ABSTRACT
The Capitol of that dystopia plays the role of the neoliberal capitalist memeplex: brutal under its glitzy surface as it enforces vast income-inequality on the masses and tells them that their children’s only hope of survival is to destroy all rivals through ruthless competition. In The Lego Movie, the villain is Lord Business, who is also President Business, and whose goal is to get every Lego piece glued permanently into place in pre-set sets that merely mimic the normal material realities of the built world. Reconciling that long-term investment in fame and violence with the worship of Christ, from his helpless infancy to his passive acceptance of insult and death, was no small task. Militant American Christianity may still be struggling with this transition. A 2017 study in Nature Communications of the Filipino hunter-gatherer population called the Agta showed that the groups that included a skilled story-teller cooperated distinctly better than ones that did not.
