Western elusion: diversity and inclusion

An elusion is a triple pretence; so, for example, there is a mental illness where a person pretends to have a mental illness—there is the default person (lost sanity); the pretended mental illness; and the actual mental illness. These layered elusions are connected to mythology and how you create a mystery.

In cinema, you see an elusion when in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) Jimmy Stewart loses his love—he then sees a woman on the street who resembles her and remakes her in the image of his lost love. It turns out, due to criminal activities behind the scenes, the woman is his lost love—there’s the love, the “resembled love”, and the remade love that is his love pretending to be his love; a threefold circular elusion that eats its own tail.

Westerners also live in an elusion, especially as regards women and blacks. A feminist society requires that men pretend women are in charge, whereas everyone knows men are in charge and yet, in many cases, men are rewarded for acting like women (Prince Harry) or becoming actual women (transgenderism). “I don’t know what I’d do without my wife” (have fun, probably—but there’s also a joke that she’s in charge “she keeps me honest” etc; except she’s not—except in the divorce court, where the decisions always favour the woman, although the court’s decisions are made and enforced by men; elusion of female control—and that raises the question as to which men are behind all this and from which race).

You see this elusion worked out in material terms when you see an advert for a water company or other utility on the side of the company’s van: there’s a smiling black engineer, perhaps with a white female boss—and then you look at the gang at work on the road behind the van and it’s seven white guys in orange fluorescent jackets (plus one black guy who has obviously been hired because he’s black).

This is an elusion: if you look at the van you think “everything important is done by women and blacks” and yet it’s done by white blokes and yet if you asked them they’d probably say, “We’re really proud of our diversity, it’s crucial to our success as a service—we couldn’t function without it” (if we assume they have had a little corporate induction about that, or there’s a press officer with them; if you ask the uninducted they’d just say, “I don’t know about that, mate, not sure what you mean,” because they know better than to get in trouble, it being more than your job’s worth to challenge a myth—they crucify you for that).

So we do the work, but we pretend you do the work and perhaps, at the same time, we pretend in the way we behave to be feminine or listen to rap music and “act black” on the weekend; we pretend to be you while you pretend to be us, yet we’re still us—do you follow? We’re in charge but we pretend you’re in charge but really you’re in a subordinate position—you’re in charge because you’re not in charge.

You have to wonder what cost this mythology is going to exact in the long term, since, as people like to say, it’s gaslighting on multiple levels for all parties concerned—a bit like Stewart in Vertigo people start to lose track as regards who is pretending to be who; and that also raises the question, “Who’s doing the *real work* here?” (and what happens if we get so confused we forget to do it). I mean, Prince Harry is supposed to be a *victim*; but he’s not (although except he is, just not in the way he presents himself to be).

The image remakes reality—when you put the black and the woman on the side of the van you yourself will eventually vanish, if you’re a white man (it’s a spell to make that happen—magic is real); and when that happens the elusion, the snake with its own tail in its mouth, will have come undone—and that’s called Ragnarök in Norse mythology (twilight of the gods).