Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

The dangerous thing about thinking of life as a story is starting to apply story tropes to it. Life doesn't inherently have happy endings, fairness, justice, heroes, villains, turnabouts, karma, or any other tropes. You can try to make your corner of it better, and in some cases you can make quite a lot of it better, but life doesn't obey narrative causality.

View on HN

There was an interesting book called Life, the Movie written back in the late '90s that argued people were even then already so steeped in entertainment media that they had internalized the mechanics of story and viewed their own lives through them: http://www.amazon.com/Life-Movie-Entertainment-Conquered-Rea...

I was reminded of the book and its argument the other day while watching David Simon's HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, so I wrote a blog post about the connection: http://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/08/show-me-a-hero-and-the-lim...

I have not read that book or yet seen that show, but I enjoyed your analysis. It rings true.

I catch myself thinking about my own life in story/movie ideas constantly

I'd guess that, at least in some times and places, a religious narrative of life and the forces in it filled that role to some degree.

I don't think it's a coincidence, for instance, that Paradise Lost reads so cinematically.

Maybe modern mass entertainment does have a larger effect, but I wouldn't take it as necessarily true. A little set design and presentation wizardry and a willing audience can fire the imagination in major ways. See: otherwise seemingly sane people joining ISIS to fulfill their role in a religious narrative. Usually if someone credits mass entertainment media for their violent acts, they were unbalanced loonies to begin with.

Not religion, ideology: secular humanism too seems to operate on a narrative that technological and cultural progress will continue without interruption from chaotic cosmological catastrophe, that those things contribute to human happiness while ignoring that humanity has higher rates of mental illness and slavery today than any other time in a global world culture defined for the last 200 years by technological progress. Scientific altruism is just as much a faith and just as exploitable as religious dogma by powerful people and organizations.

There are quite a few problems with your assertions, such as the fact that it's hard enough to gather good statistics on mental illness in the present time, much less over the past 200 years, and the idea that secular humanism should somehow concern itself with "cosmological catastrophes" that humans can't do anything about.

Finally, it's not clear that your last sentence really tells us much about the nature of altruism. What can't be turned into a matter of faith by someone whose business is selling faith?

I doubt scientific altruism is just as exploitable as religious dogma. I think the abysmal record of religion in such fields as education, race relations, gender equality, human rights, slavery, genocide, rape, the outright fighting of scientific advancements including stem cell studies, etc., can stand as its' own negation of your statement.

Well, religion isn't always bad w.r.t literacy at least. Many Catholic institutions were the first to introduce and run very good english-medium schools in India, which have benefited millions. It actually had its own term: "convent schools".

Religious beliefs center around sacrifice of 'earthy' norms to satisfy an ideal moral logic. That way of thinking doesn't stop when you leave the halls of worship. It leads to self-righteousness that is ultimately destructive in the world around you. Humility is not often slung from fiery pulpits, except that it is perverted for ensuring the dominance of that leader's place in moral authority.

Scientific altruism places faith in innovation. It can allow us to ignore reality, assuming someone else will fix things.

We should aspire to be scientists in our own lives. Not accepting conclusions at face value and working to improve understanding for people beyond ourselves.