1989: Seinfeld
April 1, 2019
By AHNZ
Situational comedy show Seinfeld ran from 1989 to 1998 and as a cultural colony of the USA New Zealanders consumed it too. In terms of art and intelligence, brilliant. Still watched and remembered today, 20 years after. Our culture at large has yet to improve upon the incredible Slave Culture catharsis released over 10+ years by this team of comics. Seinfeld serves as a clear marker in our timeline that the mainstream had gone full slave.
Prelude to Jerry: Dignity Falls
During the 1980s New Zealand had put a Muldoonist Slave Culture behind it (carless days, price freezes,..) and the resulting Honour Culture (Professional Wrestling, Louis Vuitton Cup/KZ7,..) now yielded to its age-old foe, Dignity Culture. Now was the time of Labour 4.0, The New Right, The Krypton Factor, Bob Jones, Quantifiable responsible bureaucracy (State Sector Act, Public Finance Act.) Regan in the White House, Thatcher at Number 10, George Balani on the radio and Lindsay Perigo on TV holding the nation to high account. As the inevitable Victimhood Culture rose again, people like Ruth Richardson tried to lock down the gains that had been made during the DC phase by passing laws like The Fiscal Responsibility Act (1994.)
Slave Culture Activated
New Zealand returned, spectacularly, to Victimhood Culture as punctuated by A City Possessed: The Christchurch Civic Creche Case as covered by Lynley Hood’s book of that title. This 1990 moral panic caught New Zealand up with a phase we were lagging the usual 4 years or so behind in. Pretty soon this latest iteration of Political Correctness had everyday people running scared and worrying about what to say and do or what not to. Were men safe? Were Dads dangerous? Could boys babysit? Is this or that indicative of Satanic worship? Is Dungeons and Dragons evil? Soon the mainstream Kiwi reverted once more to activating Slave Culture rather than risk expressing wrong think.
Jerry Seinfeld
What makes us laugh about Jerry and the rest of the cast is their utter lack of healthy inter-personal boundaries. Their Slave Culture is accessible to all and cathartic to any but the most extreme of the three other moral cultures; An Honour Culture extremist would not find Seinfeld’s simpering vanity amusing but disgusting. In show after show, situation after situation, the characters fail at everyday challenges easily handled by a person with regular self-esteem and the ability to assert one’s values that goes with that.
The Show About Nothing, it is called. That’s because the cringy and awkward attempts to repress and avoid rather than confront revolve around challenges that properly are nothing but take on gigantic proportions for want of ego. If Jerry had the testosterone to say “No” he would never have to wear the puffy shirt on television, never have to put up with Newman the despised mailman, never put a cup of soup above his dignity, not get dragged into spending time with an old childhood friend whose company he does not enjoy least the man cry. Jerry and the others, after their own fashion, could easily be enslaved by Victimhood Culturalists but escape using dirty tactics and otherwise live an un-liberated life tip-toeing on VC eggshells trying not to upset anyone that can hurt their fortunes.
Unredeemed and Slave Themed
Consider for a moment the bouncy electronic theme tune. This entire critique of Seinfeld came into my head recently when I realised it was a watered-down Slave version of Bobby Brown’s 1988 track My Prerogative. This is a bold Honour Culture song that takes personal responsibility just like Brown’s Ghost Busters II (1989) song On Our Own…
I don’t need permission, make my own decisions: That’s my prerogative
It’s the way that I wanna live (It’s my prerogative)
I can do just what I feel (It’s my prerogative)
No one can tell me what to do (It’s my prerogative)
and..
you want something done you gotta do it yourself..If you want somethin’ bad, yo, you gotta wanna give your all….If you feel the same as me, yo, you gotta want to take the ball…Gotta keep, keep on pushing, you gotta learn to take control, yeah..Well I guess we’re gonna have to take control (All on our own) If it’s up to us, we’ve got to take it home
Nothing could be more clear. The Seinfeld theme flips Brown’s HC on its head to SC where none of those lyrics apply. Gone, the driving beat and strutting self-assertion. Replaced, Seinfeld’s theme is a quiet unassuming and tentative adaptation that keeps to the background ready to mock itself if called upon to do so.
Try watching any episode with all of this in mind for a window on Slave Culture and the wages of having no ego. Also worth noting are the next two Jerry Cycles¹ of which this is the first (see future post.) Finally, as the show wraps up forever in 1998 the four cast members are judged and sentenced to jail for demonstrating criminal levels of slave vice. Now in jail, literally slaves as well as culturally, Seinfeld and the others don’t even raise an eyebrow but are of course perfectly suited and equipped to keep their heads down and survive. To do their time in jail, just as they were in life.
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1 Update: Jerry Cycles post now online
Note: “In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.” — Theodore Dalrymple.
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