The new opening section of Enter the Monkeywrench, originally the longer chapters 1-4 but now numbered 1-7, has a distinct plot with a cliffhanger ending. What Hugh Howey did with his now famous Silo Trilogy was revive the Golden Age science-fiction serial-novel tradition in ebook format. Such A.E. van Vogt novels as Slan and The World of Null-A actually read like Saturday-matinee movie serials in prose; Jommy Cross and Gilbert Gosseyn wouldn't be out of place alongside Commando Cody. I realized, I can do this too. Movie serials, and the short '70s TV revival of the format in the series Cliffhanger!, are actually a major influence on my writing. Of course, unlike the classic Republic and RKO serials, and much of Van Vogt's work, I go out of my way to avoid the plot contrivances that are a danger of the serial format, whether in movie serials or serial-format TV shows.
The final Enter the Monkeywrench Chapter 1 turned out to be entirely new material. I introduced a new character (a corrupted Edison Carter whom I named "Jack Campbell" after a certain SF magazine editor whose public decline is infamous) and killed him off. I introduced characters I'd previously saved for later. I established the stakes for the novel. In the previous chapters — the Intro, Interlude 0, and Chapter 0, in that order — I established the stakes for the entire Chaos Angel Spanner series.
I decided to split those four long long chapters I'd novelized out of comics issues and TV episodes into shorter chapters that focus on single characters or groups of characters. In the new Chapter 7 I'll combine the threads as they converge into a monster cliffhanger.
With the Intro, the new Interlude 0 ("The Monkeywrench Cometh", the actual introduction of the character Spanner to the series, reworked from Interlude 14 R2 and Interlude 6 R4), and new Chapter 0 ("First Blast of the Trumpet", a reworking of my original R5 Chapter 0 idea) at the beginning and the new Chapter 7 with its cliffhanger at the end, I could release this part as an ebook in itself, possibly even for free, with the four sequels that make up the rest of the novel priced at one dollar (or pound, or euro) apiece.
In fact, this is how I'm rewriting each part of Enter the Monkeywrench, leading up to the biggest cliffhanger of all, the one at the end of the novel, which has remained substantially the same through all the versions of Chapter (now Book) 1 since 2010.
Come to think of it, I may still be doing that comics/TV serial-novelization thing after all...
Showing posts with label theme. Show all posts
Showing posts with label theme. Show all posts
Monday, June 22, 2015
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Spanner Themes: Superheroes and Revolution
The article: "The Dark Knight Rises: Nightmares of a Ruling Class in Crisis" (Peter Little, The Hooded Utilitarian)
First, a disclosure: I conceived of Chaos Angel Spanner in 1992, when Marvel and DC superheroes ruled the comic-book universe. Once I'd discovered anime and manga that year, I vowed to destroy the superhero universe with what I then conceived of as a comics or OEL manga series. Now on to the movie notes:
Over the past few months I've been learning about the right-wing subtext of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight, for instance, is in part an allegory of the Terror War, starring the Joker as Osama bin Laden. Now it turns out that The Dark Knight Rises is how the American Overclass sees the Occupy movement. Naturally, they see it as a terrorist conspiracy led by... somebody evil. Like Bane. And the common people caught between the Man and the terrorists? Blank-out!
There are three dangerous (and traditional) assumptions behind this:
This seventy-something Cold War superhero, American Crusader III, sees himself as the last hope for Western civilization's survival against the onrushing barbarian hordes. He and his fellow billionaire revolutionaries refuse to realize that roots of their System's destruction lie deep within the structure of the System itself. Devout technocrats that they are, they see the Law of Entropy as not a law of nature but as metaphysical Evil. They see the suffering mundanes chafing under their control not as human beings but as "the threat from below", entropy made manifest; this is why they see liberalism, socialism, and Islamist theocracy as one and the same thing, for they see it metaphysically as entropic Evil, not as the rival alternatives to technocratic Corporatism (and to each other) they see themselves to be.
Like so many left-wing writers, Nolan cannot see his way out of the dilemma. The Corporatist System is failing, but the only alternative he sees is terrorism: either the grand terrorism of a Joker or a Bane, or the petty terrorism of a Catwoman. Like those left-wing writers, he sees the masses as passive and doomed to hopelessness — which is, in fact, one of the prerequisites for the coming of a superhero, for only a superhero can save the masses from enslavement to supervillains.
This is the fundamental premise of the entire superhero genre.
The corollary is that the superhero can never be the protagonist. He is the hero, but not the protagonist. He reacts to the actions of supervillains. Like the white-hatted gunslinger hero of the archetypical Western, the hero must never shoot first; that privilege is reserved for the black hats. The supervillain gets to be the protagonist, but at a cost: he can never be the hero, and he can never be allowed to win. The supervillain is the very archetype of terrorism: Lex Luthor demands $2 billion in 48 hours, or he will nuke Metropolis.
So what happens when a superhero defies that fundamental rule and becomes the protagonist? Watchmen is about precisely that. When Ozymandias — another billionaire superhero, like Batman and Crusader III — concludes that the Cold War will end in nuclear annihilation if he does not act, he creates his own weapon of mass destruction and destroys Manhattan. A superhero protagonist is every bit as deadly as any supervillain. And what is any terrorist in their own mind but a superhero protagonist?
The root of superheroism, and more broadly of terrorism, is substitutionism: the belief that the heroic action of a few can substitute for the collective mass action required to bring down a system as oppressive as Corporatism. Che Guevara, for instance, believed that the working masses were useless and that a small guerrilla faction fighting in rural backwaters and fired by Latin machismo was sufficient to destroy Corporatism. In fact, he wrote the book on it (called Guerrilla Warfare). Never mind that despite the Cuban anomaly, both he and his disciples failed over and over and over. Terrorists, and superheroes such as Batman and the Crusader, believe that the masses are so inherently passive that only a heroic elite, or a heroic superman, can liberate them.
The problem being that once the heroes liberate the passive masses, they remain passive and incapable of heroism. Thus the revolutionary superheroes end up becoming the same kind of oppressors the enemies they overthrew were. That's because they're acting on the identical premises.
This is where Henry Becket and his Conservative Revolution begin. The American Crusader of the Cold War era is now the savior of the American Empire. Now what? Being the black-and-white thinker he is, he can only be offended by the accusation (also thrown at his ancestor Oliver Cromwell) that he is now the oppressor. But he, superheroic defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, cannot see himself as anything but the epitome of all that is good and righteous! Therefore, his accusers are by definition evil, in the metaphysical sense. And so he throws the Populists, a category to which the Occupy movement properly belongs, into the same category as the terrorists of Al-Qaeda in America and the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, and sends the United States Police Force (a military branch) to crush them accordingly.
Now you know why Spanner must misdirect. The right-wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness, which could as easily have been left-wing (Green Arrow instead of Batman, the Proletarian instead of the American Crusader), has no tolerance of the unheroic masses; nor can it see them as anything but the passive instrument of the enemy left- (or right-)wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness. It's a black-and-white double bind. Into this stalemate, Spanner throws his monkeywrench.
Now here is the key to understanding Spanner — let's think dialectically, the way Marxists were supposed to once upon a time:
Spanner is really the epic clash between two kinds of heroes: those (both right-wing revolutionaries and left-wing counterrevolutionaries) who believe that only heroes deserve to rule and the unheroic may not even deserve to exist, and those who in effect sacrifice their own heroism in order to call the masses to action. The latter are the protagonists and the heroes of Spanner. To Shira, Jennifer, and Karen, Batman and Bane are just the two sides of Two-Face's defaced coin.
Little writes: "Who is Batman in this context? The dream of a technocratic solution to a problem of social contradictions." What I learned from John Ralston Saul is that the one-size-fits-all technocratic solution eventually ends up being worse than the problem. Little also admits that he agrees with both the tyrants and the terrorists when they insist that the working masses are passive, petty, and malicious "sheeple".
Now a Voltaire quote goes: "When the masses begin to reason, all is lost!" Enter a certain charismatic Charmer with an apparently unrealistic confidence that she can wake the sleepers up...
First, a disclosure: I conceived of Chaos Angel Spanner in 1992, when Marvel and DC superheroes ruled the comic-book universe. Once I'd discovered anime and manga that year, I vowed to destroy the superhero universe with what I then conceived of as a comics or OEL manga series. Now on to the movie notes:
Over the past few months I've been learning about the right-wing subtext of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight, for instance, is in part an allegory of the Terror War, starring the Joker as Osama bin Laden. Now it turns out that The Dark Knight Rises is how the American Overclass sees the Occupy movement. Naturally, they see it as a terrorist conspiracy led by... somebody evil. Like Bane. And the common people caught between the Man and the terrorists? Blank-out!
There are three dangerous (and traditional) assumptions behind this:
- The Overclass is by definition the standard of the good.
- It can only be opposed through terrorism, the political force of metaphysical evil.
- Beneath the level of the financially (and therefore spiritually) blessed, humanity is either soulless (thus passive) or evil (and on the side of the terrorists). The Doctrine of Original Sin is true.
This seventy-something Cold War superhero, American Crusader III, sees himself as the last hope for Western civilization's survival against the onrushing barbarian hordes. He and his fellow billionaire revolutionaries refuse to realize that roots of their System's destruction lie deep within the structure of the System itself. Devout technocrats that they are, they see the Law of Entropy as not a law of nature but as metaphysical Evil. They see the suffering mundanes chafing under their control not as human beings but as "the threat from below", entropy made manifest; this is why they see liberalism, socialism, and Islamist theocracy as one and the same thing, for they see it metaphysically as entropic Evil, not as the rival alternatives to technocratic Corporatism (and to each other) they see themselves to be.
Like so many left-wing writers, Nolan cannot see his way out of the dilemma. The Corporatist System is failing, but the only alternative he sees is terrorism: either the grand terrorism of a Joker or a Bane, or the petty terrorism of a Catwoman. Like those left-wing writers, he sees the masses as passive and doomed to hopelessness — which is, in fact, one of the prerequisites for the coming of a superhero, for only a superhero can save the masses from enslavement to supervillains.
This is the fundamental premise of the entire superhero genre.
The corollary is that the superhero can never be the protagonist. He is the hero, but not the protagonist. He reacts to the actions of supervillains. Like the white-hatted gunslinger hero of the archetypical Western, the hero must never shoot first; that privilege is reserved for the black hats. The supervillain gets to be the protagonist, but at a cost: he can never be the hero, and he can never be allowed to win. The supervillain is the very archetype of terrorism: Lex Luthor demands $2 billion in 48 hours, or he will nuke Metropolis.
So what happens when a superhero defies that fundamental rule and becomes the protagonist? Watchmen is about precisely that. When Ozymandias — another billionaire superhero, like Batman and Crusader III — concludes that the Cold War will end in nuclear annihilation if he does not act, he creates his own weapon of mass destruction and destroys Manhattan. A superhero protagonist is every bit as deadly as any supervillain. And what is any terrorist in their own mind but a superhero protagonist?
The root of superheroism, and more broadly of terrorism, is substitutionism: the belief that the heroic action of a few can substitute for the collective mass action required to bring down a system as oppressive as Corporatism. Che Guevara, for instance, believed that the working masses were useless and that a small guerrilla faction fighting in rural backwaters and fired by Latin machismo was sufficient to destroy Corporatism. In fact, he wrote the book on it (called Guerrilla Warfare). Never mind that despite the Cuban anomaly, both he and his disciples failed over and over and over. Terrorists, and superheroes such as Batman and the Crusader, believe that the masses are so inherently passive that only a heroic elite, or a heroic superman, can liberate them.
The problem being that once the heroes liberate the passive masses, they remain passive and incapable of heroism. Thus the revolutionary superheroes end up becoming the same kind of oppressors the enemies they overthrew were. That's because they're acting on the identical premises.
This is where Henry Becket and his Conservative Revolution begin. The American Crusader of the Cold War era is now the savior of the American Empire. Now what? Being the black-and-white thinker he is, he can only be offended by the accusation (also thrown at his ancestor Oliver Cromwell) that he is now the oppressor. But he, superheroic defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, cannot see himself as anything but the epitome of all that is good and righteous! Therefore, his accusers are by definition evil, in the metaphysical sense. And so he throws the Populists, a category to which the Occupy movement properly belongs, into the same category as the terrorists of Al-Qaeda in America and the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, and sends the United States Police Force (a military branch) to crush them accordingly.
Now you know why Spanner must misdirect. The right-wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness, which could as easily have been left-wing (Green Arrow instead of Batman, the Proletarian instead of the American Crusader), has no tolerance of the unheroic masses; nor can it see them as anything but the passive instrument of the enemy left- (or right-)wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness. It's a black-and-white double bind. Into this stalemate, Spanner throws his monkeywrench.
Now here is the key to understanding Spanner — let's think dialectically, the way Marxists were supposed to once upon a time:
- Thesis: the oppressive Corporatist System.
- Antithesis: the terrorist program of violent heroic resistance.
- Synthesis: the collective revolt of the masses, properly against both sides.
Spanner is really the epic clash between two kinds of heroes: those (both right-wing revolutionaries and left-wing counterrevolutionaries) who believe that only heroes deserve to rule and the unheroic may not even deserve to exist, and those who in effect sacrifice their own heroism in order to call the masses to action. The latter are the protagonists and the heroes of Spanner. To Shira, Jennifer, and Karen, Batman and Bane are just the two sides of Two-Face's defaced coin.
Little writes: "Who is Batman in this context? The dream of a technocratic solution to a problem of social contradictions." What I learned from John Ralston Saul is that the one-size-fits-all technocratic solution eventually ends up being worse than the problem. Little also admits that he agrees with both the tyrants and the terrorists when they insist that the working masses are passive, petty, and malicious "sheeple".
Now a Voltaire quote goes: "When the masses begin to reason, all is lost!" Enter a certain charismatic Charmer with an apparently unrealistic confidence that she can wake the sleepers up...
Friday, July 13, 2012
The Sixties Radicals Have Become the Man (Plus: The Latest Spanner R4 Update)
The article: "The Real Class Warfare (Reason)
Nick Gillespie is saying that billionaires and plutocrats aren't screwing you over, which in fact they are. The big surprise here is who among the general public are supporting them. Which generations are voting Republican and most gung-ho for Corporatism? The old.
The Sixties Radicals have become the Man.
For those who don't know their 20th-century history, there was this big youth revolt in the 1960s that took place in America, Europe, and other places such as Japan. Youth were rebelling against authority. The fatal premise of their revolt was the kind of romantic irrationalism that youth are prone to anyway, what with raging hormones and all, reinforced by the rationalism of the technocratic system current during the Cold War era. Some rebels even became madly infatuated with America's Communist enemies: Russia, China, Cuba, Che Guevara (who met his spectacular end in 1967).
Then the rebels grew up, got jobs, even became rich. No, Kurt Anderson (born 1954, by the way), the Sixties didn't make us selfish; that was the Seventies, the "Me Decade", followed by the "Gimme Decade" (the Eighties). Radical after radical turned anti-Communist, pro-Israel neoconservative without compromising their irrationalism one bit; only the nation defined as Better Than America changed.
And so the Baby Boom rebels inevitably became the sanctimonious authority figures their younger selves rebelled against, to the point of adopting the religious piosity of their late elders (and you thought God died in 1966...).
Sure enough, the right-wing turn of the Baby Boomers comes with a Confucian sense of entitlement: you whippersnappers wouldn't even exist without us, so you owe us a debt of perpetual duty. They've redefined "freedom is not free" from "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" to "freedom is slavery". Gerontocracy marked the long decline of the Soviet Union, that "Marxist" and "republican" version of the Russian Empire. Now America's elders, especially the rich ones, are trying to turn "the land of the free and home of the brave" into a Corporatist oligarchy dominated by — surprise! — rich old white men. You know, the same force of tyranny the Sixties Radicals were so determined to destroy back when they were young and had some semblance of conscience?
Now consider the gerontocrats of Spanner. The Becket brothers: born in the 1930s. Their baby sister Drusilla and nephew Walter Brinkman? 1950s. But they were always conservative; they were targets of the Sixties Radicals and were surprised to find them flocking over to their side as neocons. The Conservative Revolutionary Party militants who aren't simply right-wing militia types are the former Sixties (less often Seventies through Nineties) radicals turned conservative in their old age. But they haven't given up their Sixties Radical infatuation with terrorism. They still long to blow shit up, only for the Fascists rather than the Communists. And their Revolution is not just against the democratic "rabble", but even more so the "whippersnappers", who are increasingly non-white, threatening the comforting uniformity of traditional American white-bread-ness (for which threat they also blame those America-hating liberal traitors!!! whom they think are the same Sixties Radicals they themselves used to be). And so they give dominion and offer hero worship to a cabal of self-righteous Cold War superheroes born in the 1930s and whose heads remain stuck in the 1950s.
This is the theme that Willa and Hope, two "Xists" (actually, Hope's technically a late-Boomer born in 1962, but we'll let that slide) who have always refused to heed the siren song of Conservatism and Corporatism no matter how rich they got, introduce in the meeting they hold for the student tutors and dissident teachers at Mudlark House in Chapter 4.
Now for a relevant sidetrack, here's the Cracked list of six movies with political agendas you didn't notice and the Spanner response:
Nick Gillespie is saying that billionaires and plutocrats aren't screwing you over, which in fact they are. The big surprise here is who among the general public are supporting them. Which generations are voting Republican and most gung-ho for Corporatism? The old.
The Sixties Radicals have become the Man.
For those who don't know their 20th-century history, there was this big youth revolt in the 1960s that took place in America, Europe, and other places such as Japan. Youth were rebelling against authority. The fatal premise of their revolt was the kind of romantic irrationalism that youth are prone to anyway, what with raging hormones and all, reinforced by the rationalism of the technocratic system current during the Cold War era. Some rebels even became madly infatuated with America's Communist enemies: Russia, China, Cuba, Che Guevara (who met his spectacular end in 1967).
Then the rebels grew up, got jobs, even became rich. No, Kurt Anderson (born 1954, by the way), the Sixties didn't make us selfish; that was the Seventies, the "Me Decade", followed by the "Gimme Decade" (the Eighties). Radical after radical turned anti-Communist, pro-Israel neoconservative without compromising their irrationalism one bit; only the nation defined as Better Than America changed.
And so the Baby Boom rebels inevitably became the sanctimonious authority figures their younger selves rebelled against, to the point of adopting the religious piosity of their late elders (and you thought God died in 1966...).
Sure enough, the right-wing turn of the Baby Boomers comes with a Confucian sense of entitlement: you whippersnappers wouldn't even exist without us, so you owe us a debt of perpetual duty. They've redefined "freedom is not free" from "eternal vigilance is the price of liberty" to "freedom is slavery". Gerontocracy marked the long decline of the Soviet Union, that "Marxist" and "republican" version of the Russian Empire. Now America's elders, especially the rich ones, are trying to turn "the land of the free and home of the brave" into a Corporatist oligarchy dominated by — surprise! — rich old white men. You know, the same force of tyranny the Sixties Radicals were so determined to destroy back when they were young and had some semblance of conscience?
Now consider the gerontocrats of Spanner. The Becket brothers: born in the 1930s. Their baby sister Drusilla and nephew Walter Brinkman? 1950s. But they were always conservative; they were targets of the Sixties Radicals and were surprised to find them flocking over to their side as neocons. The Conservative Revolutionary Party militants who aren't simply right-wing militia types are the former Sixties (less often Seventies through Nineties) radicals turned conservative in their old age. But they haven't given up their Sixties Radical infatuation with terrorism. They still long to blow shit up, only for the Fascists rather than the Communists. And their Revolution is not just against the democratic "rabble", but even more so the "whippersnappers", who are increasingly non-white, threatening the comforting uniformity of traditional American white-bread-ness (for which threat they also blame those America-hating liberal traitors!!! whom they think are the same Sixties Radicals they themselves used to be). And so they give dominion and offer hero worship to a cabal of self-righteous Cold War superheroes born in the 1930s and whose heads remain stuck in the 1950s.
This is the theme that Willa and Hope, two "Xists" (actually, Hope's technically a late-Boomer born in 1962, but we'll let that slide) who have always refused to heed the siren song of Conservatism and Corporatism no matter how rich they got, introduce in the meeting they hold for the student tutors and dissident teachers at Mudlark House in Chapter 4.
Now for a relevant sidetrack, here's the Cracked list of six movies with political agendas you didn't notice and the Spanner response:
- The Dark Knight: Batman kidnaps foreign citizens — just like the CIA! (Nolan was trying to justify Shrub Bush's tyrannical imperial policy in this kinder, gentler version of Frank Miller's infamous Holy Terror.) Spanner: That's what bounty hunters are licensed to do; some are themselves costumed heroes, and they get very self-righteous about it.
- Ghostbusters: If you give the federal government too much power — ghosts! Spanner: True! Plus: rampaging angels, demons, and giant robots!
- Saw VI: Jigsaw pushes for health insurance reform! Spanner: Good luck torturing the chairmen of the entire healthcare industry, Jigsaw. Not that you're any less a villain (and a self-righteous one at that) for it. In fact, you'd fit right in with your fellow Social Darwinists who make up the CRP...
- Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: The Government is dumb — but America is the world, and Shrub Bush and America's Heroic Armed Forces are way righteous! Spanner: Michael Bay is an official Party propagandist, just like, say, Frank Miller or Ted Nugent. Unlike them, he loves loves loves to blow shit up.
- The Day the Earth Stood Still (the original): even space aliens love Jesus! (Note: Klaatu was supposed to be a Christ figure anyway, but those earnest Catholics in the Hays Office forced the filmmakers to hammer home the point without the slightest subtlety to prevent the weakening of social control. This was the Cold War, after all, and anything short of pro-Christian propaganda was by definition atheism and therefore Communist treason.) Spanner: What's Jesus? (Remember, God died in 1966 — or at least turned comic-book dead for a few years.) Is there a Space Jesus? (Actually, America is supposed to be Jesus: the Second Coming, the Becket brothers and baby sister Drusilla won't stop telling us, occurred on July 4, 1776...)
- Superman IV: The Quest for Peace: Superman fixes the world — by taking it over! Spanner: Nice job breaking it, heroes! So, who watches the watchers? Also, fuck the sun.
Monday, June 11, 2012
Inside Spanner: Memetic Drift and the Ayn Rand Problem
There's a lot of Objectivists among the Corporates in Spanner, or at least they like to think they are. Problem: the Corporates are essentially the same as the villains of Atlas Shrugged. Spanner's "church of Ayn Rand" is no more similar to Ayn Rand's or Nathaniel Branden's Objectivism than the Catholic Church is to Jesus' religion or early Jewish Christianity. However, there is one crucial similarity, which I consider the fatal weakness of Objectivism and especially its ethics:
Social denialism.
That's the denial that humans have a social nature. In the infamous words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: "Society does not exist." In other words, humans are by nature solitary predators — or should be. That "should be" is the core of Rand's egoist ethics — and of Max Stirner's philosophy of extreme egoism. This works to the benefit of those at the top of the Corporate hierarchy, the High Corporates who bear the titles "MBA" and especially "Incorporated". It doesn't work too well for ordinary civilians, who possess the social nature Corporates do not.
Here's the mutation: what if Rand's corporatist villains were her most fanatical believers? This, in fact, is what's happened in real life: only the James Taggarts and Orren Boyles are left when the religious Objectivists have left for real cults and the irreligious ones have grown tired of the philosophy's many contradictions and increasingly archaic errors (it is, after all, a distilled version of the worldview of the Gilded Age that lasted from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression, roughly 1870-1930). Once the religionists and the realists have left, then, you have the corporatists. I've observed that these people, including the Koch and Romney clans, are predominantly billionaire heirs, some separated from their Enterpriser clan founders by five generations or more. They believe in the virtue of aristocracy for its own sake, because they see their inherited wealth as a gift from God or whatever. They believe that democracy is a vice because to lack money is by definition to lack virtue.
Egoism has become the religion of the Orren Boyle crowd. In Spanner as in Atlas Shrugged, these people have no genuine sense of self, so they must build their false self (the colloquial definition of "ego") to compensate. As it turns out, Rand herself has become their guide, their master in ego-building! And so they build their egos into giant monsters. They deify their egos and build temples to themselves. They demand that all "lesser" people bow down and worship their egos as gods Or Else. And of course they build theocratic dictatorships dedicated to the glory of their egos. Now you understand the Corporate caste in Spanner.
Now witness their leader, one Prince William Richard Astor Cromwell-Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, Chairman of the United Corporations. Richard Becket used to be a superhero codenamed Neron back in the Cold War. He's the answer to the question, what if an older version of Ozymandias from Watchmen took over the world? He prides himself on doing deals during sex. His grandmastership of the Illuminati, however, is the subject of another post, on the elitist premises of fundamentalist "Nicolaitan" Gnosticism. But how can this guy reconcile Objectivist materialism with unworldly Gnosticism? In the way he deifies his ego, of course! This contradiction first comes to a head in Chapter 15, in which the Becket brothers and their sister Drusilla get their egos smacked by it.
Any meme can mutate into something radically different from what it claims to be. But some weaknesses in its philosophy encourage some very undesirable mutations. Ayn Rand's social denialism is a particularly pertinent case in point. That's not just because it's central to the Corporate worldview in Spanner, but also because it's become the elite consensus in America today, and the non-elite are suffering the consequences...
Social denialism.
That's the denial that humans have a social nature. In the infamous words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: "Society does not exist." In other words, humans are by nature solitary predators — or should be. That "should be" is the core of Rand's egoist ethics — and of Max Stirner's philosophy of extreme egoism. This works to the benefit of those at the top of the Corporate hierarchy, the High Corporates who bear the titles "MBA" and especially "Incorporated". It doesn't work too well for ordinary civilians, who possess the social nature Corporates do not.
Here's the mutation: what if Rand's corporatist villains were her most fanatical believers? This, in fact, is what's happened in real life: only the James Taggarts and Orren Boyles are left when the religious Objectivists have left for real cults and the irreligious ones have grown tired of the philosophy's many contradictions and increasingly archaic errors (it is, after all, a distilled version of the worldview of the Gilded Age that lasted from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression, roughly 1870-1930). Once the religionists and the realists have left, then, you have the corporatists. I've observed that these people, including the Koch and Romney clans, are predominantly billionaire heirs, some separated from their Enterpriser clan founders by five generations or more. They believe in the virtue of aristocracy for its own sake, because they see their inherited wealth as a gift from God or whatever. They believe that democracy is a vice because to lack money is by definition to lack virtue.
Egoism has become the religion of the Orren Boyle crowd. In Spanner as in Atlas Shrugged, these people have no genuine sense of self, so they must build their false self (the colloquial definition of "ego") to compensate. As it turns out, Rand herself has become their guide, their master in ego-building! And so they build their egos into giant monsters. They deify their egos and build temples to themselves. They demand that all "lesser" people bow down and worship their egos as gods Or Else. And of course they build theocratic dictatorships dedicated to the glory of their egos. Now you understand the Corporate caste in Spanner.
Now witness their leader, one Prince William Richard Astor Cromwell-Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, Chairman of the United Corporations. Richard Becket used to be a superhero codenamed Neron back in the Cold War. He's the answer to the question, what if an older version of Ozymandias from Watchmen took over the world? He prides himself on doing deals during sex. His grandmastership of the Illuminati, however, is the subject of another post, on the elitist premises of fundamentalist "Nicolaitan" Gnosticism. But how can this guy reconcile Objectivist materialism with unworldly Gnosticism? In the way he deifies his ego, of course! This contradiction first comes to a head in Chapter 15, in which the Becket brothers and their sister Drusilla get their egos smacked by it.
Any meme can mutate into something radically different from what it claims to be. But some weaknesses in its philosophy encourage some very undesirable mutations. Ayn Rand's social denialism is a particularly pertinent case in point. That's not just because it's central to the Corporate worldview in Spanner, but also because it's become the elite consensus in America today, and the non-elite are suffering the consequences...
Thursday, April 26, 2012
Spanner R4 Update: New Themes
As I rewrite Spanner Book 1, partly in script form for Script Frenzy, I find new themes emerging. One is the "bicameral mind" hypothesis of the late Julian James, who in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1977) posited that ancient civilization up to the end of the second millennium BC (and longer in more isolated cultures) was not built consciously but by hallucinated gods giving commandments that people obeyed without question or even awareness, that what is now the mental illness called schizophrenia was once the universal human mentality, and that religion, government, and much culture are remnants of the dying "bicameral" mentality struggling to regain its ancient supremacy against the inexorable rise of consciousness. Corporations as cults, the nation as God incarnate, mediums and channellers, and mass self-annihilation in cult and fascist rallies: all this fits the theme so perfectly that I suspect my muse kept the Jaynes hypothesis in mind even when I'd forgotten it. Recently I realized how perfectly it fits Freud's structural theory as modified by Henri Wallon, Jacques Lacan, and the British object-relations school: In the beginning, there was only id; man was just another ape with a typically simian mentality despite his greater cleverness. Through a series of events largely involving ice ages, language began to evolve around 45,000 BC and developed in tandem with tool technology until the twin innovations of names and agriculture around 10,000 BC. Names allowed chieftains' voices to survive their deaths: the gods were born, and superego with it. The breakdown of the bicameral mind created a gap between superego and id which can be called nemo (Latin for "nobody"), which silenced the gods: this was the Fall of Man, corresponding roughly to the explosion of the island of Atlantis around 1170 BC which created a tsunami that wrecked Mediterranean civilization. Nemo provoked many attempts to overcompensate, in religion, politics, and culture. Psychologically, the torment of the abyss produced first the false self that is colloquially called "ego", as in egotism and narcissism. Last to develop was true ego, and consciousness with it. But superego is by nature a jealous god and will not tolerate rival authorities such as ego, or the voices of reason, conscience, and the muse. Superego is the tyrannical voice that tortures schizophrenics, who have little to no ego to defend themselves against it.
The fundamental principle of the Enlightenment, in Freudian (and Jaynesian) structural terms, is the development and strengthening of ego, the integral self and its consciousness, against the brutal instincts of id, the tyranny of superego, and the nihilism of nemo. Now consider the culture war in America, a republic founded by Enlightenment intellectuals turned by religious millennialism into a decadent empire, with the capitalist Robber Barons the most fanatical crusaders for empire whether their religion was Calvinism or Social Darwinism. Its sequel is Spanner's "Conservative Revolution", which attempts to abolish the Enlightenment republic in the name of deified empire but (here's the foregone conclusion, based on the fall of the Soviet Union) only accelerating the breakdown of the already weakened bicameral mind even further, until a disenchanted people bring the creaky imperial structure down.
On a more personal level, I noticed how perfectly my new model fits the extended character arc of Desiree Richter-Thomas. In Bad Company and its backstory, she originally had a personality of her own which was quite charming until her mother, the tyrannical right-wing guru Drusilla Becket (a major villain of the entire Spanner cycle), destroyed it with relentless abuse. Two false selves, the inner villains of BadCo, emerged to fill the abyss Dru created, psychopathic Melody Starlight Thorndyke and fanatical terrorist Jamila Becket de Gabriel. With the help of her adored sister Charlie, Desiree manages to destroy these two false selves and her abusive stepfather along with them. In the sequel, Black Science, her true self starts to grow back within the abyss, and she significantly remembers her happy childhood. This is the origin of Spanner's revolutionary heroine.
The second theme: said foregone conclusion based on the fall of the Soviet Union. Irony of ironies: the Robber Barons created a new "corporate socialism" based on the philosophy of that fanatical antisocialist, Ayn Rand. What the Soviet and American Empires have in common is central planning used to prop up a hereditary elite: the Communist Party nomenklatura in Russia and China, the High Corporate oligarchs in America. Such planning locks the economy in stasis, which inevitably gives way to entropy and crumbles to dust. Naturally, the oligarchs adhere fanatically to a denialism of entropy, which in America goes along with denialisms of evolution and climate change. Thus the oligarchic Conservative Revolution is inevitably opposed by a Populist Revolution among the disenfranchised masses, leading to the entire plot of Spanner.
The third theme: ascent experience, as described by Morris Berman in Coming to Our Senses (1989). Last night I reread it after rereading Jaynes, and found them interlocking in my mind. Berman's book is where I got the idea of nemo, and ascent experience — the experience of mystical ascent of the soul out of the material body into spiritual ecstasy — strikes me as the fundamental Western overcompensation for the emergence of the yawning abyss of nemo caused by the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Berman documents five massive waves of ascent experience in Western culture: the Hellenistic period to the rise of Christendom; the Cathar era; the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution; the Nazi empire; and the current New Age period. The first four led inexorably to disaster, as the archetypal energy of gnostic ascent invariably decays into the tyranny of hardened orthodoxy. Enlightenment scientific rationality was devised as a defense against these mysticism-caused disasters. The ideologies of ascent, from quietist asceticism to crusading fascism, are inherently dualistic; indeed, Western dualism entails mystical ascent. The proper defense not only rejects dualism in favor of objective realism, not only counters faith and revelation with reason, but must be dialectical as well. This position (objective realism + scientific rationality + dialectics) is that of Spanner's heroes as they struggle to survive against an oppressively dualistic Empire.
Last but not least, there's the recent evolution of my scornfully cynical attitude toward terrorism. In a new scene in Chapter 8, Shira complains to counterterrorist Will Becket, "Problem with terrorists is, they're trying to be superheroes. They got the same contempt for the people that Superman used to have for Lois Lane before they got married. You can practically hear 'em sneering, 'We're heroes and you're not.'" Later, in Chapter 16, she answers Will's question "What do you think the terrorists want?" with: "Unconditional surrender." She explains that terrorists believe God or History gave them and them alone the divine right to oppress the people, making the government in power usurpers. In her crowning moment of cynicism, she declares that Henry Becket, leader of the Conservative Revolution, is the true heir to Che Guevara, theorist of terrorism who became the butcher of Cuba. Dr. Becket, after all, created both the Unabomber (founder of the Earth Revolutionary Front) and Osama bin Laden (founder of Al-Qaeda killed by the fangs of the Egregious Doctor's own son Will), both of whom followed Guevara's theory of terrorism religiously. In Chapter 21, Shira warns that Becket will use Guevara's paramilitary terror system against the people of Seattle, for he is its grandmaster whose greatest moment came when he used Guevara's theory to destroy Guevara himself. "Terrorism," she corrects Trotsky in Chapter 16, "is conservatism with a bomb." All the while she wears a Che T-shirt which says on the back, "I tried to exterminate the evil Yankee imperialists, but all I got was this stupid T-shirt."
These are the themes developing so far in the Fourth Revision. I'll probably find more themes and motifs as I edit beyond Chapters 4-8, 15, and 16. You'll know about them almost as soon as I do.
The fundamental principle of the Enlightenment, in Freudian (and Jaynesian) structural terms, is the development and strengthening of ego, the integral self and its consciousness, against the brutal instincts of id, the tyranny of superego, and the nihilism of nemo. Now consider the culture war in America, a republic founded by Enlightenment intellectuals turned by religious millennialism into a decadent empire, with the capitalist Robber Barons the most fanatical crusaders for empire whether their religion was Calvinism or Social Darwinism. Its sequel is Spanner's "Conservative Revolution", which attempts to abolish the Enlightenment republic in the name of deified empire but (here's the foregone conclusion, based on the fall of the Soviet Union) only accelerating the breakdown of the already weakened bicameral mind even further, until a disenchanted people bring the creaky imperial structure down.
On a more personal level, I noticed how perfectly my new model fits the extended character arc of Desiree Richter-Thomas. In Bad Company and its backstory, she originally had a personality of her own which was quite charming until her mother, the tyrannical right-wing guru Drusilla Becket (a major villain of the entire Spanner cycle), destroyed it with relentless abuse. Two false selves, the inner villains of BadCo, emerged to fill the abyss Dru created, psychopathic Melody Starlight Thorndyke and fanatical terrorist Jamila Becket de Gabriel. With the help of her adored sister Charlie, Desiree manages to destroy these two false selves and her abusive stepfather along with them. In the sequel, Black Science, her true self starts to grow back within the abyss, and she significantly remembers her happy childhood. This is the origin of Spanner's revolutionary heroine.
The second theme: said foregone conclusion based on the fall of the Soviet Union. Irony of ironies: the Robber Barons created a new "corporate socialism" based on the philosophy of that fanatical antisocialist, Ayn Rand. What the Soviet and American Empires have in common is central planning used to prop up a hereditary elite: the Communist Party nomenklatura in Russia and China, the High Corporate oligarchs in America. Such planning locks the economy in stasis, which inevitably gives way to entropy and crumbles to dust. Naturally, the oligarchs adhere fanatically to a denialism of entropy, which in America goes along with denialisms of evolution and climate change. Thus the oligarchic Conservative Revolution is inevitably opposed by a Populist Revolution among the disenfranchised masses, leading to the entire plot of Spanner.
The third theme: ascent experience, as described by Morris Berman in Coming to Our Senses (1989). Last night I reread it after rereading Jaynes, and found them interlocking in my mind. Berman's book is where I got the idea of nemo, and ascent experience — the experience of mystical ascent of the soul out of the material body into spiritual ecstasy — strikes me as the fundamental Western overcompensation for the emergence of the yawning abyss of nemo caused by the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Berman documents five massive waves of ascent experience in Western culture: the Hellenistic period to the rise of Christendom; the Cathar era; the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution; the Nazi empire; and the current New Age period. The first four led inexorably to disaster, as the archetypal energy of gnostic ascent invariably decays into the tyranny of hardened orthodoxy. Enlightenment scientific rationality was devised as a defense against these mysticism-caused disasters. The ideologies of ascent, from quietist asceticism to crusading fascism, are inherently dualistic; indeed, Western dualism entails mystical ascent. The proper defense not only rejects dualism in favor of objective realism, not only counters faith and revelation with reason, but must be dialectical as well. This position (objective realism + scientific rationality + dialectics) is that of Spanner's heroes as they struggle to survive against an oppressively dualistic Empire.
Last but not least, there's the recent evolution of my scornfully cynical attitude toward terrorism. In a new scene in Chapter 8, Shira complains to counterterrorist Will Becket, "Problem with terrorists is, they're trying to be superheroes. They got the same contempt for the people that Superman used to have for Lois Lane before they got married. You can practically hear 'em sneering, 'We're heroes and you're not.'" Later, in Chapter 16, she answers Will's question "What do you think the terrorists want?" with: "Unconditional surrender." She explains that terrorists believe God or History gave them and them alone the divine right to oppress the people, making the government in power usurpers. In her crowning moment of cynicism, she declares that Henry Becket, leader of the Conservative Revolution, is the true heir to Che Guevara, theorist of terrorism who became the butcher of Cuba. Dr. Becket, after all, created both the Unabomber (founder of the Earth Revolutionary Front) and Osama bin Laden (founder of Al-Qaeda killed by the fangs of the Egregious Doctor's own son Will), both of whom followed Guevara's theory of terrorism religiously. In Chapter 21, Shira warns that Becket will use Guevara's paramilitary terror system against the people of Seattle, for he is its grandmaster whose greatest moment came when he used Guevara's theory to destroy Guevara himself. "Terrorism," she corrects Trotsky in Chapter 16, "is conservatism with a bomb." All the while she wears a Che T-shirt which says on the back, "I tried to exterminate the evil Yankee imperialists, but all I got was this stupid T-shirt."
These are the themes developing so far in the Fourth Revision. I'll probably find more themes and motifs as I edit beyond Chapters 4-8, 15, and 16. You'll know about them almost as soon as I do.
Friday, April 8, 2011
Ayn Rand, the Psychology of Fangirlism, and How America Lost Its Freedom
The article: this one on Ayn Rand as serial killer groupie.
I've been upset enough about the Republican Party's jihad against the poor and the middle class on behalf of the ultra-rich to write Spanner. Turns out their overclass supremacism, Social Darwinism, hatred of democracy, and lust for corporatist tyranny come ultimately from Ayn Rand. And then I read the above linked article, which claims that her entire philosophy of Objectivism stems from her hero worship of a serial killer. That's right: not long after she fled Stalin's Russia for America in 1926, Ayn Rand became a serial killer groupie. Turns out she was so busy fangirling the sadistic murderer William Hickman that she blanked out the fact that his moral retardation made him too dumb to live.
I myself didn't realize the truth till early afternoon today, when I was drinking my second cup of coffee. There's a pattern here. 9-year-old Alissa Rosenbaum became a huge fangirl of the arrogant British-imperialist hero (named Cyrus, no less) of a serial adventure novel called The Mysterious Valley. Her earliest essays in Russian? On Hollywood stars. When she left for America to become Ayn Rand, where did she go? Right straight to Hollywood, where she became a scriptwriter. In her late essay "On a Woman President", she denounces the idea of female leadership because, she claims, the function of woman is to hero-worship a man. In other words, she defines fangirlism as the essence of female nature. In her manifesto "The Goal of My Writing", she says the purpose of fiction, or at least her fiction, is the creation of an Ideal Man—capitalized, of course—in order to hero-worship him with her fiction. In her lectures and essays, she constantly quotes not other philosophers, but her own heroes: Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia—they, not all those "lesser" philosophers she despised (meaning all the rest), were the authorities to turn to in philosophy.
Is the picture becoming clear to you already? If not, I'll tell you. I realized with a shock: who is Ayn Rand? The most famous and influential Ascended Psycho Fangirl in history. Her entire philosophy is geared toward fangirling the oligarchs of Big Business. Sure enough, she was quickly surrounded by a worshipful cult of psycho fanboys and fangirls, which eventually expanded to include the oligarchs themselves. After all, she made them (along with herself) the object of worship of the entire American civil religion. Is it any wonder that she became far more influential than her fellow/rival Angry Atheist Battleaxe, Madalyn Murray O'Hair?
It all came together in this line spoken by my character Willa, talking about her early rock 'n' roll days in Spanner:
I also find myself witnessing (and, in Spanner, writing) an unfortunate parallel between the ideal Randian political system the Republicans are trying to impose (by brute force if necessary, as in the 2012 coup in Spanner's backstory) and the Stalinist dictatorship Rand fled. In fact, the political structure turns out to be identical to her hated Soviet Russia, with corporations replacing soviets, Republican neocons replacing Communists, and big businessmen becoming the new nomenklatura—which, it turns out, is exactly what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism. The GOP's trying to turn America from the flawed democracy we've got now into a corporatist dictatorship modelled after authoritarian Russia and China. In the name of Ayn Rand, mortal enemy of Communism, America is turning into the right-wing version of the Soviet Union, with the Corporate oligarchs as the new master race (see her "Big Business: A Persecuted Minority").
And if you suspect there's a strong element here of what literary theorist Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"—that is, the artist's war against his strongest influences (John Milton, in the case of the English Romantic poets)—you hit it on the nose. It's supposed to be unconscious according to Bloom's theory, but my case is so bad I'm fully conscious of it. My villains all think they're Rand heroes because their real-life counterparts in the New Right believe they are. The Rand hero takes the American frontier ideal of "rugged individualism" to the sociopathic extreme; this explains why the Corporate elite are hellbent on not just stealing all the money in the world but seizing absolute power as well. They don't care if they make enemies out of the entire American middle class; after all, they can always follow the example of John Galt and kill off all of humanity except for the chosen ones in Galt's Gulch.
Fandom can go psycho. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote a famous but now rare essay on the phenomenon. But now America's ruled by an ideology based entirely on psycho fannism, created by the Ascended Psycho Fangirl named Ayn Rand. So why am I writing this in my project blog rather than my opinion blog? Because I happen to be something of an "ascending fanboy" myself, and I riff off various fanfics and doujinshi. You think psycho Twilight fangirls are bad enough? Now think of America turning into a dictatorship ruled by psycho Ayn Rand fanboys. You get the picture...
I've been upset enough about the Republican Party's jihad against the poor and the middle class on behalf of the ultra-rich to write Spanner. Turns out their overclass supremacism, Social Darwinism, hatred of democracy, and lust for corporatist tyranny come ultimately from Ayn Rand. And then I read the above linked article, which claims that her entire philosophy of Objectivism stems from her hero worship of a serial killer. That's right: not long after she fled Stalin's Russia for America in 1926, Ayn Rand became a serial killer groupie. Turns out she was so busy fangirling the sadistic murderer William Hickman that she blanked out the fact that his moral retardation made him too dumb to live.
I myself didn't realize the truth till early afternoon today, when I was drinking my second cup of coffee. There's a pattern here. 9-year-old Alissa Rosenbaum became a huge fangirl of the arrogant British-imperialist hero (named Cyrus, no less) of a serial adventure novel called The Mysterious Valley. Her earliest essays in Russian? On Hollywood stars. When she left for America to become Ayn Rand, where did she go? Right straight to Hollywood, where she became a scriptwriter. In her late essay "On a Woman President", she denounces the idea of female leadership because, she claims, the function of woman is to hero-worship a man. In other words, she defines fangirlism as the essence of female nature. In her manifesto "The Goal of My Writing", she says the purpose of fiction, or at least her fiction, is the creation of an Ideal Man—capitalized, of course—in order to hero-worship him with her fiction. In her lectures and essays, she constantly quotes not other philosophers, but her own heroes: Howard Roark, John Galt, Hank Rearden, Francisco d'Anconia—they, not all those "lesser" philosophers she despised (meaning all the rest), were the authorities to turn to in philosophy.
Is the picture becoming clear to you already? If not, I'll tell you. I realized with a shock: who is Ayn Rand? The most famous and influential Ascended Psycho Fangirl in history. Her entire philosophy is geared toward fangirling the oligarchs of Big Business. Sure enough, she was quickly surrounded by a worshipful cult of psycho fanboys and fangirls, which eventually expanded to include the oligarchs themselves. After all, she made them (along with herself) the object of worship of the entire American civil religion. Is it any wonder that she became far more influential than her fellow/rival Angry Atheist Battleaxe, Madalyn Murray O'Hair?
It all came together in this line spoken by my character Willa, talking about her early rock 'n' roll days in Spanner:
I remember narrowly escaping being murdered by psycho fangirls repeatedly. About the same time, I became intrigued by this Ayn Rand. Then I read her essay on why she thought a woman president would be a bad idea. Turns out she hated the idea of female leadership because she believed women were supposed to worship male heroes. In other words, if you're not a fangirl, you're not a woman, period, by definition, so saith Ayn Rand. She lost me there. I wasn't the least bit surprised to find out later that she was once a serial killer groupie.And so I find that when I write a character to resemble an Ayn Rand hero, he turns out to be a villain. Conversely, though some of my heroes (including not just Shira but Willa as well) share some of the Rand hero's ruthlessness, I can't write them like Rand heroes because they're not antisocial enough. The most important Spanner characters "born without the ability to consider others" are vampires, whose disease has eaten away the moral centers of their brains.
I also find myself witnessing (and, in Spanner, writing) an unfortunate parallel between the ideal Randian political system the Republicans are trying to impose (by brute force if necessary, as in the 2012 coup in Spanner's backstory) and the Stalinist dictatorship Rand fled. In fact, the political structure turns out to be identical to her hated Soviet Russia, with corporations replacing soviets, Republican neocons replacing Communists, and big businessmen becoming the new nomenklatura—which, it turns out, is exactly what happened in Russia after the fall of Communism. The GOP's trying to turn America from the flawed democracy we've got now into a corporatist dictatorship modelled after authoritarian Russia and China. In the name of Ayn Rand, mortal enemy of Communism, America is turning into the right-wing version of the Soviet Union, with the Corporate oligarchs as the new master race (see her "Big Business: A Persecuted Minority").
And if you suspect there's a strong element here of what literary theorist Harold Bloom calls "the anxiety of influence"—that is, the artist's war against his strongest influences (John Milton, in the case of the English Romantic poets)—you hit it on the nose. It's supposed to be unconscious according to Bloom's theory, but my case is so bad I'm fully conscious of it. My villains all think they're Rand heroes because their real-life counterparts in the New Right believe they are. The Rand hero takes the American frontier ideal of "rugged individualism" to the sociopathic extreme; this explains why the Corporate elite are hellbent on not just stealing all the money in the world but seizing absolute power as well. They don't care if they make enemies out of the entire American middle class; after all, they can always follow the example of John Galt and kill off all of humanity except for the chosen ones in Galt's Gulch.
Fandom can go psycho. Science fiction author Harlan Ellison once wrote a famous but now rare essay on the phenomenon. But now America's ruled by an ideology based entirely on psycho fannism, created by the Ascended Psycho Fangirl named Ayn Rand. So why am I writing this in my project blog rather than my opinion blog? Because I happen to be something of an "ascending fanboy" myself, and I riff off various fanfics and doujinshi. You think psycho Twilight fangirls are bad enough? Now think of America turning into a dictatorship ruled by psycho Ayn Rand fanboys. You get the picture...
Monday, August 23, 2010
Spanner: Morality Is Not the Point
Lately I've been paying too much attention to a site called Television Tropes & Idioms and listing the tropes relevant to Spanner in a Microsoft Word document. When I got to Character Alignment, I realized, for the first time since I started my first preliminary work on this story in 1992, that in a story about a revolution sparked by a monkeywrencher against an oppressive technocracy, morality is not the point. In most stories, the vertical axis on the alignment chart (good vs. evil) is the focus, and most writers (and moralists) conflate "order" with "good" and likewise "chaos" with "evil" (hence the trope Anarchy Is Chaos and its twin, Democracy Is Bad, which Spanner puts in the mouths of Lawful Evil villains but utterly rejects). Spanner is about freedom, not morality.
Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Future Shock
Remember future shock? It's the shock that overcomes you when you can't handle what you perceive as too much change in too little time. The term was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, and it's the subject of the book that made him famous. If anything, the speed of change has accelerated since the book came out in 1970, and the shock registered by those who can't handle it has become more extreme, to the point of madness. The ultimate expression of that madness is 9/11 — so far. But far more people have come to adapt to the accelerating rate of change; some of us can even be said to surf evolution. The 21st-century world we live in today was nothing but science fiction in the 20th century.
In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.
In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Spanner: When Power Corrupts
Lord Acton famously said: "Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely." Sure, he was writing to a bishop about the then new Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, but it applies to any organization. If someone gains too much power, they are bound to become corrupt. The famous Peter Principle explains why: In any hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to their level of incompetence. The mechanism is groupthink, or collective narcissism resulting from the leader's delusion that the fact that he is in power makes everything right and his increasing intolerance for negative feedback.
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Spanner: With Great Power...
Last entry, I brought up one of the major themes of Spanner: the never-ending conflict between those who try to raise ordinary people to their level and those merely content to oppress them. That's the basic conflict, and I'll write a few more things about it later in this post. The theme I'm concerned with, though, is closely related and should be familiar:
With great power comes great responsibility.
With great power comes great responsibility.
Friday, August 13, 2010
Spanner: Why These Big Family Things? There's A Theme In It.
That last entry was me going too far. I do that sometimes. Much of Spanner is all about either the characters or their author going too far. But the whole Wold Newton Universe thing? You know the old Arab proverb warning against letting the camel stick its nose into your tent...
Anyway, there's a purpose behind that "Grail Family", "Wold Newton Family", and "House of Dracula" stuff. Margaret Starbird introduced it and Laurence Gardner (who included the genealogy of the House of Dracula in his Realm of the Ring Lords) echoed it. It's contained in the Hebrew words anakim and anawim.
Anyway, there's a purpose behind that "Grail Family", "Wold Newton Family", and "House of Dracula" stuff. Margaret Starbird introduced it and Laurence Gardner (who included the genealogy of the House of Dracula in his Realm of the Ring Lords) echoed it. It's contained in the Hebrew words anakim and anawim.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)