Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - The Cargo Cult Industrial Complex

June 27, 2024 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

13:28

The Cargo Cult Industrial Complex

You will never get a good Star Wars movie ever again. Matrix Resurrections breakdown: https://www.lotuseaters.com/video-what-did-we-learn-from-matrix-resurrections-07-04-22

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	When an entertainment franchise no longer invents from whole cloth in accordance with the principles that defined it, it essentially becomes a cargo cult of itself.
	The term cargo cult originates from the effect that World War II had on the essentially Stone Age Pacific Islanders, remote and otherwise undisturbed tribal peoples who were suddenly introduced to the modern industrial world.
	During the course of the war, various supplies were airdropped to troops stationed on these islands, and occasionally they would fall into the hands of the islanders themselves.
	The miraculous cargo contained therein naturally seemed like gifts from the gods to the islanders, and after the war, when the cargo ceased to drop, they took it upon themselves to attempt to encourage the gods to deliver more of this modern manner.
	The islanders attempted to mimic the heavenly patterns of the creators to call down these precious goods that would bring joy and favour.
	They built wooden aeroplanes, wicker radar dishes, and carved dirt runways in order to simulate the process in the hope that it might properly invoke the magic to deliver the blessings of the cargo to their island.
	But of course, a cargo cult never actually works.
	It is the product of ignorant and primitive people who mimic the higher and productive civilization, mistakenly thinking that to crudely replicate the outer form of the thing will somehow give rise to the inner genius that makes it function.
	And it's not something that someone could blame them for either, for how could they think otherwise?
	They are trapped in their world in the same way we are trapped in ours.
	When you live in a world that is at the mercy of spirits, ghosts and various other magical forces that are beyond the ken and control of mere mortals, and something of another time and place gifts you with goods that are beyond your own, you can only respond to it in the ways you already know.
	It is to be expected that one might see this kind of egoism on display from a pre-scientific civilization.
	It's no surprise that the islanders looked at the features and characteristics of modern technology and assumed that these forms were somehow totemic to the magical process of providing the cargo, and so attempted to crudely replicate them to create a kind of rite or ritual that would cause the imminent transcendence of the higher civilization.
	The people who occupy the decision-making stations of the modern entertainment industry are in very much the same position as the Pacific Islanders.
	They don't know what the mechanical explanation for the industry's prior success actually was, nor what it is they ought to do to make the magic work again, but they can see that there was magic that was gifted down to them by the divine race of creatives that preceded them and have no alternative but to live in the ruins of this once great civilization.
	That's what it feels like to me to see woke diversity hires attempt to fill the shoes of the imaginative titans of the 20th century.
	Hollywood now seems completely devoid of artists, but filled with soft-handed helicopter-parented man-children and girl bosses who are attempting to replicate the success of Hollywood's Golden Age without understanding what it was that made such success possible in the first place.
	If they simply mimic the patterns and the aesthetic of the thing, then surely the gods will deliver to them the glory and favour that fell upon the original creators of these franchises.
	They simply don't know what it is that they don't know.
	As I pointed out in my dissection of Matrix Resurrections, linked in the description, I strongly suggest you watch it, the entire creative industry is just misnamed.
	It is they are instead the sequel industry, and the industrial manufacturing of substandard sequels is all that they produce where no creativity is necessary.
	And when you look around at the world that they inhabit, it's no surprise at all, because their entire lives are spent within a civilization that does its utmost to prevent any kind of physical hardship at all.
	This is most revealingly shown in Matrix Resurrections, as Neo is struggling to figure out why he can't be creative when his entire sensory input is just the same boring city.
	He spends his entire life in the same boring skyscrapers, living without want, and spends his days in the same boring focus groups which cannot bring anything new into his life.
	Matrix Resurrections is the most self-aware of the franchises in this way, and seems to be almost a cry for help from the Wachowskis at the stifling nature of the creative industry.
	Budgets are too big, the writers are too ignorant, the actors are too tame.
	Nothing exciting happens, and there are no new blockbusters, and there are no new stars.
	The talent of Hollywood is all getting old, and Hollywood itself doesn't seem to know what to do about it, except make sequel after sequel with these increasingly ancient actors.
	The franchises themselves have taken on the aspect of cargo cults.
	They have no sense of destiny, nor any spark of spirituality that marks truly great art.
	There is nothing transcendent about the message of the work.
	No longer was an inspired but flawed genius looking to the heavens and attempting to piece together something higher about the human experience that they would transmit to us through their work.
	Now it is about settling matters so that modern audiences, that is, woke progressive self-centered hatchlings who have never actually had a life experience, can feel represented.
	Star Wars is a great example of this process of work, and we can see in it the real-time decline of movie making.
	The original Star Wars movies were a risky passion project by George Lucas.
	Say what you like about Lucas, but he was a creative genius and brought a vision to life which still resonates in the hearts of millions to this day.
	The first three Star Wars films are rightly cherished because they had soul in them.
	They possessed a character that was uniquely and distinctly their own.
	And the first three films were beset by technical difficulties because the technology was not standardized and formalized.
	They could not rely upon computer technology to fill in the gaps and had to do everything manually.
	The constraints placed upon the original Star Wars movies gave to them an authenticity that cannot be digitally replicated.
	And the lack of these constraints were fundamentally the problem with the Star Wars prequels, which were all sub-par movies from a writing and production perspective and were rightly mocked for it in their day.
	There was no creativity in the technical accomplishment of these movies because so much of them was made in a controlled environment with green screen studios and then filled in with computers afterwards.
	I remember watching The Phantom Menace at the cinema when it was released.
	I'm not a Star Wars fan, and I watched this for the first time and just found it sluggish and boring.
	In its day, it was considered an incompetent film.
	Dull, lazy, over-reliant on CGI, and the story was in many ways nonsense.
	Decisions didn't entirely follow from characters' emotions, poor payoffs, etc.
	The list goes on.
	Art clearly comes from adversity, and the easier things become, the less impressive the stories we tell become, and the prequel trilogy is a good example of this maxim.
	However, Lucas's Star Wars prequels have aged like fine wine, despite their generally poor quality because the entire movie industry took a wrong turn and has fallen off of a creative cliff.
	Lucas was at least committed to Star Wars, above all else, and so we got to explore the political system of the universe and the Jedi's place in it, and despite being of generally poor quality, Lucas was able to tell a Star Wars story on its own terms and present to us new and novel interpretations of things that worked with and expanded the existing canon.
	But now, the combination of absurd budgets, narcissistic DEI hires, and the politicization of writers is utterly ruining Hollywood, to the point where the things they create look like the Stone Age tribes frolicking pointlessly in the ruins of a once great technological civilization.
	Like the Pacific Islanders, they create the facsimile of the great things that they want, but none of it works, because none of it is the authentic thing in itself.
	They can mock up a wicker model of whatever franchise they like, but they can't make it fly like it used to.
	Instead of being committed to the good of Star Wars, for example, we're instead committed to the good of spreading the message, which runs into the problem of imposing a set of foreign principles into the premises of the show.
	It damages the creative ability to work within the setting and turns it into something it isn't.
	A showpiece for an external cause rather than a good in itself.
	The further away the authentic essence of Star Wars becomes, the more the creative industry is unwilling or unable to maintain the distance between fantasy and reality, and this is making our fantasies as mundane as their real lives.
	Lightsabers are a great example of this reduction to the mundane.
	Lightsabers are an amazing concept for a weapon for a highly trained Jedi knight.
	A weapon that requires decades of practice and magical ability to use without accidentally cutting off your own head.
	But now, something this inherently dangerous has been made safe, domesticated and unremarkable, like everything about their modern lives.
	The muddying of the waters between good and evil also makes for a far less interesting story.
	It requires an extensive knowledge of human character to be able to create sympathetic yet imperfect characters, which is simply unavailable to the woke narcissists who are currently in charge of this franchise.
	It requires empathy to understand why we would be interested in what the characters are going through, but instead what we get are characters that put upon us a constant demand for validation.
	If you can't bring yourself to write your character with flaws, then you only have one aspect to their personality by default, a positive one.
	And if the character doesn't seem to actually be virtuous, then people won't like them.
	Because you are using the series as a vehicle to represent yourself, and therefore we know you are projecting a false image out into the world.
	You are not without flaws, and we can now see that you are not being honest with yourself or with us.
	This inauthenticity becomes noticeable throughout the work, as strange decision is piled upon strange decision to finally arrive at the point where people simply don't relate to the movie you have made and are just not interested in watching it.
	Instead of introspection, the people behind Star Wars are inexplicably convinced that they are correct and do not need to change.
	The magic can't arrive from the heavens, and they are frustrated that you won't play along with them anyway.
	They are bumbling in the crumbling playground of a beloved franchise that they have gutted out for their own vanity to try and play act like they're more interesting and virtuous people than they evidently are, and are baffled and heartbroken that nobody else wants to experience what amounts to the pure self-indulgence of a narcissist.
	The only good story that could be written about such people is how they fall from grace and tumble down into a nightmarish personal hell of self-abasement, inner discovery of their actual flaws, and the grim journey out of this dark place and into a realm where they become a properly realized human being, humbled and scarred like the rest of us.

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