The Cranky Kong Fallacy

On not abstracting nostalgia into an ideology

In the Donkey Kong video games, ever since Donkey Kong Country in the 1990s, there’s a recurring character called Cranky Kong. He’s actually supposed to be the original Donkey Kong, from the 80s arcade game, and the Donkey Kong who stars in the modern games is either the son or grandson of Cranky Kong.

Cranky is a prickly, curmudgeonly character based on older folks complaining about the kids these days, basically. He says stuff like, “The trouble with you kids, is that you’re all too soft!”, “The old games were far harder when I was a young ‘un!”, “We used to play for hours on a single screen game and think we were lucky, and we were!”

A lot of what presents itself as ideas or arguments is really just this, isn’t it? Some combination of nostalgia, and kvetching, and having trouble separating your own perspective and your own subjective experience from the way things really are.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately. I’ve written a few pieces in the last few months on the theme of keeping old things, how merely old things become history, reusing things instead of replacing them, etc. I explained here where I think I developed some of these ideas:

When I was in college, and I was an environmentalist and against consumerism and all that stuff, this all loomed very large in my worldview. It was during this time that I developed this “sacramental” notion of consumer products.

Probably for a number of reasons—having too much free time, making a few amazing finds at my local dump, reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, watching The Book of Eli, reading Vance Packard, and having an environmentalist professor I really liked—I felt like every loss of an old thing was a chip away at the foundation of civilization, and so in some way I was preserving civilization by dragging home an old TV from the dump.

I had a related discussion in the comments on a recent piece too, about whether, when we read about how difficult things were in the past, is the right conclusion something like “Wow, life sucked!” or “Huh, I wonder what those people had that I don’t?” On some level, embracing progress feels like dishonoring the sacrifices of people who came before. But, of course, those people would have taken the progress in a heartbeat. It’s only from our position of privilege and progress itself that we can look back wistfully like that. It’s really kind of spoiled to say “In my day things were harder!”

What all of this made me realize is that I had basically been walking around my whole life with the idea that “things are always getting worse,” that “things were better in the past.” I just took this as a kind of raw fact about reality. I’m not sure I ever really believed in progress. (I remember whining in college about how everyone had an iPhone, who needs an iPhone, you know in my day a phone didn’t have any screens, etc. etc.) I think I was always like that; when I was young, my mother said I was like a 90-year-old man in a child’s body. In short, I’m Cranky Kong.

You see this all over the place. JD Vance, for some reason, was talking a couple of years ago about how old refrigerators kept lettuce fresh longer. (Has he ever put a $10 thermometer/humidity gauge in his fridge, and/or vacuumed out the coils in the bottom?) There’s an essay writer on here who talks about how you need to rake your leaves to be a good member of society. It’s practically a cliche to say “they don’t make them like they used to.” Etc., etc. Okay, Cranky Kong, can I save my game now?

Sometimes, that’s probably true. But the error is extrapolating that observation into a worldview or an ideology. I dub this the Cranky Kong fallacy: the idea that