“Danse Macabre,” by Stephen King, is one of my favorite books. Unlike most of Stephen King’s work, which are horror novels, “Danse Macabre” is about the business of writing horror novels.
More specifically, “Danse Macabre” is about the psychology of writing for horror, and the impulses of the human psyche that are played upon to be able to write it effectively, drawing from a well of our emotions, instincts, and subconscious fears. It’s about digging at the root of many years of established horror stories, and uncovering the what we find scary and why.
One of the core concepts of “Danse Macabre” is the clash between the Apollonian and Dionysian -- competing currents of need that drive humanity, divided between the intellectual and the emotional mind. In Greek mythology, Apollo and Dionysus were both the sons of Zeus, Apollo the God representing the Sun, music, and light, Dionysus the God representing parties, theatre, and drink. In this sense, humans are compelled both by our need for order, for inspiration, and for fulfillment, and our drive to revel, to celebrate, and find joy in relaxing in our own vices.
If you understand this psychological dichotomy, it’s not hard to also understand that there are very similar warring factions of both intellectual and emotional truth which we seek out in directing our shaping our consciousness. Suppose intellectual truth is regarded as a scale of (0..1), but in that sense, it’s a logical statement that falls on the side of either being factual or not, there isn’t a middle ground. The Challenger exploded, The Union won the Battle of Gettysburg, the World Trade Center collapsed in Lower Manhattan.
By contrast, suppose that emotional truth is also a (0..1) scale, but floating point, which is to say there are infinite possible outcomes between a factual occurrence and our notions of what supports it. Upon the ground of emotional truth is built our subjective interpretation of existence, suppositions that we lean on as a compass in seeking out more objective foundations of the truth. Suppose you want to try a new restaurant, you’ve heard about two places, one from a close friend, one from a complete stranger. At this point, you don’t even know if either place exists, and your advice is nothing more than rumor and hearsay, which do you trust? If you said the one your friend recommended, you are weighing on your scale of emotional truth.
I wrote recently about the Trump administration’s use of an AI image to replace the face of a protester, deliberately changing her face from a steely resolve to a blubbering baby. Already the administration has been playing fast and loose with what I would describe as ‘working the refs,’ putting out a statement that characterized the situation in the worst, more dire, possible terms, allowing that narrative to marinate in the general public’s conscious, and then only walking their words back when evidence flies in the face of their accusations. This use of AI is a new and frightening escalation, in that it represents the dangers of accepting a substitute reality. A smugly antagonistic observer sees this image and thinks, “Haha, this uppity agitator didn’t expect consequences for her provocation, now she’s facing them” -- it reinforces their own smugness, instead of providing a logical incoherence. Worse still, it no longer reflects the truth playing out in front of them.
This is the inevitable end of an over 30 year cycle that began with something as innocuous titled as “The Real World.” Billed as ‘Reality television,’ the format actually relies on the substance created by the person who edits the raw footage, the person creating a compelling narrative from the hours of material spread out in front of them. Generally, this process selectively amplifies existing tensions and interpersonal dynamics for the sake of creating drama. The downside is the resulting story is deeply jarring and stripped of context, relying on the viewer to interpret based on the reductive caricature playing out in front of them.
Trump is a creature of reality television, more accurately, he precedes it but occupies a similar framework of being hyperaware of his own branding and forcing that image to occupy a larger space than the realities of his own (many, multitude) failings as a human being. I think Trump is a vile, odious, contemptuous clod but he is a master at manipulation, in painting in a canvas of deeply jarring, stripped of context images and sounds to override peoples’ own sympathies with his own. They are fed a caricature of ‘us and them’, instead of a more complicated truth of a vast nation with many differing contexts and opinions.
We know about the moments in history in which emotional truth triumphs over intellectual truth, and they are grimly horrific chapters of the history that we must contend with: The Witch Trials of Europe and later North America in the 1600 and 1700’s, La Terreur, the Cultural Revolution, the Holocaust, Jim Crow. There is a reason why our legal system falls on the scale of being ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’, in dealing with many disciplines that could be viewed subjectively (forensics, witness testimony, a body of evidence), a convincing case must to be represented to sway the audience before guilt is established. By that standard, we give the defense the benefit of the doubt. If we give that up in favor of the voice of those who already consolidated all of the power and all of the control, we know about the path that leads down.
I am not saying we are certainly headed for that road, so much as I am saying that without a tribunal with strict reprisals for those who deal in emotional manipulation and the fabric of deception, we leave all of these same weapons on the table, like Chekov’s Gun, all but guaranteeing their use by those who seek power above all else.