05 What Happened to the Gravy?
Channel: Beehive
Date: 2023-05-31

This video tries to define "gravy" and discuss what happened to it over the last few years. By doing so, a map might be drawn to describe the development of its use within the culture of "bear."

I consider "gravy" to combine four elements: novelty, doubt, alterneity and metaphysics. (These elements also hover over so-called "truther" fields of thought.)

Like "truther" fields of endeavour, "gravy" tends to overstep its mark. It tends to seize upon its tenets as if they  were as good as true. In other words, your average "truther" or "gravy-eater" is always oscillating between uncertainty and a hidden, crypto-certainty. This tendency is a moral one. Why? Because the “gravy-ist/truther” wants his tenets to be true, and so he willfully behaves as if they were true.

When "gravy" lost doubt, I think it became something else. Within metaphysics, the doubt it lost was its humble uncertainty. In my opinion, it replaced metaphysical uncertainty with an emphasis on moral self-righteousness. When it did so, instead of a maintaining a doubtful attitude, "beariness" became a dead-certain, moralizing force.

Yet neither did it abandon its metaphysical reach. Were it not for its metaphysical element, such “beary” moralizing could have been just a socio-political movement. But by maintaining its critical regards for the material and immaterial aspects of the cosmos (being, life, truth, knowledge, etc.,) “bearity” functions as a religious as well as a moral force.

In my opinion, it is for this reason that a “gravy-ladler” is also a psuedo-prophet. His systematic, “big-dipper” theology is totally comprehensive. So now the “prophet” has his followers as disciples. Together, they are aliens to their enemies, and see themselves as persecuted victims, enjoying safety and shelter within their movement against an imagined, “bad” Other that resides outside the confines of their “bear-garden,” but crucially, not just in socio-political terms, but also in religious, metaphysical terms.

Why did “gravy” lose its savour? The willful shift towards certainty may have been a visceral, emotional one. Disgust with particular social aspects may have prompted a grasp for a semblance of religious purity within your average “bear-susceptible” seeker of cosmic narratives.

If that is true, then that might explain why the “bear-religion” is so lite on theological elaboration but so heavy on moral, good-vs-bad larping behaviour (especially of such a "Freudian" nature, if you know what I mean.). 

Such acting-out surpasses the passivity of your average, stay-at-home “truther” and more resembles your common, pay-as-you-go “new-ager” endlessly consuming his diet of expensive, religious schlock. Allegedly.