Brian Niemeier #fundie brianniemeier.com

Human beings are wired for worship. If social pressure discourages worshiping God, those with less fortitude will worship trees, rocks, or even plastic figurines.

Religious identity was the engine that built the West, and it's still a major motivating force elsewhere in the world. What has happened in the American Empire is that Christian identity has shattered, and the pieces have been scattered throughout various hobbies.

Which was precisely what the main players in the Enlightenment wanted--to reduce religion to a hobby indulged in the home with no effect on public life.

People had hobbies back when the Church was allowed to matter. The sane ones didn't let their hobbies consume their identities. You might've liked gardening or stamp collecting, but you largely kept it to yourself outside the company of fellow hobbyists or unless asked.

The proper order of faith and entertainment has been inverted. Honk. Honk.

To see how people's identities have gotten mixed up in their hobbies, take a quick glance at the 'gate controversies popping up among various fandoms on a more or less daily basis. #GamerGate was the big one, but it failed due to infiltration by controlled opposition and exploitation by online grifters.

It's telling that every subsequent fandom revolt has enjoyed a brief honeymoon period before skipping straight to the "milked by grifters" stage. "If a man loses faith in God, he doesn't believe nothing, he'll believe anything," is illustrative here.

Few now can imagine--by design--a time when popular culture wasn't partitioned into myriad fractured fandoms. Sure, people had different tastes, but there were cultural touchstones everybody shared, and more of them.

Everybody tuned in to The Shadow. Everybody read Edgar Rice Burroughs. Everybody saw Gone with the Wind.

But a people with a shared culture and a strong identity is hard to conquer, so universal popular culture had to go. Fandom was the murder weapon used to kill Western culture.

[...]

Fortunately, there are creators laboring to forge new culture in the tradition of our ancestors. For a refreshing take on the mecha genre that clears away all the stale cliche cobwebs, check out my new martial thriller Combat Frame XSeed.

24 comments

Confused?

So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!

To post a comment, you'll need to Sign in or Register. Making an account also allows you to claim credit for submitting quotes, and to vote on quotes and comments. You don't even need to give us your email address.