Cult Of California

The Churches are empty. The prisons are overflowing. The streets are littered with tents. The McMansions of Beverly Hill, once the end goal of the American Dream, are going up for sale faster than ever before - who is there to buy them? Who in the squalor and the filth of the “City of Angels” can truly claim to be righteous when there are masses of lost souls openly injecting themselves with opioids like heroin and fentanyl in the streets, where the most desperate and vulnerable women are encouraged to degrade themselves to impress network executives or appease depraved strangers online, where the streets flow with literal shit to the point there are tracking apps to avoid such unpleasantries.

As it happens, “Wokeism”, Critical Race Theory, intersectional social justice and Cancel Culture all seem to originate from, or at least are found in their most recognizable forms from the same place. Yes, indeed that place is California. The state we associate most with fun in the sun, care-free platitudes and the Beach Boys has had far too much influence on global culture and morality; whether it is academic, political, or social.

In contemporary discourse, especially political and social, one often finds themselves asking the question: “Who really has the final authority?” - especially when one is being confronted with asinine, off-the-cuff remarks and “gotcha” statements that infect modern debate like a violent cancer.

Contemporary intellectuals and scholars often discuss the Culture War, but they do very little to define where the battle is being waged, or where we ought to focus our attention.

Well, one needs to look no further than a 30-mile radius in Los Angeles to find the people who have shaped our modern standard for what is and isn’t acceptable for decades. California’s most profitable and well-recognized industry, film-making, has been disastrously influential in laying the foundations for globalized morality; a new religion which is based on the behaviors and attitudes of some of the worst people living today - Hollywood executives and network producers.

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In 2016, I recall suffering endlessly through the faux-genuine, condescending, and out-of-touch commercials and “public service announcements” that recruited the ranks of Hollywood’s most beloved stars, all of whom suggested the same thing: Go and Vote!

Whether it is The Avengers, Rosario Dawson, or Gal Gadot’s triage of cringey celebrities singing John Lennon, it seems that actors and celebrities feel that they are far more informed and representative of America & the world than the average blue-collar worker, or family-oriented housewife. While some may seem shocked at the blatantly removed perspectives of these people, I find it hardly surprising.

For the last thirty to forty years American movies, music, art and entertainment have come to completely dominate the global market. With this domination, there has also been a parallel phenomenon of a rising global monoculture.

One only needs to look at box office sales to understand the scale of the Hollywood Leviathan. Every year since 1995, box office sales have risen steadily, even despite lower attendance to theatres because of internet streaming. Compare this to something like church attendance or spirituality/religiosity in society, and one finds a troubling reality. Where moral messaging used to come from priests and monks, it now spawns from the minds of producers like Harvey Weinstein, “performance artists” like Marina Abramovich, or the “intellectual” Joe Rogan - a man who personally has expressed regrets in engaging with “woke” moral relativity of contemporary political discourse. With audience rates like these, millions, if not billions tuning-in, no wonder the A and B-listers have convinced themselves that they are in fact representative of the majority of people. We have all bought into their delusions, quite literally.

We are living in a more advanced world technologically, where the mysteries of reality are constantly being “explained” by dodgy scientific studies that can rarely be replicated. Just because this is the current reality doesn’t mean we have grown beyond the need for moral guidance from a defined authority. The Church, and other religions used to act as this force in society. As the Western World has fully embraced secular liberalism, this need for moral guidance hasn’t disappeared - no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that it has and that the post-2000’s morality is the final stop. Instead, we seek to find something to fill that gap. While people haven’t been flocking to the Church pews, they have been flocking to the coke-stained plush chairs in the theatres, consuming the same pre-approved product and messaging that executives deem appropriate to showcase.

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Of course, this phenomenon of a “new morality” being manufactured through entertainment is not merely localized to the United States. Because of the success of post-WWII globalization, it has been American movies, music and popular culture that have gone on to completely dominate markets in foreign countries.

I recall living in Serbia in the late 2010’s, a country that had plenty of reason to dislike American chauvinism after the NATO bombings on civilian targets in the 1990s. Still, to my shock, these people who had experienced much pain and suffering at the hands of American jingoism would fill the aisles to catch the latest Hollywood blockbuster - oftentimes cheering at the end credits (mind you, Serbs also cheer whenever a plane lands, so this may just be cultural).

Traveling outside of Serbia, to other parts of Europe and the rest of the world, everyone was consuming the same media; whether it was gangsta rap from Compton, the airey-fairey melodies of the alternative and indie scene, the great social movements and activist culture of UC Berkeley, and especially the moral relativity of the Hippie movement - it seems the entire world was absorbed and swept away in this manufactured monoculture during the 2010s.

While we may all try to deny how much influence one State has over the global zeitgeist, every day the reality becomes more and more self-evident, especially when judging the current state of California in juxtaposition with the rest of the world.

To the world-traveler and the observer of the passage of time, this is self-evident:

Cities across the globe - whether they’re in Australia, America, Europe, Africa, or Asia - aren't the unique hubs of cultural expression they once used to be. They’ve all become the same: metropoles that have become petri-dishes for dysgenic and antisocial behavior, mixed-bags of races and ethnicities that despise each other but are forced to live amongst each other for economic growth, stripped-down, hollow and empty hives for lost souls and cogs in a machine. “Rat Park” manifested in human form. Rife with disease, drugs, abuse and antisocial behavior, whether you are in LA, Central London, or even Belgrade, the problems are more or less the same. It is a modern Babylon, make no mistake.

This reality is all the more troubling when one realizes that the very tools that have assisted this infectious spread of degradation have also emerged from California, namely the smart technology companies and developers at Silicon Valley. I’m sure I don’t have to remind everyone just how powerful and influential people like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Bezos and the other technocrats are as we become ever-more reliant on their systems - so much so that their own individual power rivals that of some governments.

For more reinforcement of this idea, one needs to look no further than the architectural eyesores of glass and steel that litter the “Global Commercial Hubs” as more than a perfect metaphor to what these cities have become. Hollow, replaceable, fragile, and insulting.

This monoculture that emphasizes “individual expression” over loyalty or accountability to a higher ideal or authority isn't the deconstruction of archaic traditions, as is often the argument by “progressives”. It is merely the replacement of established cultural standards that are organically found across the world with a manufactured, hollow and vapid replacement - like how Mao was able to reduce and effectively annihilate the “Four Olds” of Chinese tradition with his cultural revolutions led by student rebellion. How amazing the parallels one could draw between mid-20th Century China and contemporary-age California! Perhaps that’s why Hollywood has made such an effort to shift their markets overseas...

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So the question is, how did this happen? How did TinselTown become this abyss of abuse, criminality, and backwards morality that we have come to realize it is now? Many have had a picturesque view of the Hollywood Boulevard; the glitz and glam of the premier lights, the adoring crowds snapping photos of the stars - but this rose-tinted view has always been a lie. Even in the “Golden Age”, Hollywood and much of California was rife with sex scandals, political infiltration from leftist idealogues, and power players taking advantage of the wayward and lost souls that came to find themselves in this region from the 1940’s onwards. Whether it was Mickey Cohen and his mob of gangsters running the show in the 1930s, or the New Age movements and gurus that involved themselves with the pop-music industry in the 50’s and 60’s that led to the rise of the Manson cult; California has always been a hub for the worst sorts of behavior - worst still, is that it is largely celebrated instead of shamed as any healthy society would do.

One simply cannot deny that this culture in Hollywood and California still exists and runs rampant - especially in the wake of scandals involving degenerates like Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, or Roman Polanski. Where is the justice for their victims that goes beyond hashtags and patting oneself on the back for “drawing attention to the issue”?

If there has ever been a failure of capitalism, the commodification of malcontent and antisocial behavior has been the largest and most destructive.

That is exactly what Californian Morality intends:

A new religion that has been exported across the globe with incredible effect. This colossal force of subversion is an enemy to anyone who values decency, consistency, and true moral ascendence. This cult continues to grow by the day - just look at the levels of “youth activism” which manifest globally, spoon fed to children through the same social media platforms, the same cartoons, and the same “role models” that are largely manufactured by the media machine that exists in the “Golden” State.

The solution? Recognize this behavior, and reject the growing Californian monoculture wherever it springs up. The Culture War cannot be fought with passivity, tut-tutting and calling out hypocrisy alone - it can only be fought by creating a righteous countercurrent that rejects the manufactured monoculture - otherwise you better pray rather hard that Los Angeles sinks into the sea like it did in the film 2012.

(Originally published in Issue #3 of The Mallard)