The End Of Utilitarian Materialism (finished)

Facing death and annihilation of the psyche, he ( a character in Blade Runner ) realises that life is an amazing glorious, wonderful thing. Perhaps this is the reason we dwell on the idea of the apocalypse and try to envision it within the arts?
http://kinofist.blogspot.com/2008/10/personal-apocalypse.html

I did not know how to signify the philosophy of Materialism that has held sway from the 20th century to the present, so taking an inspiration from Avatar, I called it Utilitarian Materialism: a crude, crass,  what's-in-it-for-me type of materialism, which denies its roots and calls itself "religious"...but whose religion is based on material gain. It is crude, it is selfish, it is hypocritical, and it has been ruthless.
And its time is up.

What we call "The World" has at least two main components: that which we call factual, and that which we call narrative. The factual may be thought of as bed, slippers, cups of coffee, car, traffic, job, work, car, traffic, dinner, tv, bed. The narrative is the web we stick these different nouns on to give them the structure we call "Our Lives".

There is a hierarchy of narratives: there are stories and fables, and then there are mythologies of quests, heroes, and divinity.

The highest narrative is the most dynamic. In our world, we would think of this as stating that the most powerful story we can tell if that of God, Karma, Creation, and where we are going.

Thus, the great mythology of a society draws the lesser stories towards itself, and is essentially the absolute center of tension of the web of narrative we call "Our Lives".

When the center is destroyed, then it cannot hold.

Enough of Philosophy!
When the center is destroyed...!
Whatever is our notion of the "Higher Power", be it God, or the Nation State, or the Commonwealth, or the City, Urbs, or Polis, when it no longer has the power to attract our moral and ethical longings, mankind creates new stories and narratives in a fevered attempt to fill the void at the center.

Superman was born in the Depression, an era when the commonwealth had broken down, and it was becoming obvious that the system of American Capitalism had many severe problems. In the breakdown of the notions of the democracy of welfare and well-being for all men, the popular mind turned to Superheroes, who were almost demi-gods. It was a popular mythology, in which Justice and Equality were enforced and overseen by Superheroes, in the wake of the catastrophe of the normal governmental system: all in an era when the forces of disunion and disintegration overwhelmed the business-as-usual of the State - which more often than not was a subterfuge to conceal the depredations of those above and outside the laws; the fabulously rich on the one hand, and the criminal class on the other.


The  Scenarios of Doomsday...and After  started earlier than this, just after World War I - a war whose massive disregard for life and civilization destroyed most of the societies that entered into it, destroying quickly or slowly, its toxins spread throughout the world.
World War I was the great Irony: the fall from what people thought was an ever onward progress to bigger and better things, into a cauldron where human flesh was mixed with carrion meat...
(At his point, it would be well to point out that heroes and doomsday scenarios have always existed in literature and the popular consciousness. It seems to me, however, that the Present has an unusually lage number of them.)

The incredible Irony of the Nobility of Man as seen in the trenches and the massively destructive and wantonly wasteful fighting permanently scarred those who were not killed outright. There was the Lost Generation in Paris, swept loose from their domestic moorings; there was the substance abuse of all kinds in the 1920s; there was the popularization of crime and the criminal in the popular press.

While sitting in the theater waiting for Avatar to begin, I saw previews for The Book of Eli.
Mythologies of redemption paired with mythologies of destruction once again: from Shape of Things To Come, 1984, Clockwork Orange, Mad Max, Terminator...
balanced by Fahrenheit 451, Star Wars, Avatar...

...and there is a special place for things like the "Left Behind" series, wherein the "religious" indulge in their penchant for war and destruction, lovingly describing Hell on earth, mixing Damnation and Redemption. Even a cursory review of the written and the filmed shows that the Danse Macabre of Death trumps salvation and redemption most of the time - even in the time of God, there is no place for the Good until the end of the story...God as a literary or filmic device.

And we bring it in like a deus ex machina to tidy things up.

We cannot make a silk purse from a sow's ear; we cannot take Evil and call it Good, love the special effects of Evil though we do.

We are beating the drums of our own demise.
It is evident everywhere one looks. When nothing really works, we need bigger and greater Superheroes and Powers to meet the threat of bigger and more evil Villains.

An enormous portion of the Creative Library of Imagination of our society is devoted to the Mythology of Destruction and The Denying Spirit. This calls forth the large section devoted to the Mythology of Salvation.
These are new creations, flooding in ceaselessly. The old stories and narratives have been thrown out.

This reflects the coming destruction of our Philosophy of  Utilitarian Materialism. The process of this destruction is active and going forward, and pieces of our society fall by the wayside as we walk forward on a Bataan death march.
The end of  Utilitariam Materialism has created a vacuum at the center of our lives, and the old myths are not efficient, and we desperately search for new ones: myths in films, myths of Self-Improvement on Oprah, myths of riches and Rich Dads...
We feel ourselves beset on all sides, and feverishly create new idols to still our fears.
But there's always less balm than there are wounded...that's a fact, even in the end of the technological age. We never quite ever make it to that point where everyone has health care, where families have their own commuter airplanes, where traffic is intelligently controlled, where world peace is the normal...

...never quite all the way to Norman Bel Geddes Futurama - that vision of the future still steeped in optimism...
technology never quite makes it to that robust status of answering the needs of mankind.

Springing up around a planned traffic system - still looked on in 1939 as the guarantee of future happiness - the metropolis of 1960 was seen to be free of slums and blight, full of parks and civic centers. Energy sources would apparently be abundant, climate perfect.

The New York's World's Fair, 1939/1940      Selection, Arranged, and Text by Stanley Appelbaum

The spirit cries out in fear: the images of death and war!
The spirit cries out in hope: the image of heroes and redemption!
We know Society is mortally wounded, and all the uses of governments no longer work.

Our struggles today are clear indications not only of the break-down of the mechanics of Markets and Education - it was the educated class that destroyed the financial system, after all - they are indicators of our spiritual morass.

People think I put too much emphasis on Language, and Images, and Icons, and all the Narratives and Mythologies...they're just stories, after all, and mankind always spun tales and told stories seated around the fire.
But I have held that stories are not some by-product, they are the prime constituent of life: we chose the world by choosing the stories and narratives of our world.

Consider that the hijackers of Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania all came from affluent backgrounds. Matt Frei of the BBC interviewed Michael Chertoff, the director of Homeland Security under Bush, and he said:

"What these people find attractive is that al-Qaeda offers them a coherent world view, an ideology."

Others say:

A friend of mine in British intelligence called it "an alternative family"
or
They have become nomads and al-Quaeda offers them a tent and a cause."

The Structure is everything. Our souls exists as the tension and the vectors between the nodes of the structure. That is the definition of the Ideal: the relationships between the Material, and the constructions of the Material...the ideal is that which exists between the things of the world and those things the world creates, just as the Material derives from the constructs of the Ideal...existing together.
Romeo and Juliet are the material nexus of a love story, the tension from which blasts open in a creation of gifts: the physical acts of kissing  and love - and more, the spiritual states of attraction and enduring love and fidelity and loyalty......and the Shakespearean play which has lasted - and will last - for a time far longer than the age span of the quick and the dead.

We create the World. If the World sucks, it is our doing.

We created Utilitarian Materialism, and it is falling apart.

From the ashes of Materialism, the Idealism of the future is being conceived.

We see and Intuit the Future, just as we see and Remember the Past, and just as we see and Experience the Present.
Did you actually think George Lucas made the Star Wars script read the way it does because he loves to recreate stories of ancient Rome? Is that all you think there is in creativity? take a blast from the past, gaudy it up, throw it into the future...
All the anti-utopian films and novels...what horrible dynamo feeds the creative vision of despair?
And what feeds the great vision of Good triumphing over Evil?
In our day, Good triumphing over Evil only exists in the movies. In real life, we actually do steal from widows and orphans...then we give ourselves bonuses for having done it. What do we lack?

We no longer have faith. We do not even have faith in the poor substitute-gods that are ourselves. We have faith in nothing.
That's why all these artists - including yourselves, idiots! if you have not lost your savor, you are creating! - are yelling and screaming; some depict our awful lack of faith in the future, the others try desperately to remind us to hope. And we...? We just sit there and do our Consumer-Stupid-Dog trick over and over again.

The End.