The Fruits of GoT
The Fruits of GoT #01:
On GameofThrones as Educator of the Young.
Not only in the USA, also in all other places of this planet where US culture (still) rules supreme (which is a big part of the world) young people are being educated by pop culture merchandise. Those hyper-mythologies being elaborated through several media (movies, books, graphic novels, computer games) to be processed on in fan-driven formats such as blogs, cosplay, graphic designs etc. are the new churches. They tell and show you what is what, and transport that life-defining lecture with the tools of emotional, sensual, sexual, psychosocial conditioning.
But they are also products being sold for profit, and tools of a reckless colonialist project of turning all the world into a means to US-American ends.
Still, I am, however absurd this may sound, after those harsh words, in favor of this new technology of education.
Why?
Main reason: Nothing else works. Nothing else works in such a profound way, for so many people, without implanting such a horrid inner conflict of irreconcilable value systems that people simply become depressed, highly neurotic, apathetic, cynical and very often amok killers. Of themselves and others.
To be educated by the implementation of heroic figures whose actions, norms, values one can study in various situations is not only one of the oldest educational models in the book, it is also effective and in a world not being able to ever embrace justice about as just as it gets.
Why? Because your heroic model must convince not only the mind, also the heart and scenes of a highly critical audience. An audience that is by default young and privileged, if they are to engage in the relentless fan cults contemporary pop culture implies.
The core family you have been born into, the state who is claiming your obedience for the same reason, the peer group who is accepting you as their peer – all brutal systems excluding most options one would find attractive if one had the liberty to choose.
But a fan cult you engage in online might still be determined by upbringing, the culture one is already part of and more or less misguided ambitions about what and who one wants to become, hence being forced to fake that in time in order to make it later ... it is still the choice of one attractive option among several.
But from time to time one of those cults becomes so big, it defines a generation.
This happened with Star Trek in the late 1960s, an educational cult that defined a lot of my core values and passions.
It has happened with X-Files, a less defining cult maybe, but it educated the generation that would never again trust any government, not a Western one, not any other, would do away with anthropocentrism and Western rationalism and would create an amazing new chaotic breeding ground between science, magic and new and returned kinds of spirituality.
I am talking of X-Files. The defining school of generation nerd&hack.
And now Game of Thrones.
Pop phenomena of such impact cannot be "manufactured". Even with the very best PR campaign and the highest possible budget plus other forms of capitalist marketing one cannot "make" something like GoT. It just takes off.
Now that it will close its TV-related canon for good, it is about time to evaluate the educational impact that show will have on a generation that grows up under the new motto: You have no chance, use it (or invent it. Or risk/use/ignore/embrace/test-drive (the possibility of) total disaster while trying, struggling, gambling, faking your way to whatever).
