The Cosmic Jest: The Joke's On Us

by Mark Romel

"DC: Washington is being taken over by DC: Comics." - Salman Rushdie

The world is increasingly understood as a comic story, involving superheroes and supervillains. Confusingly, they are often one and the same. Donald Trump is the superhero for conservatives and the supervillain for liberals. Heroes and villains are now shapeshifters. They no longer reflect a common narrative. Their heroism or villainy depends on where you stand in the culture wars.

Next time you go to watch a superhero movie, imagine what it would be like if the superhero kept "flickering" into his opposite - the supervillain. Would you be able to follow the story? Whom would you be rooting for? Wouldn't the plot be all over the place? You wouldn't understand anyone's motivation. The story would be pure chaos.

Or imagine you were in a cinema where half of the audience were booing and hissing one character while the other half were cheering and applauding the same character.

What happens when one group of people worship the Devil and call him God, while everyone else just calls him the Devil? That's what Abrahamism is all about. The Gnostics said that Jehovah was the Demiurge (aka Satan).

A conventional narrative is not meant to be like a sports event. You are not meant to have two sets of supporters rooting for different characters, and having opposite views of heroism and villainy.

Why do so many people love superhero movies? It's because superheroes can resolve problems, evidently what no one can do in real life. Superheroes are the human fantasy of bringing the worldwide mess to an end. They are the new generation of the old gods.

Humanity now has a comic-book mentality, with a comic-book understanding of reality, revolving around bizarre conspiracies and aliens. Many right wingers believe that shapeshifting, pan-dimensional, extraterrestrial lizards are running the world! Is that a comic-book idea, or something that reflects reality? Isn't it incredible that billions of people now seem genuinely unsure of the answer?

Salman Rushdie said, "We are being ruled by grotesques." We certainly are. Politicians are monstrous caricatures. They are not real people. One reason why Donald Trump won the Republican presidential nomination was that his rivals actually seemed like robots. They were so constrained by fear of saying the wrong thing that they could barely say anything at all. At no time were they authentic. Their humanity disappeared and they became machines. Trump, by contrast, reveled in saying the "wrong" thing, and did so with so much glee and enthusiasm that he seemed exactly the same as his rancid, deplorable base, who therefore flocked to him as if he were the Messiah.

People now exist in a permanent state of cognitive dissonance because they are permanently presented with two opposite narratives, which make sense of reality in opposite ways. People try to reduce the cognitive dissonance by hanging out only with their own kind, their own tribe. They seek out the echo chamber of their own beliefs. They wallow in "indignation porn". Being indignant turns them on.

Who's laughing now?