I’d had this post simmering on the back burner for almost a year now, and I think it’s time to finish my thought in light of current events.
Back in late 2023, I coined the term “Aspirationalism” for the successor to the Post-Modernist literary movement. This came up because people were declaring this new era of post-post modernist entertainment to be several different things. From PulpRev to the Iron Age and half a dozen other different groups claiming to be the future like the artist collectives that formed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This term was inspired from a podcast done by Katie Roome of Periapsis Press on “What is the Iron Age?”
While I watched, I realized that I’m seeing similar pushes and movements in many places with the rise of the independent author. That means “Iron Age” isn’t a movement in of itself, but rather a school of a bigger trend. One of many speartips for something larger.
My first thoughts of “neo-idealism”, “neo-enlightenment” were not quite right for what I’m seeing going on. Even “Re-Modernism” didn’t work, and we definitely weren’t going back to Romanticism. Something fresh had to be coined to sum up what I was seeing.
What is Aspirationalism? It is a writing style that hearkens back to the old truths that Post-Modernism had torn apart, exposed as corrupt and stripped bare as frauds because it was not perfect. Now I’m sure many post-modernists would disagree, but that’s the functional use of the movement I’ve seen. Heroes became villains. Villains were (allegedly) redeemed. Good versus evil was a sucker’s bet in a cosmic game of three card monte run by quantum mechanics.
And although the goal was laudable in finding actual truth, the problem is that thanks to it’s own tools of skepticism, critical theory and cynicism, employed in order to find unattainable platonic perfection, it became incapable of accepting any truth or agreeing to any standard. Instead, Po-Mo became the great leveler and no ideal or goal was worthy of aspiring to because all was corrupted and corruptible.
The problem is that we are trapped in an imperfect world. Correct, no hero is perfectly good. In fact, mankind will almost reject anything they see as perfect because they are not perfect and therefore incompatible with perfection. But what about “good enough”? We are all sinful creatures in a sin damaged world, but even we recognize in some dim way what righteousness, goodness and truth are. Our dark hearts hate it, but at the same time, we crave and want it. It’s the inverse of Plato’s cave with shapes of light shining on the wall instead of shadows blocking it.
Why use this term for this growing literary movement? Because it is replacing the current trends much like expressionism became the evolution from classicism or romanticism. Post-modernist entertainment has sunk to the lowest common denominator and has even managed to corrupt itself. It focuses on only the worst, basest elements of humanity, exalting these things as virtues. We have been betrayed by the industrial propaganda/publishing complex that is traditional media in all its forms. They gave us a new liturgy, evangelizing on their new faith’s tenets. Subjectivism instead of universal truths, skepticism and distrust instead of faith and belief. Critical theory instead of rational analysis. This fed into the rise of the new multi-culty religion where all opinions are equally worthless, there are no objective facts and everyone can have their OWN truth. They don’t recognize these values are often mutually exclusive and cannot coexist creating Orwellian ‘double-think’, but underneath it all the only truth they accept is power over the divisions and a hierarchy of grievance and victimhood. This is the new theocracy, created on the corpses and rubble of previous literary movements that could not withstand their attack. Foreign gods, unknown to our forefathers.
Real virtue, morality and ethics are sneered at by the acolytes of the new subjectivist multi-culti faith as hateful and obsolete. Traditional values are considered a threat to everything the practitioners of THE MESSAGE hold dear. They’d already deconstructed these old values and have an arsenal of attacks to employ against them and reject their validity even if there is contrary evidence. The “science” is settled, debates are over and off to the intellectual gulags with those who disagree.
But a large portion, possibly still a majority, of western civilization, particularly in America, we still believe in these things and want their entertainment to match.
Like scavengers, saphrophage fungi and insects in the forest that break down dead debris into useful soil, Post-Modernism has served a purpose in destroying via critical theory, skepticism and subjectivism intellectual constructs from philosophy to theology to science what we once thought as universal and eternal. The symbols and tenets of old ways were reduced to meaningless rubble if it could not withstand the ardent parsing of their parts. It may have started as the old renaissance concept of “The Devil’s Advocate” where you pick at a plan or theory till it failed only to fix the errors and try again, but it had run amok.
Unfortunately, Post-Modernism succumbed to the same corruption of men’s souls and hearts as its intellectual prey that it condemns and feasts upon. Application became biased and twisted. The tools of Critical Theory, Skepticism and Subjectivism were and are still applied dishonestly and unevenly for the goals of men and women who saw the politics of division as a way for their own ascention. They transformed useful criticism to strengthen understanding into weapons of philosophical terror and chaos, becoming an ideological cancer that will ultimately kill itself. This misuse was designed to tear down enemies and protect their own interests. By perverting these tools for selfish and often malicious ends, the world has fallen victim to barbarism and superstition while a select elite rise to the top, flush with power and money. Here’s a clip from “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand (I can’t say the movie is good, but the novel is excellent. You can find some of my comments here.)
But here’s a great example of how Post-Modernism now destroys good. When I talk about a speech in praise of the villain, this is just a teensy part of it. Read the book, it’s better.
We’ve watched the growth in power of individuals and groups who embraced this methodology. They danced on the graves of the pillars of western civilization they had toppled. Those in entertainment who gave us such enjoyment and escapism were expelled for they did not align with the new theology/psychology/philosophy. But that has not been enough. Now that they perverted those creations and ruined their ability to move forward, the original creations lived on, and so the new cult needed to desecrate and destroy them too. The intellectual properties that spoke against them like restless spirits haunting and tormenting their own corrupt ideology that they zealously fought and protected from their own weapons. To co-opt and pervert wasn’t enough. these memories must be destroyed.
I digress, but only a little. In many ways, it’s how we’ve gotten to where we are as a fandom. Sitting in a field of broken art and molested symbolism with meaning corrupted into mud.
Ask yourself, what could grow in this soil of broken down ideas, philosophies and faiths? Could anything survive after this destruction and decomposition? Could anything new grow? Recently, I was reminded by my favorite poem by Rudyard Kipling. Now I’m not big into poetry, but occasionally one really inspires and speaks to me. “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” is one such poem.
Kipling does a wonderful job illustrating that these eternal truths are not dead and gone. There is a reason why we’ve called them “eternal truths”. They keep proving themselves true as the “gods of the marketplace” age and crumble under their own parasitic existence. And when they are starved out, what remains are these evergreen lessons in morality and ethics.
From this, I see this rise of a new literary movement I call Aspirationalism. It is the answer to the question for how re-discover and exhume these foundational truths from the depths of creative mud. To hold up what is good and uplifting while illustrating the corruption and failure of evil. We longed to see these values reflected in our fiction again. Like Brothers Grimm teaching traditional values to the German People through their morality tales, or Aesop’s Fables giving universal wisdom, we had lost these things in our storytelling, paved over by the Industrial Propaganda/Publishing Complex.
Since first coining the term, Aspirationalism seems to really have become a thing as the culture wars in the west have raged. More eternal truths from biology to social contracts have been excavated from the mud of post-modernism, stripped of all the corruptible trappings and revealing the gold inside. The push against men’s fiction and political agenda litmus tests have run into a rise of creators and publishers who have put their foot down and said “No more!” No longer will they accept that men and the political pariahs of the last decade should be refused access to the public square. No longer is it acceptable to ban and vanish creatives off to the oubliettes of multi-culty social justice for saying 2+2=4 when they want anything but.
The audiences, disheartened and disillusioned by the destruction and perversion of classic IPs that they once followed breathlessly are crying out for something new. Something that makes them dream again. New IPs full of heroes and adventures that become aspirational goals. The long night of entertainment where all are corrupt and even the grave is no solace is over. Evil is not undefeatable. Good can and will triumph. The struggle may be hard and bleak, but the end is true and good and worthy of praise and admiration. Our heroes are angels with dirty faces, but it is the necessary dirt borne of hard work, well done for a laudable cause.
I’ve been very heartened to see since 2023 the rise of, and growing visibility of several small presses that are trying to take up the slack from the dying tradpub and “mainstream” media. They are putting out many stories just like this. Even the darkest of their published works seem to aim at this core idea of Aspirationalism. Ark Press announced their motto is best summed up in the statement “The Humans Win In The End”. There are presses now filled with male editors and women rising who want to see boys served with the same exuberance as girls have been for the last 30 years. Publishers who desire to see traditional men and values featured, not subverted by perverse erotica and depictions of warped masculinity all while calling it “men’s fiction”.
So hold up the term “Aspirationalism” to the light. Turn it around in your mind like you would a diamond in the rough and see if it lives up to what’s going on in entertainment with the rising tide of new publishing and entertainment. Does it hold up to scrutiny. Can you agree in the broad scope of things that all these new schools of entertainment can fit under such an umbrella like all the things that once fit under modernism and post-modernism?
If so, the new era of Aspirationalism is here.
