• Pronoia

Despite lots of really irritating New Age pantheistic nature worshipping and political stupidities I'm finding the book referenced in Liberate Your Imagination quite uplifting

These excerpts may help explain what attracts my interest:

Lately, I must admit, our work has seemed almost comically impossible. Many of our brothers and sisters believe that everything is upside-down and inside-out. Is war really peace? Is slavery really freedom? Is ignorance strength? How did it all get so insane?

Even many of the smartest among us seem to have lost their vision. Cynicism has become a supreme sign of intelligence. Compulsive skepticism masquerades as perceptiveness. Mean-spirited irony is chic. Beautiful truths are suspect and ugly truths are popular.

At this peculiar turning point in the evolution of our 14-billion-year-old master game, it ain't easy to carry out our mission. We've got to be both wrathful insurrectionaries and exuberant lovers of life. We’ve got to cultivate cheerful buoyancy even as we resist the temptation to swallow thousands of delusions that have been carefully crafted and seductively packaged by those among us who bravely volunteered to play the role of deceivers.

We have to learn how to stay in a good yet unruly mood as we overthrow the cockeyed mass hallucination that is mistakenly referred to as reality.

Maybe most importantly, we have to be ferociously and single-mindedly dedicated to the cause of beauty and truth and love even as we keep our imaginations wild and hungry and free. We have to be both disciplined and rowdy.

That's especially thorny because of the fact that a genocide of the imagination is raging world-wide. It threatens to render our imaginations numb and inert and passive and tame.

I know you know what I mean.

Aren't you psychically assaulted by dangerous images every day? Don't the media relentlessly blast you with their trendy doom and gloom fixation, barraging you with messages about how bad life is? Doesn't the entertainment industry force-feed you insipidly paranoid scenarios in the same way a French foie gras farmer crams eight pounds of corn down the gullet of his prize goose every day?

Its just so refreshing to come across anything at all with an enthusiastically positive world outlook that is not also right-wing and/or completely apolotical.

I had vaguely similar thoughts about pessimism while watching the Dr Who episode "The Lazarus Experiment" last Saturday. (WARNING - THAR BE SPOILERS AHEID).

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what part of 'spoilers' don't you understand???






Anyway, this ep was about an elderly scientist who had invented a machine that could make old people young again. Naturally, the scientist was portrayed as a ruthless beast with no sense of the appropriate limits to human ambition, and the Doctor's dire warnings about what might happen were shown to be common sense.

This 'common sense' was, of course, shown to be absolutely correct - the experiment went wrong and the scientist's DNA kept changing after he made himself young, so that he turned into a giant mutant scuttling crab-lizard-thing that eats people to stay alive.

Of course, after using the sonic screwdriver 6, 245 times in lieu of original thought by the scriptwriters, everything turned out to be OK and the evil monster was killed. My favourite time they used the screwdriver was to open the locked doors that stopped the crowd escaping the evil monster. Thing is, these doors were made of GLASS. I'd have used a sonic half-brick myself, but I guess I'm just not cut out for Timelording.

This episode just drove home to me what I already knew - Dr Who is NOT science fiction, it's gothic horror + spaceships + timetravel (Of course, anything with spaceships or the future is labelled as sci-fi by lazy genrists).

Despite the fact that the Doctor is meant to be a scientist, the relentless theme of the series (from day one) has been that people just can't be trusted with power and knowledge. It's a thoroughly reactionary attitude, and it's directly related to popular pseudo-leftism.

Of course, that's not going to stop people watching it and enjoying it. Hell, it's not going to stop me watching and enjoying it. And now that it has added gay, viewers aren't going to stop drooling over the hot people that Russell T Davies brings to the screen.

In fact, the new version of Dr Who has inspired much loyal fandom. My favourite example so far is this LolDoctor* slashfic of the Tenth Doctor and the current Master.

*(LolDoctor - pictures from Dr Who, captioned in a similar way to lolcats).

So, people aren't going to stop watching this stuff, especially if it is slick and sexy. That makes me think that it would be nice to see stuff that is just as slick, just as sexy, but packaged with a positive view of human achievement and accomplishment.

I had similar thoughts about last week's Dr Who episode, as well as about some previous ones.  I wouldn't say though that the overall message is that humans in general "can't be trusted with power and knowledge" - it's the baddies who can't (both human and non-human).

And I also don't see it as  pushing pessimism.   It's too much fun, too quirky, too whimsical  for that.  And I thoroughly enjoy the Doctor's soft spot for humans.  I don't think he comes over as a patronising saviour from on high either.  We *are* a strange species and I enjoy the way this comes across. 

And I love his sonic screwdriver.  Sometimes you just need one. 

keza says:

 And I love his sonic screwdriver.  Sometimes you just need one.

 Yeah, like when it's 5.15 on Friday afternoon, the script needs to be finished and everyone else is down the pub already sinking their second round

I don't want to write the sort of killjoy review of popular culture that alleged socialists seem to be so good at, but I would say that despite the fun and the quirkiness (which I see too), I do get a real sense of pessimism from a lot of the episodes (not just the recent series).

Examples that spring to mind include the 4-parter Robot (where the SRS (Scientific Research Society, IIRC) are an elite group of scientists who plan to take over the world so that they can run it 'rationally'), and 2006's 'Rise of the Cybermen', where

"The Cybermen tell the President that they have been upgraded to "Human.2", the next level of mankind. Every citizen will receive a compulsory free upgrade and become like them."

More technofear there than in a bunch of hippies whose Kombi van just broke down!

Certainly, I can see lots of good things as well, so I guess I'll go back to my original comment that it would be interesting to think of stories that we want to tell, and think about how to give them a chance of being as popular as the Doctor is.

I have watched Doctor Who, on and off, with varying levels of enthusiasm, since the 1960s and I think the current series is the best. It's interesting with popular culture that there tends to be something for everyone in it. However, for myself, I agree with keza when she says of the current Doctor: And I also don't see it as  pushing pessimism.   It's too much fun, too quirky, too whimsical  for that.  And I thoroughly enjoy the Doctor's soft spot for humans.  I don't think he comes over as a patronising saviour from on high either.  We *are* a strange species and I enjoy the way this comes across. 

I've found some of his 'philosophy' uplifting at times. My favourite, which is duly inscribed on our graffitti wall in our toilet at home, is: "I LIKE IMPOSSIBLE". I forget the context but the timelord was in a jam, and people around him were saying it was an impossible situation. With those amazing bright flashing eyes of David Tennant, he immediately replies: "I like impossible!". A little thing like the impossible ain't goin' to dampen his spirit. In more rebellious times, we used to say "Dare to struggle, dare to win!". It's all meat on the same bone, as I see it. Plus the extra element in the Who quote of questioning what is impossible. My grandparents would have regarded the remote control hand-set as an impossiblity.

 

Also, Doctor Who is pretty cool when it comes to building united fronts with former enemies and/or with lesser evils, in order to secure a worthwhile objective.

 

I'm sure that pessimists read their pessimism into it and the optimists will cheer on the bright aspects, and sometimes either is easier to do than at other times. But I guess we all like the Doctor a lot, and want to claim him for our side.

 

A few weeks ago, there was a two-part episode based in New York in the 1930s. It showed the oppression and exploitation of the unemployed workers and their capacity to rise up. It also revealed the daleks to be the ultimate oppressors - the "capitalist class", if you want to interpret it like that.

 

The battle against the daleks continues!

 

Barry