People in the QAnon community have been talking for ages about a ‘great awakening’. For me, the greatest awakening this week has been how chad a dude can look wearing horns and stars-n-stripes face paint sitting on the dais at the Senate on a Wednesday night.
In the eye of such an explosive epistemological-political ‘storm’, it was a much-needed tonic that this ‘QAnon Shaman’ chose to turn up for the insurrectionary fun dressed like a bugged-out acid casualty lost on his way to Burning Man.
But levity aside, Wednesday’s events merely demonstrate further how far down the rabbit-hole of competing narrative frameworks we have fallen.
If you want to see what reality looks like when it collapses in on itself, close your eyes and imagine a Jeremy Corbyn-lookalike chud with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk.
Listen, I don’t mind a bit of chaos and insurrection. We’re all going to die anyway, so why not enjoy the decline? And if what floats your boat is breaking into a government building while badly dressed to take selfies then whatever.
The real problem here is that we have two groups of people who fervently believe in entirely opposing versions of events.
You have most of the world, who have seen Biden win the US election and who are simply getting on with their lives. And then you have a bunch of others who believe that the election was stolen via Dominion voting machines, Venezuela, dodgy servers in Germany and . . . whatever.
I don’t intend to get into the relative ‘merits’ of these positions here (although it seems to me that all Trump had to do was release the Kraken properly in one of his many legal cases and we wouldn’t be in this position now). The key point is the disconnect between these two versions of events, and the impossibility of ever reconciling them.
Put simply, if we live in a world where significant numbers of people can’t even agree on who won an election in one of the (previously) most-respected democracies on earth then we have a problem.
And that problem was created in the broiling crucible of social media, where ‘truth’ no longer matters. Wednesday was merely the physical expression of the epistemological meltdown that has been taking place across Twitter, Reddit, 4Chan and other platforms over the last four years or so.
It’s always seemed ironic to me that many on the right decry postmodernism when Donald Trump is possibly the most postmodern figure ever. And certainly (as has been noted elsewhere) it’s kinda incoherent to rage against the erosion of meta-narratives when you yourself are promoting ‘alternative facts’.
But the bottom line is that the internet – and social media in particular – has fuelled this chronicular dissonance, and that genie ain’t going back in the bottle any time soon.
Machiavellian
I don’t, however, want this to be a worthy, handwringing piece about how we must ‘do better’. Because as any Machiavellian worth his salt will have figured out by now, there are huge advantages to be accrued through a creative and artful massaging of one’s presence on the internet as well as in real life.
To put it another way, if history is now turning its back on what used to be known as empirical truth then that opens up huge opportunities for the canny self-publicist who is prepared to bend the rules and benefit from an enhanced identity.
I often advise guys that they should retain some degree of mystery when they interact with women, at least in the early stages. And let’s be honest, the old ‘wear your heart on your sleeve and just be vulnerable’ schtick doesn’t work (if it ever did) and now seems as old-fashioned as an episode of The Waltons.
In 2021, more than ever before, we create ourselves. Well, what do you think all those girls and guys on Instagram, Tik Tok and YouTube are doing? The ‘brand of me’ machine is going from strength to strength. And while you make take issue with people who you regard as being inferior to you making money on social media and reality TV, the truth is that they are the smart ones, since they have figured out before you that self-creation and self-curation is the future, not just in terms of business, but also in terms of how we understand ourselves and have others understand us.
The bottom line is that ‘you’ are no longer a fixed entity with a finite set of attributes and characteristics (‘Troy is shy, quiet, and doesn’t like to party’). Instead, you are a mass of diverse potentialities, any of which you might choose to develop and advertise depending on your mood and the requirements of the situation in which you find yourself.
And that holds good whether you are in the White House, on the news, on Instagram Stories or on Tinder.
This may run entirely contrary to your deeply held convictions about HONOUR< INTEGRITY< NOBILITY and so on. Well, tough – you’re on the wrong site lol.
But for the pragmatists out there, it’s not necessarily that we should be gleeful about this new reality (or debased reality). Rather, we are perceptive enough to recognise that it prevails, and entrepreneurial enough shape it to achieve our own ends in dating, business and elsewhere.
Happy new year!
