With genocidal wars back to bombastically rage in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, exposing the futility of extant human forms of self-governance, there should be less and less to write about, but duty is always calling to the futilist, from the micro- to the macro- and everywhere in between.
“Conspiracy theories,” as a theory, have been a conspiracy since, well, you guessed it, that fateful year of 1960, as the Google N-gram shows in dramatic take-off mode ever since. If you get more two or more humans together to perform some act, anything, then you’ve got the necessary components for a “conspiracy,” but how is the average numb intellect supposed to formulate a reasonable hypothesis about each and every nascent-to-fulll-blown conspiracy floating up from the depths of collective anxiety these days?
Where is the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator for conspiracy theories, that could give us outside-the-Beltway nobodies an updated score on the likelihood of actual fraudulent ill-minded evil intent behind any of the conspiracy propostions of the moment? Since this is the age of Information Deluge, there is probably something like that, a Snopes.com, but there needs to be some numerical precision in graphic form. Yes, the internet is awash in disinformation, malinformation, non-information, and the populace is so used to its ignorance being reinforced that making informed judgements about nefarious plotting (read- daily business in corporate suites) allegations has become like looking for a needle in the Gulf of Mexico blob of floating plastic, but here’s a very short list. Bear in mind that no one should care that much about conspiracy theories, since there is so little power from below to find justice for the perpetrators.
Who Killed JFK? - 87.5 wingnuts. Some good candidates for the conspiracy for the murder, but cover-up too strong.
9/11 Inside Job? – 11.3 wingnuts. Intentional disregard of signal intelligence from some malefactors, probably, but institutional cover-up too strong. No Bush, Jr. detonations of buildings,
UFOs, QAnon, deities, ghosts, astrology, homeopathy, past-life regressions, birtherisms, anti-vaxx, 0 wingnuts. Pure bullshit. Maybe there’s a .1 in there for a piece of actual dust in those piles of horseshit, but the human world is facing incipient real cataclysms, and you want to entertain specious nonsense? Knock yourselves out with these speculative fictions, but there are other popular forms of social culture that are based on lies and deceit (also known as “capitalism”), and for that you need to be steeped in futilism.
Take, for instance, the world of off-Broadway musical shows, such as the jukebox musicals (un-named on the advice of counsel, who says even micro-blogs can be sued to oblivion by large corporate entities) now on tour across the American occupied territories of the southeast in 2024. At one such show, the performance was highly dynamic, beautifully danced and sung, greeted with huge applause and constant hosannas of praise for the young professional performers. A rousing good time, competently put together, impeccably presented to the standing-room only crowd.
Okay, so where’s the futilism then, you might ask? What’s the complaint, now, this time? Can’t there be anything “good” anymore, straightforwardly of extraordinary positive value, in this overdetermined world?
The core problem is this issue, which popped up a few minutes into this highly stylized, note-perfect choreographed show, obvious only, it seemed, to a dyed-in-the-wool, lifelong futilist. There is no way to dance live and sing live. If you are dancing live, which for damn sure all the members of the cast were doing constantly and highly athletically during the show, then the singing, and even the narrating and dialogue, was an elaborate lip-syncing production, eq-ed, sonically enhanced, modulated at a state-of-the-art mixing board.
All that exuberant cheering from the mostly older, New England crowd was for singing that was done in a production studio months-to-years earlier. Well done, lips-movers! Great faking! Tremendous miming!
Objection! The performers were all wearing slim taped devices on their foreheads. Objection – musicians were shown to be live at some point. Is this futilism simply more conspiracy-theory crankology? Where’s the proof? How can you know for sure what you saw was in any way fake?
The answer lies in having a functional evaluation system, relying on logic and experiential familiarity with productive corruption. There was no heavy breathing after, or during, any intense-motion dancing, by any performer. The sound effects were much, much louder and crystalline than any live sound could have been, such as in the snapping of a briefcase. The narrator’s speech was fundamentally altered with precise echo effects and exacting sibilance, only requiring some inexact lip-flapping to seem live.
If in our age there is a performance, there will be every incentive to use artificial means to establish the certainty of positive reception. Nobody, from performer to audience, wants an off-key, huffing rendition of a hit. Nobody in the public arena of today wants a lined, sagging face showing the unavoidable effects of actual aging, so plastic surgery centers operate ’round the clock, coast-to-coast. Nobody wants sub-par performances from professional athletes on million-dollar contracts, so PEDs are ingested at an exponential rate with aging to recover from injury or to achieve better results. Nobody can live in a world without fossil fuels, so the sacrifice zones in the hinterlands are attacked with even greater zeal and greenwashing cover-ups.
Where’s the proof? What about testing regimens? What about governmental oversight? What about codes of ethics? Why haven’t whistleblowers come forward to protect the sainted audience from these control frauds?
There’s the con – follow the money. The money is not in the oversight, but in the production. Physics and logic cannot be overcome by credulous boosterism. All these high-stakes, big-money performances are mobbed-up in counterfeit, fake-ass production methods. The show, after all, must go on.
MACRO-FUTILISM 