“They’ve taken away joy and replaced it with entertainment.”
You know those moments when someone says something casually in conversation that sets you back in your chair and makes you think “Fuck! Yes! That’s it!” Suddenly whatever ‘it’ is, you start seeing it everywhere. And it was always so obvious. Why didn’t you see it before? That happened to me this week, during a chat held over a hotdog stand.
We were discussing the misery of social media addiction — which we all have, even you. No, don’t bother denying it, I know because I do too despite my better judgement, and so does everyone else I know. You just can’t get away from it these days. Those little screens, which were meant to make our lives easier, faster, more fulfilling, have instead turned us all into slack-jawed, bent-necked half-wits, grunting our way grumpily through life. And yet none of us can put them down. Try it. I dare you. Your hand will be itching soon enough, your thumb reaching for the Facebook or TikTok or whatever icon, even as your brain screams “Don’t do it! It’s not interesting!”
But you do it anyway, and, schuap, you’re sucked in. Oh look, that cat jumped and missed. Ha ha. Oh look, my friend James says the new Indiana Jones film sucks. Oh look, aliens have arrived. Oh look, that cake decoration is amazing. Oh, look.
Entertainment, not joy.
‘Entertainment, not joy.’ The phrase has been ricocheting around my head like a pinball, lighting things up. Immediately I was minded of a video I’d watched just last week, an old Triggernometry episode featuring Keri Smith, a reformed Social Justice Warrior (SJW), who was discussing her experience of exiting the religious cult that is ‘Woke’.
Right at the end of the discussion, Konstantin Kisin asks her: “When you were a SJW, when were you allowed to be happy?”
“That's a good question,” Keri replied,
“because, it's funny, I just wrote down a word [...] I think of them as joy eaters. They really, really don't like expressions of joy, and if you are celebrating something at the wrong time— For example I have a friend who’s daughter is in high school and she posted some beautiful graduation pictures with her grandma in June, right when Social Justice was going huge. She got taunted and piled-on online by her fellow students for posting these joyful photos at an ‘inappropriate time’. ‘You should be posting the black square of solidarity for blackout … How dare you celebrate this really momentous occasion in your life? That’s your privilege’. That’s your white privilege, that’s your straight privilege, whatever. So any joy you’re taking out of life is seen as, at the very least, an expression of your privilege, to have that joy. So that encourages you to do — what? Well: ‘I’m really serious about the fight, I can’t be joyful. I need to always be fighting’. Everything has to be this outrage, posting outrage about things that are happening and showing that I’m a good person by not having these moments of joy and frivolity.”
Jones is right. At its heart, the Woke cult is a puritanical cult. The same people who are currently screaming Love is love! while shoving a pride flag down your throat all June long would have been enforcing Jim Crow segregation in the Deep South in the 1950s, or calling for Life of Brian to be banned for blasphemy in the 70s. Now they call for Life of Brian to be banned because the ‘I want to be Loretta’ scene transgresses trans ideology, which is a new kind of blasphemy. But they don’t really care what the cause is; they are miserable, and gosh darn it, if they have to be, then so do you.
And don’t you dare suggest that maybe, just maybe, rather than dwelling in misery we could seek joy. As Jones continued:
“They also do the same when people start to improve themselves. So one of the early pile-ons I saw in the Social Justice [movement] — this was years before I left it — was, there was a huge dust up and pile-on on Maria Caine [...] she was called ‘fit mom’ by the press. She did fitness classes for mothers and toddlers — for free. She was teaching moms how to work out with their kids, and she had a poster with her looking all fit with her three kids and it said ‘What's your excuse?’ Oh! They said she was fat shaming... it made it into the national news.
That was one of the first Social Justice feminist pile-ons I saw happening in all of my echo chamber and all of the feminist blogs I read that made it into the mainstream press. She did the interview circuit; they piled on her two or three times. And really at the root of that is they don’t like anyone saying you can improve yourself if you want to. They view it as fat shaming. And at the time I didn’t believe it was but I was quiet. […] I didn’t like what was happening to her, but I was one of the people who stayed quiet through cowardice.”
Cowardice perhaps, but it’s hard to stand against the tide when we’re awash with social signals telling us in no uncertain terms that joy is not permissible. Those signals have been with us for a long time, the last three or four decades at least.
The excellent Sam Klemens over at The Unhedged Capitalist wrote a neat post this week encapsulating the miserable busybodiness that has overtaken America. Sam has been living in Asia for the last few years, an area which is not generally thought of as ‘free’ in the same way America is. Yet…
“There are no lifeguards or stupid rules at the beach here. If I want to throw sand or drown it’s well within my rights to do so. I can park anywhere and never get a ticket, drive on the sidewalk, smoke in a restaurant, blow out my stereo at 3 am, let my dog off the leash anywhere, start a fire by the side of the road to cook hot dogs on or do almost anything conceivable so long as it doesn’t harm another person or their property.”
Whereas in America…
In my younger and more vulnerable years… my friend and I were surveying the streets of Midtown Manhattan on July 4th, drinking the vodka of the impecunious when a libations inspector sidled alongside in his blue and white cruiser, leaned out the window and made unpleasant allegations to as the lawfulness of our activities. Well, it turns out that celebrating freedom from tyranny, liberty from persecution and the independence of one’s country from an overbearing monarch can be memorialized in many fashions, but not with a stiff drink in public you maniac! I got a ticket and the sidewalk got a dousing of fourth-rate vodka that the officer compelled me to jettison.
Sam rightly points out that “America’s love for the rules and embracing of the ticket is not an oppressive cloud of horror that keeps one awake at night.”
However,
“it’s not nothing either. More than occasionally I feel a heaviness in America that I don’t feel in other countries. The experience is similar to the little hit of anxiety that comes from knowing that there is something you should be doing but you’re not sure what. And to be honest, it’s kind of lame and I wish the USA could lighten the hell up.”
It’s not just America. The same spell has fallen over much of the Anglosphere, including little old Blighty herself. Yes, the island that invented freedom has given in to the petty tyranny of the apparatchik, and it goes much further than ‘No ball games’ signs on public lawns.
To take just one minor example: in 2006, Newcastle Upon Tyne City Council was ridiculed after it emerged that the council had been spending taxpayer funds on collecting conkers from chestnut trees to prevent children gathering the conkers themselves.
Steve Charlton, environmental services delivery manager for the council, told the press: “When kids are trying to get the conkers down they can fall and damage cars, or sometimes children throw them at windows and cause damage. This is the sort of thing we try to avoid. And also, by taking the conkers off the problem trees it reduces the chances of kids getting hurt if they try to climb them.”
The gathered conkers were being handed over to local schools so that the kids could still have conker fights, and I’m not sure whether that’s more ludicrous than stopping the kids from fighting with them altogether or not.
Still, it could have been a lot worse. Two years earlier, South Tyneside Borough Council provoked fury by chopping down the chestnut trees to stop kids hurting themselves while gathering conkers. And in the same year, one headteacher in Carlisle made children wear goggles while conker fighting, while another banned the game over nut allergies.
The Blair years were, in many ways, the incubator for the Nanny State the British people now live in. During Blair’s reign, a new law was passed every three and a quarter hours — not including the thousands of EU regulations that were also being handed down apace. And nothing much really changed when the Tories took over. Remember David Cameron’s ‘Nudge Unit’? By 2017, the Institute of Economic Affairs ranked Britain #2 EU-wide in its Nanny State Index, behind only Finland, thanks to its litany of sin taxes and petty rules. Things haven’t improved since, as anyone hectored and bullied over mask mandates and social distancing during Covid will readily attest to.
But with Social Media, those social signals have reached full volume. Another pinball hit this week — ping! — lighting up the neuroreceptors when I read a post by a good Facebook friend of mine, Lachlan Nicholson. He wrote:
“The reason I use social media less these days, as well as my conscious choice to put out positive stuff when I do, is that I'm sick to death of the morbid negativity of internet culture. People seem determined to wallow in how terrible everything is, as if bitterness and resentment are indications of wisdom.
“Constant consumption of culture war content is draining us of empathy and turning any given event into fodder for shitposts, no matter how dark or genuinely sad.
“Engaging with the world primarily through screens has the result of disconnecting us from the reality of what we see. I am not saying people don’t have the right to joke about whatever they like, I’m telling you that as someone who has worked in media and emergency services, and seen first hand the effects of robbery, rape, and murder, I personally will not seek joy in the suffering of others, even if they are richer than me or we disagree politically.”
One only had to witness the crowing over the death of the five people aboard the Titan last week to know that Lachlan is right. Social media has made us shallow and callow and miserly. Entertainment, not joy.
Jim Crow laws and Christian puritanism were defeated, and Woke absurdities will be too, in time. But things are harder this time round, because it’s only away from the fake confectionary of on-screen ‘entertainment’ that we can experience that sort of transcendental joy which reminds us to be thankful, and to strive for personal improvement, and that gives us the courage to stand up for truth and justice.
“All Joy reminds. It is never a possession, always a desire for something longer ago or further away or still ‘about to be’.”
— C.S. Lewis, ‘Surprised by Joy’.
So what is joy? And why is it transcendental in a way that entertainment is not?
In his book ‘Surprised By Joy’, C.S. Lewis writes of his conversion from atheism to Christianity, a conversion, he writes, which came about slowly but as the result of noticing a feeling which he termed ‘Joy’. It was a feeling which first came to him in early childhood. See if you recognise his description.
As I stood beside a flowering currant bush on a summer day there suddenly arose in me without warning, and as if from a depth not of years but of centuries, the memory of that earlier morning at the Old House when my brother had brought his toy garden into the nursery. It is difficult to find words strong enough for the sensation which came over me; Milton’s “enormous bliss” of Eden (giving the full, ancient meaning to “enormous”) comes somewhere near it. It was a sensation, of course, of desire; but desire for what? Not, certainly, for a biscuit-tin filled with moss, nor even (though that came into it) for my own past. Ioulian pothô [Oh, I desire too much.] — and before I knew what I desired, the desire itself was gone, the whole glimpse withdrawn, the world turned commonplace again, or only stirred by a longing for the longing that had just ceased. It had taken only a moment of time; and in a certain sense everything else that had ever happened to me was insignificant in comparison.
…
I call it Joy, which is here a technical term and must be sharply distinguished both from Happiness and from Pleasure. Joy (in my sense) has indeed one characteristic, and one only, in common with them; the fact that anyone who has experienced it will want it again. Apart from that, and considered only in its quality, it might almost equally well be called a particular kind of unhappiness or grief. But then it is a kind we want. I doubt whether anyone who has tasted it would ever, if both were in his power, exchange it for all the pleasures in the world. But then Joy is never in our power and pleasure often is.
It was noticing the phenomenon of Joy, and the attempt to track it to its source that led Lewis, as an adult, to a relationship with the transcendent, in his case as a Christian. But the experience of Joy requires a connection to reality, because it is the ultimate reality, a glimpse at the Real that lies beyond this Plato’s Cave of a world.
The addictive power of our little lightboxes pulls us all too easily away from opportunities which can give rise to Joy: watching children or animals tumbling in play, immersing ourselves in nature, reading classic literature, looking at art. I think this is the reason the Just Stop Oil protestors spend so much time defacing art and architecture, and disrupting sporting events: these things, as celebrations of reality, are manifestations of joy.
We support their cause, the destruction of civilisation, when we succumb to the lure of the modern magic lantern show; hours upon hours of meaningless entertaining phantasmagoria flashing across pixilated screens as our thumbs ache with pressure points and our eyes grow weary, and yet we find we can’t break away.
Entertainment, not joy.
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Excellent; just excellent. What a succinctly beautiful and common sense reminder of personal responsibility this piece was. I’ll include this verse from Galatians (5:22-23), which your writing brought to my mind on this bright and sunny Sunday morning (at least it is in Georgia, USA).
“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.”
Now I’ll go put my phone down.
"We support their cause, the destruction of civilisation, when we succumb to the lure of the modern magic lantern show; hours upon hours of meaningless entertaining phantasmagoria flashing across pixilated screens as our thumbs ache with pressure points and our eyes grow weary, and yet we find we can’t break away."
That's a great line. Joy truly is found in the real world, in reality. One of my great joys is surfing since it provides an amazing connection to the ocean, the originator of all life. And it is ~2 hours of pure presence in reality, no screens.
How long would these radical ideologies last if the internet died tomorrow and we could all only live in the local?