Cultural Dissonance
A wave of uncomfortablility against north-american society.
In the 1988 film “They Live” the protagonist, Nada, discovers a pair of sunglasses that reveal to him how the world truly is. Looking through their lens’ he realizes that the media and the government are fraught with subliminal messages meant to keep the population subdued and all who are caught in the trap or perpetuate it purposefully for the goal of world domination appear to him as skull-faced aliens. I admire the jarring imagery used in the film because it communicates the fear felt by someone standing outside the cultural paradigm in witness of it. So are the sunglasses necessary for this experience? No. For the message one perhaps may not take away from the film but is in fact very much intended is that the lens’ he sees his urban environment through are not physical, but rather ideological.
I have at times experienced a similar mental break to that of Nada’s, usually after returning home from travelling or reading a foreign or arcane piece of literature. Travel seems to be a widely effective method for cultural dissonance because it literally removes you from a habitual lifestyle and pushes you to adapt to a different set of values and social behavior. The stranger the land the more radical your self reevaluation is. But books and documentaries also have the potential to lift our minds out of a normalized cognitive canvas, if not also our bodies.
Upon having these experiences, describing what I see would be something like looking into a kind of Victorian age of top hats, corsets and superficial politesse. I am briefly able to stand outside the illusory cultural netting in which most peoples minds are embedded. Media and news reports seem manipulative, mediocre, and self- inflated with such assumed importance it shames those who do not pay attention. The general clothing appears impractical and anti-personal, which sounds ironic since the whole hipster shtick is eccentric expression, however, everyone is still adapting their appearance into caricatures of prescribed fashion trends.
The expressions of voice and language choice of the majority echo with conformity to a definition of permissibly, as if a school teacher were standing by making sure the homework’s complete, but this instructor is really just an insecure ego regulating ones actions in accordance with a relative political paradigm to validate it’s own significance. In sensitive moments you can notice the look in their eyes: unsure, upset, and hopeful that they have not been duped. In other words, they are optimistic that aiding to the momentum of the herd is “for the best”. But the very need to hope for that suggests a lack of confidence and purpose, an itch in the back of the head saying “Get out.”
It’s easy now to ignore this itch and suppress it by turning to our phones to check Facebook as an excuse not to engage with those around us, or by tuning into the “real world” on television to laugh at those more lost than we are. But if instead we were embrace this itch and allow it to devour our sense of separateness and turn to the night stars, to nature, to our own imaginations, we would find a realm of wonder both endlessly surprising and fulfilling that has and will serve as the foundation of each of our becomings. This way, instead of consuming ideological views concocted in private committees we will begin to promulgate our own ideological visions within a transparent free market of ideas.
