F**klore

"It's the way we have the world. Without the telling, we don't have anything at all. The moment goes by like the water of a river. We'd tumble and spin and be helpless if we tried to live in the moment.We'd be like a baby. A baby can do it but we'd drown. Our minds need to tell, need the telling. To hold. The past has passed, and there's nothing in the future to catch hold of. The future is nothing yet. How could anybody live there? So what we have is the words that tell what happened and what happens. What was and is."

 

Ursula K. LeGuin - The Telling

(slight spoiler for this below)

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"An author's way of getting to Mars (say) is part of his story of his Mars; and of his universe, as far as that particular tale goes. It's part of the picture, even if it's only in a marginal position; and it may seriously affect all that's inside.

[...]

If you're spaceship-minded and scientifictitious, or even if you let your characters be so, it's likely enough that you'll find such things of that order in your new world, or only see sights that interest such folk."

 

J.R.R. Tolkien - The Notion Club Papers

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By Grabthar's hammer, I am sick of supernatural invocations!

 

Mentioning Kingdom Come: Deliverance piqued myself to pick it back up and, having polished off side-quests years ago, finally get into its main quest. Which is how I discovered that unlike standard Elder Scrolls-ish fare, the main quest actually unlocks a fair handful of new side-quests as you advance, especially DLC material. Hey, not that I'm not complaining about finding more content for one of the most immersive games I've played in my thirty years of such... but I do think it weird to stumble across three NPCs at once blathering about dream visions:

Ran into a rando' soothsayer in the Rattay marketplace and told her she's full of shit without bothering to listen to her babbling, then the "relic" peddler in Sasau told me he dreamt about me as his apprentice and that asshole's definitely full of perpetual shit... but come on, Johanka too? She's supposed to be one of the sane ones! (Well, adjusted to a 1400s definition of sanity at any rate.)

I mean, I trust her quest will get resolved as traumatic stress. Czechia, whatever the country's faults, is supposedly one of the least afflicted by our species' superstitious idiocy (with over half the population openly non-religious) and Warhorse's so far refreshingly treated religion as historical trends explained by human psychology, mass manipulation or abuse of psychotropics. Maybe I'd feel less apprehensive if so many other works of otherwise secular fiction just in my lifetime hadn't poisoned the well by supernatural twists. Look at TV series alone:

Dark raised my hackles worse than most, as up until the end its heavy religious symbolism had been written as to go both ways, easily interpretable purely as the leads' self-definition or self-importance. The series as a whole (ignoring the tediously drawn out teenage romance abused for filler sex scenes) was to that point good science fiction rooted in a physically and not metaphysically active phlebotinum combined with sapient machinations, with no need for the multiverse to give a flyin' fuck about your life's meaning.

Before that it would've been, oh, say, Lost. Not that it was worth watching after the first season anyway, but the finale still turned my stomach. Even after the show started spewing "dharma" left and right, it could have remained a tale of reason domesticating some unknown cosmic force, as it has always done with fire, the wheel, motive forces or nuclear fission. There was absolutely zero excuse for purgatorying shit up, invalidating all the characters' action as toys of invisible supernatural actors via the trite old "it was aalll a dreeaaam" dodge.

In fact, it reminds me that Twin Peaks, fifteen years earlier, could also have taken its seeming supernatural elements in either direction, but no writers leaving themselves that option can ever seem to avoid the cheap cop-out of blaming all their plot holes and inconsistencies on supernatural boogeymen or divine plans.

Hell, I won't pretend Dallas was worth watching, but at least it was cheap, laughable human drama... up until the finale shoehorned a devil in for no particular reason.

More recently, a somewhat underrated two-season affair called Zone Blanche reiterated the Twin Peaks routine. But for all that its characters' progress, allegiances and motivations remained interesting, any attempt at ambivalence vis-a-vis the supernatural fell flat even sooner. It's been done so many times by now that if you notice writers leaving even the slightest opening for supernatural explanations, you know with a certainty they'll come true.

 

The less said about Battlestar Galactica, the better.

The Telling is rightly seen as one of LeGuin's lesser works, partly for a redundant suite of quaint native storyteller characters, partly for digressing into the protagonist's life on Earth to little effect, but not least for how hard it strains at differentiating good superstition from bad superstition, upholding that American yuppie orientalism to which we've grown oh so tiresomely accustomed.

 

Illustrating the erasure of native cultures across Asia by 20th-century Communist regimes would've remained poignant enough if she'd stuck to valid critiques against historical revisionism, censorship and outright book-burning, physical and cultural genocide or the sheer violence of the rapid, enforced shift into industrialization, but unfortunately the author also felt some desperate need to justify the continued practice of primitive superstition. And of course she couldn't. There is no benefit brought by loose storytelling about herbs and physiology that cannot be improved by organized medical exploration and standards of care. Whatever psychological benefit we draw from contact with the natural world (and we do) does not extend to dependence on the whims of one's home garden plot and the weather for sustenance or a lifetime of backbreaking manual labor leaving no time for personal growth. However enlightening a single culture's mythology may be, it cannot compare to the skeptic's freedom to explore any and all cultures' mythologies side by side, with no fear of divine wrath or falling off one's dharma by erring from various eightfold, quarterfold or howevermanyfold paths.

And LeGuin damn well knew it. The primitivism she wanted to uphold had nothing intrinsic to offer. So she did what writers always do at that point, what we pay them to do: make shit up. During yoga class, the protagonist sees someone walk on air, and later more or less confirms it. There. Value. Worth! It doesn't matter if the yokels cannot match modern accomplishments in physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, anthropology, because they've got MAGIC POWERS! They and only they. And of course said powers cannot be measured, communicated or demonstrated. They must be glimpsed out of the corner of one's eye in poorly lit gymnasia by unprofessional anthropologists who've "gone native" much like divine commandments are always whispered to a single prophet atop mountain peaks and deep within caves filled with hallucinogenic fumes or behind various curtains.

But take our word for it: it's real. Somewhere in a darkened cave a holy retard walks on air at this very moment!

Why?

Why do you need to hear that?

I spent much of my childhood reading Christian myths and a two-volume set of ancient Greek myths, and fables from the Orient about dragons sleeping beneath dry wells or palaces with unending entrance pavilions, and A Thousand and One Nights and forest witches luring princes aided by helpful birds... but I never needed to believe Perseus was real to enjoy his adventures. And I never needed Sarah Connor to combat terminators by releasing djinni from bottles. Why do you?

Let's stop pretending that writers are cleverly mixing fantasy with reality or science by cramming magic into non-magical plot and settings. What they're really doing is clinging to stultifying superstition to appeal to the subhuman degenerate apes comprising 99% of this species, incapable of distinguishing between internally consistent, rational sequences of events and wish-making. Of course every-yet-anotheredundantrite deus ex machina (emphasis on the deus) need not be clever; it must needs be exactly what it is: predictably reassuring to the mindless majority dependent on some insane belief that supernatural forces are looking out for them.

 

Every seraph or fomori popping up to solve a murder case reassures the imbecile hordes that even though no trace of the supernatural has ever shown up in the real world, it must be waiting juuust around the corner, just like in them thar teevee show!

And the world's IQ slips another point.

The Ones Who Seek Omelas

(Working title: Retards Must Suffer)

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"And he - wore a hat

And he - had a job

And he - brought home the bacon

So that no-one knew"

 

Devo - Mongoloid

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"Radiates, vegetables, monstrosities, star-spawn - whatever they had been, they were men!"

H.P. Lovecraft - At the Mountains of Madness

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"The problem of specifying the criteria for inclusion in our moral community is one for which I do not have a detailed answer -- other than to say that whatever answer we give should reflect our sense of the possible subjectivity of the creatures in question. Some answers are clearly wrong. We cannot merely say, for instance, that all human beings are in, and all animals are out. What will be a criterion for humanness? DNA? Shall a single human cell take precedence over a herd of elephants? The problem is that whatever attribute we use to differentiate between humans and animals -- intelligence, language use, moral sentiments, and so on -- will equally differentiate between human beings  themselves. If people are more important to us than orangutans because they can articulate their interests, why aren't more articulate people more important still? And what about those poor men and woman(sic) with aphasia? It would seem that we have just excluded them from our moral community. Find an orangutan that can complain about his family in Borneo, and he may well displace a person or two from our lifeboat."

Sam Harris - The End of Faith

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"But dolphins are intelligent!"

"Not this one! He blew all his money on instant lottery tickets."

Futurama S2E18: The Problem With Popplers

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"A phone can talk and respond. A mannequin looks human. Not all humans can talk. You have to take a number of factors and add them up and if they go above 100 percent, the A.I. treats the target as human."

---

"Why do you think [he] is human?"

"He reads. He writes and programs. He's aware of himself and others"

Freefall, comics 2547 & 2588 (MAJOR spoiler alert!)

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"What we are is semi-civilized beasts with baseball caps and automatic weapons.

[...]

Nitwits, assholes, fuck-ups, scumbags, jerk-offs and dipshits... and they all vote.

[...]

If you isolate one of them, you sit them down rationally, and you talk to them about the low IQs and the dumb behavior and the bad decisions, right away they start talking about education. That’s the big answer to everything. Edjacayshun! They say “we need more money for education. We need more books. More teachers. More classrooms. More schools. We need more testing for the kids.” You say to them: “Well, you know, we’ve tried all of that and the kids still can’t pass the tests.” They say, “Don’t you worry about that. We’re going to lower the passing grades.” And that’s what they do in a lot of these schools now. They lower the passing grades so more kids can pass. More kids pass, the school looks good, everybody’s happy, the IQ of the country slips another two or three points and pretty soon all you’ll need to get into college is a fucking pencil."

George Carlin - Life Is Worth Losing (2005)

"The public sucks. Fuck hope."

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I was having trouble picking a starting point here, but luckily both a webcartoonist and a cable TV celebrity have conspired to feed me apt material recently.

 

Tailsteak pissed me off below his current comic Forward's latest page 248, by upholding the rampant idiocy that is multiple intelligences, one of modern psychology's more destructively marketable conceits placing physical aptitudes on the same level as reason, reassuring "that immortal ass, the average man" that brain-dead jocks, grinning bimbos and subliterate crooners should count as equally intelligent to canon-shaping authors, nuclear physicists and medical researchers. If bouncing around a jungle gym is intelligence, then by all means try getting a chimp to explain the reasoning behind that - but wait, even your chimp's newfound personhood will be usurped by the merest housefly's transcendentally convoluted aerobatics!

 

Then there's Bill Maher, whose recent New Rules have decried contemporary gullibility by pointing out misinformation is as much the fault of liars as of an audience stupid enough to swallow such lies, then just a week later despaired at growing criminality... after having demanded of his audience to gracefully welcome back to reality Donald Trump's increasingly disenchanted former voters instead of calling them the gullible, criminal troglodytes they have been... and still are. But embracing gullible criminals will not reduce criminal gullibility, regardless if you're talking about Trumpists or their "defund the police" counterparts.

Both of these faults in perception reflect on a couple of other recent issues here in the States. First up, the unending attacks by Christian groups against abortion rights. If you drive through flyover country, you'll see endless variations on the same billboard: a picture of a chubby, cherubic baby face next to the slogan "heartbeat starts at X weeks/days" most frequently 18 days for bonus dishonesty. Some force is circulating fluid in there, but calling it a human "heart" is nearly as hyperbolic as calling that lump of inert matter in anti-abortionists' skulls a "brain" and doubly funny because in their bid for unthinking sympathy, none of those billboards show you what an 18-day embryo actually looks like. Hell, even newborns don't look like that, as the pictures they use are obviously taken at several months old. I always chuckle at the thought of some hick slag on her first birthing, who's grown up on such propaganda, having a panic attack at the hospital upon being presented with the wrinkled, wobbly, lumpy Carboniferous monstrosity she just extruded. (My own mother keeps reminding me: "you. were. blue!")

What qualifications can a first-trimester proto-ape present as to its personhood? Or even second-trimester? Does it compose music, solve equations, analyze plot diagrams, theorize on the evolutionary divergence of passerines, split bosons, invent fusion dishes, breed rhododendrons, or at the very least farms ten thousand zombies in a video game? What exactly qualifies it as existentially comparable to a female ape which, even situated at the rancid nadir of subhumanity, could at least recite the misadventures of the Kardashians! It has a heart? Does it have heart-beating intelligence? So fucking WHAT! Lots of things have hearts. Shrimp have this weird-ass half-vascular, half-diffusive circulatory system at least as functional as our embryonic version. Are you going to sue every baleen whale on the planet for the mass krillicide committed with every gulp? Are antiabortion activists suddenly on vegans' side now claiming every popcorn shrimp is a murder? Functionally, what could you equate to the developmental level of a pre-human at three weeks? At three months? At six months? At birth? At six months after? Does it have the intelligence of an earthworm? Of a mouse? Of a rat? Of a raccoon? Can it conceive of its own mortality at conception?

Stop legitimizing this inherently dishonest argument by engaging antiabortionists in goalpost-shuffling about the validity of persons based on their circulatory, excretory or other random organs. It's a smokescreen. One single overwhelming motivation drives the anti-abortion movement, and that's the subhuman idiocy of supernatural belief. It's the prescientific caveman notion of immortal souls, which that lump of protoplasm supposedly acquires on conception. Stupidity is their only virtue. Antiabortionists need anything human to count as a person because they themselves are subhuman vermin with the intelligence of walking abortions, who cling to fairy tales as moral justification to attack others. But you wouldn't know it from press coverage.

For decades, the Democratic party line (as represented by its mouthpieces at MSNBC or HBO) has portrayed antiabortionism as the work of stodgy, easily hateable old men deliberately harming women, to drum up votes by grace of our unthinking, reflexive protectiveness toward the unfairer sex, with demagogues like Rachel Maddow screeching about a "war on women" despite the endlessly observed fact that half of those waging the war ARE women. For as long as it has existed, entire generations, activists within the anti-abortion movement itself have consistently hovered around a 50/50 male/female split, with occasional spikes to 60% female, and the pattern plays out the same in the populace at large, with greater oscillations based on other conservative/liberal affiliations. Makes sense once you see how many antiabortionists are married couples with children. Meanwhile, if you really want the answer to abortion demographics in the U.S., you can find endless polls showing 80/20 mirrored splits between educated atheists and agnostics on one side and fundamentalist backbirths on the other, especially evangelical Christians a.k.a. rednecks.

But, again, you wouldn't know that from press coverage.

I tend to oscillate between various news outlets, from Wikipedia's current events to the AP, BBC, CNN and even NPR on days when I'm feeling masochistic. Recently I've been relying more on Reuters, which seems to retain a greater degree of sanity in the face of world events. A week ago, they chose to illustrate news of protests against America's rapid back-slide into conservative primitivism with a picture of what looks to be a transsexual holding up a placard with the slogan "remember in november VOTE" accompanied by a woman having decapitated a man (spoofing Perseus and Medusa?) during last month's pro-abortion protests. This came only days after Reuters itself also ran another article showing a picture of Christian anti-abortion activists, three of which happen to have their faces visible front and center: two women and one man. Nope, sorry, Castrato McHatchetson, aside from your #KillAllMen propaganda being so inherently unconscionable that it would prompt piles of lawsuits if attacking anyone besides the one social group forbidden from self-defense, objectively speaking it would not solve the issue you're protesting! In fact, expanding our scope to the superstition fueling the anti-abortion movement (as well as anti-homosexual and anti-most-things) women cling to reactionary, anti-intellectual, religious primitivism decidedly more than men do. Mrs. Grundy remains solidly female, thanks. So why is Reuters contradicting its own evidence by promoting that murderous, delusional cretin with the "behead men" placard as the embodiment of the fight for personal rights and freedom?

Why does nobody ever protest stupidity?

Another lengthy media circus here in the states at the moment is the House of Representatives' committee investigating Donald Trump's laughably amateurish coup d'etat attempt on January 6th of last year. While some of the testimony is amusing (Trump physically trying to grab the wheel of his car when his security detail refused to chauffeur The President into a heavily armed riot of murderous fanatics) I'm bothered by the constant emphasis on whether or not he or the murderous imbeciles in question knew of the falsity of the claim of stolen votes.

The claim had not been demonstrated. If they chose to act on a flimsy claim with zero evidence backing it, that is entirely on them. Ignorance might be excused but willful ignorance, motivated thinking is your own damn fault! Their internal state of mind is irrelevant because no reasonable person would have considered a handful of tweets from blatantly biased parties as justification for armed insurrection.

So it appears we need to define "person" because we can no longer rely on the antiquated definition of any beast possessing human features to process the information necessary for rational decision-making in modern society. Ever notice the people on Star Trek tended to be smart? The redneck hero with a shotgun doesn't play well in that setting. We know, intuitively, that retards wouldn't live long on their own in a century when half the mundane devices surrounding you can disintegrate you in an instant, when even your pants can teleport you straight into the nearest solar corona in retaliation for passing a wet fart. Modern humans can barely handle automobiles and electric ovens... and you want to give them teleporter-armed spaceships? The general population is still functioning on the mental level of a tribe in the savanna, when decision-making never stretched beyond an endless game of "fuck/marry/kill" and the prevalence of our myriad blind faiths (be it in the supernatural or the moral superiority of females, trickle-down economics or critical race theory) just proves our stagnation. You cannot reason with those incapable of reason, who prefer to make-believe that biological sex is a "social construction" or the world is being run by fairies up in the clouds.

 

If "human" means an ethically and rationally competent being, then we are not the same species, and I can demonstrate it to you by a single example. The growing, decades-long revulsion many of us feel towards Donald Trump is only reinforced, not engendered, by his many, many... many acts of demagogic, economic and executive vandalism. On a basic, monkey-in-the-mirror application of theory of mind, it only takes a few seconds of his endless verbal diarrhea for anyone with more than half a brain (yes, even those of us white and male and heterosexual) to spot the utter lack of a rational filter on his impulsive, instinctive behavior. That ape at the podium clapping its paws in self-adulation is quite simply sub-human, incapable of basic recursive self-awareness. This is why all the attempts to explain his popularity via political trends or economic ones, activist subversion or platform-building, history or memetics, have all come up short. His supporters' stated motivations are irrelevant. It's just a matter of subhumans promoting one of their own on a subhuman kin recognition instinct level, just as they're subconsciously pressed by the unrecognizable divergence of intellect from themselves.

 

Good ideas cannot flourish among bad minds. Unless you improve the public itself, any other improvements will always be poisoned by the public's virulent stupidity.

Opting to run your trolley over a live person instead of three corpses because the corpses possess human DNA does not make you either an open-minded liberal or a down-to-earth conservative. It just makes you a moral coward clinging to arbitrary rules instead of standing on your own judgment. We need to admit that humanity is insufficient. Not human vermin but mentally superior human persons created all the technology and social institutions allowing for the far better lives we live compared to our ancestors. We are thought within bodies, not the bodies themselves, the proverbial tail attempting to wag the dog, and intellectual superiority is existential superiority. As the old schoolyard joke goes, be racist against stupid people. You might justifiably cringe at past misapplications and abuses of eugenics and realistically predict that any open political movement of that sort will rapidly be subverted and co-opted by special interests of one tribal group of another... but what's stopping you from applying your influence as an individual toward improving the breed?

Every political group favors its own, from racial to sexual to religious. Why do we draw a taboo against the only favoritism which might improve our collective situation? Why are you ashamed and even afraid to promote a certain person simply for being a better mind, for writing more poetically, creating more creatively, analyzing more cleverly than the vermin? Charity is meaningless if it doesn't breed something besides more charity cases. Stop giving money to organizations saving bodies and start promoting those saving minds - if you can find any. Put as much effort as possible into extracting worthy individuals from the dung-heap that is society at large. The primitives want unwanted children, they want endless reiterations of the idiot child which will spend its early years getting slapped around in an orphanage only to get adopted out to be ass-raped by religious "family values" until growing up as yet another miserable, uneducated, brain-damaged career criminal ready to believe primitive superstitions about a magic sky-daddy. They deal in quantity. You must counter with quality.

 

Are you afraid of hurting the feelings of those left behind?

Well, tough.

No action without reaction. To value intellect, you must de-value stupidity. No terminology short of death or sex is more prone to the euphemism treadmill. Moron, imbecile, cretin, retard, mongoloid, have you not figured out yet that you can't make sub-humanity sound neutral? Do me a favor and count the years before "cognitively disabled" becomes just another slur. Maybe cog-dog? Cogable? Or just "cog"? A hundred million schoolchildren are pondering the nomenclature as you read this, because even if absolutely nobody will admit it openly, we cannot escape the fundamental truism that intellect, abstract rational thought is the central, insurmountable measure of existence itself and to be less intelligent is to be less.

 

Stupidity is not a disability. Dis-ability means the person lacks an ability, but retards, whether acknowledged as such or not, are deficient in the quality of personhood. You cannot promote the better without acknowledging the worse, and they will inevitably feel bad about their own inferiority. It's not nice, it's not pleasant, it's not seemly... but it's real. You cannot dodge acknowledging this necessity in our communication. Stupid is bad.

But hey, don't worry about it. I've been talking your ear off for the past fifteen minutes for no reason at all. This is all moot anyway, because it's too late.

 

Global warming is inevitable. The United States will descend into theocratic primitivism. Europe will fragment into a myriad Brexit-style tribal mass suicides. Pandemics will continue to rampage from ghetto to favela to tenement to bidonville, heightening social tensions and facilitating further fragmentation. World War 3 has been coming for decades, inherent in every upward sweep of the world population clock. China will over-run the globe, enslaving and genociding as it goes, and then the Chinese world state will itself dissolve in the usual pattern of over-stuffing its parasitic aristocratic and servant castes until it becomes so top-heavy it collapses, like every empire always does... and that will be the end of civilization. There will be no second industrial age, no recovery, no fossil fuels to harvest, no large swathes of stable farmland, no lack of dormant infections waiting to demolish any rising city-states, no conveniently predictable interglacial lull in climate extremes, no way for nerds to prove their worth and lead the vermin with human faces out of their natural state of superstitious sub-humanity.

It's over. Because twenty-three centuries ago, four hundred, two hundred, a hundred, seventy, fifty, twenty years ago, those who walked away from Omelas, from the necessary sacrifice of the worse in deference to the better... chose not to know where they're going, chose willful ignorance. Don't whine about losing your rights. You chose this degeneracy, this dissolution with every passing grade handed to every pinhead. This species deserves its death because even its best chose the worst.

All I want now is enough escapism to tide me over until your lynch mob beats down my door.

Rot, vermin.

It Hain't Paktical

spoilert: main plot element of Larry Niven's Protector / Ringworld Series

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I've been re-reading Protector, and there's just something so quintessentially... Scie Fie, about Larry Niven's books. Sure, his independent minded frontier "belter" social structure's more or less lifted from Heinlein and some of his alien species come across like half-baked placeholders for a better idea, but he was never afraid to think BIG, man! Solar system sized hula hoop big. Transgalactic migration big. But there's something aggravating about the Pak's main plot point as extraterrestrial ancestors of humans. It was equally annoying in Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish novels, where Terrans are merely the remnants of a colony established by the four million year old Hainish civilization, and wherever else this notion of humans as an introduced species crops up.

As a narrative cause, it's golden. It is at once pathetic and grandiose, establishing a noble heritage but demoting Earth from the center of the human universe to an abandoned outpost. It lends itself both to poignant tales of paradises lost or to hints of reconquest and lends our filthy ape species the mannered stoicism of an impoverished aristocracy. As a psychological motivation it's why, in the real world, Europeans have been looking back fondly to Rome ever since they remembered they had one, and why in the semi-real world conspiracy nuts and New Age quacks like to claim Atlantean or Anunnaki ancestry. Noble ancestry makes us feel special.

But as a narrative effect, it faceplants into justifiable disbelief. When consuming SF, we agree to choke down a phlebotinum now and then. Proposition: force fields exist. That's all right. We don't know what those are so they don't interfere with the other workings of the universe. But what about the proposition: on some planets, gravity works sideways? Gravity already exists. Its sedate predilections could be observed to vary if they ever did... and they've been the same every time anyone's counted down to lift-off. Humans being alien to Earth, that would be the biological equivalent of spontaneous sideways gravity.

Okay, sure, sure, it's easy to declare this gimmick obsolete now, as molecular clock measurements have provided us with the most minute gradations in genealogy. Your hemoglobin, cytochromes and every other flavor of goop in your goopy ape body differ slightly from those of other apes, slightly more from those of other mammals, and not nearly as much as we'd like to think from those of parasitic worms or amoebae. We might forgive older authors like Niven or Le Guin on this point, as both the Known Space and Hainish series began in the late '60s when molecular biology was still in diapers. But even then, the fossil record was fairly extensive and at least where macroscopic life is concerned, the gradations in anatomic divergence had laid out humans' relation to the rest of the animal kingdom to a more than satisfying approximation. We fit within the primates, within the mammals, within the tetrapods and vertebrates and deuterostomes and bilaterians and eukaryotes. We are intrinsically, mundanely Terran creatures. In fact, while it's nearly impossible to predict an alien species' appearance, we can safely say we know what an alien species would not look like; it would not look like us.

And here we have to address the issue of convergence. The human body, it has been said, is utilitarian. Most things that get around on land will have a use for legs. Cephalization has its advantages. Eyes confer an immense survival advantage anywhere there's light. So on and so forth, when adaptation adapts to the same conditions, it often finds very similar solutions. Wings, flattened surfaces for catching air, are so useful they've evolved independently at least four times in the animal kingdom. But note: despite adapting to the same basic utility, they evolved differently every time. If we saw a hummingbird with dragonfly wings, we would notice. An extraterrestrial might very well have a head, but it would not be an ape skull with ape molars. It might have hands, but they would certainly not contain metacarpals homologous to the forelegs of horses. The idea of an extraterrestrial "blending in" with four billion years' worth of independent Terran evolution is, paradoxically, not weird enough to be accepted. It grates, not because we don't know how it would work, but because we know how it doesn't work.

Note, this does not exclude every other means of alien influence on Earth, whether it's assuming our planet was initially seeded from outer space via directed panspermia, or a certain animal genus had its intelligence uplifted by a mysterious black monolith. However, we should really lay to rest the notion of humans alone being biologically descended from anything other than local animal stock in all its filth and monotony.

We are not intrinsically special.

It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself

"You can't crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think, refusing to change. And that's precisely what our society is doing. Sabul uses you where he can, and where he can't, he prevents you from publishing, from teaching, even from working. Right? In other words, he has power over you. Where does he get it from? Not from vested authority, there isn't any. Not from intellectual excellence, he hasn't any. He gets it from the innate cowardice of the average human mind. Public opinion! That's the power structure he's part of, and knows how to use. The unadmitted, inadmissible government that rules the Odonian society by stifling the individual mind.
[...]
What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. [...] But it's the lies, the evasion of reality, that drive you crazy. It's the lies that make you want to kill yourself."

Ursula K. Le Guin - The Dispossessed

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"The machines are willing to divulge to any curious Kesh such details of scientific theory or historical fact as might be sought. The point is that the Kesh simply aren't interested. Their world of myth, ritual, and song, and the slow turning of the seasons, satisfies them. [...] Some readers are repelled by the somnolence of the Kesh and by their renunciation of ambition; but many are charmed and inspired (although Le Guin herself seems, at times, to be wryly ambivalent). [...] the admirers of the Kesh are so emblematic - so coextensive, in fact - with radical environmentalism [...] In fact the primitivist vision is a recurrent one, and is strictly in the Western tradition. The assumption that such thinking is a natural and unique concomitant of leftist (or "progressive") sentiments is utterly false."

Paul Gross and Norman Levitt, from Higher Superstition,
(citing Le Guin's Always Coming Home in their discussion of shallow fads and Apocalyptic Luddism among environmentalists)

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Higher Superstition is a book from 1994 which should probably be obligatory reading for any Western college student. It addresses the roots of much of the insanity we find today in snowflake-riddled academia, the intersection of postmodernism with the self-serving political oratory to which it lent an air of faux-intellectual respectability. Though I hardly knew it (I might be forgiven, being eleven at the time) the notion that you can make your own reality if only you shout long and loud enough was apparently already infiltrating universities, and the rot seems to have started from the top down.

I've never read Always Coming Home, which is actually kind of weird given my somewhat intemperate consumption of Le Guin's SF novels. Gross and Levitt, as well, qualify her with "the talented Le Guin has our best wishes" before tearing into those who would emulate her fictional Kesh. Never having read the book, I nonetheless chuckled in recognition at their mention of the author's wry ambivalence.

On the flip-side, I'm currently re-reading The Dispossessed, which I'd call her best work. *

It's easy to love or hate Le Guin, given her characters' predilection for declamatory speeches and the often contrived social situations in which they manage to land. Really now, you just happen to find yourself on the empty tundra, sharing a small tent with an insta-bake trans-sexual? What a coinky-dink, tee-hee! However, she's also talented enough to remain readable even when over-indulging, in direct contrast to, oh, I don't know, just off the top of my head... Ayn Rand**. And, in contrast to Rand's fanatical, reactionary single-mindedness, Le Guin comes across in most of her writing as simply too self-aware to fall into outright proselytism. Unlike her fans.

Though she's easily identified with every facet of left-wing politics (socialism, feminism, environmentalism, multiculturalism, kumbayatic Oriental mysticism, what-have-you) that wry ambivalence, a finger constantly tracing the other side of the coin, consistently crops up just when you expect her to get on her soapbox. Her introversion pamphlet contains some scathing asides on the intellectual limitation of isolation. Her nominally female-led race of simians nonetheless holds males up as spiritual leaders, dreaming the big dreams. Her rambling tale of mystical resistance to oppressive technocracy ends up bemoaning a member of the murderous technocratic secret police.

Most importantly, her anarchist Utopian tract The Dispossessed spends quite a few chapters detailing the stifling, stultifying stagnation of mob rule. Kinda hard not to feel for the young schoolboy Shevek as he's shouted down and publicly shamed by his teacher for the terrifyingly unegalitarian crime of talking about interesting things, and it's worth noting this system of childhood indoctrination seems more or less the lynchpin of establishing an Odonian society in the first place: beating "egoizing" out of them while they're young.
Not a practice conducive to ongoing intellectual progress, and the author damn well knows it.
Although the speech opening this post comes from a relatively minor character barely qualifying as a hero's helper, it nonetheless carries the moralizing heft of the standard SF hero's mentor's pedantic monologue on society's failures - and it's directed at Le Guin's own ambiguous anarchist Utopia! More specifically, it's directed at people. Not capitalists or socialists but the average naked ape, because political discourse often views things backwardly. It's not power structures which create powermongering, but the other way around. Homo sapiens shapes its environment, and ours is the world such apes make, a lynch-mob projection of human nature.

Therein lies the tragic flaw of modern "progressive" movements. As soon as they become a badge by which to hold oneself morally superior to others, they become tribal identities, power structures, weaponized public opinion by which the cowardly average human mind seeks to rule one's fellows. No wonder a California yuppie's "I'm a feminist" echoes so closely the self-righteousness of a backwoods Alabama hick's "ah'm a Chreeshtchun" because both cases represent the tyranny of the majority. They're a regressive primitivism, the bleating of the herd, tribal solidarity seeking to blunt better minds by enforcing strict, fanatical adherence to established doctrine.

Ursula Le Guin, for all her hope and support for left-wing politics, was painfully aware of this, even while writing a story for ex-hippies in the mid- '70s. It can't be an accident that Shevek's task toward the end of the book is not defeating the planet of archists but coming home to reform his own revolutionary movement, to keep it from backsliding into counter-revolutionary control schemes. Denying the ever-present threat of human mediocrity, attempting to evade reality, is insane, and suicidal. Any mass movement will be perverted by its own mass appeal. The many shadows of god yet stalk our marketplace.






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*The Left Hand of Darkness was good but over-rated, for obvious political reasons. The Word for World is Forest comes closest. Solitude is amazing and in a league of its own 'cuz I said so. (Shut up, sorcerers.)

** This is John Galt speaking.
flip-flip-flip-flip
This is still John Galt... still speaking. You'd best settle in.

Telepathetic

"Knowing that myself has gone
To the other side of the mirror
And getting bigger"

Neuroticfish - It's Not Me


I spoil you: if you haven't read Asimov's Foundation novels, Ursula K. Le Guin's Hainish books or played Torment: Tides of Numenera, this post does allude to some pretty major plot reveals. Then again, when discussing telepathy, isn't forewarning to be expected? You decide.
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For a long time I saw telepathy as a natural element of science fiction as it is in fantasy worlds (literary or religious) or superhero comics. After all, it just keeps cropping up alongside those other monstrously game-breaking superpowers like time travel, teleportation or invisibility. Charming's just something princes do naturally, a first level wizard spell. Sense motive's a basic divination. Jesus knows your impure thoughts. If Jean Grey can read minds, it's easy to take for granted counselor Troi's presence on the bridge of the Enterprise as well.

The more I've encountered telepathy in SF though, the more it seems a dead end, untenable as a theme for any lengthy plot. In short stories, alright, it can yield some highly memorable tension like George R.R. Martin's A Song for Lya but any more coherent universe telepathy tends to monopolize and monotonize. In something as shallow as Star Trek it's barely noticeable among all the other ludicrous babbling. It's not like they actually use any of their advanced technology logically anyway.

However, take a look at something more respectable like Asimov's Foundation novels. The story starts out as a multifaceted exploration of imperial decline and fall, the preservation of knowledge, human social patterns, technological advancement, economic imperialism, harsh decisions and superior tactics. The unveiling of The Mule serves as an appropriately dramatic climax, a paradigm-shifting superpower rendering all previous tactics and technologies moot. Where do you go from there? The only thing that can beat a telepath is more telepathy. The only thing that sounds impressive after that is even more telepathy, an entire telepathic planet. The scope of the Foundation novels shrinks as they progress.

Or look at Ursula K. Le Guin's SF novels. Rocannon's World is a broad, sweeping science fantasy story with elves and goblins and "magic" reinterpreted via Clarke's third law, a fantastic romanticized anthropological sweep through various "alien" cultures. The hero dodges orbital bombardment and tries to reclaim futuristic technology from deep within the warrens of thieving goblins, lance-duels atop gryphon back, Beowulfs his way through dangerous waters protected by a suit of space-age polymer, escapes bandits and vampires and finally, at the end of the story, reaches the cave of an ancient mystic who teaches him telepathy. Then in the last few pages he takes the fight to his enemies and none can stand before him 'cuz... shit. Whatcha gonna do against a guy who knows everything you're thinking of doing?

It's a revolutionary concept in religion as well, especially obvious in monotheism. The invention of thought-crime lends the most absolutist edge possible to theocracy. Don't even think of stepping out of line, 'cuz Jesus will flay the flesh off your bones in a lake of fire for all eternity if you so much as covet the thought of coveting. With a stick that big, who even needs carrots?

By the time she revisits this superweapon in the third novel of her SF universe, City of Delusion, Le Guin's painted herself into a corner. Given the impossibility of lying to a telepath, betrayal has become obsolete, and so has most conflict. Unfortunately you can't have much of a plot without conflict, so her universe of telepaths gets taken over by anti-telepath telepaths, and these have to be countered by an anti-anti-telepath and can we at least acknowledge that infinite regression's a conceptual dead end? In her later books in the same universe, the author's forced to more or less ignore, pre-date, hand-wave or otherwise avoid the topic.

For the same reason it finds such ready use in religious control, telepathy's too damn near omnipotence to coexist with other plot points. In fantasy stories revolving around the whims of universal authority figures, laws handed down from above, it can find an uneasy truce with the narrative. Invoke the name of Elbereth to shake off that fear spell and of course the once and future King Strider can't have his mind read through the palantir, 'cuz he's speshul that's why so shut up! Science fiction, on the other hand, needs to observe some kind of bottom-up logical framework. It's tech that needs to be worked by tech-heads. No heads, no tech, no story. Think about any sciencey fiction: force fields, teleporation, time travel - all easily undermined by knowing where the time traveler thinks to travel, where the teleporter thinks to teleport, etc. In fantasy, where everything's done by gritting one's teeth, bearing down and squinting real hard, controlling minds is no different from conjuring great balls of fire. When the chain of causality requires independent private thought, invention, the manipulation of physical laws (as it does in the real world) telepathy undercuts all action.

Aside from all that, telepathy also tends to be so damn gratuitous. Take Torment: Tides of Numenera:

The whole point of far-future settings is to declare everything possible - not in dreams, not in visions or illusions but in reality. In a world in which spaceships are already ancient history and you can't take two steps without slipping on a glob of sapient nanogel, where teleportation and dimension-hopping are as mundane as running and walking, in a world in which everything is already possible, creating a "psychic dimension" is redundant and pointless. My character shouldn't need to imagine myself doing amazing things. I can already do amazing things within that high-tech world. The "plane of our minds" links us? What, they ain't got iPhones in the year one billion? You couldn't just drill a hole in my skull and implant a transceiver for our private, encrypted, subspace Changing God Intranet beta version 0.837?

Seems like every other character you meet in TToN is either a mind-reader or a mind-eater or a mind-minder or some other lazy shortcut to effects better achieved through interaction in the physical world. If I'm going to instill fear, awe or gratitude in my enemies, give me metal fangs and multispectral vision to read others' galvanic skin reactions, give me poisonous claws and acidic spit or the ability to secrete plant hormones to make crops grow faster. Let me instill emotion through the things I do, not just instill emotion. Just having your character point a finger at others and saying "ok, now you're scared of me and you trust me and you're in love with me" is cheap and lazy. If a transdimensional invader's going to spew jets of black ooze at me, there's no need for the ooze to be part of some dreamscape orchestrated by invisible psychic warriors. The black ooze is pretty damn impressive by itself. If it's supposed to inflict malaise upon me then let it do so through hormonal reactions on skin contact.

Technobabble is not that hard. Really. Even when you do it badly, it's still better than just saying "it's magic" which is all person-to-person telepathy amounts to.

Even the voyeuristic intimacy offered by telepathy can be rendered in a much more touching fashion through speech patterns, describing the character's reactions in various situations or personal effects. Seeing through the eyes of the dead Lascar's helm and sabotaging the Anchorage (no mind-melding required) was better storytelling than any amount of pointing my fingers at my temples and furrowing my brow.

Not that there isn't some place for mind-reading and mind-control in SF settings, but it must come through means within the physical world, created through scientific knowledge and amenable to rational dissection by characters within that setting: clouds of psychotropic drugs, brainscanning metallic crowns, memetic thought canalization, hell, even video ads. Don't tell me that's not brainwashing.
Just leave that "aura of fear" bullshit to the Nazgul.


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edit 2019/08/13
Changed an erroneous game reference.
(Why didn't you assholes tell me?)

Solitude for the soul ever-making

"I like songs about drifters, books about the same
They both seem to make me feel a little less insane.
Walked on off to another spot;
I still haven't gotten anywhere that I want."
Modest Mouse - The World at Large

I've had a devil of a time finding song lyrics to append to my comments on Ursula K. Le Guin's Solitude. Not that I lack musical references to isolation and alienation (far from it, as I'm an old NIN/Marilyn Manson/Garbage fan) but their focus on self-condemning internalized societal expectations of social behavior renders most songs about solitude unfit to play soundtrack to Solitude. In fashioning what she called "a planet full of introverts" Le Guin reversed the expectation of codependence which predominates human interpersonal relations. Here is a world in which it is nearly unthinkable to plead or give direct advice, in which all are taught from an early age to see our many attempts to gain mental influence over another being as despicably unethical, as sorcery.

The story's title is not loneliness, but solitude. Solitude is not a lack. Introversion is not a disease or deficiency. Solitude is privacy and though social interactions may serve as observational fodder, private thought is the true vehicle for personal growth. Eleven-Soro is populated not by faceless masses of people but by individual persons. Given that it drops such philosophical distinctions on you with the casual ease of internal monologue, ignoring how alien they must seem to most, err... people... it's not surprising that Solitude is not one of Le Guin's more famous works. It has the feel of an offhand exercise, a by-the-by niche product hovering somewhere along the edges of the Hainish universe, an illustration of the sort of individualistic anarchism excluded by the political situation of The Dispossessed.

The bulk of the story is devoted to the question of breeding and child-rearing in a society which denies its tribal apes a tribal structure. Here unfortunately the author's chauvinist streak crops up as in other works, with males being seen as a destructive element necessarily kept at a distance and tolerated only for rare reproductive purposes. Society, such as it is, is female. However, it comes across as no more annoying than, for instance, Robert Heinlein's comically one-dimensional female characters - alien creatures with perplexing motivations. Paradoxically, while Sorovian men are little more than hapless, rabid, overgrown chimps, the book's female characters end up encompassing attitudes quite easily recognizable as stereotypically male. Women being generally more social than men by default, the shift of the entire spectrum of interaction away from sociability puts them in an awkward position normally reserved only for the male nerd archetype of sitcoms.

But male or female, Solitude's target audience of introverts will likely find in the narrator's life a cathartic illustration of the difficulty and necessity for personal growth unrestricted by others' attempts at mental control, of "making a soul" as the locals put it. Whatever the author's intent, this did not come together as a story of males and females but of individuals. Individuality being such a taboo in human society, Solitude stands as a welcome reminder that despite societal condemnation of privacy, your life as yourself, the soul you make, is existence.

"I'm kicking it off like a bug in the breeze
'Cause is anyone out there inside me?"
Heather Nova - Virus of the Mind

"And she says I've come to set a twisted thing straight
And she says I've come to lighten this dark heart"
Suzanne Vega - Solitude Standing

The Telling

I've just re-read Ursula K. Le Guin's The Telling. Why? I'm not sure, really. It's not something I expected to want to revisit.
My way of recommending the story is for once the same as many readers': "decent, but not Le Guin's best work". She's written more admirable books (The Dispossessed) or more enthralling adventure stories (Rocannon's World) or ones which have hit me harder personally (Solitude.) Yet there's still something about it.

It's easy to get caught up on the politically charged elements of the novel. There's no telling (pun intended) how much East-Asian culture has been lost in the past century, much less in similar modernization processes in other parts of the world. Religious suppression of progressive thought and progressive suppression of religious pursuit will always be hot topics for any of us on either side of the fence. (To needlessly re-iterate my stance on the issue: progress.) Yet The Telling is not an ideological pamphlet like Four Ways to Forgiveness or even The Dispossessed. It is not concerned primarily with which side causes greater loss. It seems more a tale about loss in itself. It concerns the things we discard as our interests shift, as individuals or societies. It's more about the experience of tearing away parts of ourselves, and the meaning and understanding discarded in the process. It's about loss, both as the necessary or inevitable cauterizing and shedding of pain and burdens and the overkill of revolutionary or reactionary thought or of our generalized tendency toward Stockholm Syndrome.

I pride myself in my progressive outlook, whatever that ends up meaning, but I cannot say I've always kept a clear conscience. Is it possible to rid ourselves of obsession, fanaticism and cloying custom without also abandoning their accumulated experience? Are we cutting the cultural branch out from under our feet?

I also don't think it's fair to fault the book on being unfocused, or the main character for being mainly a passive observer and not a prime mover. After all, the emphasis should be on the Telling itself, on being lost in the immensity of human experience, desperately trying to patch it together as it constantly falls apart.

Rocannon's World: Science Fantasy?

It's a minor issue usually. A good book is a good book, genres being fundamentally equal. Still, Rocannon's World is a neat little dilemma. Yes, the setting is basically scifi, league of worlds and all that, but the Fiia and clayfolk are intentionally elvish and dwarvish and most of the action is... let's say 'feudal'. It's a mix, and its charm is precisely in that view of science from a fantasy standpoint, Arthur C. Clarke's famous line that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" but it also lacks the social commentary that is so central to most good scifi. It's more of a romantic-age adventure story, but the question of 'what makes it scifi' still nagged at me, until i remembered that scifi is the most speculative of speculative fiction.
If a story just has a couple of laserguns and spaceships thrown in, it's not primarily science fiction. It crosses that line when it shows some ways in which that science begins to affect the human condition, when it speculates on effects. That we see the effects of sufficiently advanced technology changing both the invaders and the invaded pushes the book past the line.
There: the dilemma has been surpassed, and the world (including old Odo incarnate) can rest easy again.