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 -
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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