But honestly these three are certainly not the worst offenders, not by a long shot. Superhero franchises for instance are half fascist ubermensch fantasy half military industrial complex propaganda. And nearly any media set in the future takes place in some kind of dystopia - it’s like Western society has become unable to even imagine a better future, or rather we are being conditioned to be incapable of imagining a better world. A healthy society would produce media portraying utopian societies to give people something to aspire to and work towards.

Instead we get it drilled into our heads again and again that things can only get worse from here. Because optimism and hope mobilize people whereas pessimism and doomerism lead to inaction and resignation, which is exactly what the ruling class wants. And if there is anything positive that is imagined about the future in such media then that thing is never the result of the mass mobilization of society toward a common goal but by the merit of individual genius, singular individuals who are superior to everyone else and who single handedly advance society and technology. A typical fascist trope.

And that’s what it boils down to. Western society’s sickness at its core is that it has a fundamentally fascist world outlook that permeates the entire Zeitgeist and is fed to us from birth, through schooling, advertising, media, politics and the structure of the economy, and which manifests as various seemingly separate pathologies but which are really interconnected and stemming from the same source: supremacism, worship of individualism, capitalist realism…