Posted by zeristor 3 hours ago
> https://www.ecosophia.net/the-three-stigmata-of-j-r-r-tolkie...
> . . . It’s occurred to me more than once recently that one of the most distinctive things about the Western cultures of the last century or so is the way it’s become so obsessed with wholly imaginary worlds, as different as possible from the one we actually inhabit. That’s a very odd habit, when you stop and think about it.
I thought I was going into a piece of writing that would be critical of drawing comparisons between fantasy and the real world, but the author did the exact opposite. He drew the comparison between the Ukraine counter-offensive and magic swords, and put those words into NATO's mouth.
It looks more a leftist who is mad that their realist socialist fiction didn't become popular and influential and instead the "conservative" fantasy of good and evil somehow came to define Western Liberal thinking, nevermind the sheer diversity of works that do confront moral grayness, or that cultures outside of the West (including Russia) do very much enjoy Fantasy as well.
(note the praise for the virtuously conservative Tolkien and Herbert at the beginning)
As someone who followed all of that quite extensivly, I tend to confirm this. Otherwise that disastrous offensive last year never would have happened at all. As it was quite clear from the beginning, that it was bound to fail - but the imagination that the glorious win of the righteous forces of history is about to happen. So it needed to happen, despite objections from reality seeing people on the ground.
Because the russian minefields and fortifications and russian artillery supperiority turned out to be very real. And they were real before.
Members acts as if the fiction was real. They have to or are labeled traitors, non team players etc. Those who get it either play along or stay silent.
Imagine Germans believing lies that hurt themselves.
And the opinion in germany is mixed about the incident, only very few believe it was Putin.
Some say, who cares for russian gas anyway, good that it ended - others are indeed very pissed about the whole thing (Scholz does not seem to like Selensky).
I did not see that. I did see the opinion, that they do not represent the ultimate evil, like the orcs do.
The russian soldiers also largely don't think they represent evil, they think they defend russia, that is the point being made - and if this already qualifies to you as saying they are not the bad guys, then I recommend reading a bit more carefully, as it is exactly this black and white thinking, that is in the realm of fantasy.
Let's suppose this is true (I'm not convinced, in practice most of them are fighting because they don't have choice, so what they think doesn't matter that much anyway). How do they explain the cognitive dissonance that instead of defending Russia they are actively attacking Ukraine? It makes no sense at all.
If you say that they believe that Russia should be great again, and Ukrainians should be its subjects just like Belorussians, this makes much more sense, and there is support for this kind of thinking in the population. But let's not pretend they're good guys then.
Replace 'Russia' with 'USA', and 'Ukraine' with 'Iraq'. There are lots of other examples that could be used as well. I am firmly in the camp that believe Russia is in the wrong here and also that the US was wrong to invade Iraq. But that doesn't change the fact that its easy to create a strong rational-sounding argument about how an offense is really a defense. It happens all the time. There is no dissonance. They believe that the attack is the defense.
I did not.
"> The russian soldiers also largely don't think they represent evil, they think they defend russia
Let's suppose this is true (I'm not convinced, in practice most of them are fighting because they don't have choice, so what they think doesn't matter that much anyway"
And are you aware, allmost no russian conscripts are involved in fighting?
It is a voluntarily army. Econonic reasons do play a role, especially for people from asian backwater provinces - but all in all they do fight, because they choose to.
So back to the main story - it is not just evil overlord Putin, that is the problem.
This is a very bold claim, can you back this up?
Because we won't see massive lines of Russian men trying to join the army to defend the homeland. In fact, the moment a general mobilization was announced you had hundreds of thousands (if not million+?) fleeing Russia.
The main motivations we've seen for the Russians joining are:
- entrepreneurship - going to war became an entrepreneurial endeavor to get paid a large sum of money (if I recall correctly Russians are now being paid more than US soldiers if you factor in their sign-in bonus);
- getting out of jail - to the point of seeing violent criminals commit crimes again;
I'm not saying they see themselves as representations of evil; I'm saying they don't seem to care whether they represent it or not.
And as far as I know, defending mother russia from NATO aggression is a major motivator, as well as money is.
But also the Nazis did not view themself as evil - but rather as powerful because of lack of restraint. And protecting the poor suppressed aryan people.
So my point was not at all, that the russian soldiers are somehow nice - just that the world is not as black and white as fantasy often is - but people like the fantasy approach of black and white - and the proplem starts when they apply this thinking to the real world.
They had their reasons or at least rationalizations, though you don't see them and they might not make sense to you.
> They literally are the bad guy.
Maybe. I agree that the invasion was a very grave evil. Even so, it doesn't mean that they're destined to lose, and we shouldn't think that way. Mongols were bad guys but won so much that they got tired of winning.
It's a very grave fallacy to believe that the Good Guys always prevail. And, besides, the Russians you ask would surely say, "Wait, you think those Banderite Ukrainians are the GOOD Guys?! And here I thought we were the Good Guys! Throughout its entire history, Russia has always fought and always conquered evil."
> Of course they say that, otherwise they would be in prison.
You can't seriously believe this. I'd invite you to hang out on the Russian internet (or Russian Telegram) for a different view. Have a look at what they write in their own language, when talking between themselves.
Let them enjoy some degree of relative freedom on Telegram channels where they still can. I honestly doubt it will last for long.
I read Putin's rationalization that was published just after the war broke off and retracted soon after but you can still read it.[0] He basically claims that Russia has to be great again and it is his historical role to conquer it so that Ukrainians are his slaves just like Belorussians are.
So yes, they have their reasons and realizations, just like another ruler in 1938 and 1939, the problem is that nobody else agreed with them.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20220305153356/https://thefronti...
You don't need to say that Putin isn't great to get arrested. Holding up a blank piece of paper is enough.
(There surely are plenty of political prisoners in russia, but I believe they were more vocal and organised in their opposition)
I suppose you can dismiss that because social media posts and having a daughter with a brain and a heart don't count as "verbal", but I don't think that would be very reasonable.
Putin et al truly believe in a "Greater Russia" and that Ukraine is part of that.
First (2014) they wanted agricultural resources, better sea access, etc. and they took Crimea.
That provided some reason for a more recent invasion, after almost a decade of blocked water supply Russia needed a land corridor and a secure water supply o/wise Crimea was a hollow gain.
Still not going well with that: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-dam-blast-could...
Next to grain and water the other complaints seem small petty namecalling with little justification.
No, they already had it de facto, just not de jure. But with the shift in power in Kiew they were afraid of loosing it.
Yeah, I'm sure that's exactly why. WW3 happened for no reason at all.
Second, they had very clear reasons: Putin always considered Ukraine his property and when he realized he can lose it, he decided to use force. He elaborated on it in a longer piece[0] and in the Carlson show.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220305153356/https://thefronti...
That we found this out in a small scale conflict is a blessing - our forefathers found it out in 1914 in a very unpleasant way across 1000km of trenches.
This is not a permanent state of affairs - a tank will be invented and it will break the stale mate in months.
This is quite nice, as it allows you to learn a lot about history by reading books from that time. It almost gives you an immersive sense of history, in a way.
Even the oldest legends of Europe -- Arthur, Holger Danske, Orlando Furioso, the 8th century BC Iliad, and I could go on -- ostensibly concerned themselves with the real world. (And, to strengthen Greer's point, often contained noble Saracens and other villains.)
Same goes for Asia, by the way. The great legends of Asia -- from the Three Kingdoms, to the Water Margin, to the Tale of Heike -- were at least nominally "real." Not concerned with imaginary worlds.
The myths we create today are qualitatively different in straightforward and obvious ways.
Nonetheless, I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing to have stories set in their own worlds, separated from reality. Maybe it is inevitable. In previous centuries, the world itself was largely unknown. Most people never left the city they were born in until they died. Reading something set in a different real place was in many ways the only way to experience it.
What is the first noteworthy piece of fiction set in a fictional land? "Alice in Wonderland", perhaps? Maybe in a world that was becoming a tad less mysterious (we already had telegraphs, trains, steam ships and so on), some started to look toward fantastical, fictional world to have the illusion of an unknown world.
> What is the first noteworthy piece of fiction set in a fictional land? "Alice in Wonderland", perhaps?
Maybe Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene? Its connection to our real world is tenuous at best, I'd say.
I don't disagree. But in a world where even reality was very much a mystery (so you had myths of ancient lost civilizations, cities of gold, etc and so forth), maybe religion, as literal as it was taken, was enough to satisfy the common people with its otherworldly descriptions of places.
My point is that I think it is natural that as the world becomes less mysterious and religion becomes increasingly seen as allegorical, the craving for fictional worlds where not all is known becomes more appealing.
> Maybe Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene? Its connection to our real world is tenuous at best, I'd say.
Maybe the oldes I can think of is the land of Avalon in Athurian legend? Still would have a tenuous connection to the real world.
Earliest I know of set in an entirely fictional land with no connection to the real world is Flatland by Edwin Abbott Abbott, from 1884.
And of course there's the religious texts. They often have a heavy focus on abstract things like afterlife that are very much detached from our daily life, but they're also very often foreign imports as well. Christianity is popular in Europe but its roots are in the middle east, and buddhism is very popular in east asia but its origins are in south asia. I think a certain desire for escapism is one reason why this is the case.
In fact, one distinctive feature of the last century was that organized religion became less relevant to many western people. Perhaps you could argue that fiction filled the void? Kind of like how the rise of protestantism removed a lot of catholic rites and rituals from northern europe and to fill the void things like freemasonry became really popular.
Really? Which ones?
Whereas fantasy is escapist and constructs alternative worlds, most works of science fiction -- and especially the classical "hard" science fiction of the Golden Age -- present us with a potential human future. Many of these futures, like Clarke's satellites and today's cyberpunk dystopia, quickly came to be realized. Others, like the space elevator, seem like inevitable ideas that will be realized at some point in the future.
There's a lot that can be written about this, but it's definitely something different...
It sort of mirrors children's development, with them gradually considering fairy tale elements as less real and relegating them to stories specifically.
Propaganda would be much less effective if people were able to think rationally.
And in a list I found here, I would say the majority is still quite concerned with the real world:
https://www.goodreads.com/list/show/6.Best_Books_of_the_20th...
Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter just replaced the bible in my opinion, but the people in the 19.century had reasons to flee into imaginary worlds as well.
In contrast, when you read The Lord of the Rings, you're reading a pure fantasy, about a world that you're not expected to believe is real in any particular way, and where the reflections on any real world concepts are buried deep in the subtext (unlike, say, a teaching by the Buddha).
When people tell their kids about Santa Claus is that because they believe he exists?
There are always credulous people, but even in highly religious communities you will find amazingly large numbers of people only there for the community and just going along with public displays of adherence to whatever the belief system is. “True believer” is a term for a good reason.
How do we know this?
Lord of the Rings is a Catholic Christian morality tale set in the third age of our world. We are now in the year 2024 of the seventh age. It is our world and it is no more or less fiction than the Song of Roland is.
I wish more people would read what the authors meant their worlds to be because a lot of what's described as 'merely fiction' is nothing of the sort.
As communication technology improves, we get better at making copies of and making searchable the most resonating works. This means that new creators face bigger and bigger barriers to resonating. Most people give up.
To adapt, People have become critics rather than creators - consumers rather than producers. This has a deep effect on our culture.
This might explain the malaise of inaction - that we don’t feel we can accomplish much and that we’ll more readily point out the flaws in an action than encourage the action in others.
As alluded to in the article, it also might increase the tribalism wherein we have one super-creator and their followers.
The act of creation also deepens understanding. The creation process creates a more thoughtful person as much as it creates the work itself.
How do we bring back a culture of creation?
I don't know if there ever was a culture of creation (have you any examples?) but I wouldn't say that there's any lack of opportunity for people today to create for themselves and their friends. Even the super-creators spin off their own opportunities for subdemiurges: recall Bowsette.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l-FDFsHA20w
It's true that now more than ever, niche super creators have found an audience. I think the paradox here is, because of specifically this, not so gifted people have less incentive to create.
30 years ago, there simply was no spreading of media that wasn't so mainstream. So there was no medium for a lot of niches. Without the medium, people felt rewarded in their local community for showing something interesting that had no mainstream analog.
In a sense, the niche creators that were great were more effectively broadcast leaving less audience for worse niche creators. This, over time, meant that less people tried to create and switched to critique.
I'm not convinced of that — I suspect that in earlier times, there were just as few creators, but we didn't get exposed to all* the critiques. (for instance, if I were to make this argument I'd have to go back much earlier than 30 years, because 30 years ago people were already putting their S&M Barbies up on the web; we were already on the second generation of browsers:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mosaic-netscape-0-9-was-released-30-years-ago-today/ )
However, under the hypothesis that fewer people try to create and switch to critique instead: that'd be their problem.EDIT: * eg, the other day on Zhihu I saw someone asking "What is even the point of Joker 2?" Nowadays we can see criticism from 5 billion people without even scrolling down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3FF_vBwftw
Why The "Toxic Fandom" Excuse Stopped Working - Critical Drinker After Hours
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tQBnhFCVcl4
In summary, blaming “Toxic Fandoms” is a convenient way for Hollywood to divert blame for the garbage movies they roll out and demand the audiences love. “Oh you hate our movies? It’s definitely not our fault, it must be because you’re just a hater and a toxic fan.”
I've always liked Nabokov's attitude towards reading:
"A wise reader reads the book of genius not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine. It is there that occurs the telltale tingle even though we must keep a little aloof, a little detached when reading."
Fandom is the opposite of this where people end up treating their favorite media the way K-Pop fans treat K-Pop idols and it's why fandom driven media just ends up lowbrow and bad.
He rails against the interactions of fans and large conglomerates but he was happy to cash checks anytime his work went up for sale
Remember his big publicity stunt of declining his name to appear on the Watchmen movie credits? Yet he had no issue taking the payday from DC that started it all
I've read everything he has written including his novels...but, shut up Alan
Because back then Comics book industry was not the same, he sold his story and rights to DC and the contract specified that if DC stopped selling the book after a period of time, the rights would revert back to him. Alas, he wrote Watchmen, it's never been out of print he has not been allowed to reclaim his own work.
A lot of his complaining about Movie/Comic book companies comes from the perspectivie of a creator who has lost control of his creations, and is doing what he can to protest that.
You thinking he should behave a certain way in response to your appreciation is more or less exactly what he thinks is ridiculous!