Showing posts with label inclusion. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inclusion. Show all posts

Monday, September 14, 2020

The Price of Your Inclusivity May Be Your Creativity

In a mad dash to be as woke as possible, the film industry is changing its rules for inclusion into the awards season by destroying the creative process. 

Did you check off all the boxes? Did you include everyone except the people you do not agree with? About time Hollywood ditches 82.5% of America and concentrates only on the most important 4.5% LGBTQ and the 13% African American population. That is, if you are into the statistical make up of the United States.

When organizations design hurdles to control the narrative, then what is the point in participating? It looks like micromanaging at best and social engineering at worst. 

People become engaged in authentic stories that have the look and feel of real people. That movie could be science fiction or Shakespearean, but when artificial external influences change the feel of the characters, that is when the public checks out. Woke doctrine has destroyed American cultural institutions like education, sports, and entertainment. There is a reason why woke makes corporations go broke.

Maybe that is the joke? 

The vast majority of Americans are not buying into the woke revolution. So the joke is lost on them, completely. Yet, sports teams and the film industry keep pushing the envelope on a product a large swath of people have no interest in consuming. 

Are wealthy entertainers just tone deaf?
According to Deadline Hollywood, “…the Kansas City Chiefs pummeled the Houston Texans 34-20, and the ratings were down — a lot. In early numbers, the primetime NBC game scored a 5.2 among adults 18-49 and 16.4 million viewers between 8-11 p.m. ET.

“Now, those numbers for the 8:25-11:30 p.m. ET game will certainly be adjusted upward later, but right now they mark a 16.1% drop over the spectacle of the September 5, 2019 season opener in the advertiser-rich demographic. In an America and a NFL still adjusting to the new normal of live sports in the era of COVID-19, last night’s game also fell 16.1% in total sets of eyeballs from last year’s fast affiliate results.”
then there is: 
The site reported that the “Braves-Phillies earned a 0.8 and 1.20 million on ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball (including ESPN2 Statcast coverage) — down 30% in ratings and 33% in viewership from week five of last season (5/5/19: Cardinals-Cubs: 1.1, 1.81M), but up a tick and 2% respectively from last year’s comparable date (9/1/19 Mets-Phillies: 0.7, 1.19M).

“Earlier Sunday,” SMW added, “a Yankees-Mets doubleheader had a 0.25 and 381,000 on TBS and a 0.18 and 303,000 on ESPN2. Cardinals-Reds had 340,000 and Padres-Rockies 231,000 on ESPN Monday.”
When there is no audience to play to, there is no revenue. No one will by dvds, jerseys, or tickets. Slowly but surely these industries will die a horrible death only to be buried as paupers. 

What is the point of this exercise? Humans are attracted to stories they can relate to and feel are organic, authentic products. Like begets like, that is your audience.

All the woke writers are following a fad that will soon fade out. Do you really want to be known for that book you wrote way back when it was cool to be exclusionary person? 

Undawnted follows mythology, literature, and original creativity initiatives. No fluff here. No fads. No woke. Just real characters that look and feel authentic. 

That is how writers should write: from their internal processes. Soon woke culture will bankrupt entertainment because the fashion of exclusion of more than 80% of Americans will soon go out of style. 

You can include anyone you want in your creativity, but once you start down the road of selective editing to satisfy an imaginary checklist: that is when your readership checks out.

The sports ratings in particular support this thesis statement.

Stop the joke now: exclusivity is not that funny.






Sunday, February 11, 2018

An Authentic Reality Deserves an Authentic Writer

Are you living an authentic life? The Existential philosophy of the mid-20th Century asked questions like this one. A few thousand years earlier, Diogenes a Greek Cynic philosopher questioned the role of society and the validity of its psychological constructs.

Is your suspended belief interfering with you living the life you have always wanted to live?

The Ancient History Encyclopedia on Diogenes of Sinope reveals:
According to Diogenes society was an artificial contrivance set up by human beings which did not accord well with truth or virtue and could not in any way make someone a good and decent human being; and so follows the famous story of Diogenes holding the light up to the faces of passers-by in the market place looking for an honest man or a true human being. Everyone, he claimed, was trapped in this make-believe world which they believed was reality and, because of this, people were living in a kind of dream state. He was not the first philosopher to make this claim; Heraclitus, Xenophanes, and, most famously, Socrates all pointed out the need for human beings to wake from their dream state to full awareness of themselves and the world. Plato's famous Allegory of the Cave is devoted to this very theme. Diogenes, however, confronted the citizens of Athens daily with their lifelessness and shallow values, emulating his hero Socrates whom he never met but would have learned of from Antisthenes. Although it seems many people thought he was simply mentally ill, Diogenes would have claimed he was living a completely honest life and others should have the courage to do the same.
As we write, we search for truths in the people around us, the culture we live in, and within our own reality. If Diogenes as was the Existentialists on the road to somewhere, it was not the argument about being housebroken, but a deeper meaning of discerning our own reality as a fiction.

Humans live in a fictional world we have developed for our safety and security. The real world is the shadows we see on the wall in the back of our cave as Socrates described in his Allegory of the Cave. Writers need to separate what is reality and what is the social constructs we have devised for ourselves and our progeny.

Are you an honest person? Do you live honestly? Or, are you wrapped up in the social constructs of censorship, identity politics, and psychological terrorism? 

American society and culture have been created for the benefit of a few. Divide and conquer, problem-reaction-solution create trigger moments of psychological harm and devastation. Without the psychological terror repeated on the news, in entertainment, and parroted in individual lives, these tactics would be ignored. We have a social construct where we have been told to fear reality because the shadows outside the cave are terrorists just waiting to do us harm. 

Identity politics are the divisive analogies being taught to children as well as adults. You are in this box. You are in that box. You cannot identify in opposing boxes. Race, religion, and many others are the artificial construct. When we realize how damaging these politicized boxes of dishonesty have become, isn't it our duty as writers to expose the falsehood? 

Diogenes did take his philosophy too far to the edge, but today's Roman culture and society, our decadence has swung the pendulum of discourse in the opposite direction toward Nero's mayhem. We need a balance. We need to correct the psychological terrorism of identity politics. 

The only course is to eliminate the censorship that surrounds this social construct of public mythology. I recently debated some points from the Entertainment Industry. The online magazine, Variety, has posted some inventive and erroneous negative social constructs that undermine our society. In these rebuttals, I discovered how Penske Media Corporation's Variety will not debate a topic but rather triggers individuals into the Divide and Conquer scheme. I called them on this dishonesty. 

What I discovered while investigating this claim of censorship was that the accusation is not unfounded. I too was censored because my beliefs did not coincide with social dishonesty. After being censored twice in the comments section, I did a screen capture: 

As shown, my first reply was revised mid-sentence. The censor removed my article title and link. The second was calling Variety out on the deceptive practice, which then was removed in its entirety. 

The original post was also censored by the removal of a link. 

I have discovered that the censorship in our news media, entertainment, and online debates stem from the social constructs of identity politics and psychological terrorism in order to cocoon humans, in this case Americans, into Socrates' Cave. A false reality is a dishonest reality. Humans are not meant to live an inauthentic life. 

How do we reconstruct our reality? The course we are on now has damaged people's understanding and perception of what our culture and society does. Not for dishonesty's sake, but our individualistic social constructs have furthered the human species while still allowing for varying viewpoints. 

As a writer, I observe the world around me. I poke the bear. I slide open the envelope to see what awaits us on the other side of this life. Humans cannot go forward by going backward into this tyrannical world view of dystopic socialized conformity centered on the premise: inclusionary Social Darwinism. 

Neither Diogenes nor Socrates would approve of furthering that type of dishonesty. 

So as a writer, who are you going to be? Diogenes looking for an honest man? Socrates searching beyond the Cave for reality? 

Or, are you going to write the socialized identity politics that further divides society into Nero's mayhem?
 


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