Overcoding Culture
Cultural narratives, such as mythology and shared history, are the genetic code of a society. This mythological DNA structure determines the shape of beliefs and modes of being of the people who live out the ideals of those myths. Throughout American culture right now, we are seeing an “overcoding” of cultural myths and popular media to create the impression that “marginalized” people and ideas have always been front and center, and that ideals currently out of favor with the woke mainstream have always been on shaky ground. This is in fact happening to all of world history, where we see burial remains interpreted in such a way as to make it look like non-binary or transgender peoples were the norm in pre-modern societies, or that women played the same roles as men in traditional societies. In addition to trendy gender ideology being written into history (a history we had hitherto worked very hard to record as objectively as possible) we see too the faces of recently-arrived ethnicities miraculously insinuated into recreations of medieval European society. And of course, virtually any male relationship that cannot prove itself otherwise is now imagined as homosexual, at the very least, “homoerotic.”
Genetic code springs up spontaneously and then life takes shape around it, according to its programming. Alexander the Great, for example, idolized the heroes of the Iliad, and Julius Caesar idolized Alexander. The Classical World formed itself around the myths of Homer, just as the Christian West found its form in trying to imitate Christ, and found meaning in the stories of the Bible. Both Homer and the Bible gave form to millennia-long civilizations, but after a time the culture goes off-script, the code runs out, and new stories come in to replace them. When it happens organically, this process takes a long time. The Bible was around for centuries before it became the code for the West after the heroism of Homer faded. Sadly, we live now in a time more or less coded by pop culture, but even pop culture held up traditional norms until very recently, at least in terms of gender roles, male relationships, and genealogy. But now there seems to be a concerted effort to overtly “overcode” the existing norms in a perpetration of cultural erasure, to convince the masses that current woke ideals have always been with us.
A good example of the strangeness of this is seen in Disney’s casting an African-American actress not as simply a black mermaid, but as the character of “Ariel.” Surely there must be other black mermaids that this young woman could have played? It can only have a purpose which pretends to be arbitrary? The Rings of Power is another example, but that goes without saying. What we have to keep in mind is that by replacing white male characters with females or other ethnicities, or by writing a different story in the same world as The Little Mermaid or Lord of the Rings, the wokesters wouldn’t be replacing the cultural heritage of western mythology, they would merely be adding to it. That clearly isn’t enough for them. They don’t want to be a part of Western heritage, they want to take it over. What they’re trying to do is inject the DNA of their ideology into the DNA of our culture and overcode the very fabric of mythology that makes up our shared cultural heritage. This is exactly how a virus works: it injects its code into the DNA of the host to get the hosts DNA to stop replicating itself and begin replicating the viral DNA. If the hosts immune system isn’t strong enough, the virus will kill the host. Too bad for the host, but chances are the virus has already spread itself to several others.
One of the refrains I’ve heard in protest of the character changes in the Rings of Power Amazon franchise is that Tolkien’s world allowed for people of color and women, but the show runners chose instead to replace male or white characters with women and brown characters. I personally would have no problem, in fact I would rejoice in seeing a show focusing on Galadriel, nor would I begrudge a story incorporating already existing foreign races of Middle Earth. What I cannot abide however is the attempt to rewrite the entirety of the world Tolkien meticulously crafted to suddenly try and pass it off as a place in which women warriors routinely defeated foes in combat, or that the elves and dwarves were a multicultural people like Middle Earth was suburban New Jersey. This is simply not the world Tolkien created.
Certainly, women and other races play a role in the rich tapestry of our civilization, but it’s simply a fact that these are marginal roles in the “story” of the history of the West. There are of course exceptions like the female ruler Elizabeth or a successful military man like Othello. But to rewrite a story, be it historical or mythological, is to take control of a host and overcode its genetic makeup to serve an alternate agenda, like a virus. And because it’s so out of place narratively, it is aesthetically unpleasant. Why did the military exploits of Galadriel, one of the most popular characters in the series, never make it to the volumes Tolkein and his son Christopher dedicated to the history and lore of middle earth?
This insertion of racial and gender incongruence into the canon of beloved myths of the West seems to be ramping up, but its not the only way they’re trying to overcode our culture. The reinterpretation of archaeological remains is only one way of making it look like woke ideals have always been the norm. They reinterpret old stories to make the narrative fit today’s woke script, as if trying to convince us it is only contemporary us with the aberrant, temporarily relevant perspective on sexuality, race, and gender.
Think for example of the novel Song of Achilles in which a female author writes the story from the perspective of Patroclus. In her telling, she casts him as gay and he and Achilles as lovers. Or think of Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, in which Odysseus is a “complicated man.” According to Vox, her translation offers “a new way of thinking about it in the context of gender and power relationships today. As Wilson puts it, “the question of who matters is actually central to what the text is about.” Not only is the poem about gender relations and power dynamics, but it has always been about those things, according to the woke scribes. They’ve overcoded the story of adventure and heroism that inspired an entire civilization into a critical race and gender studies story of Foucaultian power-dynamics.
The Lord of the Rings and The Little Mermaid have their origins in Northern European mythology, Rings based on Icelandic sagas and the British isles in the dark ages, while the little mermaid was written by Hans Christian Anderson, a Dane. These stories, along with the Iliad and the Odyssey, are depictions and mythologizations of the very people who founded western civilization. Their ethnic and gender roles are central to the importance of the story to their culture, and bringing them into question would have been unthinkable outside academia as recently as ten years ago. Rewriting them to change the central figures and the relationships between main characters is nothing less than a direct attempt to erase the contributions of white men from history. A worthwhile study (which won’t be done) would be to see how many non-whites or women even care, or even want to watch these stories with or without ethnic representation or a girl boss taking center stage. This is pure cultural erasure with no other motive.
As a viral assault on western culture, the woke overcoding of mythology must elicit an immune response from those of us who have to live in the society founded on these stories. The immune response is simply the truth: there were no non-binary warriors in ancient civilization or medieval Scandinavia, European nations were easily 95% ethnically homogenous until the 20th century, and women played no role in the development of the classical world.
