The Iceberg

For every action is an equal and opposite reaction. As a psychological variant or distortion of this, the more infantile or unnaturally jocular someone is, the more opposite to this can be inferred their true nature, or the nature that appears to be his true nature to himself. Hence the necessity for the false front- not to be confused with a natural healthy sense of humour. Similarly, the inane and insane celebrity 'culture' being foisted on the people of the west by the state - in the broad sense of the working systems of control - implies a vastly different deeper inner essence to such a culture. God is not mocked and neither is human reality; our reality doesn't get erased so easily. Like an iceberg, from the very existence above water of the saccharine celebrity culture can be inferred a great dark mass below the surface, balancing and sustaining this external portrayal. The primal source of the Brave New World culture of inanity is America, and that the same place spreading succcessfully the virus of this vacuous infantilism to the wider world- which is to slur infants- simultaneously employs the death penalty, is torturing people without charge, engaged in aggressive wars, etc- I leave it to the reader to conclude the unhappy tedium of the sentence- is far from a contradiction to being the source of this mindless 'happy' culture, but instead the natural corollary of such a false degradation of being. The inevitable seven eighths of the state that the visible fragment does its best to conceal. The vile tabloid culture of Britain is perhaps more honest in that the nature of missing seven eighths is more truthfully reflected by the polluted nature of the visible, though this is far from a virtue; perhaps just adaptation to different cultural conditions. This more ugly Janus face more suited to the British nature than the American, where more in the way of innocence and love of the celebrity is required. Though this innocence inevitably comes to be made more cynical and defiled the longer the false culture is propelled; reality not being mocked. An image relating to this is Mark Gerlter's The Merry Go-Round below, painted during the more or less orchestrated slaughters of World War 1, and the painting's sinister essence often interpreted as a kind of analogy to that war. However, it seems a more natural parable on the entertainment industry, where to use the language of the moment, entertainment is manufactured by the entertainment industry to be consumed by the consumer. The greater the number of consumers who consume the manufactured entertainment, the more successful the entertainment in having provided the greatest entertainment to the greatest number.