culture

What If They’re All In On The Lie?

by

There’s a thing about lying in that, past a certain point, liars need people to actually believe them. Not just pretend to believe them, but actually believe them so they do what the liar wants. You can’t have that terrible risk of being dishonest to someone and finding out they’re as bad as you are. They might not do what you want or lie to you about it.

In the year of 2026 (how I hate to date myself, but it is necessary) I keep an eye on political pathology, conspiracy theories, and what is currently called The Right in America and Elsewhere. I say currently, again, since context and times change.

One of the things I notice as I scrape through podcasts and writings on conspiracy theorists is how many of them lie and it’s clear they’re lying together. You can watch or listen to assorted people, famous and want-to-be-famous shaping narratives as they go, taking the yes-anding to new levels as they add things together. Liars lying together.

But these are the actions of Conspiracy Theorists who, let’s be honest, are pretty much the same as what we call Influencers. They have a lifestyle of, well, saying and promoting things. Their goal is to Influence. I guess we used to call it propaganda or marketing, but now it sound almost respectable until they think about it.

Then I look at the legions of would-be Influencers. Maybe some of them want to make it a career, maybe they want social media hits. But many of them also jump onto the conspiracy train, be it to sell their courses in 5D Immune Meditation or for likes. So their job is already to at least sort-of lie to us, then they latch onto the Conspiracy crowd and just get in on the lie.

In the past I commented about how people have sounded more and more like the 3 P’s – Politicians, Pundits, and Preachers. The Conspiracy Theorist-Influencer-Political dynamic has made so many people impossible to differentiate, from the podcaster spewing crazed anti-semetic theories on aliens down to someone who just wants to be loved for their content. It’s liars all the way down.

But I wonder how far down it goes. Because if you’ve ever heard someone “normie” talk these weird theories you wonder how much they believe them. Is that friend of yours who’s getting increasingly radicalized one of the honest people being affected or are they getting in on it?

How much of our culture, our politics, is liars all the way down? Everyone is lying, from selling products to wanting to “own” their family members in a dinner table argument?

This makes me think the more conspiratorialist side of American (and world?) culture is inherently unstable. If everyone’s job is to lie, to be abstract from the truth, top to bottom, how do you function? How do you trust each other, since the person in on the lie with you has proven they will lie? For that matter how much of conspiratorial politics is even actually believed?

What if the people who are bellowing the loudest don’t believe their own bullshit and neither do most of the people who listen to them? What if everyone is lying?

Do I have an answer? No, but I invite speculation. And I will probably write more on it.

I’d promise to write more, but I’m being honest.

–Xenofact

Evangelical Christianity All The Way Down

by

Something I’ve seen coming up in a number of podcasts and videocasts are people talking about – and dealing with – just how American (and Western) cultural thinking is a essentially Evangelical Christianity. It doesn’t matter what your religion is, if you grew up in America, you’ve probably got a good shot of fire-and-brimstone apocalyptic evangelism in your head.

The more I think about it, the more I see it. Yes that may be pattern matching, but I think there’s something really there.

There’s a streak of righteous punitive cruelty in American culture. Yes, we’re used to it in the “God hates everyone I hate me types.” But I also see it in people supposedly with progressive or humanist values, suddenly ready to throw out their beliefs to enjoy watching “them” suffer. There’s also a strong belief that people will actually learn from punishment, believed by the people who A) aren’t being punished and B) will probably say that they don’t change their beliefs just because someone threatens them.

There’s a kind of “Divinity-seeking” as well. There’s people, again who are distinctly NOT Evangelical Christians, who are still looking for a Big Daddy to tel them everything. Maybe it’s a political figure, maybe a writer, maybe some activist. They may even claim to have some belief in principles, but those principles are expressed in very anthropomorphic ways. Ever heard someone talk about “what science wants” or “what the economy” desires?

There’s the evangelism. Look, I’m a believer, I’m a guy that likes to speak and preach good ideas. I do enjoy it, but I wonder how much of this is cultural influence, wonder what I’d be with less influence from Evangelism. How many talks on technology, ecology, whatever sound like church services – it’s enough to lead you to find mind-numbing TED Talks soothing.

But most of all, over it all, is the waiting for Judgement Day. America has a huge streak of waiting for/wanting the Big Boom/Big Uplift. Once you think about it it’s hard to not see it everywhere.

It’s in our fear of Nuclear War hanging over our heads for decades – an understandable reaction.

It’s in talk of an Eco-apocalypse, which also includes no small number of people who hint darkly that we deserve it and that they will survive in a new heaven.

It’s in endless speculation about social collapse – and the order that follows. It’s not just racist internet fantasies, it’s people who happily talk about how Capitalism will fall apart and then we get heaven on Earth (without the effort of building it, apparently).

And as of this writing it’s in the speculation on “Artificial Intelligence” which apparently will both kill us all, and lead to an enlightened new world, and also give us AI girlfriends/boyfriends. The apocalypse is a selling point, be it edgy fear of “being so powerful” or talk of utopias (without covering the economic issues of the same). AI evangelism feels so familiar, the God in the Machine indeed.

I’d recommend taking a good look at how much of your life and actions is just repurposed Evangelical Christianity that you absorb like spiritual microplastics. Trust me, it’s worth examining.

Maybe at some point, I might even have to followup on my own experiences . . .

–Xenofact

Creating Across the Centuries

by

Art Connects us, art is part of bigger things.

Digital collage is one of my artistic media, and one that I didn’t expect to become such. I originally picked it up for my work in zines, and then it just became “my thing.” Now I regularly examine public domain art resources, usually museums, for interesting images and such to work into my mashups.

My collage work is, for those aware of it, rather surreal. This originated out of my early zine days, punk, and the Church of the SubGenius. It was honed by an interest in alchemical and spiritual diagrams of yore and the Surrealists themselves. I combine images from across the centuries to create something new – many times something that surprises me as Surrealist work is Rorschach blots in reverse.

Once when poking around for some backgrounds to work with and inspire me, I searched the Welcome Collection, I stumbled across a lot of lovely, colorful prints. These were meant to be part of something called a “Toy Theater,” which I’d never really heard of. So I took a break from my art-searching to learn a little history.

Toy Theaters, to judge by the Wikipedia article I found and the art I had discovered were “a thing” in the 19th century, with interest surviving to this day. You could buy backgrounds and kits at theaters and operas, scripts were available, and there were of course fancier and self-made versions. Imagine going to the theater and then your parents buy you the kit so you can reenact the story you saw!

Toy Theaters, to an extent, were the same as merchandise and action figures we know from our mass media movies, albeit more personal. You’d assemble your own theater, you might customize it or alter it, you may even have cutout actors based on people you had seen the night before. They were also stages of the imagination.

Despite having scripts and the like, we all know people like to create. I’m sure over the decades that there were romances and battles and skulduggery among casts that would never have met. I’m sure people got silly, had fun, or got serious. They could mash things up, do things there way.

Then, across the decades, I realized they were like me.

Here I was, looking at images of Toy Theater backgrounds, finding inspiration just as someone would unpacking their Toy Theater kit. I combined disparate elements in a fury of inspiration, no different than someone playing with the Theater or taking a stab at the equivalent of fanfiction. There, across ages, I was doing the same thing that those people with their Toy Theaters did – creating my own world out of the parts.

Every artist who’d made these backgrounds and printer who’d printed these prints was having their work still used by people like me. Every parent who lovingly saved their child’s toys, toys which eventually were donated to museums, were seeing their effort live on in how that art was seen and used.

I felt both small and large, part of something bigger but also just me, there, a guy behind a computer playing with graphic programs.

Art, art has so many connections that it lets us feel the largeness of it all. A hundred years ago a family happily assembled a Toy Theater. Now I create strange and wonderful surrealist work. And we’re all the same, part of the same thing.

–Xenofact