Mediocrity is a Weapon – Why everything is shit on purpose.
Fri 10:06 am +00:00, 17 Jul 2026
Source: https://jupplandia.substack.com/p/mediocrity-is-a-weapon
I have been thinking a lot about the Odyssey lately, and I have shared my thoughts on it in two pieces here. I don’t intend for this to be another Odyssey piece, and I want this to be a much broader discussion of the use of mediocrity as a weapon and the inherent triumph of mediocrity in a progressive leftist regime.
But the Odyssey does give us a very useful starting point.
Before the Odyssey, I was confused by the reputation and success of Christopher Nolan as a director. For some reason, I hadn’t directly equated his career with politics. This was a curious failing on my part, only beginning to be corrected when Oppenheimer was released, when it coincided with Barbie, and when both films and the vast media campaign in favour of them served obvious progressive leftist purposes.
Until Oppenheimer, I hadn’t thought of Nolan as a political director or as a regime figure, just as a director whose status and reputation I couldn’t understand. I thought it was an aesthetic only issue, where I didn’t understand an appeal discerned by others. Oppenheimer’s incredibly sympathetic view of Oppenheimer and more importantly of Communism opened my eyes, and everything that has come out about Odyssey has confirmed the realisation since then.
Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed that it took me so long to realise what Nolan was and to have viewed his prior films as if they were merely dull, turgid, slow, difficult to follow with any great interest, and purposefully alienating in decisions like Nolan’s expressed desire to make scenes difficult to see and hear in order to force the viewer to concentrate more. I wrapped this into general aesthetic pomposity rather than malign political intent, which was an error. Orwell said that all art is propaganda, and it’s an ugly thought I’ve always revolted against. Metro Goldwyn Mayer after all have the Latin version of the 19th century French bohemian concept of art for arts sake (ars gratia artis) front and centre on the company logo, suggesting that even if many films failed the standard there was this idea even in Hollywood that trying to create something profound or beautiful in film, something universally rather than didactically so, mattered.
Poe, as was so frequently the case when he took up an idea that someone else had suggested and made it his own, put it best when discussing the purpose of poetry:
“We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true poetic dignity and force:– but the simple fact is that would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls we should immediately there discover that under the sun there neither exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified, more supremely noble, than this very poem, this poem per se, this poem which is a poem and nothing more, this poem written solely for the poem’s sake.”
I agree with this general aesthetic principle. Art may strive for many things and include many ideas, both ridiculous and profound, pleasant and unpleasant, elevating and depressing….but if it is trying to create something wonderful that stands by its own merits it will generally work out better than if it is delivering a didactic lecture.
The progressive period of control of the arts and entertainment has glaringly shown this to be true, as did Soviet Realism or the worst excesses of Marxist influenced Modernism between 1900-1940. It is very rare (and dangerous) for great propaganda and great art to genuinely combine successfully in an aesthetic sense, examples of this are far overwhelmed by the crudeness of the ideology limiting the quality of the art. Riefenstahl’s films with their soaring cathedrals of light beams and impressive aesthetic eye for instance are rare, whereas grossly drawn illustrations of Jews as rats were common. In Soviet art, the genuine quality of Battleship Potemkin or of Dimitri Shostakovich’s 5th and 10th symphonies is rare, whereas boilerplate muscular worker art, utterly forgotten Soviet Realist novels, identical statuary of Lenin and Stalin, and execrable poetry were common. Soviet architecture, in particular, embraced the very opposite of the artistic impulse, with Brutalist Soviet Modernism seemingly being determined to crush all Beauty beneath concrete blocks.
It’s an anti-creative, anti-artistic, anti-human sensibility which becomes common to totalitarian regimes, telling us that thinking in totalitarian ways results in the death of human creativity as well as of personal freedom.
Art is perhaps the most personal freedom of all, and the most human activity there is other than the love between families, and therefore is never suited to and always denied by the totalitarian mind. There’s a reason that the greatest Russian writers of the Soviet period were the dissidents. And there’s a tragic irony too in the modern reality that the most unthinking totalitarian conformists of the progressive leftist era are the artists, film makers, musicians and ‘creatives’.
The people now least equipped to recognise truth and beauty are the people who claim to artistically express it, and the people who are most prone to celebrate aesthetic barbarism.
Such people for instance worship Obama’s library on purely ideological grounds, when it is objectively speaking the ugliest building ever constructed in the United States of America. It completely recalls Soviet Brutalism, British multi-storey car parks of the 1960s and 1970s, and the design of sinister alien hive ships in a science fiction film. But we are told it is beautiful, which mirrors the distinction between claim and reality regarding the man it was built for.
Going back to Nolan, this is a director who has never had art for art’s sake in mind, even though the regime consensus is that he is some great modern auteur with a unique vision to offer. What he offers is not unique or artistic. In fact it’s the most unartistic cinema experience currently available, so devoid of substance that one can think of a film like Inception as a complicated puzzle box with no puzzle in it, as layers that automatically unfold and look complicated, but mean absolutely nothing and have no more content than an empty supermarket trolley.
It’s the layers of unfolding, on their own, that are supposed to pass for art and profundity, or philosophical speculation, as if this is an intellectual exercise of worth rather than a few hours where nothing much happens for no particular reason (save perhaps a tissue thin ‘corporations bad’ message). It is Philip K.Dick stripped of all the genius and humanity, all the pathos and heart and truth, with only the distrust of reality left.
As his career has progressed, the mock profundity and the layers of seriousness have been unfolded in such a way as to expose what the core really is, which is an intensely anti-creative impulse of pure bludgeoning progressive didacticism, just as artistically worthless as what Kathleen Kennedy did to the once-mythic Star Wars (for all its faults, it did access myth via George Lucas following the patterns of The Hero With a Thousand Faces).
Nolan’s ‘vision’, then, is entirely an illusion, a thing built on flattery and what 19th century antebellum writers called ‘puffing’. It’s built from thousands of ideologically aligned and paid fellow travellers insisting that this is a magnificent vision. And insisting on that solely because, ironically, any one of them could have supplied the same thing.
They marvel at his vision, because he has none of his own. It is their vision, the same one they all hold, incredibly narrow, focused on the same anti-creative and anti-human Big Messages. It is actually the case that it impossible to possess an individual vision at all if you are a leftist progressive using art as a vehicle for your politics. You are not sharing Art. You are sharing an ideological ritual, a confirmation mass seance, where the dead spirit of Progressivism speaks through you and the film is an ectoplasmic vomit.
How does this relate to broader trends, how do we look honestly at the politics of such creations stripped of creativity? We must see their parasitism as reflective of the politics they serve, which cannot create, but can only attach in a feeding parasite manner and drain some host of meaning and worth. The Odyssey, of course, is Nolan’s latest chosen host. And in this case the obvious insulting inauthenticity of the whole is no longer disguised but actually reaches the same place an Airplane style spoof of Greek mythology or Western Civilisation at its origins would reach.
Viking longships used as Greek vessels. A black Helen of Troy. A transgender mighty Greek warrior. Germanic woods as Greek olive groves. A Medieval dress on a Bronze Age heroine. Modern idiom and talk about ‘daddy issues’ in an epic setting. Mythical figures in Robocop costumes or armour that looks closer to recent superhero outfits than the cuirass and greaves of Bronze Age warriors.
These are the elements of a spoof. You take these seriously if you know nothing, and you present them seriously if you are filming Airplane The Greek Tragedy. To view them as artistic excellence is to pile a ‘critical’ absurdity on top of a ‘creative’ one. For the director to think he is offering something serious testifies to the extreme chronological ignorance and idiocy of progressivism, as does the assertion from ideologically identical critics and reviewers that these absurd elements and anachronisms constitute an artistic masterpiece.
One of the features of both fake high art (the productions of talentless pseuds convinced of their genius, the Avant Garde and Modern art aesthetics that make gallery pieces indistinguishable from litter) and totalitarian politics is the complete denial of any awareness of absurdity and any sense of humour. It’s not just great film that becomes impossible under progressive rules (like the 30% race quotas demanded for Oscar consideration). Recognition of absurdity and possession of a sense of humour becomes impossible too, and for the same reasons that Germans were unable to realise that Hitler’s hand movements and appearance and ranting delivery was absurd while British observers instantly saw the comical absurdity in such figures and in the very notion of dictatorship.
Progressives are at their most serious when they are at their most absurd.
This is not to say that old sources can’t be reworked in a way that is not directly comical spoof. Pulp writers knew how to recast ancient Greek sources as space opera. The original Star Wars trilogy was not great art, but it was powerful cinema from using mythic elements in a new setting. It gained that power from following mythic templates, and it retained it by knowing not to have Darth Vader say “Luke, I am your daddy”. It knew that would instantly be ridiculous. 300 and 300 Rise of an Empire are both ridiculous and have costume choices for the Persian Emperor Xerxes and others at least as absurd aa those we glimpse in the trailers and posters of Nolan’s Odyssey, but they are not simultaneously claiming to be serious masterpieces set in a real time and place.
We know that the Xerxes of reality was not a 9 or 12 foot tall black giant with gold nipple rings and the gay fetish bondage wear of a very specialist private party at a nightclub hired by Liberace. That stuff went too far for me to enjoy those movies, but it was possible for others to do so because the films never sold themselves as a serious treatment. They sold themselves as what they were-brain dead entertainment with lots of fighting, big muscles, slow motion action, and the same comic book film style as Frank Miller’s Sin City.
Similarly older treatments of Greek myth that are pure entertainment, like the 1981 Clash of the Titans or it’s more serious but still pure entertainment focused 2010 action movie remake, aren’t movies that get every historical detail absolutely correct, and don’t try to. They include elements that could be just as jarring as the Viking longships of Nolan’s Odyssey for those with scholarly knowledge of the mythic sources or of the real culture of Bronze Age Greece. Yet in their non-didactic purpose, in the lack of ideological and political reasoning behind these movies, they manage to be far more respectful to the sources even when being faintly absurd.
What earlier treatments are, or that something like the very recent gonzo treatment of Greek myth found in the extremely entertaining anime Blood of Zeus are, is highly competent efforts at pure entertainment, whereas Nolan’s Odyssey is a dour, imagination-free, utterly pedantic, bigoted act of deliberate cultural vandalism, delivered in the exact same spirit that toppling a statue or scrawling graffiti on a church would be delivered in.
Nolan’s false eminence is not a thing unique to film, it’s a key aspect of progressive rule. What he delivers as a director is mediocre, and described as excellence. It is described as excellence because he is a regime artist, delivering to order exactly what the regime wants and methodically going through key moments or myths of Western civilisation destroying and perverting them. If there wasn’t that shared ideological and political purpose the ignorance and contempt for the sources and the audience would be recognised. The spoof like absurdity would be as laughable to them as it is to us.
But the reality of progressivism in dominant positions in culture is that mediocrity is a weapon. The ability to elevate a very poor director to very great heights is the same as the ability to elevate astonishingly mediocre political figures into high office. It’s a testament to the power of the ideology that can achieve this and a test of the success of their brainwashing of the general public in terms of whether we accept these false valuations as real.
Mediocre white artists like Nolan are DEI picks in the same way that mediocre staff members chosen for being black, or in the same way that picking Kamala Harris for senior office, are. He’s been elevated purely for ideological reasons, like them, and purely to serve the political cause, like them. Indeed, unthinkingness, Nolan’s complete lack of independent vision, creativity and thought, is the engine of his enormous success, just as the same quality explains why someone like Keir Starmer becomes the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
Mediocre talents and mediocre people remain the most grateful and loyal advocates of an absurd regime, who take it seriously because it pretends to take them seriously, that can exist. By definition, a person of talent must be blocked from success in a system that despises genuine meritocracy while persons of little or no talent must be advanced.
Whether it’s Christopher Nolan or Tim Walz, Bad Bunny or Ed Davey, mediocrity is the thing you need to possess if you want to rise in a society dominated by progressive politics. You may ask yourself why, again and again, you can’t understand how such a person ‘achieved’ so much. You may look at a piece of woke film-making or a piece of modern art or a political or journalistic career and consider it bizarre and confusing that this person or this thing is elevated beyond others. You may look at their products and know how poorly constructed they are, or ask yourself why studios give hundreds of millions of dollars to people who aren’t very good at what they are supposed to be doing.
And it’s the same thing in operation when someone like Tim Walz becomes a Governor or when Owen Jones has a very well paid career as a ‘writer’ and ‘journalist’.
It is because these things work by selection rather than merit, and by ideological loyalty rather than by talent.
Mediocrity is a weapon. Those you thus raise, are forever in your debt. Those you thus crush, are the genuine talents who would have questioned and challenged you.
