The MLP Season Four Finale and Ideology/Free Will/Ideology/And So On

If you ask me, which religious orientation--which flavor of Christianity--would be closest to My Little Pony ...

Generally, Calvinism. Why? Because, we can debate about everything, one thing I don't concede: this obscenity about how our salvation, our cutie marks, our purpose in life, and so on. On how this depends on our good acts. I think, this is an obscenity for me. An obscenity in the sense that this then introduces an irreducible aspect of "My God, if I make this will it be okay," "Can I do this," of kind of economic exchange or whatever.

It has to be predestination. But, if everything is decided in advance, why doesn't Applebloom sit down, read clopfiction and drink lemonade?

There is a very refined paradox which theorists--even some theorists of rational action--articulated how something may happen or not, but, if it happens, retroactively it appears that it had to happen from the beginning. For example, all good histories of Roman Civil War--Julius Caesar, Yawning Cassius, General Hurricane, and so on--will tell you how once a Cutie Mark appears, everyone sees it as a destiny.

This is why, as a Marxist, I love My Little Pony. Like, T.S. Eliot, that famous proposition that every great work of art--and, of course, life is the longest work of art, of performance art for no audience and not even one's self--retroactively this art changes it's entire past. A truly great--and therefore merchandisable--Princess must create her own precursors.

We see this in the Season Four Finale, in Twilight's anxiety about her role as a Princess. Throughout the fourth season, Twilight shows the plight of anyone thrust into power. Her inability to assume her symbolic function, or better to say, I will say that it is her ease with which she seems to have assumed her function--like the Hegelian ideal monarch, she is just in place, without reason. I am reminded of The King's Speech and ideology¹--in which the turning point is the king being replaced upon his throne by the Australian therapist. He declares, in a rage, that he has a divine right to sit there. [The crown] is on my head."

There is, in power, a continual need to retroactively justify one's position. This can be seen in all humanist images of power, such as the capitalist's charitable work, the aristocrat's noblesse oblige, the officer's detachment from his soldiers, and so on. Events in the past can only justify other events in the past. The now is a continual demand to prove that the past genuinely existed, and was not some fluke or dream. That this destiny, this crossing of the Tiber, this coronation, this decision by forces which overdetermine my behavior, is my own. One cannot rest on one's accomplishments, because those accomplishments have already been negated. There is--in the nothing between Twilight's socially determined existence and her behavior--room for her to be genuinely an actor. A person, using the ancient Greek meaning of the persona--as the mask one wears in public.

Twilight's need to prove her right to her past is directly opposed by Tirek. The demonic antagonist of the finale possesses no meaningful past. Rather, he defies it. Not only is this apparently lethal enemy introduced--based upon an event from the second season no less--without prior explanation, but he also creates a deliberate antagonism between the prior generations and this one. The Tirek of the first generation used the Rainbow of Darkness contained in a bag around his neck, but this Tirek wears an amulet, which despite the stylized resemblance, is openly stated to have no value. With the Rainbow of Darkness, the new Tirek has also lost his political ambitions. Unlike earlier villains (Nightmare Moon, Discord, Sombra) who sought to conquer their respective domains, Tirek has no interest in a take over. His deal with Discord is predicated on the idea that, once Tirek has devoured all of the world's magic, he has no use for Equestria.

In addition to lacking any meaningful past, this Tirek has no future. He seeks power, but only uses it to obtain more power. He steals from the unicorns so he can steal from the pegasi so he can steal from the earth ponies so he can steal from Discord, and so on. He moves up this food chain in montage, passing from small to immense in moments, but once he has stolen Twilight's magic, he remains standing in place just off the screen. For Tirek, the past and present are discarded, ends and means are equally unimportant. Tirek is not a character so much as the capitalist jouissance embodied.

The jouissance--the capitalist jouissance, which is nothing like the actual jouissance from Lacan because I literally make up the definitions for words so that they suit me--is the perpetual delay of gratification in service of expansion. A religious fanaticism, it reaches toward the objective, but it does so with the knowledge of missing and planning to miss--planning to fail and repeat the failure in an expanding cycle. Like the Wall Street wolf who sacrifices himself--up to and including the point of going to prison and writing a book glorifying his Miltonian self-destruction--the capitalist is a fanatic who loses his own being to the pursuit of something forever distant, and so on.

The conflict then appears. Tirek on the one side--the jouissance--and Twilight on the other side--the authentic figure pressed back into her past in order to preserve herself as a genuine identity. She has received, as any one of us on this website has received, the privilege of power, and we must remember as, Stanley Baldwin advises King George VI, "The Greatest Test is yet to come." It is always yet to come, and it is always already here, and we have always already faced the microphone, the cage, the scourge, the Nazis, the demon Tirek, the looming hum of the Predator drone, and so on. Having won once, we are again impaled upon on the point of the spear. Having lost once, we are again pressed upon the walls of our friendships.

To endure. To study. This is our eternal war, this must be our primitive doctrine: might is right. History will have been right. There may be--there will be--there are dark days ahead, but we must do the right as we see the leftist slogans--and ironic in voice become propaganda in deed. With harmony's help, we shall prevail. Or not. The zeitgeist has already not yet been written, and many revolutionaries and insurgents already fill mass graves across the globe, but the sun has already not yet risen if it is to rise.

Or whatever.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to dive nose first into a mountain of cocaine shaped like Joseph Stalin.

¹Everything reminds me of ideology².

²The signifiers that compose the word "ideology" just reminded me of the signified--ideology.
>mfw ideology