He seemed like some­one you would meet in a movie, whose life was falling apart and who was attempt­ing to begin some­thing new. Only, this ‘some­thing new’ had its ori­gins in same­ness, and the dri­ving force behind it, medi­oc­rity. His wife and dog, unbe­knownst to him, had planned to leave him for some time now: his pres­ence, his insis­tence upon ‘white space’, bore all the mark­ings of an insuf­fer­ably inanity. Liv­ing in an obscure cor­ner of an increas­ingly insignif­i­cant part of the world, deal­ing with dimin­ish­ing clien­tele (both in cal­i­bre, num­ber, and con­spic­u­ousity), it didn’t much mat­ter what he said next. No-one was listening.

But, you see, they were. At least fifty of them, hang­ing on his every indif­fer­ent word. Such is the metoo­ism of the Inter­net, deserv­ing of its proper-noun-capitalisation as one would cap­i­talise the title of any film of the ‘my-life-is-falling-apart-and-oh-I-hope-something-interesting-would-happen-to-substantiate-sales’ vari­ety. These days, how­ever, not even all such films declare them­selves wor­thy of said cap­i­talised sta­tus. The deli­ciously ambiva­lent “def­i­nitely, maybe” sports no such accou­trements com­mon to film, and, you know, things with names – but its name pro­vides for fas­ci­nat­ing dis­plays of noth­ing­ness in all kinds of con­texts, so it can per­haps be forgiven. I sat across from a work­sta­tion prepar­ing the launch of this and other films in this coun­try on Mon­day, and lis­tened, enthralled, as the male lead declared he was thrilled to hear “def­i­nitely, maybe is releas­ing in Aus­tralia”. Well, that is a non-announcement, now, isn’t it? (Launch­ing on V-day… vacuous?)

Still, when even our most influ­en­tial and award-winning actors and direc­tors lament the dearth (or, per­haps sim­ply the death) of cinema’s golden age, we must pause to con­sider what is being achieved by the broad spec­trum of media before us. All the trends of Inter­net media can­not save us from its dubi­ous cre­ative poten­tial in the face of browser lim­i­ta­tions (I have recently been work­ing myself into a lather over the indef­i­nite lag between multi-touch reach­ing the Inter­net com­pared to the rest of con­sumer tech­nol­ogy — let it be noted, mobile client-side is the future?). All the films in the world can­not save us from the medi­oc­rity of their scriptwrit­ers, as all the blogs in the world can­not save us from trends of buzz­words and analy­sis and not a sin­gle real client or solved prob­lem in sight. Nei­ther can google (that not requir­ing proper-noun-capitalisation as it is used syn­ony­mously with ‘search’) save us, invest­ing its vast resources into online plat­form advances. Plat­forms are not con­tent. Con­tent dri­ves growth. Enough of that. Clooney says we should all watch TV, because that’s where the inno­va­tion is going on these days. I strug­gle to come to terms with that, some­what. Part of me would (hon­estly) be quite con­tent to sit and watch end­less episodes of whichever series is avail­able on DVD. DVD, because, as much as I occa­sion­ally enjoy advertising, I have absolutely no desire to see the same com­mer­cial over again fif­teen times over the course of a sin­gle episode — get your bloody ads on YouTube and if they make con­sumers care enough, they’ll find you… noth­ing wrong with democ­ra­tis­ing TV adver­tis­ing val­ues, except, iron­i­cally, the poten­tially dimin­ish­ing pro­duc­tion val­ues of such ads in light of the decreased expen­di­ture on pro­duc­tion — yeah, that’s what I thought.

The other part of me finds it’s all much the same. We all know The Simp­sons is bril­liant, because it pushes bound­aries and made cer­tain peo­ple in the 1990s acutely uncom­fort­able. Fam­ily Guy fills the void, now, only with­out the coherency. Its near-absurdist “we-don’t-actually-expect-you-to-get-this” irrev­er­ent take on pretty much any­thing is funny, but not for rea­sons we can com­pre­hend. And it’s hardly going to stand the test of time. An ani­mated ana­logue to The Chaser’s War on Every­thing, only less coher­ent. But let’s look at The Chaser for a moment — it is the news. Oh, wait, The Col­bert Report used that line first. At any rate, The Chaser made inter­na­tional media before Stephen Col­bert, for the audac­ity of — wait for it — actions beyond mere commentary.

And there we find it. The mat­ter in which the public’s inter­est is held is not the simpering-yet-somehow-hostile satire, but in the vio­la­tion of the sole sanc­ti­fied role of gov­ern­ment, the defence of its cit­i­zens. The note­wor­thi­ness of this act came not in the vio­la­tion of this respon­si­bil­ity for secu­rity, but the triv­i­al­ity by which this breach took place. Such is the Leviathan in whom we are col­lec­tively engaged by social con­tract: with­out defence against the sta­tus hominum nat­u­ralis, bel­lum omnium con­tra omnes as Hobbes rightly pre­sumes it, if we con­sider ‘nature’ after the fall.

The impli­ca­tion, of course, is that our gov­ern­ment is pow­er­less — or, at the very least, pow­er­less to enact that which it is its duty to. C.S. Lewis expresses it thus:

“As a result, clas­si­cal polit­i­cal the­ory, with its Sto­ical, Chris­t­ian and juris­tic key-conceptions (nat­ural law, the value of the indi­vid­ual, the rights of man), has died. The mod­ern State exists not to pro­tect our rights but to do us good or make us good — any­way, to do some­thing to us or to make us some­thing. Hence the new name ‘lead­ers’ for those who were once ‘rulers’. We are less their sub­jects than their wards, pupils, or domes­tic ani­mals. There is noth­ing left of which we can say to them, ‘Mind your own busi­ness.’ Our whole lives are their busi­ness.” (C.S. Lewis, “Will­ing Slaves of the Wel­fare State”, in ESSAY COLLECTION: Lit­er­a­ture, Phi­los­o­phy and Short Sto­ries)

One might argue this is merely the impact of democ­ra­ti­sa­tion of gov­er­nance. That, as the Leviathan power is some­what more dynamic in its head­ship in this present soci­ety, it will nec­es­sar­ily reflect ‘lead­er­ship’ over lives in ways unprece­dented in his­tory, as the will of the indi­vid­ual is closer to that of the state. What plu­ral­ist absur­dity: the exis­tence of democ­racy itself demarks the neces­sity of com­pro­mise, the inabil­ity of man to, inde­pen­dent of the state, agree. Democ­racy is respon­sive to and guar­an­tees the per­sis­tent dis­par­ity of the will of the indi­vid­ual and the State.

The role of the state, there­fore, should be con­strained to that of arbiter and defender alone. Any­thing beyond that is an unnec­es­sary infringe­ment of the rights of the indi­vid­ual. Yet our polit­i­cal clime is such that we assume this nec­es­sary, and, his­tor­i­cally, this is true. We accept the medi­oc­rity of human­ity, cel­e­brate it even. There is noth­ing new under the sun.

And we still trust in our ‘lead­ers’ for poten­tial change. Hello, Kevin, hello, Obama. You are mere men. Your rev­o­lu­tions will fade. Hello, those lead­ers who have come before them. Your names are not remembered.

Make poverty his­tory, cry the same peo­ple who decry government-sanctioned dis­crim­i­na­tion against the poor, the indige­nous, the homo­sex­ual. Their voices are not alone. Make poverty his­tory, cry the same peo­ple who decry government-sanctioned sec­u­lar­i­sa­tion and interest-rate-driven threats to their com­fort­ably pros­per­ous ‘but-not-too-much’ upper-middle class ‘chris­t­ian’ exis­tence. Their agenda is not that of the Christ.

“A hun­gry man thinks about food, not free­dom”, Lewis con­tin­ues in that same essay. What then, do we con­sider? We are hun­gry, though not for food. We are hun­gry for mean­ing that is not forth­com­ing. Hun­gry for the right­ing of wrongs in our eyes; wrongs that are plain to all, but per­sis­tent because of… well, how would you fin­ish that sentence?

Let me find your grace in the val­ley
Let me find your life in my death
Let me find your joy in my sor­row
Your wealth in my need
That you’re near with every breath
In the valley

There is only one mean­ing, one absolute real­ity, one Lord, one faith, and one God worth trust­ing because he is over all and sus­tains all. With­out him, the mean­ing­less­ness of this earth’s seemingly-perpetual abil­ity to decay should have us sur­ren­der to that entirely. Instead, we are to sur­ren­der to Him, or embrace that ambiva­lent indif­fer­ence so ulti­mately char­ac­ter­is­tic of the endeav­ours of humankind.