Say goodnight to the Bad Guy

Every so often, the world chucks up a period of complete uncertainty. We are living on top of a paranoid fault line in time. Here’s a list of things I should be worried about:

_Government is becoming a whimpering incredulity paid off by every right-wing corporation with money and the Eurozone’s rapidly seeming more and more fucked and David Cameron this and David Cameron that and Osborne hasn’t got a Plan B and his Plan A isn’t working and we’re all becoming machines and everything has got a dollar sign attached to it and the price of everything has gone up and banks banks BANKS!_

So, I’m thinking noose. Or possibly shot-gun. When I watch the news for long periods of time, the above list is literally a direct notation of my trembling, contorted, hyper- paranoid interior monologue. Honestly, the world can become terrifying if one pays enough attention to it.

So I’m sure we’re all agreed that it would be rather despicable of me to continue in the style seen above. That kind of stuff is what pub smoking areas are for anyway. No, I’m more concerned about analyzing why we complain the way we do. Why is it that when one genuinely has something to say about the frailties of our society, it so easily descends into unpunctuated, overly-conflated?

As an illustration, I’d like to compare two very different messages that you can extrapolate from Occupy Wall Street. On the one hand, you have the ground-level interviews where protestors rant aimlessly at banks and general human suffering – on the other, you have the main speeches (see Slavoj Žižek, Michael Moore), which display clarity of thought and a sense of strong intellectual purpose.

Why does this clarity not permeate into the collective? It cannot be due a difference in education – I know many intelligent people who all too often fling their fists in the air and cry “CAMERON!” after doing something so inconsequential as stubbing their toe or dropping their cigarette in a puddle.

What seems to me more likely is that this confused reaction is due to a hard-wired setting in our social consciousness. It is a mentality crafted by popular films, music and television. It is a lie that we tell ourselves day-in-day-out, and it has become the way in which we conceive and structure our perception of reality.

Al Pacino said it best: “You nee’ people like me so you can point your fucking finger and say: ‘That’s the Bad Guy.’ Well say goodnight to the Bad Guy!” Very true. But in the world we live in now, there is no capital-B Bad Guy. We have created him/her from a bunch of abstracts – and our confusion lies in our dependency to this philosophical personification.

The system is broken. That is, the very structural essence of the world we live in is cracked and bruised, painted over with product-placement and seductive slogans. Blair and Cameron, Goldman Sachs and Kweku Adoboli, are just the surface of a wider social problem. We can turn all our energies on them because they have been hand-crafted to resemble the big, bad Cuban-gangster Bad Guy. So don’t be surprised when the rage pointed at them turns into a slurred and directionless furore. They are not what you are really angry about.

The truly mature way of looking at the world will be to spot the trends and structural inadequacies of life as we know it. We are the ones that are going to have to clear the shit off the floor when this building falls down, and we as a culture must have better architectural instincts than the people who built the last one.

Furthermore, I posit that this way of looking at the world will bypass blind party-political loyalty, which feeds into the heroes-villains bullshit anyway. Can we realistically arrive at a cohesive, culturally aware mentality? We better – if not, consider us all doomed to a howl of defeat. In other words, consider us shafted.