Hey all,
Thanks again for all the support. It means a lot to me to hear that you enjoy what I’m putting out.
How was your week? Mine was a blur of bad sleep and accomplishing little things here and there, but not feeling like I was moving forward. The good news of the past 3 weeks is that I’ve started running again (after 5 years avoiding it post-stroke). I’ve also started day-driving! My confidence is growing and I even managed a reverse parallel park, too (with lots of help from Max).
Continuing on from last week’s theme of innate personal qualities and labels, this week I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and reading about colonialism for uni and eugenics with Max (long story) and how we’re not clear of these woods at all.
Colonialism is paternalistic — meaning that one culture postures as though (or even believes) it "knows better" than an ‘inferior’ one. Mythologies are created around a benefactor bringing modernity to the displaced populous, when the motivation since the European conquest of the Americas has only been that of looting and then controlling resources.
One mythology that gained popularity (and credence) around the beginning of the 20th Century is eugenics. For settlers in majority white settled states, like the US, Canada and Australia, the application of eugenics was supported by a strand of saviour Christianity and the concerns of capital. A strong, powerful country had a workforce that believed in the sanctity of capital gains. First Nations peoples had a lifestyle too sustainable for that.
Capitalism spawned neoliberalism — the dangling carrot of prosperity from the rich to the poor — that looked less racist on the surface than pure colonialism. But the vestiges are manifold. We have a culture of individualism, a break down of community responsibility. There’s a passport hierarchy and immigration involves costly hoops to jump through. In Australia, you have to prove your worth as a potential citizen by not only having a job and paying taxes, but passing a complicated English test (the IELTS), too. And for everyone else, we’re being sorted into production machines by psychometric tests that were created by eugenicists!
These psychological tests celebrated by human resources and, I’m sure employers who favour their accountants above all else, are just another mythology. An offshoot, the Myers-Briggs personality test, still has its proponents, even though many in psychology deride it as being nothing more than repackaged astrology. That we could be innately suited to the world of over-work (and able to snatch that carrot above our heads) appeals to the idea of the individual.
This led me to ponder the popularity of the Chosen One trope in fiction. The idea that the protagonist has the exact innate qualities needed to defeat the big bad. Good writers play with the trope, but readers/audiences enjoy coming back to its purest form. In this piece by Margaret Owen, she discusses the limitations of the Chosen One storyline and the implications it can have on our perceptions of the world. She cleverly draws a comparison between the ‘chosen’ superheroes of comic books and the current social mores:
Instead of “Anyone can wear the mask,” it’s “Someone else was chosen to wear the mask, so I don’t have to.”
The Chosen One trope is uber-individualism, and the pandemic has really revealed who among us has bought this mythology wholesale.
Writers subvert the Chosen One trope in many ways. In Steve Sem-Sandberg’s ‘The Chosen Ones’, the titular characters are children selected to have horrific physiological experiments performed on them in Nazi-occupied Austria. Today, the mythology is that ‘essential workers’ are the chosen ones to bring our economy back to life.
In Frank Herbert’s ‘Dune’ series, the protagonist Paul and his mother travel to planets and propagate the mythology that he is the chosen one in order to conquer them. “He who controls the spice, controls the universe”. (By the way, OMG THE FRIGGIN TRAILER!!!!)
Listening to American podcasts this year, one of the more interesting takeaways is that with Trump’s presidency, it’s become clearer for many how deeply rooted the myth of American exceptionalism (colonial, Christian, capitalist) has been, and how the presidency should no longer be seen as the station of a ‘chosen one’. It’s just a job that the people want you to do well.
Anyway, just remember that Paul Atreides is not a hero. The point of the Dune series is that leaders should always be questioned.
The reason we keep coming back to the idea that a chosen few will take care of us is that it’s easier, and it absolves us from thinking about how our own actions contribute to the society we live in.
Here’s some fun and not-so-fun stuff from the week:
The Australian Government are fucking awful. Here are two reasons:
The Bushfire Royal Commission keeps skirting around Australia’s own participation in climate change;
Maori gamer and wood carver is visited by Prime Minister Jancinda Ardern:
How To Cross The Border From Mexico To The US:
New song from Lido Pimienta (& producer Ricky Reed). It’s her first single in (mostly) English:
That’s all for this week. Thanks for reading! If you like what you read, or just wanna show some support, please ‘like’ the newsletter by clicking the heart.
Until next week!