Oscars at intersection of global cultural crisis

ON SUNDAY, MARCH 27, 2022, fifty years of neoliberalism walked onstage at the Oscars and smacked comedian Chris Rock in the face. It was the slap that was heard around the world, easily displacing headlines including the war in Ukraine.

Pundits immediately set out extemporizing on who was in the wrong, Rock or his assailant, Will Smith, the underlying culture of misogyny and bullying, the limits to free speech, who should apologize to who, and speculating on the psychological roots of Smith’s actions.

The noisy details 

It was Smith defending his wife, Jada Pinket Smith, and her sensitivity to both hair loss and perceived verbal abuse, that led to the assault on Rock. So, at the hub of this media swirl is Pinket Smith, host of the Facebook Watch show Red Table Talk, with her daughter Willow and mother, Adrienne Banfield-Norris as co-hosts.

Photo source REUTERS/Brian Snyder

Ironically, Smith’s protectiveness about his wife’s condition may well have stemmed from the fact that their marriage had been on the rocks a year earlier—which was the subject of a husband-wife interview on one of Pinket Smith’s shows, during which she discussed her affair with another man. Weeks later, in an interview with GQ magazine, Smith himself copped to having extra-marital relations. Which all points to two things: the instability of their relationship, and the public’s insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip.

The underlying cultural drivers 

Both Rock and Smith represent the dynamic shifts in culture in America over the past 50 years. Here are two black men at the top of their professions. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Rock is worth $60 million. Smith’s net worth is nearly six times greater at $350 million, according to the same source.

The entertainment industry is one of the US’s strongest exports. SelectUSA.gov reports that it accounts for 4 percent of total US global service trade exports, creating a trade surplus of $10.3 billion (most recent data, 2016). As of December, 2020, the entire US entertainment industry accounts for $660 billion in revenues annually, and is growing at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the US economy.

It is not an overstatement to say that US media and entertainment sector has become one of the most powerful influencers on the planet, not only in terms of dollars, but also in terms of shaping our collective cultural narratives.

The two main staples of the American entertainment narrative are profanity and violence. It comes as no surprise to anyone that Rock and Smith are entitled darlings of the industry, given the enraging/engaging content they deliver to the public. In reference to Smith’s defence of his partner, a great deal of the onscreen—and offscreen—profanity minimizes women, which has been fuelled to some extent by black culture over the past few decades. 

“Bitch” and “motherfucker” come to mind. To “fuck” someone, or to be “fucked” is to be placed in the female position of doing it to someone as if they’re a female, or having it done to you as if you’re a female. It’s basic female subordination, masked by the rudeness of profanity. “Cunt”, “ho” and a litany of other epithets fall into the same gender-reducing category.

Violence is even more prevalent in the media, not only in movies, but in the news (“if it bleeds, it leads”), on television, and across all media platforms. Violence is a staple product of the mainstream US entertainment industry, much more than sex. This is not to dismiss the tremendous expansion of porn—and its degradation of women—since the beginning of the internet age. Yet, in a grossly ironic and almost humorous turn, in his apology, Will Smith extolls the need for love. But mature love, as opposed to sentimentality, is in short supply in today’s media environment.

What all of this doesn’t explain what’s at the roots of these recent phenomena. The audience is a contributing factor. The most profitable market segment is the youth audience, which is attracted to brief glimpses of sex, breaking of social norms and destruction of property. Marketers and the people who make movies, understand all too well that this is the low hanging fruit of the entertainment industry, and both Smith and Rock are products of this cultural shock-and-awe system aimed at youth. Violence is simply the empty calorie fast food broadside of the business.

Changing roles and expectations 

The actions of figures like Harvey Weinstein, Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein have generated a backlash. Public opinion woke up in response. Allegations against public figures including Dustin Hoffman, Kevin Spacey, Gerard Depardieu, Israel Horovitz and Allison Mack in entertainment, not to mention figures like JFK, Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner, and George H.W. Bush in politics have revealed the scope and depth of the problem.

But there’s more to it than mere public reaction. A new Utopianism has taken hold after two decades of political correctness. There’s a growing intolerance for behaviour deemed unacceptable by the majority. The punishment is swift and harsh: job loss, banishment, ostracism and deplatforming. Public figures and even ordinary citizens are now extremely wary of crossing the fine threshold of public tolerance. Which is what makes the Rock–Smith encounter so noteworthy. How will each of these two manage the narratives in their favour without relegating themselves to the trash heap of political correctness?

Political correctness is reactive, but also the leading edge of Utopianism. The unspoken mission of PC policing is to reform human behaviour—even in the face of rampant misbehaviour and entitlement among the privileged classes, which includes Rock and Smith. But the dark underbelly of Utopianism is authoritarianism, whether covert or overt: society must have its controls.

Digging deeper, we witness the widening divide between the entitled and the disenfranchised. The entitled are easy to see. They’re on our screens and in our faces every day. They’re our “real” housewives and famous house guests. The disenfranchised are less easy to see—until they hit the streets as Gay Pride, Occupy, #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Capitol Hill or Freedom Convoy protesters. And they only get real when they hit the mainstream media news.

A rising tide of desperation

What’s even less visible is a growing desperation among ordinary people. Both Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump tapped into these feelings. The question becomes, why are ordinary people feeling so resentful? And what has this got to do with Rock and Smith?

For the past 50 years there has been a concerted effort on the part of neoconservative and neoliberal ideologues to decouple business from government oversight and regulation, while at the same time infiltrating government through the funding of candidates in exchange for pro-business and pro-wealth legislation. The architects of this include Frederick Hayek and Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand, James M. Buchanan, Henry Kissinger, students of the Chicago School and a host of others.

Their collective success has been staggering. Not uncoincidentally, every president since the assassination of Kennedy, excluding perhaps Johnson, has fallen in line with this ideological vector, from Nixon to Ford to Carter to Reagan to Bush I to Clinton to Bush II to Obama to Trump and finally now to Biden. Nixon severed currency from the gold standard, allowing fiat currency to be infinitely flexible and footloose. Later, out of office and wandering in the political wilderness, he helped open the bridge to China that enabled US businesses to access a huge pool of inexpensive and willing Chinese labourers. That, coupled with so-called “free trade” agreements, led to the rapid decline of unionized labour in the US and stagnating worker salaries since 1990—while American GDP rose to unprecedented levels over the same period.

The offshoring of labour—turning the US into a service, marketing and distribution economy—plus the financialization of the economy, disenfranchised the blue collar American male worker. From 1970, as more women entered the workforce in service and management roles, the opportunities for male workers declined, leading to not only lower wages but increased job insecurity and financial precarity.

By now, the American people, or a majority of them, know that they have little to no effect on their government’s legislation and believe democracy is dead, which, arguably has never been achieved in Utopian terms in the US or elsewhere, as the interests of the elite are invariably achieved before all else.

The financial crash of 2008 made this painfully clear as millions of Americans lost their homes and their savings while Obama and Timothy Geitner bailed out the “too big to fail” banks and financial institutions, which then turned around and gave their C-suite executives million dollar bonuses for their fine work. Speaking to the losers in packed stadiums in 2016, Bernie Sanders appealed to their rational thinking. In similarly packed stadiums, Trump appealed to their emotions and surprisingly, even to himself, won the presidency.

The driving force behind everything that’s happened in the past 50 years, including the storming of the Capitol in Washington, is the massive transfer of global wealth to a very small billionaire class. The phenomenon is so extreme that mildly conservative economist, Thomas Piketty, recognizing that redistribution of wealth is of vital importance to economic and societal well-being, has declared himself a socialist. 

After Reagan challenged Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” and helped break up the Soviet Union, the same system of transferring wealth upward and disenfranchising workers led  to the current Russian regime. Putin, an autocrat trying to stabilize an economy in free fall due to rapid neoliberalization, stripped dissenting Russian oligarchs from their newfound power, and appointed subordinates he could control. Power abhors a vacuum, and Putin conveniently filled the space, and in doing so stabilized the Russian economy, which is not something we often hear in the mainstream media.

From desperation to mass psychosis 

From sitting in meetings through the years, I’ve learned that people will discuss possible solutions to minor problems almost endlessly. But when it comes to solving large problems deep discussion is avoided, and only discussed briefly and resolved quickly with a simple yes or no to an A or B solution. The A-B solutions are usually alternate proposals that unseen experts have formulated in the background for months or even years.

It’s no accident that both Reagan and Zelensky were actors. They, and other leaders around the world, including Trump, Boris Johnson, Justin Trudeau and others are performers who deliver pre-written policy scripts to the public, informed by a small group of public policy experts and guided by another small cadre of public relations experts continuously taking the public’s pulse. Their collective task is to manage the actual corporate agendas that would likely to be distasteful to the general public. 

There are two methods to assure public compliance: either soft or authoritarian control. Soft control is the preferred method in the West. It’s based on nuanced salesmanship, a call for public safety and civility, and dispensing just enough money to local public projects to keep voters satisfied and showing up to vote. Authoritarian measures only become necessary when protests break out that challenge the official narrative. The most recent example is the Canadian government’s invoking of the Emergencies Act to quell the Freedom Convoy occupation of Ottawa using armed and mounted police to forcibly clear the streets—and freeze financial donations to the protest through FINTRAC and the banks. This has been seen by some around the world as government overreach, especially the now-permanent government’s spying powers on personal finances enabled through FINTRAC.

From Will Smith’s public aggression to the unleashing of FINTRAC on the public, the ability to distinguish right from wrong seems to have been seriously eroded. At issue is trust. When Will Smith left the audience, climbed the stairs and strode on stage he broke the theatre’s cardinal illusion: the fourth wall. By breaking the invisible fourth wall dividing the performer from the audience, taking the audience on stage, he broke trust in the illusion of the Oscars as a special theatrical pageant elevating excellence to a higher professional level.

I would argue that Trump and now Zelensky, Putin and Biden are betraying the same trust, breaking the illusions we hold sacred: that governments can provide universal peace and order in a chaotic world. The public can clearly recognize the US’s hypocrisy after serial involvement in altercations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Gaza, Somalia, Yemen to name a few of the most recent. As the late Madeleine Albright famously said after being asked if the deaths of a half million Iraqi children would be too high a price, she answered, “…the price is worth it”. When the extinguishing of millions of lives becomes a mere policy point, you know we’ve reached the limits of civil interaction as a species.

And now we’re on the threshold of nuclear war as the US through NATO and Russia face off in Ukraine. We now see the world dividing into distinct sides, them and us, and all the attendant propaganda and embargoes directed against the evil monster, Putin, his apparatchiks and Russia’s allies, which may or may not include the Chinese depending on how they succumb to being coerced into line by the US.

War, of course, is the ultimate mass psychosis. The Ukrainians and Russians are now fully under its spell. What started as an asymmetrical mismatch between heavily armed Russian vs. the smaller Ukrainian military has turned into a brutal quagmire as the US and NATO allies feed state-of-the-art weaponry to the Ukrainian side, stalling the Russian onslaught, prolonging the war and pushing negotiations further into the background. Their hope seems to be that the Russians will concede and withdraw. The underlying fear among Western leadership is that public opinion might encourage the West to impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, further escalating the possibility of a direct confrontation between US and Russian aircraft.

Missing in the picture is what an aftermath might look like. Ukraine has just armed its civilian population with weapons and munitions—after 8 years of civil war between western Ukraine and Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine. What could possibly go wrong?

The disenfranchised self and the rigid collective 

Massive technological disruptors such as the creation of the global information network, bioengineering, robotic production capabilities, rise of social media, empowerment of government personal data collection, and tracking and surveillance systems have reduced individual human beings to data points that can be controlled and mined to the most utilitarian ends by both private corporations and governments.

These intrusions are rightly seen by the public as new existential threats and breaches of the public trust and, as real personal income continues to decline relative to the growth of wealth at the top, levels of society-wide frustration and anxiety will continue to rise. On top of all this, the continued push to maintain consumer spending, based on personal debt to shore up the crumbling economy already facing higher interest rates, is pressurizing the system to its structural limits.

A growing number people are feeling isolated from each other and from the society they once viewed as mutually supportive. The public, consciously or unconsciously sensing that they are being exploited as data points rather than being treated as living, breathing human beings, is more isolated and socially atomized than ever before in history, despite a global population nearing 8 billion.

Our entire system of overconsumption growing exponentially over the past five decades and built on the backs of ordinary people, has had an extraordinary effect on the natural environment. The inexorable advances of climate change, soil and water degradation, and species extinctions are as existentially threatening as a sudden nuclear war.

War is a natural human behavioural response. War is the ultimate curative to mass psychosis brought on by social pressure, the ultimate purging and reordering of societies. The question before us now is, can we afford another major war at this critical point in human history? Or any war, for that matter, given the collective work we have to do to repair and restore our natural environment here on Life Raft Earth.


So over to you Chris Rock and Will Smith. Tell us how we back out of this one.