Almost everybody knows that what’s presented on WWE isn’t real fighting. But people still watch it, and get passionately wrapped up in it, because it’s based on a core narrative they just can’t get enough of. The narrative goes like this:
An endlessly put-upon hero whose abilities and efforts make him clearly deserving of higher recognition slogs on through intolerable unfairness and outright abuse, never losing his faith that he can prevail over the rotten people and systems bent on keeping him down—and a significant portion of the time, he actually comes out on top.
It’s hard to imagine a tale that could be latched onto more quickly, deeply, and consistently by people who feel put down and rendered intolerably small by today’s oppressive gigantism of scale, and yet can’t identify the real source of their pain—or even admit (or just recognize) how profound their suffering is.
Neither Trump nor Bannon seems ever to lose sight of how desperately many people crave an addictive alternate world where they can feel they’re playing a non-trivial role on a stirring mission. Can anyone hoping to supplant them afford to pay less attention to this yearning?
In the meantime, strong emotional reasons to latch onto particular narratives that aren’t based on actual reality lure people into increasingly toxic forms of neo-tribalism. And when paired with tribalism, the dangers inherent in a world of alternative realities increase exponentially.
The potential for the debilitating chaos of everyone feeling entitled to create and believe in their own reality, with none of these to be considered any more valid or worthy of belief than any other, might be mitigated if the alternate views of reality were scattered randomly in all directions—with one person believing, say, that he needs to wear a tinfoil hat to prevent Martians from interfering with his brain waves, while another one is convinced the Mayan deity Quetzalcoatl has re-emerged in the form of a costumed Mexican lucha libre wrestler on pay-per-view cable.
But today, we’re not so fortunate. Instead, widespread humiliation and boiling rage at feeling insignificant drive large numbers of people to latch onto stories that provide an explanation of their plight that they find acceptable (a vast shadowy cabal running everything from behind the scenes), along with a remedy they find even more satisfying (Tear it all down! Bring low the very same entities that have already laid them low).
The net effect of this destructive frenzy is like getting the previously-mentioned drivers wearing virtual-reality headsets to all see a demolition derby on their screens, where the most appropriate action is to crash into as much as possible.
The cringeworthy absurdity of this situation masks something sinister. A lot of what people are seeing on these virtual-reality devices has been carefully programmed by totalitarian adversaries, with the specific goal of rendering democratic forms of government no longer viable. Although our intelligence agencies are sure this is going on, and have been warning about its dangers for quite some time, at this point hardly anybody seems to know what to do about it.
One thing is clear, though: we need to respond to this threat with all the resources at our disposal.
