Doom Sells!

I've never seen Wicked, the Broadway musical. I am unlikely to see the movie(s) either. This is no knock on the play or the film, nor is it a knock on the millions who saw the Broadway production or the tens of millions who will see the movies (they split the story into two parts for the silver screen). It's just that my personal tastes run in a different direction.

This doesn't mean I stand insulated or oblivious to any things Wicked. Anyone who interacts with anything in today's culture will eventually intersect with highly successful product of this sort. As a parallel, I can report that I have never seen Titanic, but know a fair bit about the movie nevertheless. And about its director, and its stars, and so on.

So, I was not surprised when I intersected with a political opinion proffered by Wicked (the movie(s)) director Adam McKay.

That opinion? That he "wouldn’t be surprised" if ‘Wicked’ is "banned in 3-5 years."

You can read about his "logic" here, but my TL;DR summary is that he is regurgitating the "Handmaid's Tale" dystopian prediction that the Left peddled during Trump 1.0 and that is part of their "anyone who voted for Trump supports destroying women's rights" Chicken-Littleing.

That broad fear-mongering is based on one policy area: abortion. Because Trump had the opportunity to seat three Justices on the Court, and that Court subsequently overturned Roe v Wade and in doing so returned the regulation of abortion to the states, the Left reduced the entire concept of women's rights down to that one issue. That the Court didn't actually ban anything, that abortion access was actually expanded in some states, or that it didn't change in many other states, is of no consequence, of course.

I am awarding McKay a Golden Shoehorn Award:

for cramming the right-wing dystopia fear-mongering into a thirty year old piece of intellectual property. Which he acknowledges.

What’s really striking about 'Wicked Part 1' is that it’s coming out NOW when America has never been more right wing and propagandized. And yes, I know the theatrical production and the book are much older so part of the timing is a coincidence but still...

As far as conspiracy-theory doomsaying goes, this is really rather pedestrian. You've heard it before, you'll hear it again, and variations will emerge as long as the echo chamber continues to ring.

But, lest you be inclined to conclude that conspiracy-theory doomsaying and cultural straw-manning are the exclusive province of the Left, allow me to remind you of the long-running right-wing propaganda about FEMA internment camps and, more recently, the Jade Helm folderol.

Click the links if you want to numb your brains a bit.

Doomsaying sells because humans are wired to be receptive to it. Evolution has instilled in us the proclivity to exaggerate unknowns, to see patterns even where they don't really exist, and to "other" those not of our tribe. That "othering" has been greatly amplified by the dehumanizing and decoupling effect of social media, where we can hide away from disparate opinions and where it's so easy to think and say terrible things about fellow humans who don't agree with us on one issue or another.

Media old and new have responded to these realities, and provide endless fodder for doom-scrollers and the black cloud brigade.

Since most of us just scroll past sharings of histrionic crap, the sharers don't get nearly enough of the sort of feedback that might deter them or make them question that which they share.

All this should stand as a stark reminder that societies evolve, but human nature does not. At least not in a time frame that is relevant to any of us. We still have the same evolutionary proclivities as our ancestors of 1000 or 10,000 years ago, and when we try to order society (via voting, via punditry, via other means) we really cannot ignore human nature. Nor can we ignore it when we try to make sense of others' behaviors. Progressives, leftists, technocrats, and the rest of the Best-and-Brightest brigade, along with their forebears the Marxists, Leninists, and Maoists, reject this reality in favor of what Thomas Sowell dubbed the "unconstrained vision." A belief that humans can be reshaped via education and inculcation persists, and when human nature dashes their grand plans against the rocky shoals of reality, they blame everyone but themselves.

As for the plethora of memes that purport to claim that yesterday's conspiracy theories are today's realities, if you throw enough garbage at a wall, some of it will stick. Putting forth fifty claims without evidence, and having a few of them come true, is dumb luck, not prescience or insight. But, that's a tale for another day.