The World Was Fun Before We Started Analysing Everything
The death of simple pleasures in the age of ideological obsession
Popular culture has performed a remarkable feat.
It’s taken a planet bursting with astonishing people, beautiful places and gloriously ridiculous moments ... and somehow made it all feel like a compulsory university seminar.
Not because reality has changed, but because we have.
Somewhere along the way we stopped looking at the world and started looking at our interpretation of the world.
We no longer saw trees. We saw climate change.
We no longer saw neighbourhoods. We saw colonisation, privilege, patriarchy, capitalism, systemic bias, and whatever fashionable “-ism” happened to be trending that semester.
Reality became nothing but raw material for ideology.
Imagine a group of people watching the same football match at a local stadium …
One spectator sees racism because not a single player on the field is black.
The other sees environmental destruction because the stadium’s electricity comes from coal.
A third sees toxic masculinity after a scuffle just before the half time siren.
And the fourth guy - poor bloke - who just wanted to watch a game of footy because he enjoys the competition and is partial to a meat pie with sauce … well, he’s dismissed as the intellectually unserious one.
Nobody can agree on the simplest observations these days because nobody is observing anything anymore. Everyone’s interpreting.
Which brings me to the now disgraced Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday.
Leaving aside the recent controversy that led to Arday’s resignation from the prestigious university, he confessed something the other day that was unintentionally revealing.
He explained to a group of uni students that, before studying sociology, he loved nothing more than watching Home and Away and Neighbours.
He told them …
“When I started watching Home and Away and Neighbours, I’d just watch it and it was escapism. For one hour I was Australian”
But then he explained how becoming a sociologist was the worst thing that happened to him, because it robbed television of its simple pleasure …
“And the worst thing that happened to me was becoming a socialist. You become a sociologist and you start looking at things through a different lens.
Suddenly he couldn’t just watch Home and Away. He had to interrogate it.
“You think Australia has an indigenous population, first islanders. How come none of them are present in this utopia that is Summer Bay?
“And then you have Ramsey Street and you think: oh my god there’s no (Indigenous) people. You start looking at it really differently it’s not reflected in these spaces.”
There’s an honesty in that admission that’s almost refreshing.
Most people spend years pretending that their preferred ideological obsession is enriching their life.
Professor Arday simply admitted that his ideological bent made him less happy.
That’s progress.
The tragedy isn’t that he noticed something (ie that there was no Aboriginals performing smoking ceremonies on he Ramsey Street nature strip) Anyone can notice something.
The tragedy is that he apparently lost the ability to enjoy a fictional television show because it failed to behave like an Australian Bureau of Statistics census.
The remarkable part is that this passes for sophisticated thinking.
We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that enjoying something at face value is naïve, while dissecting every frame for hidden power structures is a sign of intellectual maturity.
I’m not entirely persuaded.
Some of the wisest people I know couldn’t spell “intersectionality” if you spotted them the first 16 letters.
Yet they possess something increasingly rare: the ability to distinguish between fiction and reality, entertainment and ideology, observation and projection.
They understand an unfashionable truth.
Sometimes a television show is just a television show.
Sometimes a joke is just a joke.
Sometimes a footy match is just a a bunch of blokes kicking around a bag of air while the crowd pretend their lives depend upon it.
And sometimes the smartest person in the room isn’t the one who can discover oppression lurking behind every pot plant and weatherboard fence.
Sometimes it’s the person quietly enjoying the story while everyone else is busy explaining why they’re no longer allowed to.
Perhaps that’s why the world feels less fun than it used to.
Not because reality became unbearable.
Because we’ve become incapable of leaving reality alone.
We’re just unwittingly becoming victims of the thought police
We are being forced to change how we think and speak
Put on a dress and say your a woman and use the ladies facilities, no worries at all, then take your dress off wash your lipstick off and go home to your wife and children for dinner
Police covering up the Rotherham rape gangs so as not to appear racists
Acceptance of a new vocabulary of meaningless words
We’re are being conned big time and just walking into a giant abyss from which there will be very little chance of escape within a generation
This thought process is very much a product of the West. As previously mentioned, spending about three weeks in a third world country would probably cure most people of inward navel gazing and analysing everything.