The Granny State and Cultural Exhaustion. By John Carter.
80s flicks are a kind of spiritual comfort food for me. Part of that is probably sheer nostalgia …
They aren’t trying to beat me over the head with The Message, and so they don’t put me into a defensive cringe where I’m reflexively rolling my eyes at blackwashed characters, grrlboss Mary Sues tossing linebackers around like bowling pins, or mandatory gay erotica. …
A really large part of it, though, is just that 80s movies are fresh. Almost four decades on, and they still possess verve, energy, a spark of creative originality that has become utterly foreign to the microwaved leftovers served up by Bad Reboot era Hellmouth.
This is all the more remarkable when one considers that the iconic movies of the 80s weren’t actually all that original. Most of them were just silver screen adaptations of pulp stories from the 20s and 30s. Indiana Jones, for instance, was a two-fisted antihero that could have been lifted straight from the pages of a 30s boy’s adventure magazine. Star Wars was basically Buck Rogers. And so on.
But now:
Still, while the great intellectual properties of the 80s were inspired by what came before, they were at least original creations. Since then, it’s like our culture has been stuck in a time loop, an endless Sisyphean cycle in which every narrative bends back onto itself, spawning only itself. We never seem to find out what happens next. The end of a narrative simply leads back to where it began, triggering only the continuation of the exact same narrative. We’re on, what, the third Spiderman now? The fourth? How many times have we seen Batman’s origin story?
When we don’t get a reboot — the same as before, only this time black! And gay! And female! — we seem to get an endless series of prequels. …
This cultural stagnation is everywhere. Pop music hasn’t produced any new, universally recognized anthems for decades. The fashion of the 20s isn’t identifiably different from the fashion of the 00s, aside from that everyone looks a bit sloppier and shabbier now.
There are no new subcultures, or even really any subcultures – certainly nothing like what we had in the 80s and 90s. Where once we had goths, skaters, wiggers, stoners, jocks, metalheads, punks, rave kids, and so on, if you look at the kids now you basically have two types: normal, and tranny. I suppose you might claim the pudgy genderqueer pronoun girls to be the heirs of the punks, if only because of their penchant for washed-out bile-coloured highlights, but their social function is much closer to hall monitor than it is to troublemaker. …
Why the decline?
I can’t help but wonder if much of it is simply a result of demographics. Our population structure has become top-heavy with senior citizens, and like old people at any other time in history their interest is not in the next new thing, it is in what came before. Elders live on a diet of memberberries.
You see this everywhere. Congress has become a gerontocracy. Wealth is heavily concentrated in the swollen bank accounts and appreciated assets of boomers. Our tiresome political discourse is largely a relitigation of the great struggles of the 20th century — civil rights, WWII, the Cold War. The top movie stars are the same guys that were heart-throbs back in the 80s. …
We’re living in a civilizational retirement home, which is every bit as exciting as it sounds. Great for boomers, I guess — for the rest of us, it’s claustrophobic and smothering.
I don’t see any timely resolution to this. Barring a black swan civilizational collapse scenario, the boomers are going to maintain their white-knuckled death grip on our decaying civilization for a decade or two to come — the youngest of them aren’t even 60 yet. The concentration of wealth in their appreciating assets will warp the economy like a supermassive black hole distorting space-time, bending everything to their generational imperatives. The only growth industry will be health care, and what genius remains in our rapidly enstupidating society will be directed towards life extension technology so that biotech companies can separate seniors from their wealth and thereby ensure that it doesn’t get passed on to whatever children they might have had …
The worst of it is that when they finally shuffle off, the racial demographics of the Post-West will abruptly lurch into majority-minority territory. Our elders didn’t bother having kids, then they did everything in their power to prevent their kids from having kids, and they made up the resulting demographic deficit by importing other people’s kids. For now, it’s possible to look at the raw numbers and conclude that the racial makeup of our countries is still majority white, so what are you Nazis all worked up about with your fascist conspiracy theories about the Great Replacement that’s totally not happening?
Our civilization peaked around the moon landing. This cultural decline nicely fits the data on declining western average IQ.
Btw, ever notice that there are no major rock bands formed since 1990, but that the Rolling Stones are still touring?
