” is not.

that way lies dissolution, resentment, and domination by the truly damaged and misanthropic.

all politics is downstream of culture and so reclaiming the culture is paramount to accomplishing the rest. no laws or leaders can save you if your civilization lacks basic ethics and civility.

but nature has a funny way of healing itself.

and laughter wants to return.

and pulling the tails of these crybully scolds turns out to be quite a lot of fun.

and i really do encourage everyone to get involved.

you’ll be glad you did.

it’s the best game in town.

and perhaps the rising generations are cottoning on.

this text below is exactly how we would have acted in the 70’s and 80’s and 90’s when someone told us what not to do.

consider the possibility that this represents a return to healthy expressions of identity through the act of laughing at oneself and realizing that the human condition need not always be serious or self-absorbed and that living as a perpetually provoked prickly protest peon is not a life, it’s a beating. (and a self inflicted one at that.)

the human condition is inherently pretty hilarious.

and if you cannot laugh at yourself and your differences, then you are the problem.

consider the possibility that this is not “out of hand.”

perhaps it’s just finally in better hands than hers…