I've been thinking about conflict vs mistake theory lately, especially since the events of October in Israel last year.
I've been particularly trying to understand where support for Palestine (and Hamas, implicitly or not) comes from. Much has already been written about this of course, whether it's the bigotry of small differences or the trap of the "oppressor/oppressed thinking," the hierarchy of oppression, and so on.
What I found striking and want to discuss here though is the strain of thought responding to "how can LGBT+ support Palestine" by declaring, e.g., from Reddit:
It's easier to focus on getting gay rights when you're not being genocided.
Or from a longer piece:
The interviewer asks him, “What’s your response to people who say that you’re not safe in Palestine as a queer person?” Dabbagh responded, “First and foremost, I would go to Palestine in a heartbeat. I have no fear. I love my people and my people love me. And I want to be there and be part of the movement that ends up leading to queer liberation for liberated Palestinian people. If you feel that such violence exists for queer people in the Middle East, what are you doing to change that for that community? The first step is the liberation of Palestine.
I don't claim it's the most common strain of thinking, but to me this largely cashes out as "they are homophobic because of oppression/imperialism/Jews." As an aside, contrast with the way "economic anxiety" plays out in the US.
The part I want to focus on is this kind of blend of mistake and conflict theory -- there's conflict, yes, but it has a cause which can be addressed and then we'll all be on the same side. I'm skeptical of this blend, which seems to essentially just be false consciousness: if not for an external force you would see our interests align.
I think this mode of thinking is becoming increasingly popular however and want to point to the two most recent video games I put serious time into (but didn't finish) as examples: Baldur's Gate 3 and Unicorn Overlord (minorish spoilers ahead)
[Again, minorish spoilers for Unicorn Overlord and Baldur's Gate 3 ahead]
Baldur's Gate 3 was part of a larger "vibe shift" in DnD which I won't get into here except to say I think a lot of it is misguided. Nevertheless, there are two major examples of the above:
The Gith'Yanki are a martial, fascist seeming society who are generally aggressive powerful assholes. A major character arc for one of your team Gith'Yanki team members however, is learning she had been brainwashed and fed lies not just about the leader of the society and her goals, but also the basic functioning of the society. For instance, a much-discussed cure for a serious medical condition turns out to be glorious euthanasia.
The Gith have been impressed with a false consciousness, you see, and your conflict with them is largely based on a misunderstanding of the facts.
More egregious is the character Omeluum, who you meet early in the adventure. Omeluum is a "mind flayer" or "illithid":
Mind flayers are psionic aberrations with a humanoid-like figure and a tentacled head that communicate using telepathy. They feast on the brains of intelligent beings and can enthrall other creatures to their will.
But you see, even these creatures turn out to be the victim of false consciousness--Omeluum is a mind flayer who has escaped the mind control of the "Elder Brain." After fleeing, he happily "joined the good guys." You might think it's an issue that his biology requires he consume conscious brains, but fortunately he only feeds
on the brains of creatures of the Underdark 'that oppose the Society's goals', and wishes to help others of his kind by discovering a brain-free diet.
In the world of DnD (which has consciously been made to increasingly mimic our own world with mixed results), it seems that but for a few bad actors we could all get along in harmony.
Anecdotally, the last time I ran a DnD campaign it eventually devolved into the party trying to "get to the root" of every conflict, whether it was insisting on finding a way to get goblins to stop killing travelers by negotiation a protection deal with the nearby village which served both, or trying to talk every single cultist out of being a cult member. I'm all for creative solutions, but I found it got pretty tedious after a while.
The other game, Unicorn Overlord, is even more striking, albeit a little simpler. Unicorn Overlord is a (very enjoyable) strategy game where you slowly build up an army to overthrow the evil overlord. What you quickly discover, however, is that almost without exception every follower of the evil overlord is literally mind-controlled. The main gameplay cycle involves fighting a lieutenant's army, then using your magical ring to undo the mind control. After, the lieutenant is invariably horrified and joins your righteous cause.
I should note this is far from unusual in this genre, which requires fights but also wants team-ups. It's a lot like Marvel movies which come up with reasons for heroes to fight each other then team up, like a misunderstanding or even mind control. Wargroove was especially bad at this, where you would encounter a new friendly and say something like "Hello, a fine field for cattle, no?" but the wind is strong or something so they hear "Hello, a fine field for battle, no?" and then you fight. Nevertheless, the mind control dynamic in Unicorn Overlord is almost exclusively the only explanation used.
Funnily enough, I think in these an other examples this is seen as "adding nuance," but I find it ultimately as childish as a cartoon-twirling villain. The villain is still needed in fact (Imperialists, the Evil Overlord, The Elder Brain, The Queen of the Gith), but it's easier to explain away one Evil person who controls everything than try to account for it at scale.
Taken altogether, I can't help but think these are all symptoms of the same thing: struggling to explain conflict. The "false consciousness" explanation is powerful, but seems able to explain anything about people's behavior.
My suspicion is that mistakes and genuine conflict can both occur, but this blended approach leaves something to be desired I think. I had an idea a while ago about a potential plot twist for Unicorn Overlord where it's revealed you aren't freeing anyone -- you're simply bringing them under your own control but you don't notice. That feels a bit like the fantasy all of this is getting at I think: I have my views because of Reasons or Ethics or Whatever, and you would agree with me if not for Factor I'm Immune To.
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Notes -
First off, I like this topic and the discussion below is pretty good. Most points are well stated already, and converge to fairly reasonable conclusions.
As such, I will posit an unhinged opinion on why modern morality in the media/meatspace spheres is so weird, with everything from ISIS to Tolkein Orcs to even 40K Horus getting some woobie 'they actually have good reasons for being total assholes'.
I blame online fanfiction. Specifically, Harry Potter Fanfiction. Even more specifically, Draco Redemption fanfics.
In Harry Potter (or whichever OC self insert is used in place of Potter), Draco is the central proximate agent forcing Harrys decisions. He is active, always Doing Stuff, always in Harrys face. Harry is reactive, and always must act against Draco, who is at the very least a persistent thorn in Harrys side. Harrys companions are set dressing, hypoagentic slaves to the protagonists actions, and thus subservient to the hyperagentic Draco.
Oh, and Draco is hot. He has enough charisma presented in order to directly command toadies and followers, and is explicitly described as good looking. Bishi white haired bad boy had its predecessor in Sephiroth, but Draco was the western normies intro to this rabbit hole.
Good looking ,always in your face, talks shit all the time, always does stuff. But a total villain.
Imagine, dear reader. What would happen if this handsome manifestation of the Dark Triad was not, in fact, an asshole. What if he were good. Why... he and Harry would... oh my...
But he's a villain! How can our morally upstanding hero have anything to do with this cur! Well, what if Draco actually did not want to be a jerk. What if it was Something Else motivating him to be as such.
Bang. Internet, do your thing.
Why is Draco a jerk? Its purely his abusive fathers fault! Its Voldemorts fault! Its his lack of Real Friends! It is literally all externalized. For True Love to win over this dastardly villain, all he needs is to have his evil outside heart vanquished. Preferably by the protag, for maximum emotional impact.
This is the modern morality tale. Writers cut their teeth on fanfic as teens, grow up to be journalists or showrunners or academics or civil servants as adults, and have this as a compelling base morality. Everyone who is an asshole actually just wants to be good, and the power of my special Goodness Heart is all that is required to defeat the big bad enemy and unleash the kumbaya cooperativeness natural in my prize.
But wait, you might say, furrowing your brow as this crazed pervert blames deranged early '00s teenage fujoshi for modern moral failures. VOLDEMORT was the ultimate agentic force of the book. He was the Big Bad Evil Guy, not this Team Rocket prettyboy.
Yes, Voldemort is the external. But Voldemort was He Who Must Not Be Named. An amorphous concept, helpfully instanced in the narrative as a real tangible force*. Defeat Voldemort and Harry becomes best friends (and maybe more?) with Draco!
As it is in fiction and its derivatives, so too must it be in reality. The moral prize of a redeemed asshole must have an external to be blamed, to focus ones efforts and emotional energies on. You can't change Draco, theres nothing to change, you just need to free him from his evil fathers influence!
Father? Didn't I just say it was Voldemort who was the Big Bad Evil Guy?
Father. Because the Father is a closer proximate target that can be easily affected.
Here is where we come full circle into modern morality. Harry Potter, or the self-insert OC, cannot be an overpowered god at the beginning because it renders all conflict meaningless. The BBEG must remain, but there must be defeatable proximate villains. Voldemort is a cursed horcrux corpse**, a mcguffin as far as the relationship dynamic is concerned. Draco cannot be redeemed if it requires defeating Voldemort.
But prying him away from his dad? That can easily be done in a few chapters, depending on authorial angst level at time of writing.
The identified moral enemy to be destroyed is not the actual loci of externalized influence on the victim, it is the one that can be easily attacked based on current capabilities. I can't do anything about Voldemort, but I can give Draco another voice to listen to other than his dad!
So too with modern morality. Jihadism is Voldemort, he who must not be named. Palestinians are dicks only because Israel, whom I can actually talk to, are dicks. I just need to tell Jason Isaacs to show Tom Felton proper love and Draco will be the perfect companion to Harry. Either that or destroy Lucius Malfoy, then Draco will be free.
Here is the closing of the loop. The hyperagentic asshole is now no longer the sole agent in these relationship defining exercises. The protagonist can exercise agency by attacking a nearby actor that is identified as the Real Proximate Cause. Once that is done, my beautiful Draco will be a perfect companion.
Reality breaks with this fanfic construct in two ways. First, Draco is ugly (sorry Tom). An attractive skinsuit must be superimposed onto the current presentation to justify all the emotional energy previously invested in such a prize, and that itself breaks away from what others can see. Secondly, the identified target may not actually be the cause of the dickish behavior. Draco was a dickhead independent of his dad or Voldemort, and his character arc ended with him staying away from Harry instead of having his soul redeemed. The agentic entity may in fact be fully cognizant of the consequences of their agency, and the negative consequences can be their actual desired outcome.
To effect Harry/Draco, the reality of mistake morality must be made manifest. The gazans are innocent lambs lashing out against the agentic Israelis, whom we can actually influence. The skinsuit of moral attractiveness is draped over the gazans, the Israeli is the only one with agency, and with this moral dynamic the arc of responsibility turns even more away from the gazan.
*There is also plenty of Snape,Voldemort redemption morality fic. Its all the same principle
**I don't remember the books anymore and my knowledge of the deep lore is corrupted by my forays into editing alpha/omega smutfics. I am a broken man and I need help.
Don't worry, I understood most of those words you put down. Maybe we're both broken.
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Thanks for the contribution. I think you hit on something important, which is the rationalization aspect of it.
It does seem like it comes back to using concepts of evil vs evil influence to justify what I already want to think.
What’s striking to me is even in your Harry Potter example it seems like we could make it go any direction we want. Maybe we want to redeem Voldemort because of absolutely-not-sex-related reasons.
Wouldn’t I be on equally firm ground (which is to say, not that firm) saying “yeah the little scamp got carried away but it was the bad influences! And now he’s terrified of these Death Eaters who know where his horcruxes are and are Evil!”
As I type this I think it’s basically scapegoating. That’s all it is. There’s something bad I need to account for so I pin it on someone I don’t like in order to absolve someone I do.
I am a big believer in motivated reasoning and self imposed blinders being the reason for cognitively dissonant presentations. It does not matter that a stated reason fails to hold up by its internal historical context or by the proximate current context. All that matters is that it is true for the arguer. The true value of moral arguments is self certainty, and the strongest of wills do not require a single external to agree with them.
You can present the statements made by Azzam Pasha about how he looked forward to the slaughter of jews, or video recordings of palestinians spitting on Shani Louks corpse, or the videos of palestinians beheading a thai worker with a hoe, or the ecstatic calls of palestine supporters screaming 'gas the jews' at the Sydney Opera House. The Israelis, for daring to win their wars against brown muslims, are the moral villains. Thus the palestinians and supporters are eternally innocent, and their just cause must be evidenced by comporting history and facts.
Or you could just be hot. Hasan Piker interviewed a handsome yemeni pirate and socialists everywhere started slobbering houthi dick. Its not like 'hot dude = good guy' is unknown to terrorists. You just have to see the AI art generated on Arab telegram to see how they portray themselves as handsome badasses. Reductive, but surprisingly consistent.
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I'd go a bit further, and say that they often touch on a nerve of insecurity about why others would conflict with them.
One of the bugs/features of irredeemable villains and mind-control alike is that it poses no moral conflict or tension with the protagonist's moral position. When adversaries literally can't be reasoned with, it means there's no morality challenge the protagonist needs to do with their fundamental position. This is true regardless of whether the adversary is a monster or a mind-controlled victim- the main heroic struggle is how to handle and overcome the adversary (and moral quandries about killing, or mercy, or endangering many to save one), not whether the adversary should be overcome.
This dynamic does not exist if the people who are opposing you are reasonable, moral people, with whom you are in a conflict with due to choice rather than necessity. While sometimes (often) you can easily come into conflict with reasonable people for reasons beyond your control (such as if they are conscripts in a foreign army- a metaphorical analogy to the mind-control), you can also come int oconflict with reasonable people if you, yourself, are the less reasonable one.
This is an issue for fiction, and especially power-fantasy fiction like RPG games, because one of the narrative elements of player-centric fiction is agency. You play the game/indulge in the media in the first place to feel powerful, to escape the limitations of your real life, to live vicariously through a character-avatar that can do what you want to do.
But what a lot of people want to do is be the nice and popular person. A reoccuring trend of most moral choice system RPGs is that an overwhelming ratio of people play... conventionally morality heroic paragons of virtue. Paragons of Mass Effect as opposed to racist Renegades, Lawful-Good Paladins rather than sociopathic chaotic-evil liches, and so on. Even 'neutral' characters almost always end up 'doing the right thing' in the end / extreme circumstances. People like being popular, and being nice.
You don't get to feel that if your avatar of agency is the unreasonable person picking fights with people who never harmed you, and wouldn't be fighting you if you didn't take the fight to them. The character's agency, and the player's desires, come into tension if the opponent is someone who'd give you shelter as a guest and hide you from the Evil Empire, but would also risk death (and almost certainly die) standing up to you for pursuing some vendetta that endangers others. If the character would stand up to the bad guys, but also stand up to you, wouldn't that mean... you might be the bad guy?
There are certainly series that would double-down on 'yes' and relish this. Grand Theft Auto makes no mistake that you're a crook. But in heroic-fantasy stories, this conclusion often needs to be avoided to avoid player moral incongruity. Therefore, the possibility needs to be removed.
For the player to feel good about themselves no matter what they do, good people should never oppose them. Therefore, the only reasons to oppose the player that leave their moral superiority unchallenged are those without agency (who satisfy the moral power fantasy by freeing them) or those who aren't good at all (who satisfy the moral power fantasy by being overcome).
This is in issue in real life as much as in fiction. Up to 1900, schoolboy history takes for granted that most wars are fought by patriotic men displaying martial virtue on both sides. (Wars against Muslims may or may not be an exception depending on who is writing - the version of schoolboy history I grew up with made a big deal about how Saladin was as much of a chivalric paragon as Richard the Lionheart. In so far as an actual villain was needed, it is the snivelling, sneaky, backstabbing French or Bad Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham on the home front). My favourite treatment of the subject is Kipling's Ballad of East and West, which famously begins "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" but makes clear that it is going to refute this proposition before the first stanza is out - "There is neither East nor West ... when two strong men come face to face". The idea that both sides could be fundamentally good by the standards of the age and be fighting over a genuine irreconcilable difference is unremarkable.
Beginning with WW2, schoolboy history takes for granted that all wars are caused by the fundamental wickedness of one side. Even the footsoldiers can only be excused by denying their agency. The fact that WW2 was mostly caused by the fundamental wickedness of one side helps this transition but the actual tipping point is WW1 - the documentary evidence makes clear that the people starting the war did not think their enemies were driven by wickedness, and serious modern historiography agrees with them. But WW1 was so destructive (as in three of Europe's leading dynasties were cancelled and the British and French traditional elites were so depleted in numbers that they could no longer rule even if the people wanted them to) that conflict theory with sane actors was, with hindsight, inconceivable and mistake theory was morally unsatisfying, so people turned to "the Central Powers were motivated by wickedness" as a cope.
After WW1, institutions like the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact are set up on the assumption that most wars are caused by the wickedness of one side and that collective punishment of the wicked is the way to bring an end to war. This is, of course, a midwit view. The "sophisticated" alternative is that some wars are indeed caused by the wickedness of one side, but that most wars are caused by the fundamental wickedness of both sides. The view that sane, neutral or good actors can have a conflict worth fighting over for sane reasons is now fringe.
I'm not convinced that it's false, though. You can fudge it by saying things like "he wanted to conquer the enemy because he honestly sincerely thinks the enemy's country belongs to him", and insane and bad actors really like to say that kind of thing. But I'm hard pressed thinking of any conflict in the modern era where sane, neutral, or good actors have a conflict worth fighting over, except maybe for wars of independence, and we don't have too many chances for those any more.
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Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail has some interesting, if spoileriffic counterexamples. For those who aren't interested in the game or spending a couple hundred hours to get to the endgame:
There is some mind (or more specifically memory) control, but ultimately it's a bit of a distraction: there are fundamental disagreements, and while they might have been solvable by looking for some third option, neither society was interested in it.
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Good post.
The absolute apotheosis of these kinds of fictional examples has to be Ian Banks' "Culture" series. The Culture, being a post-scarcity society that is run by nigh-omniscient AI, approaches every single potential conflict with outsiders with the idea that any rational society would inevitably prefer to join the culture and all it should take to convince them is to show off how perfect life is when you remove all hierarchies and social restrictions and accept the post-singularity as your lord and savior.
And when they encounter outsiders who resist, normally its just a matter of identifying which of the leaders are 'irrationally' opposed to joining the culture, and supplanting them through various means. In short, the culture has mathematically proven that the only reason someone would resist the culture is they're 'mistaken' in some way, and once you correct them, the conflict evaporates.
Or so that's my take on the philosophical underpinnings of the books.
I think that there's something to be said for writing your antagonists with serious nuance, or even taking a character that was described as 'pure evil,' and even having them act in line with that description, but then get into an explanation for why they are the way they are, and perhaps even write your story so to make them subtly heroic.
It can be a demonstration of skilled writing to flip the audience's emotional valence towards a character without technically changing anything about their basic traits and characterization. Perhaps not the most skilled or best example, but Snape from Harry Potter is one that every Millennial will think towards.
Disney, for example, has gone back and created origin stories for two of their outright evil villains, Cruella De Ville and Maleficent, and from what I gather (I haven't watched the films) they do manage to 'humanize' them and even maybe vindicate them?
I would say that making a character ontologically evil as a simple fact of your fictional world is a bit lazy and can work for the story but becomes unsatisfying if it really does seem like the conflict wouldn't exist but for them being evil. That is, there are obvious routes that the parties could take that would leave everyone better off but these are ignored or refused by the villain without explanation so the story can happen.
Side note, I also think this is why "revenge" stories are so popular. When one party has been wronged in an irreparable way, it makes perfect sense that the only thing they could want, their sole motivation, is to inflict harm on the one who wronged them. And that's a motivation that can work for both heroes and villains! Although you can also write in 'mistakes' to explain why the harm occurred at all, or give the offending party some solid justification for why they did it.
I also think that writing with the assumption that even the most heinous and gleefully malevolent beings are really just mind controlled or misinformed or are perpetuating a cycle of abuse or otherwise can be 'persuaded' of the error of their ways is pretty lazy, you inherently lower the stakes since now there is always an 'out' that the protagonist just has to find the correct words or a particular piece of information that brings the villain around and defuses the situation without forcing a final confrontation and, you know, making the Protag actually risk his life to save the day.
One thing I liked about the early seasons of Sherlock (RIGHT before it goes off the rails) is Moriarty literally just wants to fuck with Sherlock and will go to his grave to achieve it. There was never any outcome where Moriarty was convinced into joining the side of the angels, and if there was, it was because he wanted to be and presumably had some other plan involved.
I like my bad guys to have agency, to be aware, on some level, that they're hurting others and making the world worse, but choosing to do that anyway and being intelligent about how they do it!
I think I myself am a bit of a 'hybrid' theorist. That is, I mostly believe that most conflicts could be resolved by talking it out, recognizing which 'mistakes' each side has made, identifying a more peaceful option that benefits both parties, and avoiding the costs of a drawn out fight. Even if neither party changes their mind, they can probably find a way to peacefully co-exist rather than fight an existential battle that can end up killing both of them.
But... we live in a world of scarcity, and people can have utility functions that diverge enough that they can't easily be resolved without a LOT of effort. Sometimes, there are not enough seats on the lifeboat, everyone has strong reasons to want to live, and there is objectively not enough time to debate and discuss things such that one of the parties could be persuaded to sacrifice themselves. And thus things default to good old fashioned violence.
I believe that there are natural forces out there that don't care about your utility function. A tsunami can't be talked out of carrying your home and family away. There are creatures (mostly the parasitic kind) whose whole existence and reproductive cycle is based on making some other creature's life miserable. There are likely alien utility functions that value things that, if not quite the opposite of what you value, are so orthogonal that even learning of their existence might make you significantly worse off!
And perhaps most importantly, I believe there is a 'sanity water line' for humans, and only those above the line are truly capable of recognizing when a mistake has likely occurred, and that taking some time to discuss the matter will probably lead to a better outcome than immediately fighting. For those below that line, such negotiations and discussions probably won't bear fruit, and conflict may inevitably result.
And lets be clear, even those above the line can drop down below it under the right conditions or when confronting a particular sort of issue, and thus there is no real guarantee that a conflict can be averted if the otherwise rational participants are sufficiently aggrieved.
Now, all this is just to say, my general approach to people I seem to vehemently disagree with is "Assume mistake (either mine or theirs) until the conflict appears inevitable, then CONFLICT THE SHIT OUT OF THEM."
I suspect that the 'rational' calculus that leads to situations like Israel-Palestine is both parties determining that under foreseeable conditions conflict is unavoidable in the long run, and the other party believes this too, and thus they both have to avoid allowing the other party to gain an irretrievable upper hand. Even if they try to signal willingness to discuss mistakes, the core disagreement is unlikely to be solved before the conflict, so each side operates under the assumption that there will be conflict.
At that point, I think the main debate is not 'conflict vs. mistake,' but literally whether one should accelerate the conflict and get it over with or try to delay it as long as possible and hope for a miraculous intervention.
I think we're at the point where the "subversion" of having the monster not be evil is so common that having the enemy be irredeemably evil has become the subversion, even though everyone who makes good orcs or demons or wicked witches thinks they're being clever and original about it.
Yes, if the entirety of your 'twist' on genre conventions and tropes is that the evil forces are actually 'good' or justified, without taking that anywhere interesting in the story, you're probably being lazy.
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If you label all cultural differences as "mind control" then isn't it true that everything is reconcilable? If you're master bioengineers that can transmute anyone into anything, is anything really fundamental?
On one hand, this sounds like a word game, but once you reach the tech level of the culture, I think this just becomes correct.
If someone is pure evil just do brain surgery on them until they aren't. Prrrroblem solved! Of course, the 'mind control wars' themselves also take on the format of a conflict until resolved. But the killing of entire bodies becomes wasteful and unnecessary. What was a game of Chess becomes a game of Shogi.
If we assume full magitech then that seems like a viable solution.
But I've also read the book Blindsight, which posits the existence of a totally nonsentient (in the sense it has no self-awareness or internal dialogue) but superintelligent entity that simply evolved from the random permutations of the universe and its intelligence is literally just an 'emergent' result of its physical structure, and in a sense is inseparable from that structure.
That is to say the "mind/body" distinction pretty much doesn't exist for this thing in any sense. You can't just do 'brain surgery' to change its mind without potentially killing its body. And it is VERY hard to kill.
The book goes so far as to suggest that sentient beings are likely a tiny minority of intelligent life in the universe, as sentience is costly in terms of energy/computation, and mostly unneeded for survival, if you otherwise possess high intelligence.
This starts to blur the line between "natural force that doesn't care about your utility function" and "alien utility functions." I'm sure you could write up a theoretical 'cure' for this sort of thing, but imagine if it already had spread to and occupied the majority of the galaxy and was capable of undoing any cures you came up with.
If I were to imagine a major threat in the Culture universe, maybe posit a species/society that reached some level of near-equivalence with Culture tech, then decided to use their power to rewire themselves to remove their own sentience and make their own intellects a distributed, 'immutable' aspect of their physical structure so you cannot just hack their brain open to make changes. i.e. they make themselves as resistant to brainwashing/brain surgery as possible.
And now add in the parasitic angle: they intentionally work to make any other species/societies they encounter 'nonsentient,' without changing any other aspects of their minds. Just lop off the parts of the brain that generates sentience, because from their perspective, sentience is 'evil' or 'inefficient' and thus removing it is just a quick little surgery that no rational person would refuse.
Actually I realize this is basically just describing the Borg.
So yeah, maybe imagine if a society created "Minds" on par with those of the Culture, but these minds were basically running on Borg logic and were steadfastly devoted to 'peacefully' removing sentience from the universe by spreading their nonsentience through whatever means they can devise. Basically a hyperintelligent P-Zombie horde.
Indeed, that kind of matches with my thought above, about a society that shares the Culture's social mores except for one: "Do whatever you want at any time, but don't be self-aware while you do it!"
I am not certain the Culture wins a direct confrontation if the nonsentient civilization is equivitech and the Culture is fighting to to preserve sentience. If Blindsight's logic is right, then the sheer added efficiency of nonsentience means they will be better at fighting because they don't waste epicycles reflecting on what they do, they just act on their instinct at all times. I am positing that the Culture won't be able to buy them off to convince them to stand down.
Or if you want to amp up the challenge even more, accept Blindsight's logic that sentience is rare, and imagine that the Culture realizes that 90% of space around them is inhabited by these sorts of civilizations.
Indeed, now that I think about it, Banks' most optimistic assumption in writing his novels isn't so much that we'd manage to pull of friendly AI... its that the other alien civs out there would, whether they're sadistic, friendly, or straight up hostile to everyone, at least be sentient and thus one can deal with them through negotiation and social influence.
On his blog, at one point Watts actually walked back his belief that consciousness is not evolutionarily adaptive after reading a study on it, if I recall correctly. I just searched around for it but couldn't find it - my apologies.
I should add that Blindsight and the Culture series are still some of my favorites though!
I'm not going to pretend to know the answer on that one.
I read Blindsight right around the same time I read A Fire Upon the Deep by Vinge, which also had a lot to say about the nature of Conciousness/sentient life. And I read Who's in Charge. These days I'd add in Behave by Sapolsky.
The effect on my psyche and outlook on the universe of reading these three books in short succession was noticeable.
Regardless of whether full-on sentience is adaptive from an evolutionary point of view, it is conceivable that intelligence could either evolve independently of full sentience, or that after evolving high intelligence, the part that makes the brain self aware could become vestigial.
And a society on the Culture's level could presumably do some engineering designed to remove the 'sentience' part while otherwise preserving as much of the self as possible.
I wonder if part of the bargain for joining the Culture was to sacrifice your self-awareness but otherwise still be 'you,' and you get all the rest of the post-scarcity hedonism to boot, how appealing would it really be?
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Maleficent pretty heavily vindicates The Wicked Witch. She's reimagined as a dark fairy who protected the forest from aggression by a nearby king, made friends and fell in love with a poor commoner from that kingdom, and then was betrayed by that commoner, who takes drugs her and takes her wings for the bounty. The whole curse on Sleeping Beauty is a fit of rage and misguided revenge against that once-commoner-now-king that is Sleeping Beauty's father, but she regrets it near-instantly and spends the next two decades trying to help protect and raise Sleeping Beauty, eventually lifting the curse. This version isn't a perfect hero, but she's at worst a hero with flaws, and while it's definitely a different take on her from the original version, it's at least recognizable from the original story.
Cruella, not so much. The attempts to tie the any dalmatians in are both perfunctory (they killed her mom! kinda; she ends up taking them in from their previous owner) and not really relevant. It'd probably have worked out okay as an entirely unrelated movie -- she's turned into a headstrong artist wanting revenge on the psychotic baroness who twice orphaned her, and there's a certain Beetlejuice-the-TV-show vibe going on that kinda works -- but it's so little connection to the motivations of the original work that she doesn't really say anything about the original 101 Dalmatians character.
Wicked kinda runs in between those two. There's a bunch of new motivations -- Elphaba's reacting to psuedoracism against her and actual-racism against talking animals, the Wizard is a not-very-subtle fascist -- are not only invisible in the original works, but pretty much incompatible with a lot of them, and even with some higher cause Elphaba's still a murderer in the books. But she's somewhat humanized in motive, even if still doing the wrong things and regretting them.
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An extreme non-fiction example of this is "Sluggish Schizophrenia" in the Soviet Union. Since Communism is obviously the superior social system, and there is no logical reason for anyone to oppose Communism, those who oppose it, against the wishes of all their friends, their elders, the experts, and all of society, must be mentally ill. Of course in practice this was created as an excuse to torture dissidents, and it's unlikely that those involved in that were true believers in the excuse.
Related, back in 2021, had someone I once considered close to me make approximately the same accusation regarding my opposition to lockdowns. Because I refused to abide by some COVID restriction, and therefore couldn't participate in some activity that was surrounded by COVID regulations, even though everyone else was apparently "fine" with it, I must have some mental illness.
Still, at least that's more creative than the usual real-world accusation thrown at us who disagree with the current thing. Usually we're regarded as brainwashed by Russians. Pretty silly when I hate Putin for pretty much the same reason I hate western leaders.
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I'd argue that while this - or something close enough - is what the Culture believes, the books themselves and their narrative voices are more skeptical. The Culture tells a lot of stories about itself, but in most of the Culture novels I've read, those stories are questioned or deconstructed by the end, usually in a way that leaves us wondering to what extent the Culture is self-deluding. I don't think the goodness of the Culture is as obvious as some readers seem to think. The Culture is so materially prosperous as to be effectively utopian, and its libertarian-except-for-anything-that-harms-others ethic may seem hard to argue with, but Banks does not stop trying.
Well, as we've seen in real life, this naturally devolves into endless fighting about what should count as harm, and who should count as others.
Anything else is at least as utopian as an end to scarcity, or faster-than-light travel.
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Yes, I haven't read all the books through to hear all of Banks' own self-aware critiques of the culture's self-aggrandized superiority.
But the books I've read tend to make the societies opposed to the Culture out as complete nightmares where any reasonable person, given the choice between the Culture and, say, the Idirans or Azad (or the affront,) would easily choose the Culture unless they were guaranteed to be in the upper echelons of the other societies.
I've wondered if there was a story that has the Culture encounter a rival power that matches their social mores in almost all but ONE critical way, and they abjectly refuse to compromise on that one difference for reasons that they cannot explain (and may not even know) but that is such a central, load-bearing aspect of their civilization that they simply cannot join the Culture if doing so would endanger that factor at all.
Banks certainly adds tidbits that make it pretty clear that the Culture is not literally perfect in every way. Sometimes there's even some hypocrisy and unnecessary suffering that results from it.
But it does still strike me as the final boss of "everyone would be able to just get along if we could talk things out" mindset.
This is the case with the Gzilt in Hydrogen Sonata, who actually almost joined the Culture as founding members but stayed out because they see themselves as a chosen people because their holy text being surprisingly scientifically accurate. In the Culture universe this could mean all sorts of things, including sponsorship by Sublimed (functionally godlike) entities.
They haven't really suffered for it. They're about equivtech, despite not having a war for a while they maintain a Starship Troopers-style draft system that is functionally optional because they're also post-scarcity and they insist on their ships running their own emulated minds sped up. It's basically an answer to many of the things people don't like about the Culture like the hereditary caste of Minds running the whole thing.
Look to Windward's Chelgrians aren't Culture-level and their caste system seems to have very strong downsides. But it also allows them to maintain communication with their ancestors who Sublimed, which is basically unheard of. They truly are special, in a way many don't want to lose. The Culture's attempt to weaken their caste system releases awful tendencies kept in check and leads to absolute disaster.
Haven't read that one yet, but you just bumped by interested in reading it by like 30%.
And I already like them a bit more than the Culture! The "chosen people" thing would rub me the wrong way but if your religious text actually seems to be bestowed upon you by a higher being, and holds up to scrutiny for eons, I'd have strong feelings about it too.
Guess I'll have to get to that one ASAP too.
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I take it you've read The Player of Games, and I like that one as a case study, actually. The Player of Games is probably the most straightforwardly pro-Culture Culture novel, and yet even then, I think it portrays the Culture as kind of being bastards? They lie and blackmail Gurgeh into doing this mission for them, even though it is clearly doing Gurgeh considerable psychic harm. Moreover, the Culture's action against Azad is indisputably a case of unprovoked aggression. Azad have done absolutely nothing to the Culture. Azad aren't even able to do anything to the Culture. The Culture move in to destroy Azad purely because they find Azad's existence to be offensive to their enlightened liberal sensibilities. Azad is a repressive, autocratic caste system, and the Culture don't like that, so they intervene. It is pure aggression.
Now, we see enough of Azad to make that society look truly loathsome, but here is where I have to note that the novel is narrated to us by Flere-Imsaho, and Flere-Imsaho is pretty firmly established to be a manipulative liar. Flere-Imsaho is himself a rather repulsive and arrogant character. (I remember a part discussing alien genders where he writes "the precise translation depends on whether your own civilisation (for let us err on the side of terminological generosity) is male or female dominated" - he smugly implies that civilisations he doesn't approve of aren't really civilisations at all.) Gurgeh's expedition into the seedy depths of Azadian society is in fact orchestrated by Flere-Imsaho in order to convince him that Azad needs to be destroyed, so even if we take the narration is reliable, the situations it describes are curated to try to make the moral case against Azad. But why would we take the narration as reliable? After all, the novel ends with the words:
This is the most pro-Culture Culture novel. The most! And it's one with an unreliable, manipulative narrator who lies to and blackmails the hero and is clearly trying to prosecute the case against Azad as fiercely as possible, and even then, there's no disguising the fact that the Culture arranged a coup and violent revolution in a neighbouring nation simply because they found that nation's culture repulsive. Moreover, this was engineered by Special Circumstances, who are not democratically ratified or accountable in any way - most of the Culture had no idea this was going on. So actually a small group of super-empowered elites just... went around and wrecked a nation because they didn't like it.
If The Player of Games hadn't been published in 1988, I'd snark something about the Iraq War, or democracy promotion more generally.
You might still say this is all fine. Even if Azad is only 50% as bad as Flere says it is, that's still bad enough to be worth overthrowing, and the planned revolution had to be carried out by native Azadians anyway - it's not as if the existing Azadian regime had massive popular support. And what does democracy really count for in a society run by god-like superintelligences anyway? Am I really going to support the existence of a government as awful as Azad on woolly procedural grounds?
I don't know. Maybe I am.
Because, well, I've also read Consider Phlebas, and Look to Windward, and Excession, and I know that the Culture only gets dodgier from here. Consider Phlebas ended with its primary Culture character putting herself into cold storage until the Culture can mathematically 'prove' the war was justified, at which point she commits suicide as a kind of protest. I think part of what Banks is doing is contriving a situation that satisfies most people's utilitarian calculus - the Culture is king of QALYs - and yet something about it, something difficult to define but nonetheless there, feels wrong. That itching sense of wrongness is the point, it seems to me. Even if we struggle to define it, something here isn't right.
Yes, ALTHOUGH I recall that Gurgeh was basically falling into a listless depression because playing games with no stakes was no longer satisfying, so in a certain sense, the mission was simply giving him what he wanted, and the Minds could be all but certain that he wouldn't be harmed.
As to whether they tricked him about how bad the society was or the narrator was reliable, I grant that's a clear self-aware critique of the Culture. Still, I imagine Banks' own ethics would conclude something like "you can judge a society by how it treats its worst-off members," where the Culture has nothing resembling poverty, whereas if we assume that the portrayal of Azad was accurate as to the existence of castes who were tortured at the elites' whim, then that alone justifies some sort of intervention.
Whether a full on coup and revolution was ethically defensible, I guess I'll leave that aside.
You know I think I've also gathered as subtext (or maybe it was specifically stated at one point) that some of the minds get 'bored' with merely managing the Culture society and economy and will try challenging themselves to nudge other societies into joining the culture simply to alleviate that boredom, and perhaps on extremely rare occasions they miscalculate and trigger real war, which they KNOW they can win, but then the challenge is making it a 'just' war. Which leads into:
I was actually uncertain whether that particular portion of the book was Banks critiquing the Culture/minds for prosecuting a war despite being well aware of the costs it would incur, OR he was actually making a small jab at bleeding-heart liberals who want to enact change in the world but can't stand getting their hands even a bit bloody.
"You guys won the war and saved the day, but then couldn't stomach the actions it took to win unless your conscience could be mollified? Grow up."
Agreed. And the answer for myself that I settled on is that humans in the Culture have no volition. They can't make anything meaningful happen that the minds aren't already planning. As we see, the minds will nudge or outright deceive humans towards a larger end goal. Humans aren't able or allowed to truly decide on the end goal. Yes, the Minds will put things to a democratic vote and 'abide' by the outcome, but the outcome itself is never in doubt.
So that feels like a subtle horror story to me. Humans are locked in a nature preserve and will never know if this was something they wanted or it was decided for them. That the walls are basically invisible and the guards are entirely benevolent doesn't change that.
From a storytelling perspective, you HAVE to make the Culture get a bit Dodgy or else you can't really derive conflict from a world of such abundance that is ideologically committed to nonviolence.
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For what it’s worth, as someone who loves “muscular liberalism”, many of my favourite parts of the Culture books are when you get to see its bared teeth (perhaps most spectacularly at the end of Look To Windward with the Terror Weapon). There’s a reason why all Involved species know the saying “Don’t Fuck With The Culture.” I fantasise about being part of a similarly open, liberal, and pluralistic society that is nonetheless utterly capable of extreme violence when its citizens’ lives and interests are threatened.
I mean, being honest, thats my ideal for a libertarian society. Maximum openness (which also means allowing people to form consensual 'closed' sub-societies) but also maximal 'deterrence' against outside interference.
Live and let live, until they don't let you live, then you end their life (if needed).
I think the issues that come up on the one hand is that a society of maximal openness usually viewing outsiders as having the same value as insiders because that's how you've organized the entirety of your society.
Like, how do you have a coherent definition of 'us' and 'them' when the whole ideology that you've built your society on is intended to remove that distinction entirely? You don't use such distinctions within your society, but how do you strictly define the boundary beyond which you do NOT extend the same courtesy?
And likewise, the problem of pre-emptive violence. When you can see with near-certainty that an outside force is going to attack (Russians massing troops on your border for a 'training exercise,' for example) and yet if you take action before the danger manifests you're sort of breaking your own rules. And if you can justify a pre-emptive strike, you can probably justify any other intervention, like targeted assassination and 'regime change.'
And now you're back to basically being Neocons.
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The bolded part is, I think, a mistake.
My model of the western queer islamist-supporter isn't that they think muslim societies would be pro-LGBT but for the interference of the west, and that after the removal of the oppressive outsider everyone will be chill and copacetic; it's that they identify first and foremost as opponents of what they believe is the hegemonic moral, political, economic, and ethnic power of the west. They then see the islamists as also opposed to the same forces and, since the enemy of my enemy is my friend, automatically support them as fellow-travellers. All oppressive struggles everywhere are linked and intersectional. "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere".
I'd say that a major component is not having to deal with the contradictions of living cheek-by-cheek with large fundamentalist muslim populations, but I'm not sure even that would shake the trend. Plenty of prominent queer and secular-socialist leftists have been seduced by the thrill of exotic, primal, other Islamic revolution as an alternative to dreaded western capitalist modernity.
I can't even really blame them for it; there's plenty of historical basis for westerners using outsiders as a political cudgel or hedge against local enemies.
There are certainly ways to support the rights of people who would enact violence on you - you say that even if a person desires to hurt you, that person still deserves protection from injustice themselves. They have the right to be free from a punch until they throw one at you, as it were. But I'm legitimately torn on whether that would get you far enough to make "X for people-who-want-to-kill-X" a rational slogan.
That said, you're spot on that there's a strong component of support for Palestine which is fundamentally anti-Israel, not just pro-Palestine. There are also ways to construct arguments in favor of that, but they're entirely unrealistic because short of an invasion, Israel isn't going to delete itself or change how it controls its demographics.
I don't disagree with anything specific you said, but I don't think most of the "queers-for-Palestine" leftists are deriving their positions from rational analysis of facts; I think they have a vibe, an aesthetic, a friend-enemy instinct, and tack on rationalizations after that. TBH, I increasingly think most politics (very much including my own) draws from this tendency, and clear-eyed rationality is both extremely-hard to maintain and prone to error itself (legibility problems and incomplete data being the root of most of them).
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I think people have perfectly valid reasons to be thoroughly annoyed with the behavior of American and British Jewish elites and Israeli leadership for a long, long time now. I think it was a strategic blunder not to give the Palestinians a viable state of their own, and that in their greed, the Israeli leadership have deranged their own people.
I don't even disagree, but I don't see how you could argue that the same is not true for the Palestinians. The truth is that humans can create a situation where, to a first approximation, there are no more good guys. Contrary to popular belief, the "least bad" guy doesn't become the good guy by default; sometimes, it's just bad guys all the way around, at least to the extent that we're talking about the people driving events.
I've no doubt that there are numerous innocents remaining on both sides. They should leave.
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When was the last time this was possible? Palestinians never had a chance.
Careful about "them" in the context of the Middle East.
The decision to go to war rather than accepting the 1947 partition plan was made by the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. To the extent that the Arab side is to blame for the 1967 Six-Day War (I am not going to get involved in that hoary old chestnut) it was a decision taken by Nasser for his own reasons, with the Jordanians and Palestinians taken along for the ride. Arafat is declared leader of the PLO by Nasser, and spends the next few years trying to set up a Palestinian pseudo-state in Jordan until the Jordanians kick him out. He then tries the same trick in Lebanon, during which time he gets UN recognition as the representative of "Palestine" based on lobbying by other Arab governments. Eventually Israel invades Lebanon in order to get Arafat, and he is smuggled out by the Americans as part of an American-brokered deal to stop non-Lebanese fighting each other on Lebanese territory. Arafat then hides out in Tunis seeking money from Saddam to pay for terrorism against Israel. "They" did bad things, but "they" do not meaningfully include "The Palestinians" if "The Palestinians" primarily refers to people living in Palestine.
For "The Palestinians" to have a chance of anything they need to have agency. The only time the actual human beings living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were able to exercise agency was the First Intifada (1987-1993), which saw the emergence of a younger, bottom-up leadership based inside the territories - as opposed to the PLO which was funded by foreign governments and led by emigres. The new leadership was for obvious reasons more interested in the lives of the human beings living in the territories than the grand political narrative of "The Palestinian Cause" and was accordingly the first Arab voice to implicitly support a two-State solution.
My unconventional take is that the real missed opportunity was when Arafat was able to take back control of the Palestinian side of the negotiations and establish a Palestinian Authority led by PLO lifers rather than locals. (At the time Arafat was declared President of Palestine, he had spent four years in Palestine as a child and visited twice as an adult, one of those times being as an invading Egyptian soldier in the 1947-9 war) As of now all powerful factions in Palestinian politics (including Hamas and Fatah) are more concerned with using the Cause to appeal to foreign supporters than they are with the actual Palestinians.
I'd be more sympathetic to this if not for just how transcendentally ecstatic the Palestinians seemed about the Oct 7th attack. I know Palestinians are used by Iran and the UN (only slightly exaggerating) in their mission to eliminate Israel but even without these influences the widespread resistance to any form of peaceful co-existence with Israel seems entirely organic.
Of course the prospects for peace would be very different if the UN used the resources it pours into Gaza to deradicalise the population rather than funding Hamas. But that's not going to happen for the foreseeable future.
I feel compelled to ceaselessly remind everyone that Arab social media on Oct 7 was ecstatic and claiming the facade of Jewish capability was pierced, with the initial claims that the IDF was fully defeated and that Jerusalem was being returned. The celebratory mood called for the Arab armies to wipe out (re: kill) the Jewish people now that the hard work of defeating the IDF was done.
It is necessary to point out that my main source for this, the Gaza Now telegram channel, interspersed these calls to action with livestreamed footage of sexual violence (no PIV, but naked girls bleeding from their vaginas) slaughter of civillians in bunkers, including children. The smiley faces and heart emojis flowed as freely as the blood of screaming children, and I've seen that stupid leaf character enough to recognize laughter.
The arab world was absolutely ecstatic about oct 7, and the palestinians were basking in their moment of glory. Yes, the palestinians were exercising agency to be the unrepentant dickheads they have always been, but within their own information environment they were egged on by cheerleaders encouraging their self destruction.
The UNs failure to help Gaza lays bare its fundamental problem: the UN does not, in effect, exist. It is a facilitative entity superimposed on whatever local authority actually exists, and is at best a taxi service for invited externals to aid the local group. There is no way for.the UN to exert its will on an uncooperative local partner, and without that they exist as a fig leaf. Whenever the media reports that a UN worker is attacked, the framing is meant to imply some do-gooder New York Caucasian executive. The reality of course is that UN workers are inevitably local goons issued a blue vest doing their own thing with UN sanction. Someones level of screeching about Israel attacking UN sites inversely correlates to their understanding of the UN functions. See if these people mention 1701 or UNIFIL. Blankest of blank stares.
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When was there really a chance for Palestine to have a "viable state" (IMO a weasel word in context). They were self governing in Gaza for a decade and a half, and decided that the best thing to do with that is launch an incursion into Israel to kill a thousand or so civilians.
Pre-1948 the concept of a "Palestinian" didnt even exist. They were just Muslim Arabs that happened to be located in a specific territory, but culturally were indistinguishable from their neighboring states. Post 1948 they were maintained as non-citizens for political calculation in other states. Then we had war in 1967, a defensive war by Israel where they took land to make their borders more defensible (much like the French following WWI, in theory).
In the early 2000s Ehud Barak almost brokered a peace deal that gave Palestinians thrice what any rational actor bargaining from such a weak position could hope for. He was met with, in the end, an intransigent Yassar Arafat and an intifada. In the end Israel turned to Bibi and folks like him because it was obvious that the motto "from the river to the sea Palestine will be free" had an addendum to it: "of Jews". So either they will win out, or be genocided. These are the options until the Arab world reforms.
You might be already aware, but in the original arabic, "from the river to the sea Palestine will be arabic/muslim" was/is just as popular. Hamas, which still remains very popular among Palestinians, and the Al-Aqsa Brigade, which is even more popular, both primarily use this version in arabic, the other only in english.
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Morris argues it began around 1920. Righteous Victims. pg. 34:
A solidified identity didn't come around until years after 1948, iirc, but to say the concept wasn't there is wrong.
28 years is still little in world history. You might as well argue that Alsace and Lorraine are German.
Why would that matter? We're still left with the fact that almost 3 decades before Israel was created, the people the Zionists were basically displacing had a distinct notion of being their own people, not just people of a broader identity who happened to be located in a particular place.
It matters because we shouldnt care.
You said there wasn't even the concept of the Palestinian identity prior to 1948. Whether we should care is a separate argument. Do you acknowledge that your statement was wrong?
I think there are some arguments that it was not correct, but on the whole it wasn't solidified nor considered important in any way. They easily could have been absorbed into neighboring countries in 1948.
They were! Egypt held Gaza from 1948 to 1967, Jordan held the West Bank at the same time. Israel won the six-day war, then had 6 years of negotiations to try and formalize peace between the decision makers - Egypt and Jordan.
The political masterstroke for Jordan and Egypt was to sign peace treaties with Israel without taking back the Palestinian territories. All the calculus of concessions were unilaterally ceded by Egypt and Jordan, leaving the Israelis to deal with the Palestinians. The emergence of the PLO as a distinct Palestinian organization was a godsend for the Arabs who were finding continual conflict against the Jews to be more difficult and less rewarding than anticipated. Let Israel be responsible entirely for the Palestinians, who helpfully have decided against cooperating with their sponsors.
As an independent state/statelets, the Palestinians will be starting from a terrible position. At war with the regional military superpower (who was providing all food and water and electricity because it was previously an occupying power), blockaded by its neighbors, riven by internal factional wars, and its only allies are faraway Shias or useless college students. I don't think even the most autistic HOI IV player can exploit a victory out of this map seed.
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I agree with all this. The unfortunate corollary is that even if the Arab world did reform, there's now enough crazies in the settlements to derail it from the Israeli side.
I don't think there was another viable option or anything, but I do think that we started with a Palestinian population that had altogether unreasonable preferences and their intransigence (as you point out) lead to the conditions where now there are unreasonable preferences given weight on the other side.
The radicals are no longer crazies. They see signs. Losing for them is winning because antisemitism is ascendant in the west.
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For people living in the Western countries, this is largely true. None of the people they encounter daily have fundamental differences with them that are irreconcilable. KKK-style racism is largely either dead or so deep underground that you're more likely to encounter 10 trolls mimicking them to piss people off than one geniunie article. Violent homophobia never has been truly widespread, but now is practically extinct. "Transphobia" has always been more of a slur than a description of something real and threatening. Most of the differences are about relative political power, policies, etc. which can be reconciled in a way that may lead some people unsatisfied - in a way that one would be agreeing to a salary less than they'd like to get, ideally - but not in a way that makes violent conflict inevitable. There are some enclaves where one could experience something approaching that, and there are individual psychopats and criminal groups, of course - but if you specifically don't go to those places, they likely won't come to you. In general, you can expect that vast majority of people you encounter do not have fundamentally irreconcilable interests with you.
These people mostly have no experience with conflict where the other side genuinely wants you dead. Not get 5% more in relative distribution of power, not some goods (physical or social) redistributed, but genuinely thinks each moment you exist is an offence to all that is holy, and each action that contributes to your destruction justified, not just practically, but because it is objectively Greater Good Thing. Such conflicts exist, and there's no way one can bargain your way out of it. There's no arrangement where the interests of the sides align, when one side's interest is seeing other side completely annihilated or enslaved. Not all conflicts - even in the Middle East - are of such nature, but some are. "Get along" people can not accept that, and the more evidence is piled up to support it, the more ardent they become in inventing complex structures that would justify why it is not the case.
Incidentally, there was just recently a book review - the "nine lives" one - that showed how some "irreconcilable conflict" people think. Thinking that you can get them to abandon their beliefs by just giving them more of something and making a bargain with them is completely idiotic. Of course, idiots is something that there was never a shortage of.
I think this is true, and I’m going to drop a culture war addendum- the only people in the modern US, outside of some ethnic enclaves, who experience the ‘no common ground possible because of fundamentally different values’ are serious social conservatives. We understand the whole ‘murdering terrorists calling for death to the Jews are not trying extremism as a negotiating strategy’ because we recognize being on the receiving end of ‘our values are not your values, and you don’t seem to recognize that’. It’s a scary feeling when you’re not a dominant group and your values are regarded as defective.
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I’ll be honest I think people just really have trouble understanding minds that are not theirs. We just sort of assume that everyone is just like us and therefore values what we value and fears what we fear and so on. Especially for Americans who live in a huge continent surrounded by oceans and have only two neighboring nations that can be visited by land Canada (which is culturally similar to the USA) and Mexico (which has learned to cater to American tourists) — getting around to understanding that not everyone values what we value and thinks how we think or lives how we live.
I don’t think Americans, who are largely secular (even if we are nominally religious) get how religion rules the mind of a sincerely religious Muslim. We think about God for an hour a week on Sunday, maybe pray before a meal or something. They think of God all the time. They think about how to please God all the time. Or we assume that everyone is as individualistic as we are, or that they value consumer capitalism like we do. Even within our own country, I submit that neither side has a very good understanding of why the other side wants what they want. There’s a temptation to think that if only the environmental factors that make them disagree with me were removed that they would vote like I do, think like I do and do what I do. Except that this is rarely true. The Palestinians opposed homosexuality long before the Jews showed up because they read it in a book that they still take seriously as being from God. Jews or no Jews, you don’t want to be known as Gay in a Muslim country. Liberals are not brainwashed conservatives, and conservatives are not brainwashed liberals. We want different things and think differently about how to get there. It has nothing to do with loyalty or lack thereof for America.
The lack of ability to really model brains other than our own means that you end up stuck for an explanation for why you don’t agree about this really obvious thing. Is it because they don’t like the country? Is it because they’re stupid? Are they being fed lies? It doesn’t make sense to think of that other person as another person who has their own history, wants, needs, hopes and fears, and who does things even when you aren’t thinking about them.
I have a loose theory that this is correlated with people's inability to read.
I've noticed that there is a particular streak of thinking in modern media that assumes both 1) the consumer is unable to enjoy a piece of Content without seeing Literally Me in it and 2) the consumer lacks the capacity to model the thoughts and feelings of a character who is not Literally Me.
I've always had some issue understanding this strain of thought myself because part of the joy of reading is the almost voyeuristic approach of getting a window into someone else's thoughts, feelings and mindstate, but maybe this kind of joy is less widespread than I thought.
Another anecdote I have noticed that also seems loosely related: the number of people who are writing vs the number of people reading. Everyone wants to be read, and it seems these people outnumber the people reading. I'm not comfortable with making some broader-strokes statement about closed minds, but I refuse to think there's nothing to it. When I was taught writing as a craft, I came across the idea that to be good at it you needed to not just have a firm grasp of language but also have extremely high empathy, both things that seem in short supply at the moment. If you can't model people with a fundamentally different worldview than you, it's hard to write from their perspective without significant flanderization.
A good book can be a window, but so can travel. But even if you’re a reader, for whatever reason, most books, no matter what the setting tend to act and think like 21st century Californians wearing the costume of whatever country and century the book’s setting tends to imply. And especially upon reading history, no we’re pretty unique as a culture. Most of human history is much more concerned with religion, with ethnic conflicts, with improved social status, with marrying into a good family. They were less concerned with hedonistic pleasure, more group oriented, more pragmatic, and much less tolerant of bad behavior. Yet every modern fantasy novel seems to think that the difference between medieval France and modern France is the fashion and aesthetics.
But books, unlike TV and film, were being written by people 1/2/300 years ago. You can read those people in their own words (sometimes translated). That is the difference.
I mean sure if you’re reading books like that, but then again, in order to find books written by people 300 years ago, you’d have to do some pretty active searches, they’re not likely to be on Amazon bestsellers lists or, prominently featured in B&N, or actually available at a local county library. For most people, it’s the path of least resistance that decides what books will be the ones they choose, and so unless it’s a pop culture book or popular classic, most people won’t find it. What they will find is modern novels and modern fantasy or romance or sci-fi novels in which the characters are completely modern people stuck in a different setting.
I feel the same way about travel being somewhat overrated as a “mind expansion” experience. Sure, properly done, you can learn interesting things about other cultures and people and yourself. But if all you’re doing when you go to these places is hitting tourist hotspots, and you really aren’t getting the full experience. Going through Puerto Vallarta and visiting Mexico are different— because decades of tourists have shaped everything there into something that appeals to modern Anglo American sensibilities. The locals speak perfect English, the food will be what we expect Mexican food to be like.
No argument with either of those. I grew up with my grandparents' childrens' books, which probably shaped my outlook on many things.
(Side-point but while I agree with you on travel, I find the endless dick-measuring tiresome. "You travelled across rural India on a rickshaw? Well I was a missionary to an island off Surinam where they killed white people on sight!" and so on. I rather prefer the tourist hotspots. At least everyone knows where they stand and nobody with a brain things they're going to receive anything more than a tan.)
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Regarding the fictions you described, I think you’ve rediscovered a dynamic that Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis observed from different perspectives:
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I think support for Palestine among non-Muslims very simply boils down to people looking at which side has more people dying, and supports the "victims".
I do think mistake theory is usually a more useful model than conflict theory, but certainly there are exceptions. Hamas being one of them- there is no possible way for the state of Israel to arrive at a win-win result with Hamas, because they value the deaths of Israelis more than they value their own lives. Very few groups are like that though, that's the exception not the rule.
Eh, I think support for Palestine over Israel was baked in by who was on what side in the late Cold War.
Most progressives are not Marxists but their thought leaders are often tankie leftovers quite literally, and like most groups they choose to support Palestine because that’s the cool thing to do in their communities.
That does influence it, but a lot of leftists still support Ukraine and will condemn the Uighyr genocide. Just not as loudly as they condemn Israel.
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I wish it was that easy, and maybe for some small part it is. I think for much bigger part it's either "look at which side is more Western and choose the other one" or just "look at what my cool friends are saying and repeat after them".
The Western side tends to have significant dominance in warfare so they do often go hand in hand. But I think most leftists do support Ukraine over Russia; and the ones who do support Russia are the craziest of tankies.
Russia is kind of an anomaly here. I think the Left has been generally rather friendly towards Russia (remember "the 80s called and want their foreign policy back"?) until somebody thought it'd be a brilliant move to declare Trump a foreign agent (which is BTW so Russian thing to do it is not even funny) and whose foreign agent could he be? Iran and China obviously don't fit, but Russia fits just fine. Trump was not openly hostile to it, nobody in the US knows much about Russian politics, and Russia is big enough that they have spies in the West (as do Iran and China, of course, but it's not the time to talk about those) which could be revealed at the right moment as a proof of whatever nefarious plan is necessary. I think that's when Russia suddenly became a huge enemy of the Left.
They also created a foreign policy crisis for Obama and were very publicly mean to gays.
Irianians are much meaner to gays than Russia has ever been, but the Left is just fine with Iran. Despite Iranian agent (Arianne Tabatabai) working in Pentagon, nobody shows even 1% of the paranoia directed towards "Russian influence" right now. So the gays thing didn't help, but if they had a gay parade in Kremlin every Sunday, it still wouldn't change anything.
So's Palestine. Less-brown-than-commonly-perceived Muslims being brutal to gays is old news. White European Christians is not.
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Interesting thoughts and good post. Not to get sucked into bikeshedding, but in the case of the BG3 examples, I think they're partly justified. Omeluum is very much an aberration (chuckle) even among mindflayers. While it's true he was able to break free from his Elder Brain's control, and he turned out to be pretty nice, I don't think this has many implications for how we should understand mindflayer behaviour or ethics. Notably, there is another very prominent mindflayer in the game who ALSO breaks free from Elder Brain control and is a massive asshole (being vague for late-game spoiler reasons). And in both cases, I think the 'escape' from Elder Brain control was more like a body rejecting an organ than a slave escaping from their masters; I don't think we should infer that all mindflayers would be nice chill people if they could break from Elder Brain control. Also note that even though Omeluum is portrayed generally positively, there are hints of a darker side too, for example when he exults in hearing about your experience on the Nautiloid and talks of the wonders of his civilisation.
Regarding the Githyanki, the trope here is not "democratic revolution", but rather a much older one: Orpheus is the True Heir to the Throne, and he was usurped by Vlaakith, and you can restore him to his rightful place. Baezel is still a hardcore militant quasi-fascist even after she realises she's been lied to, and still serves a fundamentally ethnocentric goal, just to a different master, and neither she nor other Githyanki are about to beat their Silver Swords into plowshares even if they can overthrow Vlaakith. I say this as someone who absolutely fucking loved Laezel's character as a real outlier in how most NPCs are written - her moral system is dramatically different from that of most bleeding-heart contemporary players, but she's not strawmanned or shown to be stupid, and on several occasions her instincts are shown to be better than those of the Gales and Wylls of this world. Finally, perhaps worth flagging that the Vlaakith lore is not Larian's doing, but goes back to 3E, so more than 20 years ago.
I don't think there are many wider conclusions to draw from these specific examples, but I'll note one interesting thing, which is that a common trope among the statistically illiterate is acting like isolated exceptions disprove a general stereotype (actual examples of this in practice are mostly left as an exercise to the reader). This is obviously silly, because even very robust correlations between e.g., gender and grip strength will have some outlier cases. In this regard, I think it's potentially good for big media properties to have lessons like, e.g., "mindflayers are gross and evil, but there is the occasional exception", at least insofar as the second clause is shown not to overrule the first.
Bear in mind that this game is fiction and was created by writers. It's possible that the writer is such a statistically illiterate person and is, in fact, trying to say "the stereotype of evil mind flayers is bad". It's also possible that a reader who isn't one could realize what the writer is trying to do and make that a point of criticism.
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To me what was striking was not the counter examples or the rightful heir trope, it was the explicit invoking of varying degrees of mind control to account for the baseline behavior.
Maybe I’m just reading overly into it but it felt conspicuous not that there was a random mindflayer, but that the reason he was good seemed to be he’d broken free of mind control, implying others might be too.
While I agree that there’s some justification in each case, if you couple that with the recent push to for instance remove alignment associations in DnD, it seems to me a pattern starts to emerge.
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Did you mean October 7th? Or did something noteworthy happen in Israel on November 7th that I'm not aware of?
Yeah I fixed it, thanks for the catch.
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