Unfortunately, whether we want to be or not, we are all now floating in the “perpetual now” of the weaponized Unreal, we must push back the false narratives and shore up our ability to cope with it's ever-increasing weight.
One of the side effects of a perpetual and ever increasing amount of information overload is to be stuck in a moment that seems to be apart from the natural flow of history and time. it keeps those ensnared in a perpetual state of exhaustion, fear and ambiguity and outside of time.
@brooklynmarie.bsky.social I'm just going to lay out the whole damn thing I guess since I haven’t really spent much time on here explaining how this all works. I figured since we had been talking about this recently you might want to speak to this.
i think it’s very important to articulate our story of the future at a time when fascists are trying to present theirs as inevitable and liberals cower at the thought of even presenting one
one of the things I am working on right now and the paper I’m writing is on the power of storytelling within the far right and it’s use to bolster their both external and internal social reproduction. the left once had the monopoly on building futures but abandoned it. we have to imagine better
i’m looking forward to reading it 🖤 i’m totally with you. i had to read sorel for a history of fascism class and it convinced me fascists are reliant on mythology and we can’t afford to leave it uncontested ground
Ooh are you going to talk about oral theory and the “king crab legs and birthday cake” narratives started by 1980s Republicans to create a completely fictional “welfare queen” archetype they could use to project onto poor (and often also Black) people to destroy public benefits policy?
Not that you necessarily need help but orally transmitted mythologies are a huge component of the far right and of how the moderate right became increasingly radicalized and hateful so I’m always down to nerd out about that.
The ones circulating now wouldn’t be considered “pure” bc they’re not preliterate but they share many characteristics w/classical oral histories incl lexical bundling and noun-epithet pairings with deeply complex meanings greater than the sum of their parts which imo is why they spread so easily.
