How Spectacle Deflates Agency

They use stories to do this, to deflate our feeling of agency and to make us think resistance is futile. They coercively control our activities by affecting our Mana, which is the well from which all our moods, intentions, attitudes and motivations flows.

They use stories to deflate us and to affect our motivations, which we’re not even aware of. We’re just consuming a story about such and such thing, about Ukraine and something that might have happened. But at the end of the story, we decide not to donate money to Ukraine.

Source: How Disinfolklore Communicates Archetypes into Our Inner Minds

This is the invisible mechanism: a story that seems informative actually saps your will to act. After reading it, you feel slightly more helpless, slightly more resigned. That feeling IS the Spectacle working.

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