“When Jung once said that “a neurosis is an offended god,” he meant, metaphorically, that the neglect of a deep, instinctual energy ultimately revenges itself in our somatic discords, compulsions, addictions, or projections onto others.” ~James Hollis
One of the reasons I like putting on plays is that it provides a release valve for repression (my own included). Theater allows certain unsayable things to be said.
In an era of digital scolding, shaming, destroying—in which unreal personas and reputations are atavistically dismembered and consumed—there’s something about theater, the physicalness of it, that feels like an antidote to this. Like the Internet, a play is made up, but a live performance actually activates more than just serotonin and dopamine for the audience. More of the whole body/self gets invested in evaluating the fictional characters of a stage drama—if it’s decent; it’s not a two dimensional representation—a meme—that can be instantly consumed and commented upon.
Good plays activate dead and dying parts of the imagination.
Between 2020-22 it became cool, and not unreasonably, to become, if not conservative, anti-liberal; now, I have the gut feeling that former liberals are really beginning to miss the home tribe, and that after midterms, they’ll swing back, probably for good. There’s too much cultural allegiance, too much comfort and security in the normative framework of American liberalism; I think a lot of people just wanna go back to Obama-era confidence in slow, arc bending, ameliorative progress that no one has to think too deeply about.
Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.
Modernity means bifurcation: utopian projects, boring results.
As the seemingly boundless Internet 2.0/tech era begins to break down—as tech stocks crash—it’s clear that a decade or more, and trillions of dollars, were truly wasted building dumb products that made people dumber. The fascinating thing about the crash of Meta/Facebook (which has grown from 3,200 employees in 2011 to 87,314) isn’t the rate of the company’s public devaluation, but the fact that we have all known for years that Facebook—and Instagram—is worse than obsolete; it’s soul-sucking, absolute bullshit. Our economy is based on fake products, and the pride derived from association with these products is also fake.
Twitter’s mass layoffs, I suspect, will prove to be the beginning of something: the decoupling of economic reality from fantasy. No one actually needs Twitter; if Twitter stopped working, nothing bad would happen. It’s not a highway system, or a hospital, or a farm; this stuff just doesn’t matter; if it disappeared, life would most likely get better, not worse.