In the long-running cartoon strip Peanuts, by Charles Schulz, there was a character, Linus, who was – even more than the others (Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy etc) – a bit of a contradiction.
He was rational, sensible, well-informed and yet, also a believer in “the Great Pumpkin” who would come flying out of the pumpkin patch at Halloween. Repeated cycles of excitement and disappointment could not dissuade him (as per Festinger et al).
Perhaps this is why Linus needed his security blanket – to cope with the contradictions.
I thought of Linus just now, when reading Adam McKay‘s latest essay. McKay, the brains behind “Don’t Look Up,” and script-writer for “The Big Short” talks about lies being like gourds – coming in different shapes and sizes. There is then an extended riff on pumpkins and climate change, and the lies we marinate in.
There’s lots of good stuff and I am not doing it justice, and you should defo read it. (McKay’s bsky here).
There are, of course, other ways to talk about the lies – The Emperor’s New Clothes is one. “Kayfabe” – the word that professional wrestling uses for the agreed hallucination of the ‘narrative’ of heels and faces – is another.
Yesterday I re-upped a post I wrote last year called “Affect and the Fafocene: kayfabe, hypernormalisation and Leonard Cohen“, and someone grabbed the following bit from it when they kindly quote-posted.
We have, in the second half of the twentieth century, under the shadow of the bomb, been able to use astonishing advances in public health (water treatment, inspection of food production), medicine (vaccines and anti-biotics), food production (pesticides, mechanisation, containerisation, etc) and much else to create a world of luxury, convenience and safety for a significant minority of the world’s (expanding) population. Almost by definition if you are reading this you are part of that significant minority. Leisure time, access to education (albeit massified and largely indoctrination, but nonetheless, education), access to information. Clean water coming out of your tap. I mean, wtaf.
All of this seems “normal” if you’ve grown up in it, but it really isn’t. Occasionally reality – in the form of a pandemic – intrudes, but even then, in what is probably one of the last gasps of technological fixery, human ingenuity intervenes and softens the blows.
Meanwhile shifting baseline keeps shifting, the springs get silenter and the oceans warmer.
All this luxury, given names like late capitalism, or the Great Acceleration, or post-modernity (“sociologists invent words that mean… industrial disease“) is based on looting the past (fossil fuels), looting the present (using other humans and animals, and ecosystems as ATMs) and looting the future (deforestation, soil depletion). We are like nothing more than a trustafarian ripping through two or three generations of accumulated wealth on a six month bender after they turn 18 or 21. the kind of bender which ends with them as a corpse with a crusty cocaine facemask in a five star hotel’s penthouse, and a weary detective (Jimmy, or Bunk, or Lester) writing it off as a suicide but knowing it was social murder.
“We” are that trustafarian. After us, not the deluge, but the desert, the boiling unforgiving desert.
What kills me (!) is that it didn’t need to be this way. We could have done better. We didn’t though, and here we are, on that island, it burning to the ground because we were feckless, and without the British Navy officer arriving to save us and chide us at the same time.
Oh well. Welcome to the Fafocene, I hope you enjoy your stay.