Decadence sets in when people have it too easy. Most manifestations of decadence are obvious enough and have limited shelf-lives given their nature of excess, exhaustion, and expiration. Decadence can even fester into degeneracy, which, if widespread and unchecked, can bring down civilization.
If decadence is a matter of fashions that come and go, it could be tolerated and written off as just part of doing business with history. Whoever said mankind was ever perfect? However, if decadence is institutionalized, it could be mistaken for something of value because of the officially sanctioned ‘legitimacy’ about it. It can gain validation and prestige, thus power.
Consider the decadent(and even degenerative) culture of dog-breeding.
There was a time when dogs were bred and appreciated for what they could do. They were prized for qualities of running, hunting, retrieving, fighting, herding, guarding, pulling sleighs, fetching objects, or etc. So, even though dog breeds came in all shapes and sizes, they were healthy, sound, purposeful, and functional as organisms. Their existence and legitimacy depended on utility than futility.
But over time, dogs became increasingly less useful in a mechanized and urbanized world. Most owners had no use for them as anything but pets. For some, having a loving creature in the house wasn’t enough. They had to play games with canine genetics to show off, gain attention, and/or win prizes. They raised their dogs to be trophies or oddities.
The varying traits of the healthy and purposeful breeds were exaggerated and perverted into caricatures. The resulting phenotypes served no purpose and could even be unhealthy, but they were perpetuated(and made even more extreme) to serve the vanity of owners who had nothing better to do except show off that they owned something ‘special’, ‘exotic’, or ‘cute’. Some owners had a perverse knack for particularly grotesque and unwieldy traits. Others acquired such degenerated breeds because the Establishment deemed them to be ‘valuable’, ‘worthy’, or ‘expensive’. And over time, these freak-dogs were prized for their ‘purity’ even though their purity was based on something close to deformity.
The ancestor of the bulldog was a tough and healthy creature. But the later bulldog as a show-animal was a genetic perversion with over-sized head, cumbersome limbs, and flat nose that made it difficult to breathe. Such dogs were totally useless, but owners wanted them because of their cartoonish features and ‘pure’ pedigree. And the Establishment(made up of so-called ‘experts’ on dogs) deemed such breeds to be of ‘value’ as status-items.
The Chinese court bred totally useless dogs like the Pekinese, the canine equivalent of bound feet. Small, neurotic, inbred, and nuts. They were ‘toy dogs’. Totally purposeless but for serving the decadent whims of owners. Consider something as ridiculous as the Sharpei. Just awful.
Even the original dachshund wasn’t what it is today. They were bred to be shorter in limbs and longer in body to pursue burrowing animals in holes. But over time, they made the legs even shorter and the bodies even longer, leading to all sorts of skeletal problems.
When dogs served a real purpose, they had to be healthy and functional. But as dogs became show-objects of vanity, they were designed for quirks, oddities, and eccentricities. The health and function of the dogs mattered less than the ‘charm’ of their peculiarities. Some of these prized peculiarities could be harmless enough, like colors and patterns on the fur(though extreme-inbreeding to maintain those traits could lead to health & mental issues), but others were obvious genetic disasters, which however were lent legitimacy by the Establishment that determined the relative ‘value’ of dogs. And many people bought such dogs as ‘status’ symbols. Since such dogs were associated with ‘status’ and ‘privilege’, many rich owners preferred genetic disasters to healthier and sounder dogs lacking in ‘pedigree’.
A similar logic is at the center of globo-homo, tranny-tyranny, and various forms of gender-bender craziness. When life was tough but meaningful, humans understood it came down to men and women, family and children, health and survival. Of course, throughout history, some people were born weird and tolerated as such, but on condition that they remained on the periphery or fringe. If a guy wanted to bugger another guy or if a guy wanted to wear a dress and act whoopsy-doo, that was his problem. Most people understood the true meaning of life as shown in an Akira Kurosawa film or John Ford movie. It was about the daily struggle, important events, and/or the essential meaning of life. There was a time when most people had definite roles in life in terms of survival, health, morality, and meaning. Life was about core values and essential needs.
But with massive increase in plenty/prosperity where even poor people got fat and where ‘leftism’ turned into celebrations of vanity & narcissism, humans began the process of becoming like the degenerative dog breeds. We went from Kurosawa & Ford to Tarantino & Takashi Miike, the hideous freak.
The various healthy and virile breeds of dogs were turned into mutants of the original. Look at the mutative degeneration of the bulldog. Once a well-proportioned and powerful animal but later turned into a gross mutation of its former self. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulldog#History
What we see all around in pop culture and political culture is the Rise of the Mutants. Granted, it was long understood that the arts and pop culture tend to attract the eccentric and strange who tend to dominate the creative scene. Still, such peculiarities are seen for what they were. If the price for creativity and originality was some measure of weirdness, so be it. As an athlete risks his body and health to go beyond the ordinary, so a creative person risks his mind and sanity to feel and express more. The costs are often unfortunate, even tragic, but the achievements are real enough. Michael Jackson and David Bowie two beats away from insanity, but their contribution to popular music is undeniable. Much was indeed deviant and demented about them but served as fuel for their creativity.
But over time, this weirdness got theorized, idealized, and then politicized into some kind of ‘value’ and worldview, and millennials were raised under the impression that gender-mutation is some kind of New Normal, a noble ‘human right’ or even holiness, something even deserving the blessing of the church.
The world appears to be heading toward the Rise of the Clones and the Rise of the Mutants. Bio-engineers seem hard at work in the future prospect of a world of clone-beings.
To be sure, the two trends are polar opposites in their tendencies. Since bio-engineers will predetermine the IDEAL traits, clones will likely be very similar to one another: Intelligent, healthy, fit, attractive, emotionally stable. So, in one way, the future of clone-ism seems to be anti-mutant-ism. (If a future couple wanted a perfect designer-baby, how many would want someone like Chris ‘Leave Britney Alone’ Crocker or Trigglypuff?)
And yet, at the same time, our ‘progressive’ culture encourages mutative-identities of batshit crazy neurotic derangements. Mutationism favors the weird, ugly, demented, unstable, wacky, tardo, gargoylean, putrid, repellent, gross, degenerate, punkass, and etc.
In some cases, there’s the combo of both clone-ism and mutantism, like the case of Martin(e) Rothblatt the ‘transhumanist’. On the one hand, he eagerly anticipates cloning or bio-engineering technology that will allow the creation of ideal humans from scratch. But lacking such technology in the present, he has made a total whacko of himself by pretending to be a ‘woman’ with make-up and dress(and maybe surgery).
Clone-ism narrows the range of ideal traits. It weeds out the dumb, ugly, unhealthy, and demented. It favors Sean Conneries and Pierce-Brosnans over Elephant-Boys and Crackhead-Bobs.
In contrast, mutantism widens the spectrum of ‘acceptance’ and ‘normality’, like what was presented in Bill Nye’s (sex)junk science. So, some fat ugly guy with hair on his chest who says he’s a woman and insists on being recognized as ‘them’ and wants to play with dolls and pretends to be 5 yrs old is part of the ‘new normal’.
Clone-ism and mutantism are opposites but currently allied because they both go against the spiritualist and humanist mode of what constitutes meaning and purpose. Mutantism is nothing new. It was always around because some people were born strange from the dawn of time. It’s like the Kyoami character in RAN. A weirdo. But then, deviants and oddballs can see things from interesting angles all too often ignored by conventional perspectives. So, they occupied a special niche in society… as long as they knew their relative position vis-a-vis the normal folks. Oddity of perspective is part and parcel of abnormality but also glimpses what usually eludes the normal eye. The problem sets in when this odd angle is made the main angle. It’d be like using the triangle in an orchestra as the main instrument.
Kyoami the jester weirdo of Akira Kurosawa’s RAN
Kyoami has his place and even value in RAN because he knows what he is, and others know it too. He is a weirdo, a jester, and clown. But because he’s an outsider, he catches things that insiders often miss. He has his own kind of intuition and insight. And this mutual understanding between the dominant normal and the marginal abnormal used to define society where most people upheld the True Normal but could also be appreciative of the weird and different. But now that this mutant-ism has been promoted as the New Normal, reality seems inverted. If nuttery is the ‘new normal’, what is truly normal? And if the outsiders now have the insider-view, what can they offer us? The value of the outsider’s view is from the outside. When the outsider serves as the insider, his view is neither that of the insider nor of the outsider.
Weirdness has value in an uneasy relation to normality. The value of the eponymous characters of HAROLD AND MAUDE, for example, depends on them being surrounded by ‘normal people’. Normality may be limited(and hypocritical and corrupt) but it has a fuller grasp of the essentials of life and society, like family, law and order, security and continuity, and spiritual tradition. In contrast, weirdness is innately dysfunctional and has value as counterpoint, contrast, and variance. It’s like the Adult World may be compromised and all in THE CATCHER IN THE RYE, but if everyone was like Holden Caulfield, there would be no social order, end of argument.
Mutants will always exist, and on occasion, they may offer something valuable. (It’s like most genetic mutations are useless or harmful but on rare occasions beneficial to the organism.) But it’s not something that should be encouraged or promoted as the ‘new normal’, and certainly not something deserving of the benediction of spiritual authority. While the deviance of Weimar Germany was not without artistic merit or cultural value, the problem was it often occupied the center of national life, especially when so many people were in dire straits(far worse than even Americans in the Great Depression).
Also, if weirdness is encouraged and popularized, it devalues genuine weirdness and what it has to offer. Once the underground scene was ‘upgraded’ to appeal to the bobo-yuppie crowd, it lost its authenticity and its own kind of integrity. In the past, those with ‘gender-issues’ had REAL problems. They couldn’t help being what they were despite pressures of normality. So, their difference had meaning and even value. It meant a genuine struggle to understand one’s strange self and its place in society. But now, thanks to gender-bender-mania promoted by ‘woke’ PC and Pop Culture, every confused kid going through puberty and adolescence(or even earlier!) isn’t only free to but encouraged to fantasize that he or she has issues(that must be resolved through hormone-treatment drugs and even mutilative surgery) as globo-homo-tranny-nuttery is the ‘new normal’; thereby, he or she is favored as a ‘cool’ magnet for attention and sympathy. As such, both the meaning and the value of the Normal and the Abnormal are lost.
Also, when the Abnormal are at the sidelines, they are more likely to use their special insights and talents for something bigger than themselves, something meaningful for the larger population of normal people. And something like a respectable bourgeois or middle-class culture exerts pressure on the weird and different to use their odd tendencies and creative gifts to produce something of higher value and wider meaning. Thus, eccentricity serves something higher and/or grander than the mere solipsism of escapist vanity. In the bourgeois age, closet-homosexual Marcel Proust wrote IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME. In our shameless age, ‘gay’ expression has come to this: It sure isn’t the Sistine Chapel.
All great things are the result of excess, but excess in and of itself has no value. What matters is the excess of reaching further, not the excess of wallowing in itself. Excessive tattooing isn’t the same as Beethoven’s excessive immersion in music. The current culture is overly defined by easy and formulaic excessiveness, often imitative with the stamp of approval by a society in rot. Instead of an excessive desire to know more or seek further, what is often favored is the excessive self-indulgence of vanity and narcissism. Instead of a fat person forging an ‘excessive’ iron will to lose the pounds and be healthy, she would prefer to indulge in excessive pigging out and demand to be appreciated for her ‘beauty’ based on ‘radical’ new standards. It’s just yuck.
