by Ada Bronowski
It is a truth Disneylandly acknowledged that ‘when the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world’. A famous piece of advice given by the little meerkat from The Lion King encapsulates a philosophy that grounds not only the destinies of all the great Disney heroes, from the little mermaid to Pocahontas, but also a certain idea of the Good as a secret garden to be cultivated contra mundum, against and despite the world (and which eventually shall flourish and change it). An idea that perhaps above all others is losing its meaning for the vast majority of us today not only out of wild-capitalist callousness as from a basic instinct for survival which prefers to that Disney catchphrase, another old cartoon chestnut: ‘if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em’.
In a recent act of defiance, a French comedian, Blanche Gardin, whose award-winning one-woman shows have enshrined as one of the most fearless and successful straight-talking satirists of our times (and whom American audiences might have heard of by way of her indelible support and relationship with comedian Louis C.K.), stoked the embers of this dying idea. She publicly and provocatively turned down a job-offer from the TV platform Amazon Prime because the cachet was too high. This rebellious feat of virtue goes far beyond the rebuffing of a job. Gardin rebukes thereby a whole system, our world as it has become, in which big bucks flow senselessly for a select circle with no relation whatsoever with the real life of most people. She received a great deal of backlash from the ‘other side’, those who joined ‘em. If there is nobility in Gardin’s gesture, and if indeed it comes from a certain idea(l) of the Good, it is also suffused with the puritanical fire that Disney fantasies help keep alive but which only in fantasy worlds seem to yield happy endings.
To turn your back on the world is an act poised between insanity and idealism and, like all forms of resistance, arises from a conception of humanity that is greater than the sum of the humans that currently embody it. It is, as such, a uniquely human gesture. As Oscar Wilde has taught us, a swallow that abandons its group to go solo – however noble the cause (his swallow helps the Happy Prince distribute gold and rubies to the poor) – dies, and as for meerkats, the survival of the individual is unthinkable outside of the tight-knit pack. An animal would never risk its life for an idea. Disney’s anthropomorphism merely highlights the difference. Turning your back on your world, on the order of things – on the ‘powers that be’ as Hollywood calls them – is to risk if not your life, your livelihood. You turn your back on the world, because of a moral conscience which impels you to go against a basic animalistic instinct for survival. Not everyone has it in them, first and foremost because, like Aristotle would say, not everyone actualises their capacities to be fully human. And Schopenhauer to add, that it is human weakness which prevents us from realising our humanity.
The greatness of the Disney narrative is to elevate a political debacle into a question of morality. Whether it be the usurping uncle, the conniving Grand Vizier, the nasty step-mother who wants to be queen, what the Disney heroes rebel against is the moral infamy that emanates from the political manipulations involved and not so much the actual scheming. The evil are evil therefore the world which allows such evil is not worth being part of. For a pure heart like that of the Disney hero, there is no place and role in the world as it is. They would need to change, to adapt, to become a different person. But in turning their back on this evil world, their rebellion is not political, nor even personal. The hero does not protest against the workings of the world, does not manifest disagreement. For in turning his back to the world, the Disney hero makes a moral gesture signifying the absolute refusal to dignify the way things are with even an acknowledgement that they are an option. Morality arises from disgust, and the back-turner is supremely disgusted with the world he leaves behind. He immediately reaches a moral high-ground that no profusion of wordy arguments could.
Civilisations are born out of such gestures. And indeed, Western civilisation begins when Achilles, a warrior groomed for war and obedience from birth, refuses to comply with his general’s commands. The wrath that Homer’s Iliad sings is the wrath of a man who deems the world as it is has no place for him, and so he turns his back on the world and on the whole Trojan war. If at the end, Achilles returns to it, it is not for the sake of honour or loyalty to his general, nor is it, at an epic level, to fulfill his destiny and become a Greek Hero, which is what the old rules would expect of him. Achilles returns to the war out of a broken heart and in a delirium of personal revenge for the death of his beloved friend Patroclus. Homer’s Iliad, one of the founding texts of our civilisation, is a book about Achilles’ rebellion, in appearance against Agamemnon but really, against a whole primitive world of values he demolishes in one shrug of his mighty shoulders, by refusing to be part of them – and then, returning. Later, in the Odyssey, Achilles’ shade in Hades confesses to Odysseus, who is passing through, that he would rather be the servant of a servant and live, than be a hero and dead. Even in death, Achilles is a rebel who refuses to accept the world he was born into, where death is glorified – even though, as he speaks he is a glorified divine hero.
The clash between Achilles and Agamemnon is the paradigm on which Western civilisation has been built, in which power and demonstrations of strength have, at critical moments in time, not been eradicated – that never – but challenged and transformed. It is the transformative power of acting on moral indignation which is Achilles greatest legacy. As is his returning to the fold.
Where the Lion King and the Disney cohort diverge from the primordial Homeric back-turner is in not returning to the fold but creating a new order. They instigate the idea that a new order is possible as a reward for moral integrity. Blanche Gardin, child of the eighties and daughter of socially conscious parents who voted for the communist party in France all their lives, harbours the Disney dream that a new order is possible.
Against all propriety, and the way of the world, she refused flat out to participate in Amazon Prime’s comedy program: LOL: Last One Laughing, in its French iteration, because she “would be embarrassed (…) to be paid 200,000 euros for a single day’s shooting”. Her post on social media, addressed to “very very dear Mr Bezos”, goes on to detail the reasons for this embarrassment: 
to be paid by a company which does not pay taxes in France, pollutes shamelessly through their myriad data centers and use of planes and cars, exploits Uighur workforce from the Chinese concentration camps, destroys small businesses and transforms its own workforce into robots in inhuman conditions – all for the sake of enabling millions of people to order cheap stuff they do not need from the comfort of their couches. Gardin, an actress, writer and film director, also attacks the destructive force of the TV platform itself: she “won’t contribute to the advertisement of the platform, because [she] does not want a future in which no one will go to the movies anymore, and in which, instead, everyone will be glued to the small screen, binging on endless TV series and ordering burgers brought to their doorstep by illegal workers cycling in the rain”.
The post is an impeccable and absolutely damning exposition of the ravages Amazon has perpetrated on the world at large. Though Amazon responded, claiming they pay ‘a fair share of taxes in France’ and have made a ‘Carbon Pledge for 2040’, coming from a company whose CEO goes on day returns to outer space, the response does not hold a candle to the sea of woes Gardin lists. She nails every accusation. But what of the gesture? The gesture, fueled from within with all the righteousness of the Good, and awe-striking from its sheer punch, is not without a flip-side.
If the world order as it was disgusted Achilles already back when mythology was just becoming history, fast-forwarding a millennium or two, the sense of disgust at the world order has amplified considerably. In his monumental, The Way We Live Now, from 1875, Anthony Trollope tears open the cesspools of moral depravity, corruption and manipulation that sustain the race for the stranglehold of millionaires over naïve investors and subdued working masses. Trollope sculpts the polymorphous idol his loathsome and petty characters worship: Greed. But Trollope’s masterpiece itself was a product of capitalist consumption, serialised over a run of almost two years; its own survival depended on readers’ thirst, lust – and greed! – for more: more plot, more deceit, more merciless moguls and more dizzying retribution from one episode to the next. And it is precisely in the name of such a consumerist appetite that at the end of the novel, the bad are punished and the relatively good are rewarded. It is called satisfaction and the success of works of fiction ever since the Iliad has depended on satisfying endings. In Trollope’s book, the unromantic, uncaring, uncouth men of an already untethered capitalism receive their just deserts by the author who wrote the book as a satire of his times.
It is the same uncaring and uncouth men who, from Amazon to ex-twitter-now-X (why has no one commented on the aesthetic proximity between the new (repellent) logo and the Nazi swastika?.. but I digress…), along with the rest of the GAFA squadron are the targets of Blanche Gardin’s great contra mundum outcry. The way we lived then and the way we live now seem sadly not so much to blur and merge as to have amplified and complexified in the very same strive for domination and manipulation of a few over the many. But the way we live now is no fictional satire, nor is it a Disney fantasy; 
in both cases, the contra mundum gesture is eventually rewarded. It is right, it is always right – in fiction – to rebel against evil, because the end justifies, not the means, but the act of defiance. This is also why Disney has been so instrumental in vehiculating an idea of the Good and the right as worth sacrificing everything for because, from the safety of the fictional and controlled world their heroes operate in, not everything will ultimately be requested (of the hero) to sacrifice. Fiction promises that the Good will bring rewards.
But reality? If reality inspires fiction that betters it, and is a deterrent for philosophy that imagines ways it ought to be (but in fact never is), it is also the place and time we are all stuck in, like it or not. Reality, like Don Corleone’s family, always pulls us back in. Gardin’s rebuke against Amazon clearly sets Amazon out as villains. But they are villains that are so firmly installed in our world that Gardin’s rebuff is a drop in their ocean. Would it not be more judicious to take the money and use it to do something anti-Amazon? Make an indie film, give the money to a friend or indeed a few friends in need? Give it to charity?
‘In the fight between you and the world, help the world’ writes Kafka in a famous journal entry. That is to say, force yourself to go against yourself. Play yourself against yourself. This is not a variation on join ‘em; quite the contrary. But neither is it a flat out turning away, for the simple reason that there is no new order to create, only the old order to dismantle from within, whilst also resisting it. Kafka is in every respect the opposite of an Achilles. When Achilles left the war he caused a revolution in showing that you could; a whole new horizon line suddenly opened up (a long peaceful life back home). When he returned to the war, Achilles founded a new era, that of tragic realism in which the individual always loses, but loses lucidly. With Kafka, his form of rebellion being from within, in an internal duplication of the self – innocent and guilty at the same time – consists in analysing to its visceral depth the absurdity and inevitability of the systems we never cease to build for ourselves, and which feed on the human weakness identified by Schopenhauer not through tragic realism but through unflinching pessimism. And with pessimism comes pity, pity for all.
Should we then feel some form of empathy for the bosses of Amazon et al., and of TV platforms, and chatGPT? Some form of pity for them, who themselves, are pawns in a race they cannot get out of, like the megafauna of post-dinosaur ages that could not help but out-eat the world and die from their own inescapable stupidity? It is Amazon and co. who have submitted to the animalistic instinct, to the human weakness of not being able to be fully human. How then, to be properly human? Not saintly, just human?
Kafka breaks the age-old dilemma between joining ’em or turning your back on them. In our Pagan and Judeo-Christian mythologies both gestures are punished. Lot in the Old Testament who turned his back, and his wife who did not, on Sodom and Gomorrah – he, saved only to go on to have children with his daughters (whilst drunk!) is surely far from an enviable fate. She, transformed into a pillar of salt. Orpheus who could not turn his back on Eurydice and paid the price by losing her, after which he did turn his back on the love of women and there too paid the price, ripped apart as he was by the Maenads in retribution for his disdain of their sex. You cannot win at this game. And yet you cannot not play it. You cannot not face the dilemma. These models of the human condition set out, long before Disney, the terms, not so much of a freedom of choice as of the necessity to make a choice – a necessity which spells out the ending before things even begin: that there is no happy ending, whichever choice one takes. I can’t live with or without you, says the song.
Kafka breaks the dilemma by inviting us to do both. Not as a compromise, but as surpassing a dichotomy that only a Disney film can plausibly sustain. Is Amazon purely evil? Yes and no – it is also the product of the consent and desire of millions of people. Is boycotting it purely good? Yes and no – because of how things are, it is a lifeline to millions of workers even if, as Gardin also commented, to defend the GAFA in the name of these lifelines is to validate the inhumanity of the work conditions and the system where greed has the last word. To other comedians who appeared on LOL, Gardin’s words were distressing to say the least: they made them look like sell-outs, and exposed a cachet inequality (as some, less famous comedians presumably received smaller sums), whilst also revealing the hypocrisy of the philanthropic signalling of the show, comparing the comedian’s cachet (her 200,000) with the 50,000 that, in the eventuality of winning the game, Amazon then pays a charity of choice.
The program is dumb, the system stinks, and the money is absurd – but this is the way we live now.