Today, I want to take a little bit of time to talk about why all culture being created today by the monoliths of society (AKA Hollywood and the like) feels stale and uninspired.
What is mass culture?
It seems congruent then that if we were to talk about the decay of mass culture that first thing we ought to do is define it, mass culture, or as it is put in a more candid light «popular culture» is commonly known as the set of artistic output, or values that are prevalent on a society at a point in time,
also encompassing the activities with are born through interaction with said media (think in this case about the link between the hellspawn looking «Funko pops» and how the came into existance thanks to the prevalence of Hollywood movien in the popular Zeitgeist). It is also worth taking into account that certain media con come and go from popular culture, as this only marks the relation of the subject (in this case broader society) with the objects (books, movies and the like), what this means is that as society changes culture changes with it.
Is mass culture necessary a bad thing?
Mass culture, by virtue of its very name can inflame some thoughts into out mind; massified, industrial, uninvolved, or in more net savvy terms «slop«. However, thing is that mass culture can (and has) aspired to much more. It is hard to imagine than in the modern industrial nation state, in which, it’s components can number in the tens of millions, the means in which culture used to be reproduce fall short. With the creation, of new tools, processes, and ideas, a new form of being subjected to culture do also appear.
Mass culture thus, implants itself into a new niche. The implementation of social values into the mind of the individual. In antiquity, culture was transmited through the word, the Illiad was recited, and it managed to irrigate the post bronze age collapse Greeks with a master morality which made them conquer half the world, the invention of the paper press engulfed the Catholic Church in a schism and Europe in a near centure of war. Most recently the 20th century showed us what the power of the Radio and film had to prepare a peoples for war, God knows what can be accomplished with the internet, if we did not waste our vital essence in atomizing Marvel movies, with their materialistic ethos.
Spengler talks about this…
Now, making a measured read on Spengler’s writing is well beyond the reach of this article, but the gist of Spengler is the following: Cultures are organic things, they are born into the world to carry an idea through, and as they live, they age, and as they age they die.
Our current society according to Spengler is the Faustian one, which came into existence in the 900’s a couple of centuries after the fall of Rome, after it mature we can see the Faustian ethos flourish into its better form, think of the 1700’s in which colonialism was a healthy expression of the curiosity and adveturous Spirit of the West rather than the imperialistic drive of the 19th century. As society advanced and developed it saw itself be deprived of it’s spiritual core, materialism takes hold of a society, God, morality and objective good get swept aside by science and cold harded results.
And thus the capacity of it’s creative genius dries up, and we see art become ‘remakes‘ of previous works, in antiquity we can observe this in the ammount of statues that were made out of previous ones, like Laocoön and His Sons which was a copy of a greek statue predating it by a couple of centuries, and in modernity we can see it by Hollywood trying to replicate it’s previous wroks, today cinemas are filled with 20th century classics reformed to appeal to the derascinated and atomized and materialistic «modern audience», think of the 3d Disney Movies, trying to appeal to the audience through the seer size of money spent on uncanny visual effects, or the one millionth samey capeshit movie, or the sporadic ‘Nosferatu (2024)‘ being critically acclaimed but adding nothing to the original, being thus redundant on arrival.
But this will not be overcomed if we were to magically kick all the writters and suplant them with actually competent people, the problem is that what Western society had to say has already been said, we’ve already had out Cervantes, our Mozart, our Shakespeare. We have conquered the hummanities, the art, all sentiment has been explored. The problem of why Mass culture is bad is not that the writers suck, or that we use too much visual stimmuly, the problem is that there is nothing new to say.
Or at least is what Spengler says, him being overtaken by nordic pesimissim. I do not agree with him, but it’s an interesting oulook on things.