A NEXUS FOR SURVIVAL

Sex/love interacts with terrain/travel. The first is often used as a marker for success which is how it became entangled with profit. The second is access to food, which along with sex, drives the existence of the species. Profit is balanced with “enough”. To not have enough is to end. All people alive now are descended from people who had enough long enough to replicate. To have more than enough usually means to keep on living plus to share or to store.

This tangle of essentials is so basic as to be almost unconscious, but they affect everything we do, as individuals, as cultures and as a species. Once we began to write — even more than to discuss — and to translate words into numbers, we left the realities and began to believe the abstracts. This has never been more true than now.

Radio, then TV, and finally movies — originating in one place and time, through the work of one body of creators — has created a pseudo-reality so persuasive and vivid that many people have abandoned reality to get involved with criminals, imagined medieval life, and the sex lives of impossibly beautiful women. Because so many people watch the same stories, they seem very real.

Screenwriters, the most influential, have a tight grip on the world they made up because it is based on profit, their own livelihood. Whatever sells. What is marketable is a mix of arousal and reassurance. (Follow me and I’ll save you.) Even Putin believes everybody’s favorite story, which is to stick to the known while forgetting why it is lost, a combination of overvaluing sex or violence or a failure to recognize and nurture the good and future-making. Trump denies the election. Putin denies the break-up of the USSR. But they are self-starving, preventing the birth of the continuing species.

We need more and better stories. Personally, I really liked “Don’t Look Up”. Better doesn’t mean soppy sentimental.