The Successor Theology Rising
Some Fragments of a Culture in Transition
I have to confess that the firehose of daily content with which I’ve been engaged online has overwhelmed my capacity to ingest and process the volatile emissions flooding the culture. I have a dozen drafts in various stages of readiness and have been struggling to bring any of them to completion. I do have to take some time to remove myself from the firehose and do nothing but think and write and produce the sustained argument and exposition that the ongoing coup requires. I have been promising for a long time to become much more prolific. It’s now incumbent on me to deliver.
Fortunately, I feel ready. The screenshots and videos collected here should convey that drinking from the firehose, being overcome by its force, has not been an idle preoccupation. It had to be done. For the disorientation and derangement that one encounters online is an encounter with a disoriented and deranging pseudo-reality that has steadily impinged on the reality that once encompassed it, but that is now being outflanked by it.
In the summer of 2020, we learned that the virtually networked fan fictions which have subsumed the fact gathering function of the media can turn a local tragedy into an international frenzy that sets our cities aflame. These derangements are incubated online and have the power to ensnare real children in their net and persuade them to inscribe the mindless copypasta of the age into their own flesh. They possess the power to do so by virtue of having first ensnared the medical and political and social welfare apparatus and made those institutions into their catspaw.
The process of institutional capture that needs describing began decades ago. But as the world closes in on the destination envisioned by the drafters of the Yogyakarta Principles, (about which I’ll have more to say soon) we are beginning to see the Long March through the institutions become a sudden sprint toward a kind of sexual singularity. The Queering of the Imperial Hegemon has begun in earnest. What was once a meme has become a fact and is seeking to become a collective destiny. Those of us who have been attending closely to this process know it. Others want it to be something peripheral, something silly, something that can be readily accommodated without undue burdens, or merely a “culture war” in the petty sense of the term. And of course it is all those things too, and will remain so for many. For many, life proceeds as before, even as the ongoing coup institutionalizes itself all around them, and the words they can say and the thoughts they can think grow constrained and bent from one day to the next.
I began assembling a few screenshots this evening and just kept going, marveling at both the multifariousness of the ongoing crush and its rigid underlying unity. Pasted into this document is my Twitter timeline from the last week and a half. Anyone can see these tweets on my timeline, so this is not a real post. But assembling them in a document helps us to reframe them as the building blocks of a synoptic picture of a bizarre present. The last week has felt like one that crystallized the shape of the oncoming frenzy. Anyone perusing these fragments of a culture in dramatic flux can begin to sketch out the outlines of a master narrative not yet written and indeed, not yet writable. That’s my task — but I’m also asking you to help me process it in the comments section. The images and videos collected here, a fraction of my burgeoning collection, is fodder for a dozen essays of various lengths in itself. The essays will answer snide questions (such as “Why Die On this Hill?”) seriously and treat half-facetious hypotheses — such as one framing the emergence of the Trans Kid as a nation-building project of internal colonization — with the half-facetious seriousness they deserve.
Everything is changing all at once. The change moves in lockstep, even as it summons up bewilderment, chagrin, and pushback. The pushback feels too little and too late — for what openly declares itself now can only do so by virtue of territory already captured and held while the rest of us slumbered. The captured territory encompasses institutions that have until recently been granted plenary power to decide such matters. They have put themselves on a cliff, with no precedent — and perhaps no capacity —for climbing down safely.
I follow you and many of the accounts posting the tweets you compiled here, but when I scrolled through the entire list in this post, it really hit me how staggering this is and how complete the ideological capture has become. It’s really disheartening that we are so easily swayed to disavow reality.
I remember reading “The Emperor’s New Clothes” as a child and marveling that adults could be so stupid. It never occurred to me that I would be living a version of it when I was older. It’s a shame children and adults no longer read fables—they taught valuable lessons in a concise and entertaining way.
There's no such thing as "childhood" anymore. Everything that is appropriate for adults to think about is now appropriate for children to think about. Everything that is appropriate for adults to see and witness is now appropriate for children to see and witness. Children are now conceived as adults that have been alive for a shorter amount of time.
There are no longer any legitimate constraints on the fulfillment of ego-driven fantasy. We're at a point where trying to disabuse someone of a persistent and recalcitrant belief that he is a mermaid is regarded as borderline hateful. The fact that a teacher could reprimand a child for hatefulness for refusing to acknowledge a classmates' alleged cat-identity means that notions of justice and mutual respect have become as thin as the air at 35,000 feet.
I want to see more - a lot more - on ideological capture. This notion needs to be mainstreamed. When I first heard you (W. Yang) use it on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast, it resonated so deeply. We need this notion to be mainstreamed because I think it has the potential to be as powerful as "sexual harassment" might have been (NO disrespect intended to those who might regard the phenomenon of sexual harassment as more serious in its consequences than successor ideological capture). So many of us have been struggling to understand what happened to public consciousness, and how, to put into words with a single notion or phrase just how things got to be as crazy as they are now. I think many many people will feel empowered to resist the cultural currents if they have the conceptual resources to explain why it is utterly inconsistent with pluralism and democracy. Please please please give us more on ideological capture.