The acolytes are running the asylum

What Disney’s latest failure tells us about the world we live in.

The latest Star Wars show from Disney is The Acolyte. Predictably it has failed to enthuse audiences and has experienced some of the lowest viewing figures in the company’s recent history. An unsurprisingly poor start from a production hailed by its creator as the “gayest Star Wars show” to date.

Even before its release fans eviscerated the trailer, the brief exposure to the show’s storyline enough to anger them. It looked like it would be a car crash and it is. Many cars, much crashing.

Bringing a knife to a lightsaber fight

Now the show is airing, and fans are watching, it is worse than even they anticipated.

So far we have been entertained with the following:

• Trained Jedis bringing a knife to a lightsaber fight;

• Lesbians producing children, immaculately conceived using the Force;

• Renaming the Force to some other thing that makes no sense;

• A rehash of other pop culture films (the series creator openly described it as a mix of Frozen and Kill Bill);

• Avoiding, ignoring or circumventing inconvenient aspects of the established universe, much as the recent Star Wars films did too; also known as weak writing.

Fans witnessed numerous inconsistencies just within The Acolyte’s world itself. For example, one character claims a Jedi only ever draws a weapon if they intend to use it for defence or offence, and a few scenes later ignites his own lightsaber in a dark cave to use as a torch. This level of clunky writing is typical of much of the show. It is amateurish.

Fans were predictably disappointed. This is not just unpopular but clearly a poor quality production run by people with no respect for the source material.

It is a big budget television show being used to broadcast yet another incarnation of The Message. Needless to say, resistance to these progressive lectures has been unwelcome.

The fans are idiots

Disney’s response to the atrocious fan ratings on websites was equally predictable. They came out fighting.

Fans are getting it wrong. Their prejudice is getting in the way. They are missing the point, the wonderful opportunity to spread important social justice talking points using popular entertainment.

Years in the making, the spokespersons seemed genuinely outraged The Acolyte was considered anything other than a masterpiece of cinematic television. There was no discussion of the shoddy writing, the absurd plot holes or the established fundamentals of the Star Wars universe they ignored.

They also strenuously avoided discussing The Message, something of a feat given it saturates every frame of the production.

Fans’ concerns were quite legitimate. Poor writing, weak characters, even some who should not exist in this timeline. One popular character ought not to have been born for another thirty years. This is the level of ineptness we are dealing with where the established Star Wars universe is ignored.

How do we explain this disconnect? How do we explain the casual contempt Disney demonstrate for their own fans?

Some would argue bad luck or just the normal difficulties inherent in any creative endeavour. Making good quality entertainment is not easy. It goes wrong more often than right.

But what we witness isn’t production woes or bad luck. The Acolyte reflects the disturbed preoccupations of those who created it, including the need to usurp expected norms.

The pretenders who made The Acolyte are displaying something akin to mental illness. More specifically, personality disorders, and very specifically, narcissistic personality disorder.

It’s not me, it’s you

A narcissist’s automatic evaluation of situations is, my actions cannot be wrong, it must be you. Narcissists have an unerring capacity to emerge from even the worst of catastrophes and convince themselves they were blameless while being surrounded by idiots who let the side down.

If you have ever seen a politician or businessman walk away from some monstrous debacle seemingly unscathed, only to reappear a few months later completely unaffected by any of it while everyone else gets condemned, criticized or jailed, that is narcissism in action. A kind of reality distortion field most cannot fathom.

The narcissist doesn’t just avoid blame or criticism, their entire life is an act designed to circumvent any and all responsibility in the relentless drive to succeed. It is a psychological orientation we could only describe as being somewhat flexible with reality.

Those acting their way through life must always hide their true selves. This is the deep solipsistic fissure that characterizes the narcissistic mind. To accept wrongdoing challenges the fake persona they project into the world. To acknowledge this is to face the erasure of their false projection and expose their real self, a terror they cannot accept.

Everything about the narcissist is an act. Nothing is real. Their invented persona is their life’s work. They are pretending to be normal, to be likable or charming. Some are pretending to be film and television producers making it all the easier for them to use these popular shows as a platform for their own agenda and their own insatiable need to control the world around them. Even mild criticism cannot be tolerated within this very constrained mental prison.

Disney’s response to criticism from fans is precisely along these lines. The audience are getting it wrong. Disney know what they are doing. Those protesting about lesbians producing kids using sorcery, or the abuse of established Star Wars norms, are just small-minded bigots who lack vision.

The production teams making these kinds of shows are overrun with wokesters as their output demonstrates. Their public pronouncements alone are riddled with the kind of extreme selfish outlook characteristic of those with narcissistic personalities.

There is no mea culpa, not even a press release saying they will consider audience feedback. Just an automatic defence of bad ideas and poor ratings, much of it with an undercurrent of exasperation at the fans and their backward attitudes. An alternative worldview to their own is inconceivable. Even the notion the inclusion of contentious issues may simply be inappropriate for popular entertainment shows is not accepted either. They are oblivious to how exhausting the rest of us find this kind of thing.

Humility, a virtue championed by the Jedi, is in short supply.

Give me an audience

To the narcissists and other socially impaired people in Disney the world of Star Wars is just a commodity to be used, a convenient way to gain an audience for their message with minimal effort.

It doesn’t matter if it is Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or the New Testament. It is the attached audience they seek. The material, and the respect with which it is held, is a means to an end. A shortcut that saves them the multi-decade hassle of creating their own demand.

Its importance to fans, or its cultural impact as a whole, means nothing. Narcissists lack the capacity to empathize with others. If they acknowledge such sentiments at all it is only to exploit them for their own ends. Such is the bleak inner life they experience; a wasteland of envy, distortion and fear of being challenged by the more capable. Literally everything in their purview is bent towards servicing a false self they fear they will lose.

It is difficult to overemphasize how central this distortion is to those with narcissistic personalities. The horror stories of the carnage they leave behind are just one consequence of the single-minded nature of their obsession with themselves.

Ignoring fans’ desire to watch something normal and to preserve a universe they like is not a show of contempt, it is indifference. The indifferent do not create art, they use it to further their own ambitions. And that is what Disney is doing. It is rapidly burning through the legacy of Star Wars, the goodwill of the audience, and everyone’s patience.

In their minds they are winning. They have reached the audience. They are broadcasting their gospel of progressiveness. Every pushback, every infuriated review by a loyal fan, is just proof to the production team they were right all along. They were right to target this wretched hive of homophobic scum and racist villainy. If anyone needs a solid dose of communist space lesbian one-upmanship it is the misogynistic nazi racists voting down the brave new galaxy created by The Acolyte team.

There are clearly many more of us dangerous homophobic savages than they realized so they have much work ahead of them, and the entire Star Wars canon will be consumed to bring about this ambition. All of it will burn to feed the progressive lust to spread their mindless egalitarian drivel they imagine as some kind of universal revelation and not the disturbed, erratic fumbling for meaning the university-educated midwits often become lost in to stave off the existential horror of their mismanaged lives.

That is how mental distortion works, it distorts. It is not normal, it is abnormal. Broken people do not make much sense to the rest of us.

They are deranged and they shouldn’t be making television shows aimed at mass audiences because they don’t view the masses as an audience to entertain but as a handily pre-organized group of chumps to receive the Important Message implanted in their minds by a previous generation of cultural improvers.

They view all audiences in the same way, from schoolchildren to army veterans. Undifferentiated blobs of people to whom they can lecture The Message. This is how the delusionally enlightened think, and that spectacular disconnect from real life is why everything they produce is unwatchable, unreadable and unlistenable dogshit.

They are no better than you

It is often said, if you cannot be a great inspiration you can at least be a horrible warning. Disney’s very public decline is a warning to us all.

Hubris combined with untreated mental illness is a lethal combination. The wrong people take over then populate the firm with unquestioning supporters and hangers on, accelerating the decline to the point it becomes impossible to hide.

But it does more than this. It reinforces a neglected observation.

The late Steve Jobs once explained the reason he got into personal computers was because he looked at all the amazing inventions and creations around him, from light bulbs to music, and realized most had been invented by people no smarter than himself.

This was not a put down. He meant it in an inspirational way. The difference between them and you was not some special talent or IQ, just action. The world belongs to those who act upon it. It is effort that is rewarded, not talent.

If the crackpot social justice progressives embody anything it is the power of determination. Their determination seems to be a manifestation of insanity, which can add quite a bit of energy to proceedings. But it still encourages them to act on the world while many of us just talk.

Perhaps Disney’s The Acolyte serves this important purpose. We are talking about them precisely because they are making the movies and the television shows. They are making the music and the pop videos that corrupt the young. They are publishing the books and the journals. They are doing all the doing.

That is a philosophy Jobs understood too. We trash them for their lack of greatness or talent, but almost no one is talented. Even fewer are great. This is their secret. Despite their limitations, up to and including being deranged, they do it anyway.

They are oblivious to the plot holes, the bad writing, the weak ideas; they are indifferent to destruction of the Star Wars universe or the unsuitable nature of the storylines. No senior executive on The Acolyte production team thought it was badly written or in need of a rethink, a determination most of us could easily make just by watching the teaser trailer.

That total lack of discernment, judgment or even taste hasn’t stopped them one bit. This blindness is common in narcissistic personalities. They literally cannot comprehend being wrong. So everything is right. This is their superpower.

The Acolyte may be trash, but it exists. Somebody is watching it. Somebody probably likes it. Some poor demented soul probably thinks it is the best thing they’ve ever watched. You never know.

We must learn from this that the world belongs to those who act upon it. If we do not do so ourselves it will be left to the inappropriately confident to make all the cultural material, and we can’t have that. That would be too lopsided, like bringing a knife to a lightsaber fight.

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