Looking at two seemingly unconnected events — the Barbie movie and the Hamas atrocities of October 7, 2023 — helps us clarify our perception and articulate a third possibility. Although there is zero moral equivalence between Barbie and Hamas, both are degraded love stories.
That’s what makes them so dangerous.
- Hamas is a wildly destructive expression of fundamentalism; it degrades and demonizes the body and desire itself. Desire, perceived as evil, is projected outwards, onto ‘infidels,’ and then brutally destroyed.
- Barbie is an expression of postmodernism: it disqualifies love, value, and desire as non-real, as mere social constructs.
In absence of real value, we lose capacity for moral distinctions; that’s why Hamas atrocities were celebrated on university campuses across the Western world. Postmodernism and fundamentalism are swelling movements in today’s world, and both will destroy us.
Our only chance is the third way, the third possibility — articulating a shared story of value rooted in the clarified realization that the Universe is a love story, Reality is desire, and no one is excluded from the love story.
Episode 363 — Reading Barbie as a Text of Culture: The Tragic Rejection of the Universe, a Love Story – Part 1 The Mocking of the Hero
Episode 364 — Reading Barbie as a Text of Culture: The Tragic Rejection of the Universe, a Love Story – Part 2 Reality Is Relationships
Episode 365 — Discerning Israel & Hamas Conflict: Evolving the Battle of Good & Evil to a Higher Level of Consciousness
Episode 366 — What Would Homo Amor Do in Response to Hamas?: Moral Complexity Is a Sign of Homo Amor, Moral Equivalence Is the Failure of Homo Amor
Episode 367 — Hamas Is Not the Palestinians – Hamas Is a Jihadi Culture of Death: Homo Amor Stands on the Side of Life
Episode 368 — From Horror to Hope: The Crossing from Failed Love Stories to Homo Amor
Episode 369 — Barbie, Hamas & Homo Amor: from Degraded Love Stories to “the Universe: A Love Story”
Episode 370 — Singing “One Day” Together is Necessary but Not Sufficient: Only a “New Story of DesireValue” Can Take Us Home
Episode 371 — Eros and Gnosis and Ethics Are One: Reality Is Evolving Scripts of Desire
Episode 372 — CosmoErotic Humanism: Transitional Objects, Evolving Scripts of Desire, and the New Human and the New Humanity
Episode 373 — Barbie Got It Wrong: Love Is Real
Episode 374 — Holding the Impossible Paradox
Aubrey Marcus & Marc Gafni Podcast — Barbie & Hamas: A Failed Love Story
