UE 5, Part 1: Are We Ready to Go Through the Portal?
On the ongoing duet of narrative and reality in Spring 2021, as the nation reopens and a sense of systems horror intensifies. (Note: Part 2 of this essay will go up in June.)
Taking stock of the air in the spring of 2021, as Covid appears poised to draw to a close in America (though uncertainty about whether this is true, and what it might mean, both psychically and medically, lingers) and the Biden Era (though this hardly feels like a comprehensive term for the current moment) moves beyond its “first 100 days,” I think the most productive starting point is to consider whether we’ve finally reached the edge of something new—not only the end of the old Trump and Covid narratives—and, if so, what its post-narrative reality might be.
While ruminating on this possibility over the past few months, I’ve begun to have the sense that a portal might be opening, the first since the late 80s, a Cronenbergian era obsessed with alien abductions, liquid TV screens, haunted arcade games, sinister biotech and cybernetic interventions, and other pop manifestations of portals that characters either did or did not find the courage to go through, or to let themselves become.
If the late 80s portal—though which I entered the world—involved the simultaneous fall of the USSR and the rise of the Internet, and thus required a willingness to transition out of the analog “American Century,” and into the unknown digital sprawl of the new millennium, then the portal of 2021, while harder to define, has something to do with the feeling that an obviously horrifying future—America as an actual Third Reich, and/or site of a totalizing Black Death—has been temporarily averted, while, at the same time, a countervailing suspicion grows that the forces that will or won’t ultimately lead to that imagined future are far more complex than they appeared during the Trump Era, when the narrative of Good vs. Evil was oversimplified to the point of absurdity, crammed into the carnival persona of a single man who, with suspicious swiftness, has now been shuffled offstage.
Both sides presentedTrump as a singular figure—either a self-possessed mythic redeemer or literally Evil incarnate—but today he looks more like another manifestation of a media-driven financial system that manifests in numerous ways, using human hosts however it pleases without ever coming from within them. In this regard, seeing Trump as a singularity or aberration—a rare mortal incarnation of the really real—looks like a kind of wishful thinking, a desire to believe that one man still has the power to do anything other than be used by the systems he’s enmeshed in, serving to confuse reality and narrative in ways that are precisely calibrated to stultify real cultural progress, while making money for a select few. In ways I want to keep exploring below, the approach of Weird or cosmic horror, or what author B.R. Yeager calls systems horror, in which individuals host forces they can neither generate nor comprehend, feels like the most fitting narrative and aesthetic mode for an age of viruses both bodily and psychic, in which, as narrative diffuses, reality in all its strangeness may be about to become apparent.
Just as cult leaders accurately pick up on their adherents’ loneliness, confusion, and dissatisfaction with contemporary urban life and offer a means of accessing a more elevated plane, only to fall back into the same lust and greed they claimed to have found a way out of—thus revealing that cults are no more than glorified scams—Trump, who was himself endlessly called a cult leader, entered the narrative as a self-made visionary without ties to either party, an anomaly so abhorrent, we were told, that it had to be met with paralyzed shock… before it receded into the same morass of grift and materialism that it claimed the singular ability to disrupt.
Whether this lack of ultimate disruption is cause for relief or deeper dismay is one major topic I want to consider because, I think, it’s indicative of the larger atmospheric disturbances afoot in this new age of systems horror, as the two-dimensional left-right axis grows a spooky third dimension, so that narratives and alliances shift not only along this line, but also off of it into a spooky new space, as if Trump were the last force of gravity keeping us tethered to a ground we’ve now begun to float away from.
This floating action generates a new kind of energy, which may be the force that’s opening the portal. If so, then it’s been building over the past five years, the period during which America molted and appeared to show its true form: the national spirit that’s defined us since going through the 80s portal literally metastasized into the idea of Trump as singular, despite half the country loudly proclaiming that “this isn’t who we are,” and even insisting that he wasn’t fairly elected, much as the other half now insists about Biden. Beneath these mirror-narratives, as we see the system (or virus) first assume and then shed its human form, we can begin to understand how much stranger the underlying reality may be, and thus how inadequate all the available narratives have become.
In retrospect, even though the narrative of the Trump Era was one of mutually inconsistent realities and crazy-making media silos, perhaps the truth was the exact opposite: perhaps Trump was actually the last object of convergent attention, the last centrifugal avatar in American life, sinking now into a lineage of American huckster-dreamers that reaches back to Mark Twain, Herman Melville, Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen, Citizen Kane, and Daniel-Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. In the previous era, people may have violently disagreed over what Trump’s figure stood for, but they absolutely agreed to ensconce this figure in the dead center of their gaze.
Now, with Biden as a dead center that’s actually dead, there’s no consensus on where the culture’s gaze should be pointed. There’s something almost comically obnoxious about NFT discourse, but, without digressing too far into that morass, I do find it worthwhile to consider NFT’s as brief instances of crystallization from the otherwise formless churn of digital media in 2021, literal coins minted from a flowing torrent of molten iron that otherwise flows on and on without stopping or leading anywhere definite. This notion is productive here in that NFT’s represent rare moments of coming-together within a post-Trump cultural sphere that otherwise has no subject and no object, only mood, tone, atmosphere, and a queasy, ambivalent sense of forward momentum.
In a way, then, Trump was the NFT of his own era (just think how much he loved to coin memorabilia of his own image), the material form at the center of the narrative, whereas now that we have no such thing, we’ve entered a new paradigm in which, from time to time, dumb pieces of digital art become hyper-valuable for seeming to crystallize a zeitgeist otherwise too liquid to grasp.
Therefore, after the true form of the optimistic techno-capitalism of the 80s portal has grown so concrete as to become grotesque and then melt back into liquid, the feeling is the opposite of what it was during my childhood, 30 years ago: a sinking fear that Western liberalism has had a full generation to produce a fair and open society, and has instead produced a world so complex and fraught with doublespeak that no one can bear to consider it sanely, and is thus made complicit in their own exploitation by being forced to choose a commercially-motivated narrative lens to impose upon it.
Therefore, we stand on the threshold of a portal that may well lead to a new world order, one in which the ideals of 80s and 90s liberalism are left behind, and some other set of factors—perhaps inhuman ones, as environmental strangeness clashes with increasingly incomprehensible technology and our own crazed counter-reactions to a real or perceived loss of agency—rule instead. There is thus a sense of guilt this time, a feeling of wasted opportunity, though perhaps this very feeling also contains within it the seeds of a new utopianism.
Cults, Scams, and Quelling Epistemic Uncertainty as a Business Model
On a more granular level, the spring of 2021 feels fraught with the suspicion that the world, relative to 2017 or ‘18 anyway, seems simpler—at least for me, my diet of political media is way down, my sense of constant alarm significantly dulled by the normalness that Biden was clearly hired to project—but I’m aware, to a far greater degree than I was pre-Trump, that this is only because I’ve tightened my filter bubble, tuning more media out, and viewing the media I do encounter with more and more distrust.
In other words, I’m more aware than ever before that the real world extends frighteningly far beyond what the lens I’ve taken on it allows me to see. The truth today seems either unknowable or unutterable, which cultivates a suspicion that everyone is gaslighting everyone else, pretending to know what cannot be known, because admitting the vastness of the unknown opens too directly onto the realm of the Weird, where human commerce, and perhaps all of human aspiration, flickers and goes out. This is why the notion of cults—both actual cults, like NXIVM, and so-called cults, like the “mask cult” or the “anti-mask cult” or the “Maga cult” or the “cancel cult”—are everywhere in today’s discourse, with everyone accusing everyone else of having sequestered themselves inside a deliberately and often aggressively simplified reality—for which their own reality is, of course, the only corrective.
Given that we’re all terrified, stressed, and deeply uncertain about what, if anything, is actually true (and whether the truth is even a concept worth preserving), it’s understandable that we’d sequester ourselves inside these cultish bubbles, within which we’re always right, equipped with real knowledge, as if the feeling of rightness were itself the ultimate consumer good, while everyone else is always wrong, either passively duped or actively lying. Furthermore, like a doomsday cult, this form of knowledge presupposes that things have already taken their course, that we already know how the mythic struggle will shake out, even as we go on suspecting that reality is much less resolved, and resolvable, than any narrative can make it appear.
When I think about this trajectory and how the change of presidents and end of Covid have impacted it, I’m filled with a combination of relief and dread, informing much of the fiction I’ve drafted this spring, which seems compelled to deal with scams, grifters, and salesmen of dubious worldviews in a more direct manner than ever before.
This work has led me to the hypothesis that scams, of which cults are today’s most salient example, stem from the fact that epistemic uncertainty—the underlying condition in which people don’t know what to believe, and can’t bear this condition for very long—can always be commuted into a classic American business model. Perhaps all world religions, once they exit their prophetic stage and begin to ossify into bureaucratic dogmas, follow this trend, but, after the colossal scam of the Trump (and anti-Trump) years—themselves outgrowths of the scams of the War on Terror and the Financial Crisis—I’m most attuned to its American manifestation.
Mark Fisher once observed that crime movies show how the culture at large really feels about itself—The Godfather reveals a crisis of family and honor in the 70s, Heat reveals a crisis of anonymity and transactionalism in the 90s, and perhaps Uncut Gems reveals a crisis of suicidal debt in the late 2010s—because they remove the veneer of decency that occludes the latent criminality in all economic dealings. In this same way, I’ve come to think that scams reveal the insecurity of the culture at large by offering fake solutions to a real psychic crisis (and thus the solution, if there is one, cannot be simply denying that the crisis is real). In 2021, scams also embody business in its most clarified form, trading money for the illusion of certainty, while feeding back into the very uncertainty they claimed to solve once they’ve been debunked (or generated enough opportunistic counternarratives), thus in turn generating more marks for more scams, unto infinity.
This feedback loop also runs in the other direction, since money itself, beyond the meeting of basic needs, is nothing more than another proxy for a certainty we can never achieve, another salve for the psychic wound of feeling that something is really real without our ever knowing what it is. As the desperate insecurity of a supposed billionaire and genius-level scammer like Trump proves, money is both the reward for a successful scam, and a scam itself, leading right back to the dread I mentioned earlier.
The nature of this dread, while hard to define, is connected to the feeling that something that became apparent in the Trump Era—not only on the right, but on the left and in the center as well—is still here, but it has gone underground (into remission, just as we hope Covid will), or cloaked itself in a new veil of propaganda, such that any apparent saneness in current American politics is impossible to take at face value, even as the desire to look beneath that façade—and thus beyond the purview of whichever cult we’ve joined—is hard to muster, while the penalties for even trying to do so keep growing more severe, in line with the penalties that cults always impose on defectors.
Disembodied Dread
This disembodied dread of 2021 is distinct from the embodied horror of 2020, and is in many ways less palpable, though it may by that token also be more real.When Trump was elected in 2016, I sincerely believed I was about to die in a gas chamber. Even in 2020, I sincerely believed that he wouldn’t leave office without a bloody war. Now that he’s left with barely a whimper—whatever one makes of 1.6, it did not delay or even disrupt Biden’s inauguration—the narrative of the past five years grows murky in retrospect, and questions about which news sources were pushing which stories, and why, become more salient, or at least more confusing, in much the same way that mainstream news sources are now scrambling to legitimize the Covid lab-leak theory they viciously discredited last year.
Seen from the vantage of today, we must all, whether we admit it or not, feel that Trump’s defeat was a little too easy—I waltzed down to my polling place, cast my ballot, and picked up a donut and coffee on the way home—so either the threat, like Covid with all of its variants, is still more present than it appears, or else there was never as much threat as we were led to believe… or perhaps these possibilities are convergent on the level of systems horror: some threat is certainly still present, but its source and nature, after the absurd hyper-clarity of Trump and Covid, has swung way in the other direction, into a spooky zone of mystification where, though it’s harder to locate, it may finally be possible to consider as such, as in a demonic fairy tale where the demon can only be defeated in the unstable interregnum between one human host and another.
If 2020 was a slasher film, with Trump, Chauvin, and Covid bound together into a Leatherface-style bogeyman, 2021 is more like the old PC game Myst, an eerie environment in which danger is everywhere and nowhere, so that it feels like something is wrong with the world itself, not with any avatar rampaging across its surface. On the one hand, the presence of actual violence, spurred by clashes between white supremacists and Antifa, arranged along a bizarre axis that was somehow both anti-government and pro-Trump—a precursor to the conflation of pro- and anti-police attacks on 1.6—has simmered down, but it feels as though these forces have simply receded into the all-pervasive woodwork surrounding us, rather than reaching any resolution.
Last spring, as Covid was rapidly shutting everything down, I felt a combined sense of terror and wild hope, as the possibility of true, totalizing change, for better or worse, came into view with an immediacy—a sense that this is really happening—I’d never felt before. Now, a year later, I feel the opposite set of contradictory emotions: surface-level relief that the worst appears to be over in the US, undergirded with an ominous sense that the systems that keep the culture and the economy going in the direction they’ve been going since the 80s are far stronger than they appeared—so much so that, not only were they not obliterated by Covid, but they actually found a way to profit from it, as surely they’d intended all along.
However, to make matters even more complicated, I also have the sense that my growing awareness of these forces as such may ultimately weaken them: perhaps they overplayed their hands during Covid, revealing how depraved they were in the first place, and this, rather than the pseudo-shocks of the UE, will actually lead to their overthrow or evolution into a radically new form on the other side of the portal whose nature may be coterminous with this new systemic understanding. If so, then Trump’s defeat will stand no so much as the toppling of a dictator, but as the puncturing of an illusion.
Narrative vs. Reality
The paradox of energies that have bubbled up while also seeming to disappear raises the question of whether the narrative (that Evil has been defeated) and the reality (that something much stranger is afoot) have begun to diverge this spring, or, like an Apocalypse that only ever reveals what is already the case—perhaps the Trump Era revealed how sick our information sphere had already become, rather than causing this sickness for the first time—whether they diverged long ago, or were never aligned to begin with. Either the story is changing, or else the supposed story was never the real story, and this is only now becoming clear. If the fantasy sold by a cult is that of a narrative capacious and coherent enough to encompass the real reality, then the process by which that cult is discredited, and its adherents set free, has to begin with the fantasy becoming apparent as fantasy, since this is the reality it seeks to suppress.
The combined shocks of Covid, last summer’s BLM uprisings, and 1.6 are perfectly ambiguous in the sense that they generated tremendous amounts of narrative, while also, clearly, being real events. Now, as we either process or fail to process these narratives (1.6 apparently generated 14,000 hours of footage), the crucial question is where and how their realness will manifest next, and what relation, if any, this will have to the narrative that’s now unfolding. We still don’t know where to look, nor whose directions to trust, and yet also—because something is clearly happening—we can’t look away, nor can we go it alone.
Insofar as it left us in this position, 2020 was a cusp phase between narrative and reality, a test to see how and whether one might dominate the other, or if they’ll be intertwined in mutual exploitation forever. My hunch, which may be one reason why the UE derives stability from instability, is that reality always feels poised to dominate narrative—we’re conditioned to expect the really real to break through at any moment—and yet this feeling may itself be the narrative, not the reality, which is why the breakthrough still hasn’t come.
Following this perverse logic, cult leaders claim the ability to merge by fiat what seems true with what really is, while debunking cults (the culminating narrative pleasure of every cult documentary and podcast) works along the same axis, by revealing the cult as false and hence the spurned outside world as true. The mental leap I’m straining toward here is to resist both forms of relief by fortifying my mind with a durable enough internal value system to remain sanely immersed in external ambiguity, and thereby accept that the mediated world will never reveal its secrets in a way that doesn’t seem like a scam.
A Rebirth of Productive Paranoia?
As I began compiling notes for this essay and trying to articulate what I hoped might lie beyond the portal, I revisited the writings of Erik Davis, especially the 2015 revised introduction to his classic TechGnosis. What struck me most was the quickening he describes in the early 90s on the West Coast, the burgeoning of subcultures, the about-to-combust feeling of the Internet at that time, the strangeness and sincerity of early blogs, and the ways in which paranoia and conspiratorial thinking led to a twitchy excitement, a psychedelic sense that maybe nothing is as it seems. He made it sound like the kind of pleasurable pain of your mind about to explode with enough heat to fuse narrative and reality into a shocking new form, thereby transcending the otherwise deadening disjunct between what you read and what you perceive. I first discovered this feeling as a teenager, reading Gravity’s Rainbow and The Illuminatus! Trilogy—both key subjects of Davis’ also excellent High Weirdness, released last year—and I’ve tried to harness it again throughout this essay project.
All this got me thinking about why the conspiratorial mindset during the Trump years was so mentally deadening—a vision only of violence and authoritarian submission, as America’s insurgent, underdog energies aligned with those who, bizarrely, also held political power—whereas Robert Anton Wilson, Thomas Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick in the Vietnam and Nixon Era used their druggy paranoia to break open a vista of potentially profound mental freedom, a turning-away from mass culture and toward a coherent inner autonomy, rather than the super-fascism that Q-world seemed to desire in 2019 and 2020. Looking ahead from here, I also yearn to embrace a paranoia that opens outward, rather than closing inward, or defaulting back to the paradoxical “believe whatever you want” mantra of the mainstream culture we’re stuck with today, which, sadly, grew out of the same Phildickean and Pynchonean counterculture that morphed into Apple, Microsoft, and Wired in the 80s and 90s.
Now, in 2021, if this truly is a new moment of going underground and beginning to question the faux-tolerant mainstream culture we’ve ended up with, maybe some of that productively febrile paranoiac thinking can return, and become a source of future-facing momentum for a new sub- or counterculture still in its nascent phase. If so, it will have to find a way to, as my brother Rob has productively phrased it, “return to modernism to depart again,” this time toward some unlikely but still possible third position, neither the horrors of the 1930s and 40s, nor the mental dead-end that the postmodernism of the 70s and 80s has arrived at. Avoiding the dual traps of the fascistic “only one thing can be true” and the postmodern “anything you want can be true” (which only leads to a new form of corporate fascism), this new counterculture will have to find something, or some set of things, to believe in that are actually grounded in a reality deeper than narrative—and thus deeper than money—while at the same time guarding against that very grounding thing turning into a repressive narrative of its own, a risk that the 60s counterculture clearly underestimated.
30-year Cycles
If the culture evolves in 30-year cycles because those who grew up in one era come into their prime 30 years later, then the 60s seeded the 90s (Erik Davis is a perfect example of this), just as the 90s are now seeding the 2020s (my own 30-year cycle). In each case, a portal opened, out of the reactionary decade preceding it (the 50s and the 80s are also alike in this regard, just as Pence was a 50s throwback and Trump an 80s throwback, his own Maga slogan a direct Reagan rip-off) and toward the possibility of something genuinely new, only to make partial progress and then get coopted by the same old “military industrial complex” in a new and savvier form. Still, in each era, it’s essential to try to go through the portal, because refusing to try is to go through another portal—that of choosing stagnation or, worse, degenerate nostalgia.
The portal we stand before now involves a refusal of the 80s, insofar as the gospel of personal aspiration and competition above all (Thatcher’s infamous “there is no society, there are only individuals”) has reached an obvious crisis point—even Biden admits this much. At the same time, the USSR as the 80s straw man for the innate villainy of “collectivism” is also no longer a threat, so perhaps the ground ahead is uniquely open to a new form of cooperation and an attempt to forge a sense of clarifying meaning and value in an age where everyone is, so far, unified only by fear of something too vast to comprehend.
With these conditions taken together, then, the portal of 2021 has to lead toward something less financial and transactional, and more communal and archetypal, a realm of re-enchantment on the far side of the “everything for a price” regime in which we’ve all lived until now. The key point that I want to consider below is whether it’s possible to sincerely yearn for “non-fungible” values like myth, magic, heroism, community, family, and a realm of trans-individual archetypes, while remaining aware that these same yearnings led to the worst horrors of the 20th century (a question that Adam Curtis raises in his new documentary, Can’t Get You Out of My Mind). This means playing with fire, but if we don’t find the courage to try, we may ironically conjure a new Nazism through our increasingly violent attempts to prevent it.
Knocked Back to Weimar?
Here on the threshold, the air is supposedly suffused with the scent of Weimar. Rather than entering the Third Reich just yet, we’ve been knocked back to an atmosphere framed more like the Berlin of 1925. The question now, of course, is can things still go another way? Can that 1925 Berlin—this brings us back to the notion of returning to modernism in order to depart in a new direction—evolve into something other than 1935 Berlin, or is it just a waiting game?
As we either face or ignore this question, the Trump Era grows slippery in retrospect because it somehow both hardened and softened the lines along which the culture war is being fought. On the one hand, Trump certainly (as we’ve been told ad nauseum) increased polarization among communities and even between neighbors and within families, pushing the right further right and the left further left, and yet, at the same time, he rendered traditional terms like “liberal” and “conservative” obsolete, leading instead to a series of realignments. The culture of the past five years therefore resists scansion along left/right lines—why is an ultra-conservative, law-and-order movement bashing the CIA and the FBI? Why is a progressive movement calling for entire websites and media outlets to be shut down, and for books to be pulled from publication? Why was Steve Bannon on Red Scare, one of the most popular far-left podcasts in an ever-proliferating field? Why are Republicans screaming, “do whatever you want” and Democrats screaming, “follow the rules”?—to such a degree that any media effort to shoehorn recent history into a pre-established narrative has come to seem like another scam.
Now, as some of this dust begins to clear, things feel different. Allegiances are less legible than ever, even as people are increasingly agitated and at each other’s throats. Maybe this apparent paradox, which seems to grow out of a new cultural moment that lacks a central figure to project its anxieties onto, actually coheres in the sense that a feeling of scrambled identity makes people more desperate to define themselves in absolute allegiance to certain ideas and absolute opposition to others, for reasons far more elemental than they appear.
Most profoundly, as real power grows ever more shadowy and numinous—whether in terms of so-called Dark Money, in terms of the masters of the Internet and hence the entire information sphere we live in, in terms of the environment itself changing beyond our control and comprehension, and perhaps in terms of whatever the proliferation of new UFO reports actually signifies—people’s allegiances to politicians and their attendant lifestyle brands grow ever more desperate, as if in defiance of this very fact, just as those doubting their religious faith may double down rather than renouncing it. In 2004 or 2008 or 2012, although real outcomes were at stake, it was acceptable to not have an opinion, or even to not vote, whereas in 2020 that would’ve been seen as criminal negligence.
As the world has grown increasingly complex, therefore, it has grown ever less acceptable to seem uninformed about or disinterested in any given topic: the expectation that you will claim to know about everything grows in exact proportion to that knowledge’s diffusion into the unknowable, a fact never more palpable than in terms of how “science” was discussed during Covid (“in this house, we believe in science”), as if it were a field of totalizing and stabilizing knowledge, whereas any real scientist will say the exact opposite about the actual work they do.
In this way, secular society is growing more religious, while religious society is growing deformed and reactionary, as the very stance of “remaining religious” in 2021 becomes confrontational in ways that it shouldn’t have to be. Political support follows this same pattern, insofar as people no longer vote for policies or agendas they truly believe will be implemented, but rather to define themselves in the eyes of their peers, choosing to worship one idol over another as an expression of values that have ever less to do with what a president can or cannot accomplish, and ever more with whichever cult they’ve chosen or been forced to join. As the systems we live in grow more horrifying, the premium on pretending that individuals can either fix or ruin them swells to the level of dogma.
In this same way, as supposedly secular events like elections and public health briefings take on religious significance, the culture grows increasingly confused and on edge, whereas, I think, if people could separate the levels more clearly—which would require an uncomfortable degree of honesty about the religious needs we all share, and how these are connected to the limits of reason and scientific knowledge, which itself fragments along the reality vs. narrative divide—then we’d be clearer about what we’re actually talking about, and how to talk about it as such, rather than as a code for something else.
A Pre-Revolutionary Phase
In terms of separating fact from ideology, we will fail to pass through the portal—as the 60s counterculture failed to avert the 80s, and thus also the 2010s—if we continue to refuse to acknowledge the ideologies that American liberalism both represses and secretly clings to. If we continue to mask brutal individualism and the need for personal comfort above all else with a thin veneer of social progressivism, judging governments and corporations by what they say rather than what they do, then a totalitarian freak-out will either come from the fringes, which will have no choice but to keep hardening and sharpening their opposition to the center, or from the center itself, which will grow ever more vindictive and censorious in its supposed (and perhaps half-legitimate) opposition to these insurgent lines of attack.
2021 therefore feels like a pre-revolutionary phase, a gathering of energies toward a future Storm that still hasn’t happened, as Trump and Covid increasingly look like warnings (and the possible return of both, in terms of the next demagogue and the next pandemic, are already deep in the narrative churn). As always with the UE, however, the feels like aspect is crucial here, insofar as this coming Storm may never come, or may come instead as a series of anticlimaxes.
Still, as a means of describing the mood in the spring of 2021, the combined fear and hope that the other shoe is about to drop is dominant. To reincorporate an idea from UE3, this is a seedy moment, swollen with potential that has yet to sprout. Here as ever, the seedy aspect of American culture stems from a desire to always have it both ways—for example, the American suburbs, which in many regards defined postwar American life, stand as a botched attempt to combine the best aspects of big cities and small towns, while America itself may be a botched attempt to be at once a truly New World and a proud satellite of Western Europe—which leads to a terminal hesitation, a refusal to make the hard decisions necessary for the seeds of newness to sprout, free of the clot of the past.
The attempt to have it both ways with regard to 2021’s portal—to maintain the option of going through without taking the full, terrifying plunge—is likewise a recipe for letting the seediness of this moment go to waste, turning either from seedy to shitty (if the opportunity fizzles), or, more likely, from seedy to sleazy (if corporate interests continue to be the main beneficiaries of the myriad destabilizations of this era).
This begs the question of whether America is capable of generating the forces of its own renewal: are the classic American drives of grandiosity, optimism, insecurity, and irresolution, however much they’ve stalled out in grift, resentment, and outright violence, still capable of conjuring or unearthing a yet-newer frontier, or do we now need to discover another continent (perhaps the urge to reach Mars grows out of this feeling), if we can’t accept that the story ends here?
If any terrestrial possibility remains, the only way out of trembling-on-the-threshold, as Kierkegaard would put it, is to jump through the portal, accepting both that we’re not going back to where we were, and also that we need not submit to a future of either ethno-nationalist fascism, or tech-fueled corporate dystopia, in which only sanitized, commercially viable perspectives are allowed to exist. Surely—I need to believe this much, even if I end up in a cult of my own making—there is, or could be, something better on the other side.
Do We Really Want to Move On?
Speaking of the other side, the most immediate question, of course, is how and even whether the hyper-atomized reality of the past year will phase out. If we keep the medical questions about vaccines, variants, and other disease factors in the realm of the real rather than the holy, what interests me most is the psychological and sociological dimension that these same questions also dredge up: in the aftermath of both Covid and Trump, have we decided that we must keep apart ideologically as well as physically?
During lockdown, as the home was defined as the only site of safety, and the Internet thus became our only interface with the outside world, the notion of staying in became linked with goodness, while going out became linked with badness. While Covid may have been the proximate cause of this linkage, the psychology morphed to touch on something deeper during Trump’s final and most definitive year: a sense that the home ought to become a microstate, a zone of exception from a larger cultural calamity.
If Covid was the literal contaminant, then, just beneath or behind it, was a less tangible but likely even more powerful sense of all-pervasive contamination, as in Todd Haynes’ masterpiece Safe: a fear that the entire American atmosphere had grown toxic, so that the only sane response was to avoid it altogether, breathing only one’s own air (the mask represents this in a literal form), rather than anyone else’s.
Furthermore, during Covid, the right thing and the easy thing (for those of us in the laptop class—the experience of frontline workers and so many others forced to remain in the usual flux of their lives is an entirely different, and highly significant story) were conflated: stay in, watch Netflix, and get everything you want delivered. Now that the question of how to do the right thing is no longer so simple, new fault lines are appearing and, as ever, new lines of cultish thinking are making their bids for our (monetized) attention.
Even if we resist the urge to remain locked down, we have to ask how much of the simplified lockdown mentality lingers, and why. Do we now fear any collective movement as inherently fascist, and therefore only see the possibility for peace and mutual contentment in solitude? Is any notion of reconvening in the public space of America akin to reentering a nation we’ve privately seceded from?
I very much hope the answers to these questions are no. For my own part, I’m torn between a desire for mass collective celebration and togetherness—a new summer of love to make 2021 rival any highpoint of the 60s—and also a desire to pursue my own eccentric, outsider interests even more fervently than before, with even less regard for mainstream support or approval. Happily, the past year has shown that these two desires are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, for me, the portal is a means of fusing them: of saying both that a collective utopianism is possible, and that my own small way of participating in it is to ground myself with greater and greater passion and confidence in my own realm of images and symbols, my own America, embracing rather than suppressing the fear that this will render me illegible—and perhaps even abject—to the majority of the culture.
At the same time, there are clearly forces pushing in the opposite direction, tempering the celebratory mood of the moment with something darker, a worry that, whether or not the vaccines work and whether or not people take them, something more insidious is keeping us apart, smothering the old forms of socialization and drawing us deeper into our private cells, reinforced an ideology much deeper than rational caution.
Ideologies Hardening While Seeming to Soften
One measure of why this spring has such an unstable, pre-revolutionary energy is that the UE has also come to represent a phase between recognizable ideologies, in which ideology seems problematized and in recession, invisible even, but may in reality be growing stronger, approaching a breakthrough that’s hard to see coming. It’s a time when, lacking an official ideology (even the bastardized but effective mirror ideologies of pro- and anti-Trumpism are out of the spotlight now), anything at all can become ideological, like in a nightmare where any object, no matter how banal, can become menacingly enchanted, as if all matter were an empty vessel awaiting possession.
This means that we’re reaching the end of an experiment in living without overt ideology, which was itself the defining, if covert, ideology of the last portal-phase, 1989-2020. This “rationalist,” tech-driven phase has of course revealed itself as highly ideological—Silicon Valley entrenched a new set of anti-humanistic ideologies rather than freeing us from their pull—and also engendered a hardcore return to overt and ancient ideologies, as manifested most clearly in the extreme religious right’s messianic embrace of Trump, which should come as a warning not just about the specific lunacy of that movement, but about the danger of trying to ground a society in quicksand.
Indeed, as mentioned earlier, part of why this evangelical culture has grown so debased is because it has a near monopoly on ideology as ideology, whereas the rest of the culture is still stuck in the 90s paradigm of “lifestyle and consumerism as (hidden) ideology.” Evangelical culture has taken this deadly turn in part because, as religious scholar and journalist Jeff Sharlet points out, its broken its own Protestant rule against idolatry and explicitly conflated the Second Coming with Trump himself, thereby signaling the end of the era of mainstream American religion keeping a strict barrier between the divine and the mortal.
In this way, just as many of us saw Covid as a potential but then deferred Apocalypse, American evangelical culture seems, or seemed, ready to accept Trump as the final form, dispensing with all normal processes of ongoing government to cement him—or whatever he represented—into that position. The fact that they were willing to do this reveals the larger emergency of our era, the maddening but also clarifying fact that we cannot live without something tremendous and unifying to believe in—and that this thing cannot be purely material much longer.
Are You Guys Stroller-less?
I was lying in the grass in Brooklyn Bridge Park with my wife recently when we overheard two couples with infants meet each other and begin to compare notes on their respective pregnancies and deliveries, and how Covid had impacted them. One couple had a large stroller, which they talked about for a while, extolling its myriad virtues while humble-bragging about how expensive it was. Then they noticed that the other couple didn’t have a stroller and remarked, “Oh, are you guys stroller-less?”
This formulation chilled me. It literally suffused me with horror. It seems like a trivial detail, and in many respects it was, but I felt an unacknowledged ideology assert its presence in a way that seemed loaded with dark power. One couple could have simply remarked on the fact that the other didn’t have a stroller by saying, “Oh, I notice that you don’t have a stroller,” and thereby kept the discussion on the level of the literal, but the neologism “stroller-less,” combined with the verb “are,” was so much more than that (it reminded me of Deeley’s inexplicably harrowing invocation of a “lobster and lobster sauce ideology we know fuck all about,” in Pinter’s Old Times). It presupposed an entire belief system, a commitment to a stroller-less ideology and whatever that implied, a fusion of profane object and divine spirit every bit as perverse as the right’s insistence that Trump is God incarnate.
Indeed, the idea of “stroller-less-ness” as an ideology was chilling because of how the banal took on a kind of power it should never have had, but of course must have within consumerism, because every object we buy and use (or don’t use) is meant to convey who we think we are, as supposedly enlightened, post-ideological urbanites, while only the rubes and whackos remain mired in ideology as such. The fact that this maneuver works at all, and I’m hardly the first to point this out, is a sign of a profound spiritual crisis.
This exchange had a Naked Lunch quality that seemed to reveal, with a rare and awful clarity, just how desperate and perverse the hidden ideology of America, or at least of gentrified Brooklyn, has become in the spring of 2021, pushing us toward an edge beyond which I have to believe the portal awaits.
Upon hearing this story, a friend mentioned a similar grotesquerie with a more Ballardian flavor: a high-end moisturizer company called Face Gym, whose slogan, apropos of nothing other than buying face cream, was “join the movement.” Of course Covid safety has become the ultimate hidden ideology in this regard—rather than openly debating when and why to wear masks, especially as more and more people are vaccinated, the conversation plummets to the level of being a masker or an anti-masker (or a vaxxer or an anti-vaxxer), as if that were a totalizing identity, rather than a specific medical decision, whatever its repercussions may be (and these too are never discussed on the level of health impact, but always on the level of righteousness or wickedness).
In this regard, I wonder if so much attention was leveled on Proud Boys and other “overtly ideological” forces of the right not only because of the actual danger they posed, but also as a cautionary tale against ideology itself, a means for the commercial center of the culture to say, “if you adopt any non-commercial ideology, you’ll end up like that” (or, more insidiously, “if you adopt any non-commercial ideology, we’ll present you like that.”).
If so, then the fear of Proud Boys and their ilk may be at once a real danger and a distraction, just as 1.6, as peak Proud Boy cinema, was both a genuinely frightening event and a kabuki version thereof, a means by which the incoming Biden Administration could warn the American public that any opposition would be presented as “Domestic Terrorism,” with no room for nuance or pushback. In a bizarre sense, then, 1.6—like Trump and Covid—was both a cataclysmic event and also a warning about a possible cataclysmic event that almost happened but didn’t, even as it also did. Like a Zen Koan that only begins to make sense after hours of contemplation, dwelling on the nature of this mindfuck might be as good a mental exercise as any for trying to conceive of where we stand right now.
The Freedom to Not Know
If there remains any opportunity to avert the real cataclysms that these events, or pseudo-events, warned of, it will be achieved partly through separating identity from politics in the sense that we become freer rather than less free to have good-faith debates, to wonder aloud about the sacred cows of the day, and to discuss complex issues in all their complexity, while admitting how little we know and can know, free of the fear that this admission will tarnish our deeper being.
This will in turn require a conscientious separation of sociopolitical debate from absolute Truth, thereby deconsecrating the fluid and lie-filled realm of “facts” and reconsecrating another realm, be it a religious realm, a realm of art and symbols, a dream realm, a realm of humor and fun, a realm of debauchery and silliness, a realm of collective action, a realm of what I’ve called productive paranoia… anything that can serve as a still point in the otherwise endlessly turning universe of public-debate-as-identity-warfare.
If we find a way to cease requiring ideological lockstep among all “good people” and to embrace heterodoxy and honest confusion—to study science rather than believe in it—it will help us live more healthily in the perverse media environment of 2021, in which no narrative will ever be as airtight as we need our reality to be. If we cultivate a mental life that’s internally airtight, which requires summoning the courage and the humility to realize that we need to adopt an ideology and call it what it is, we’ll be much freer to dwell sanely in the grey area of external reality, treating the myriad narratives of this moment with the skepticism and open-mindedness they deserve.
In the post-truth reality that the last portal phase has left us with, the realm of facts is too motivated and corrupted to serve as a personal bulwark against insanity, so the sooner we accept this and end the motivated reasoning that claims otherwise, the less lasting damage we’ll incur, and the fewer scams we’ll fall for. If we can laugh together about the fact that none of us has the slightest idea what’s really happening, we will have gone a long way toward healing ourselves and finding the wherewithal to move on, into whatever comes next, which, as I’ll discuss more in Part 2 of this essay, is bound in one way or another to be a post-secular age.