What a great metaphor, The anxiety Generator of culture. We are plugged into that generator at childhood and learn to be anxious about what might happen to us, guilty for what we did to ourselves, hostile to what’s being done to us, and resentful for what has been done to us. The world is a hostile place under the light of this generator.
You can’t unplug it because the generator makes us believe we won’t have any light of consciousness if its unplugged. Our parents and family plugged us into the generator because they are plugged into it. Everything we do and every place we go is powered by the light of this generator. But the exhaust fumes from this generator are slowly killing us. The generator creates the stress and then offers cures. All choices to escape are created by the generator. Just as an actual generator is impersonal, so is the Culture Generator. Even our concept of God and death are generated by this self generating generator. It’s power runs on the investment of everyone who is plugged into it.
Movies like the Matrix are metaphorical keys that plant the seed idea in your consciousness that light and power is possible without the generator.
The paradox is that you can’t unplug the Culture Generator because the choice between being plugged in and not plugged in comes from the generator.
Anxiety creates conspiracy theories because anxiety is about an empty category, just fear of fear without some specific object, like a wild dog. Anxiety fears what is in the unknown, so the imagination comes rushing in to fill the unknown with something, a theory of who we should fear. Once this web is hung, it only needs a few twigs to keep it flying in space.
Anxiety is a background feeling that something is wrong. It’s a sense of dread, and Fox News feeds on that feeling, pointing to imagined causes for it. There is no cause for anxiety but the culture one identifies with. All cultures are closed systems that are driven to maintain a homeostasis of stable sameness. The create stable sameness by creating anxiety and then offering choices on how to remove the anxiety. What is stable sameness is the anxiety.