What does it mean to give the people what they want? A common idiom in matters of commodified transaction between actor and audience, to give the people what they want implies what they want is not necessarily what they need…but hey, give it to them anyway! But why? What is so innate within a populace that an actor can deny the best interest of his audience, or the most democratic outcome, or the most Utopian of horizons, in order to sustain this onstage charade? Politically, giving the people what they want, implies the continuation of myth, the next page in a legend that contextualizes everything we, the people, need to aspire, to saunter through days; a present-day answer to whatever Westernized-American-Dream. We can watch this, then, as the Dream weaponized. Our readings this week expose the historical terms of conditions the populace agree on instinctively, as spect-actors do, in order for the ruling class to make belief, weaponize dreams, disarm truths, and alter realities.
“Give the People What They Want” is a pretty popular Philly Soul track from the O’Jays that spent one week at the top of the R&B Single Charts in ‘75, peaking at number 45 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was regularly used at campaign events during Barack Obama’s 2008 Presidential Campaign. Another track by the same name was written by The Kinks in 1981, as the English rock band’s response to the fascination of the abomination splattered across American TV. Here, the musician asserts the role of bard, as if delivering a message from the Otherside, a plane of existence that is not confined by earthly limitations, but is still privy to the trials and tribulations that comprise the lives of ordinary citizens.
Giving the people what they want suggests a collective sanction that Machiavelli professes is perpetually underlying; omnipresent and overarching; foundational and supportive. It is the continued legend of sovereignty latent within the realm of politics just as much as it is another indication of our abdication to Doom-Give the people what they want…because they know not what they need, nor should they, for if they did, perhaps that which they needed would not reflect our (the Rule’s) best interest.
Therefore, the bard, the shaman, the folk, is styled, ever in-draft, as performatic allegory, giving you modern tragedy, serving up Death and all his Biopolitcal Friends. In such an enshrouding fabulation, the folk hero (as in the Man, the Myth, the Legend), thrives like a Criminal, the taste of glory forever on the tip of his lips, but never in his grip. Like some obscene after hours show on repeat, this dreadful pornography is lore-making, and the constant aversion to the laws of nature or man (or both) sting like a delayed orgasm.
Which, it seems, might be at the root of giving the people what they want. What they want is to keep wanting to keep pining; an encore without applause; a show that is episodic, but free from threats of cancellation. In this way, the populace can continue relying on the perceptions of others to help sharpen their teeth, feed their egos, break their jaws. In turn, we don’t even have to blame ourselves, nor the folk hero in which we base our beliefs; we can simply blame the way things are on the way things have always been; at the feet of Legend; an abdication of Doom.
In “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Mind,” Kolbert highlights different experiments and findings revolving around the human faculty of reason and its relation to fact. In the vastness of the modern age, she argues that “incomplete understanding is empowering,” and there is a pleasurable rush of dopamine involved in the sanction of fallacy and depth that often constructs a community of knowledge. It is this capability to be social, to learn and trust in another’s performance, that has formed the basis of reason as an evolved human trait. It is with great cunning that bad actors, those audacious enough to see themselves as princes, mislead a populace into the erroneously scientific, the perceived natural, through the ritual performance of Doom, the false pulpit of royalty, and the security within Fear, that Machiavelli tells us is supported by the dread of pain, which is forever implied in this darkened theatre.