Our Favorite Narrative Cliche: A World Filled with Idiots (2013)
davidbrin.com
davidbrin.com
In game of thrones every faction does exceedingly stupid and brilliant actions. There are no protagonists (besides maybe the mother of dragons - who burns people alive), who are ever clearly going to be good people or even win. It makes you always sit on the edge of your seat and makes the whole story much more entertaining
As it happens I am nearing the end of reading Brin's excellent Uplift series (spanning six books from the 80s and 90s), where the story often involves several groups of protagonists and antagonists acting in parallel. It makes for a nice change from the typical hero-driven stories that do appear to form the bulk of our fiction.
People and systems are depicted in fiction as stupid because writers, by and large, are stupid people.
In reality, the problem isn't that writers are stupid but that writers are lazy--unfortunately the result is effectively the same.
Writing a smart character takes a great deal of work. Most authors simply will not put in that work.
Guy Gavriel Kay is one of the few authors I like simply because his characters are competent.
Writing characters that are actually intelligent is really, really hard and I tend to remember the few characters that seem honestly clever that I really tend to remember those. I still remember my jaw dropping when L first told Kira he was coming after him in Death Note because of the clever way that was executed. Not to mention how both of those characters exhibited a very different sort of intelligence and you could follow their reasoning process most of the time.
Where Japanese writers suffer is, not unlike the American TV show writer, in the business incentive to drag a series out for as long as possible to milk the most money out of it. Anyone would run out of material under those circumstances. The best serializations are those smaller ones that either planned the arc of the story from the beginning, or never pretended to have one in the first place.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0978076/
The first episodes with the Teacher are okay, but it really kicks into high gear when they being playing 'minority rules' later on. Really marvelous!
If you enjoy a real challenge read The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. It's the most rewarding puzzle I've ever tangled with. I was up for days, weeks, thinking about it afterwards.
Here is an introduction by Alastair Reynolds.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0kY1kJA0jA
It is the favorite book of a huge number of well known authors but is less known outside of their circles.
Wolfe's book is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
The story of Revenge of the Nerds was really needed at the time. Keep in mind at the time that movie was released gays were still hated, much more than today and yes there seems to be people in today's government who vocally hate gays. The movie causes us to identify with the nerds, to see how we might fit in as an individual, and to see how Lamar with his effeminate javelin throw is a member of our in group, our team.
Any larger community that doesn't accept gays are a bunch of idiots and there is a time and still large communities in the United States that don't. In that case the world is filled with idiots.
> The "we're in this together" spirit of films from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s later gave way to a reflex shared by left and right, that villainy is associated with organization.
That's not true. First movie that comes into my mind is the Wizard of Oz from 1939. The witch with her obedient monkeys and the wizard are the antagonists. The Munchkins were not idiots or enemies in the film. They were hard working people who wanted to get through the day and take care of the their families (maybe not that exactly). They needed someone who was brave, smart, and compassionate, to help them face a problem. That is what the hero does.
"Society never works". This completely misrepresents what Joseph Campbell was explaining about these stories. He would say most people need to conform because they need at the top of Maslow's pyramid to belong but society only works if someone with a new and different idea to solve a problem for that era and time stands alone against the grain of all the people who submit to the status quo because their need to belong.
It's not that society are idiots. It's that most people need to conform. Also, society won't work if people didn't conform. Society doesn't need everybody to be a hero but only a few.
I dunno, that last movie I saw in theaters, Finding Dory, was sort of about the social support system coming out to save a member of society in some deep shit...
Besides the non-sequitur section about individuals acting stupidly for plot reasons in horror movies, this shift also fits another pattern. One of people being more educated and more able to communicate and discarding some of the ideology of: those who rule us must be our honourable betters.
I personally feel the evidence is more on my side than Brin's. Especially the ethical behaviour of humans when layers of abstraction are added in between their choices and the consequences.
Perhaps he can write another piece about how modern propaganda has implanted the ridiculous cliche in our heads that Kings don't actually rule by divine right and that time spent as a serf who always submits to authority won't be repaid in the next world. That cliche is even more widespread!
Sometimes the evidence is so obvious, we don't even see it. I – and most people frequenting HN – have the fortune to be living in a time and place of 70+ years of peace. That's a "black swan" event when viewed from history, and institutions & political leaders quite possibly have contributed to it.
The same could be said about the economy, civil rights and science.
But even if you disagree with that, there's a difference between "they're all corrupt and idiots" and "they failed". It's quite unlikely that we manage to systematically elect people with a below-average IQ, or below-average moral standards. Therefore, it'd be more constructive to assume good faith and consider that some of the problems are actually hard to solve.
Fundamentally (in discussions such as this), this would require a bit of ethical behavior itself. First among them: Consider the best possible version of your opponent's argument. I. e. nobody is suggesting a return to a King <-> serf relationship model.
The argument in the essay is that the idea that leadership and the masses are stupid and corrupt compared to intelligent individuals (not the average person, but a cliche heroic individual) is propaganda, which wasn't present in the past.
I think that's ridiculous and it's much more likely that the idea of there ever being benevolent and intelligent rulers (compared to this intelligent and ethical individual) was the propaganda, which is working less effectively now.
Hence the King/Serf jab, obviously we now know more than those in the past did, and reject the propaganda that the King rules by divine right and is superior to the rest. This is similar to what I'm saying is happening now.
Past: the cops in that town over there are probably good because the cops here are good.
Present: the cops here are probably bad because the cops over there are bad.
If that's part of Luddism – sign me up.
Still, it's a damn bad movie.
But guess what? This isn't the general experience! Most people are constantly, crushingly immiserated and failed -- a societal "failure mode," as he so charmingly terms it, has already come to pass. It's unclear, in fact, that we've ever /not/ been in a failure mode -- begging the question of /why/ things are so consistently fucked up.
The author lost me the moment he introduced the "paradox" of a writer thinking the societal systems are inefficient but they would dial 911 as soon as there's trouble. So...
(1) Both things are not mutually exclusive at all. Nobody is expert in everything.
(2) What does this guy think the writer should do? Grab a kitchen knife and go be a hero? Outside the USA you can get jailed for assaulting a burglar. He should do some net reading because I suspect him of being too USA-centric.
(3) You can write about heroes while fully realizing you're not one. Takes culture and education to do, and it's very far from impossible. Example: the writers of Spiderman whom the author likes aren't superheroes themselves yet they portrayed the superhero quite well.
The whole thing is written in a way that somehow makes you feel the author is salty and strongly dislikes people who criticize the current public systems. "Be respectful for the work previous generations have put for your future, you ungrateful whippersnappers!", that's how he sounds to me.
I'll admit he makes several good points (like the horror "plots" which were probably already beaten to death as far back as the 1950s) but there are parts of his article I find to be very biased.