F·R·I·E·N·D·S: A Work of Truly Bewitching Propaganda

Dr Morello analyses the invidious propaganda for the sexual revolution that was the underlying premise of the hit TV show, Friends.

From The European Conservative

By Sebastian Morello, PhD

Unlike imagination, fantasy permits one to depart from reality and take refuge in cheap consolations that cannot be found in this world and would destroy our world if they were here.

There is a longstanding distinction in the discipline of cultural criticism (one that was deployed with great insight to the field of education by Maria Montessori) between fantasy and imagination. ‘Fantasy,’ here, is not meant in the sense of the artistic and literary genre. (In fact, some works of that sort of fantasy—especially the ‘high fantasy’ of J.R.R. Tolkien—are among the best examples of imaginative achievement.) The critical distinction between fantasy and imagination, on the other hand, pertains to whether a given artistic work fosters a better apprehension of reality or provides a mechanism for intellectual and emotional departure from reality.

Imagination—not fantasy—is precisely what a child is utilising in the act of play. The young boy who charges round the garden with a wooden sword, slaying invisible dragons and storming unseen citadels, is engaging in exactly the sort of imitation of virtue that Aristotle proposes in the Nicomachean Ethics as a precondition for habituating real virtue. Imagination in the arts presents to the one on whom it bestows its gifts a way of seeing things that creatively illumines the world in which one actually lives. This is why, despite what modern educationists will tell you, storytelling and playing are the fundamental principles of good education in early childhood; it is also why a rule-based, technique-centred education, delivered through the medium of virtual reality—widely promoted today as the best kind of education—is the surest way to corrupt young minds.

Unlike imagination, fantasy permits one to depart from reality and take refuge in cheap consolations that cannot be found in this world and would destroy our world if they were here. Pornography is arguably the worst of such fantastical prisons. But there are less obvious sources of epistemic spell casting that make engagement with reality difficult at best, and at worst impossible. The philosopher John Haldane has pointed to the 1990 movie Pretty Woman as a good example of fantasy in this sense. In this story, a very wealthy man played by Richard Gere picks up a roadside prostitute played by Julia Roberts, asking her to drive him about because he’s struggling to work the manual-drive car he’s borrowing at the time. Later that night they have sex, and a romantic roller coaster then ensues in which the hitherto money-driven man is transformed into an altruistic hero by the straightforward personality of his new companion, whom he showers with cash and—after some drama—eventually declares his love for in a theatrical gesture involving a white limousine. The movie is pure trash from start to end, but it achieved remarkable success at the box office.

Pretty Woman presents a world that can tell you nothing about the one in which we actually live. It is, in the modern idiom, total escapism. No one, obviously, is beyond redemption. But our nature being what it is, it’s commonly observed that even elementary relationships—like those between family and friends, and especially between spouses—are maintained by a lifetime of both tacit and deliberately cultivated virtue. Even then, such connections remain poised on the precipice of conflict, ever upheld by sacrifices and apologies. That a roadside prostitute who has known only abuse since childhood (experiences of which Roberts’ character discusses in the movie), has been sexually exploited for decades, physically attacked and degraded, and has likely acquired several substance-dependencies that only intensify the chaos of her life, could even come close to living the life portrayed in that film or forming the relationship therein is quite beyond credibility. That movie is a pernicious work of fantasy that utterly warps its viewers conception of reality.

I have come to see such works of unreality as propaganda mechanisms of a dying liberal regime, necessary to keep alive the fiction that whatever one’s situation, history, behaviours, habits, ethical commitments, social standing, and so forth, there is always the pre-societal ‘authentic self’ which can be emancipated through the moral and material conditions offered alone by the liberal regime of globalised late modernity. Gere’s character is, if you like, the personification of that regime. He is driven only by the impulse to accumulate capital, and the ultimate corollary of such mammonian appetite is, apparently, spiritual enlightenment and redemption for everyone—without any need of repentance. Liberalism, in this sense, is itself a work of fantasy. At its core is the notion that I need not better understand reality and its conditions, but free my self from that reality by the forces of Progress, that I may ultimately become that thing I know not what, to live in that society I have not seen. 

According to liberal progressivism, the instrumentalization of science will get us to that future state of individualistic paradise, and the all-encompassing state will be the providential god that will steer us there. We needn’t do anything more than enjoy being the beneficiaries of these forces of Progress that, it is said, increasingly unshackle us with each passing day. But this is quite clearly a fantasy. And to keep us believing the lie, a great, bewitching propaganda machine is required, which will tell us the stories that continually capture us from reality and place us in liberalism’s fantasia.

There is perhaps no better example of such a work of propaganda than the American sitcom Friends. From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, it seemed as if everybody was watching Friends every week. My parents, siblings, and I certainly did; then we bought the videos and re-watched the episodes. I’m not sure there was ever a greater work of liberal propaganda that was so influential in shaping the worldview of my generation. The script was brilliantly written, with a humorous remark at least every five seconds, and even a laugh track to tell you when to be amused. The sitcom really was astonishingly popular (I remember the Friends pencil cases and water bottles that children would bring to school), and it remains the second highest grossing series of all time, just after the cartoon The Simpsons.

Friends has seen some backlash in recent years from the ‘woke’ crowd, many of whom belong to Generation Z and are thus young enough to be encountering the sitcom for the first time. Many of these youngsters are scandalised at the lack of homosexual, trans, or black people in the cast. (This, of course, is the trouble with being in the vanguard of Progress: one soon finds oneself in the gulag that one helped to build.) Such ‘Wokerati’ haven’t recognised the truly revolutionary charm of Friends, and how deeply saturated it is with the very anthropological and moral principles which they uphold. Friends helped to create a vision of adult behaviour and what flourishing in early adulthood looks like, without which ‘wokeness’ today might have still been a weird, fringe subculture—rather than the shared ethic of our political and social elites.

If you are one of the cave-dwellers who isn’t aware, there are six friends who together make up the leading characters in the sitcom. Ross and Monica are siblings and both secular Jews, completely disconnected from their religious heritage; Ross is considered the really brainy one of the group because he’s a ‘sCiEnTiSt.’ Phoebe has a history of crime and homelessness, and is the only religious one of the group, being a practicing witch and New Ager; she is typified by her stupidity (apparently fitting for someone with any religious leanings). Chandler is the particularly witty and sarcastic one, whose father is a transvestite, homosexual cabaret performer in Las Vegas (Chandler’s discomfort with his father’s ‘identity’ has caused outrage among some of Friends’ recently acquired younger viewers). Rachel comes from a wealthy background and has an on-and-off relationship with Ross throughout the ten seasons. Joey is a struggling actor who, like Phoebe, is characterised by stupidity; he’s a lapsed Catholic and a porn-addict, a disorder that the audience is meant to find both charming and comical.

According to the Friends fantasy, one can routinely sleep around; be incapable of establishing a stable relationship; develop a porn addiction; have a chaotic professional life, continually moving from job to job; irregularly turn up to work; contract multiple marriages; have children out of wedlock; be alienated from one’s own offspring; have casual sex with those in your close friendship group; be formed by totally dysfunctional family units; actively develop an utterly vacuous, hedonistic approach to life, devoid of any overarching moral account of one’s existence, and still live in a large apartment next to New York’s Central Park, drink artisanal coffee all day, and never get an STD or have an abortion.

Friends is American liberalism’s version of one of China’s communist theme parks: just look at the lives we could all be living if we were really committed to the regime! For many millennials, Friends provided the near-absolute blueprint of what a healthy early-adulthood might look like. Many of my school chums, following their university-provided lobotomies, moved to big cities and embarked on lives that imitated what Friends had offered as a vision of human flourishing, proceeding to plunge themselves into a miserable existence.

Liberalism promised to fulfil our lives by demoting all questions of flourishing and meaning to private, personal sentiment, with no claim on the public arena whatever. Liberalism has never, though, actually done this. It has offered an alternative account of human flourishing centred on the basest and most shallow commitments to specious emotions and the satiating of appetitive cravings. By so doing, it gave us a new religiosity with a whole set of new aspirations about how we should live and whom we should be. Liberalism has always been, then, a religious phenomenon, and it has always needed religious narratives to fill the imaginative faculties of us fools with the fantasies needed to becharm us. This is what Friends was all about. The regime gives us such narratives in a thousand ways through the pop-culture propaganda machine, declaring:

Therefore, do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For even conservatives seek after all these things, and the State knows that you need them all. But rather, seek first the authentic self and its moral emancipation, and all these things will be added to you.

Decades later, after much experience of sexual degradation, superficial (virtual, even) ‘friendships,’ captivity by addiction, economic disparity, rising debt, and family breakdown, the attempt to conform our world to the liberal sitcom has left us jaded. Friends-educated millennials are generally more at home in virtual reality (or, unreality) than reality, they struggle to make prudent professional decisions, are alarmingly entitled, and have extremely unstable friendship groups and sex lives. Millennials haven’t just been unable to get the large apartments next to Central Park, they won’t even get mortgages in the whole course of their lives. Trapped inside the comedy, they’ve discovered it’s nothing like its portrayal on the television, and it’s definitely not funny.

I am a millennial, and for my part I do not have a television for precisely the reason that I don’t want a propaganda machine of a regime I despise forming my worldview, let alone that of my children. Thankfully my wife agrees. It seems to me that this is the only way to outwit the regime at the cultural level within the borders of the domestic sphere. In the past few months, I have read to my children Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Kipling’s The Jungle Book, Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, and countless stories from our ever-growing library of folktales. As my sproglets grow, no doubt the challenge will also grow of inducting them into a contra-modern, pro-traditional worldview. At least, though, they will have some intuitive grasp of the distinction between fantasy and imagination, and that’s more than can be said of most who stumble confusedly in the darkness of our ‘enlightened’ epoch.