The spiritual human core of our system comprises a pair of siblings, myself and Frisk; we grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, and from an early age we learned to despise American marketing culture. We had an unusual upbringing; our mother was from Chile and our father was an embittered American scientist who'd given serious thought to leaving the U.S. for good until Pinochet happened.
As a result we were raised with unusual cultural reference points; neither Frisk nor myself has ever felt like we were American in spirit. We felt like strangers lost in a sea of noxious American entertainments, rubbishy music, and most especially advertising. The Reagan era, especially, meant being overwhelmed with advertisements and propaganda, and we hated it. Eventually, though, we would flee in different directions from this tide...and that would mean a lot of pain and suffering for the both of us, but especially for Frisk.
As a result neither Frisk nor myself has ever been much good with the overheated, rapid-fire culture of the American business world and marketing flackery, where the only point of conversation is to win some kind of implicit game with the other person. Frisk had at least been better educated on these matters but that was a long time ago; we've yet to recover that knowledge. But we think perhaps now's a good time to start. We plan on revisiting some media familiar to us before branching out to new material. In particular, while Frisk was assigned Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman way back in school, I never was, so I've never read the play beyond a few pages; nor have I seen any staging of it.
If there's any one thing I've picked up from other sources, though, it's the obvious: the salesman in the United States—and it really is, I think, mainly a sales MAN thing, for Reasons™—is America's idea of a prophet. The most successful salespersons succeed in selling themselves as dispensers of God's blessings to the people, and that's unfortunately a very sexist idea in hardline Christian culture, which recognizes only cis men as valid preachers of the Word. I suppose that's one reason Elizabeth Holmes is such an enduring figure: despite her unfair disadvantages in this cutthroat only-for-men field she's still clutching hard to her evangelical zeal, her vision of the Good News (which requires generous investment.)
I don't like false prophets but I suppose I'd better learn how to get closer to them; after all I've been something of a tinpot prophet myself, in my own weird way. But I've never been much good with...well, you know, matters of kromer.
~Chara of Pnictogen
