Opinion
‘Reality Decay’ Is at the Root of All the Bad News
Society is breaking along multiple lines due to a single cultural pathology.
Society is breaking along multiple lines due to a single cultural pathology.
Ben Davis ShareShare This Article
Reality is decaying fast. It is hard to explain the news if you think only in terms of facts and material interests, because so much of it is about fantasies running out of control. Thinking about all this, trying to understand, my mind turns to an artwork by the artist Paul Chan from 2009 called Sade for Sade’s Sake.
The 5-hour-plus projection shows shadow puppets locked in an interminable reenactment of the many spectacles of sex and violence in the Marquis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785)—twitching silhouettes locked in a relentless, joyless, ghostly freak-off.
The product of an aristocrat’s overheated imagination, 120 Days of Sodom is an unrelenting and joyless read—just endless mechanical fantasies of powerful men engaging in sexual torture and taboo-breaking. Pier Paolo Pasolini used the same text to inspire Salò (1975), considered one of the most disturbing films ever, an attempt to capture the psychosexual pathologies that fed Italian Fascism. In an interview, Chan explained what inspired him to return to it in the 2000s:
I realized that we don’t really think about it this way, but Sodom was a book about war profiteers, that the four men who perpetrated the atrocious, sexual, violent acts of kidnapping people—girls and boys—to bring them to their chateau to do whatever they want with them, they could do that because they were war profiteers within the war of Louis XIV …That really struck me, because at the time that we were living, we were going through a war, the Second Gulf War. We were going through the destruction of countries in the Middle East, and we were hearing stories about war profiteering.
This particular artwork gets a mention in the recent dump of Epstein emails. In January 2010, an art adviser identified as Annibelle from Neilson Consultancy—likely the late Annibelle Neilson, a British socialite known to have wrangled girls for Epstein—writes to Epstein. She suggests names of artists who “could and have done some of the things you explained to me that you were looking to do on your island,” telling him to check out the Paul Chan artwork seen at the 2009 Venice Biennale: Sade for Sade’s Sake.
That title of Chan’s work is a play on “art for art’s sake.” A purely aesthetic life, lived only with reference to one’s own pleasure, becomes monstrous and sociopathic, it suggests.
Well, artistic nuance is no match for the bottomless ability of the incurious to misread it. I do find the little incident emblematic and telling.
Read enough of the Epstein emails and you find yourself in a strange headspace. You begin to reconstruct the outlines of a hermetically sealed, hyper-transactional world of privilege, where anyone from outside appears like an inconvenience to be ignored or a prop to be used.
People talk a lot about the evils of inequality, and inequality is evil. We live in what Oxfam calls an “inequality emergency.” But if you stop to think about it, it’s not intuitively clear why. Poverty is bad, but inequality is not a synonym for poverty; it just means the top has a lot more, proportionally, than the rest.
There are many answers to this question, but one I have come to is that extreme inequality has a tendency to break reality. Paul Hokemeyer, a psychologist, imagines the process in eight steps in a recent New York story on the effect of extreme wealth on the brain:
It starts with (1) a shift in how the person sees themselves. Wealth changes not just what a person can buy but what they feel entitled to want. Then comes (2) isolation: private clubs, private schools, private planes, private neighborhoods, private versions of reality. Soon (3) an echo chamber forms and the wealthy person is surrounded by people whose status and income depend on keeping them happy. Bad news stops arriving. As a result, (4) tribal instincts take over and outsiders are viewed with suspicion and contempt. Then come (5) psychological defenses. The wealthy person begins to deny the humanity and needs of others. They rationalize that if they made their money, anyone can, and those who didn’t are lazy or immoral. Eventually (6) they become isolated from consequences. They can hire other people — lawyers, publicists — to deal with the ramifications of what they do. From there (7) a feedback loop takes hold: Bad behavior is rewarded with more power, more wealth, more status, which only reinforces the conviction that one is right and others are wrong. The final stage is (8) moral distortion.
A society whose institutions and social life are shaped around such dynamics is not healthy for most of us, but even for those at the apex of the hierarchy, it’s ultimately destructive. Because—and it’s weird to have to state this, but such are the times—reality is real. Insulating yourself from inconvenient facts is not an effective long-term life strategy, even for someone powerful enough to externalize the costs of most of their bad decisions onto others.
I thought of this watching Melania: 20 Days to History, the recent documentary about First Lady Melania Trump, directed by Rush Hour auteur (and Epstein email buddy) Brett Ratner. Melania is awful, but tellingly so, and worth seeing and studying in that it does capture something about the “reality distortion field” gripping the present.
It is, above all, a movie about image management. To the extent it has a plot with any momentum, it is about the once and future First Lady picking out an outfit for the 2025 Inauguration and planning various aspects of the accompanying parties. It shows her meeting with a litany of flunkies and assistants, and no real friends of note. Melania is always in transit, in cars and planes, completely enbubbled in a mobile world of shiny surfaces.
Many have commented on Melania‘s Scorsese-inspired opening needle drop, which features the Rolling Stones cataclysmic anthem, “Gimme Shelter.” “Rape/murder/it’s just a shot away,” Mick Jagger wails as we zoom into Mar-a-Lago. Just as recommending Sade for Sade’s Sake to Epstein is like saying, “You are an sociopathic pervert,” without any awareness that you should add, “This is a bad thing,” this musical choice says, “We are gangsters,” without adding, “This is a bad thing.”
Parts of Melania are so unflattering—her singing along robotically to “Billy Jean” in the back of a limo; her blank back-and-forth call with Trump when he tells her excitedly how he won the 2024 election—that it’s hard to believe that Ratner set out to make Melania Trump look good. Yet every beat of the film is meant to please an audience of two, the Trumps—and that’s exactly why it completely fails in its ostensible purpose as image-massaging PR. This plotless, garbled mess can’t possibly charm any viewers outside their most slavish stans.
The Melania doc has been widely criticized as a $40 million bribe from Amazon to the Trumps. But garbage-tier propaganda is clearly not the worst symptom of reality decay at that heights of power.
In the chaotic Iran War, you can see the “reality distortion field” at its most disastrous. Trump’s successful adventure in Venezuela seems to have given him the false feeling that he could bend reality to his will with no resistance. Former Fox News host turned Secretary of War Pete Hegseth seems to really believe that all that was holding back the U.S. from total dominance forever was “wokeness.” The administration was warned extensively that attacking Iran was a bad idea for a whole host of reasons, military, and economic, and political. There appears to have been no real plan besides, “Iran will do what we want because we are powerful.”
And thousands of people will be incinerated, and millions of people will likely suffer the economic consequences. We will all be living with the fallout of the United States’s psychotic break for the rest of our lives.
Among the most striking characteristics of the Iran War is the complete lack of any attempt to truly sell it—either to the public in advance, or to other countries. The ghouls and profiteers behind the Iraq War back in the 2000s, when Chan was conceiving Sade for Sade’s Sake, were high on their own supply to a certain extent, believing the bad intel that they were feeding the media—but they look like Sun Tzu compared to the clowns here, who seem to have veered off into some feedback loop of Fox, Truth Social, and alt-right memes, spiraling away from reality.
The memes are where I am going to land this. The rapidly degenerating digital culture is the third leg of the stool of the “reality distortion field” that has engulfed the U.S.
Many reasons can be advanced for why the lords of Silicon Valley went MAGA, but one is the shared belief in reshaping reality to fit massive egos, rather than adapting egos to fit reality. Open up X any day and you will find the platform that Elon Musk personally bought and turned into a turbo-charged amplification chamber for his own worst impulses and delusions of grandeur. You will see its direct downstream effect on the sense of reality of thousands of people. Even worse than the “filter bubbles” Eli Pariser warned of a decade and a half ago, social media’s current inbred info climate has surely fed the ever-more extreme and febrile MAGA cadres.
But social media is yesterday’s thing. The new thing is generative A.I. (ever heard of it?). And this technology, being pushed on us all through every channel possible, is almost custom-designed as an accelerant for a society-wide retreat from shared social reality.
Locking people into closed loops of their own fantasies is one of the main viable uses for a lot of these A.I. applications. There is no reason to believe that the hyper-scaling A.I. giants are going to follow any ethical limits when it comes to commodifying their users’ delusions of grandeur and psychotic whims, as long as flattering them is more profitable than not flattering them. They have untold billions of debt, on the one hand, and “an archive of human candor that has no precedent,” on the other, as Zoë Hitzig, a researcher OpenAI, wrote recently when she quit, sounding the alarm about what could be coming.
“The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within the reach of factory girls in return for steadily decreasing amounts of effort,” the economist Joseph Schumpeter once wrote. That’s a bit pat and a little patronizing, but it captures the reality that phenomena that begin as luxuries often get defused. The BlackBerry used to be a niche product for bankers, executives, and Barack Obama; now everyone has a smartphone and is on it all the time.
And that seems to me to be the vector of the A.I. economy: Democratizing the right to be a mad king, so that even a friendless nobody can have sycophantic flunkies that cheer them deeper and deeper into their own bespoke personal version of Melania or 120 Days of Sodom, take your pick. Total reality decay is just a shot away.