As my bio suggests, I'm involved with some novelists, some much more than others, and I often analyze the social and moral implications of certain stories and potential stories. In all of the scope of modern fiction I see many a story that has fantastic implications. Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider is one good example. In a world so inclined to rationalize a lack of justice, Pale Rider was a breath of fresh air. I also was recently touched and quite frankly surprised by the positive symbolism in the movie Battleship, rogue American and Japanese naval officers team up to save the world (that shouldn't spoil anything for you, I at least hope). The United States and Japan working in tandem, that is the path to a promising future IMHO. Those are two examples, but in all of this there is still one particular story that no one has managed to run with that I would very much like to see. Here is my synopsis of it.
Welcome To The Intergalactic Community
This story would begin with a diverse group of sentient beings from other worlds appearing to our leaders and telling them that we need to shape up fast or they will be forced to blast us to the stone age. Their ultimatum could be triggered by any number of things that I would happily leave to the writer's imagination. Perhaps we're on the verge of mastering environmental control that will lead shortly to a terraforming technique that could double as a weapon of mass destruction, just as one example of the sorts of things that could get these beings' attention.
They give us a list of things we need to correct and soon. The list includes religious fundamentalism, the desire for regional ethnic homogeneity, the use of fossil fuels, and the killing of animals for food. Maybe some other things as well. I'm flexible, just as long as the basic story gets told.
Our world leaders hop to it. Even the nations that would normally resist such things, however reluctantly, cooperate. They fear the ultimatum.
But there is a resistance and, to the surprise of Earth's leaders, it's not isolated groups of extremists. It's a unified and well coordinated resistance. They don't use terror but make direct attacks on the alien beings. Key operatives of Earth governments start to disappear without a trace and key elections around the world start to seem obviously rigged. Slowly but surely the Earth's ability to cooperate with the aliens is being destroyed.
Desperately the leaders of Earth turn to the best analyst they can find. Probably a quirky guy or gal who's quirkiness would only be tolerated because things are so desperate. Our hero sets out to find who's behind this sabotage of Earth's ability to cooperate with the Intergalactic Community and thus avoid being blasted back to the stone age, and how that goes is what makes the story interesting, worth reading, worth watching, or enduring whatever other medium it's told through. The only detail I offer here is that our hero discovers another alien is behind it, one that looks a lot like us.
Somewhere around the big climax, probably just before it, the hero discovers this alien who is working against the rest of them is Reason herself. You know, something like the Greek goddess Athena. Our hero then ends up helping Reason humiliate these other aliens along with many of Earth's leaders for their hubris.
In some sort of epilogue it is made clear these aliens were not the all-wise and powerful beings they claimed to be, even though they may have actually thought they were, and now that Earth has been freed from their attempted tyranny, we now enter the greater Intergalactic Community as a worthy peer. Worthy not because we did things the way some self-appointed judges told us too, but because we entered on our own terms with only Reason and our traditions as our guide.
------
I long for that story because I tire of the hubris of so many temporal movements. Just once I'd like to see them take it on the nose and be put in their place. History tells us that movements come and go, and most of them, no matter how important their participants think they were at the time, end up looking silly and misinformed in hind sight.
Only those movements that center around individual dignity and liberty last. The moral lessons of Homer and even the morals of folklore all continue while Alexander's beloved cause of Hellenism is long dead, Greek and Roman democracy left with whimpers, modern liberalism has become near hopelessly corrupt, and no current political cause except possibly libertarianism has any legitimate hope to reach across more than a few decades or at best a couple centuries. The lessons of history tell us this, if we are humble enough to listen.
There is no permanent residence for Reason in any collective movement or cause. That is why they don't last. The collective mind is the mind of an irrational beast. The rational mind, contrary to some modern philosophies, must be an individual mind. Productive group-think only occurs to best effect when each mind involved is distinctly individual. To paraphrase Stephen Covey's 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People, a group of individuals can become an interdependent and highly effective unit, but a group of collectivists become co-dependent and get less done as a group than even a typical set of individuals working apart would. The key is the individual in this, and any movement or cause that doesn't see the individual as greater in importance than the group is doomed to be swamped in time's wake.
I know this is a hard concept. How can the individual be more important than the group when the group is made up of multiple individuals? Here are just a few reasons why the individual is more important than the group.
(1) The group can cease to exist while all the individuals that comprised it remain. They can go their separate ways, the group is gone, but all of the individuals that were part of it still exist.
(2) The group exists to benefit individuals, not the other way around. If at least one individual doesn't benefit from a group, doesn't it go away?
(3) Groups are conceptualized entities. They have no concrete existence. They can be an easy illusion or delusion. One doesn't need to be mentally disturbed to believe one is interacting with a group that doesn't in fact exist. Some times perceived friends, people who you believe to be part of a group you call 'your friends', turn out not to be in that group. Individuals on the other hand, their existence is very concrete. They may not be in groups you believe them to be in, but their existence is undeniable, short of questioning your very grasp on reality.
Finally, there is a very important distinction to be made between "the individual" and "me as an individual". "The individual" is third person, meaning reverence of "the individual" is a reverence of others not of self. This fine point confuses many a highly regarded scholar.
Individualism is not self-centeredness, but quite the opposite. As an individualist I want you and others to have your individual dignity respected and your individual liberty maximized. The third person nature of this fixes the commonly perceived problems with individualism and liberty. Since I want to see not only your liberty maximized but everyone else's as well, I balance the extent of your liberty with that of others. You should essentially be free to do whatever you wish as long as it doesn't cause a critical problem for someone else.
e.g. You're free to own and use guns but your not free to use them to harm others except for defensive purposes. You're free to behave as you please in privacy with other consenting adults, but you're not free to bother people with public displays of what most think should be private behavior. The question of harm may be debatable, but it is reasonable for people to expect not to be blatantly offended in public places, unless of course the subject of their offense does not offend most others in the community.
Too often people have launched from the need to accommodate others into a collectivism that some how elevates the community above the individual, or at least attempts to put it on par. The launch is an irrational leap. I think we could use a good story told that helps more of us to see that.
Welcome To The Intergalactic Community
This story would begin with a diverse group of sentient beings from other worlds appearing to our leaders and telling them that we need to shape up fast or they will be forced to blast us to the stone age. Their ultimatum could be triggered by any number of things that I would happily leave to the writer's imagination. Perhaps we're on the verge of mastering environmental control that will lead shortly to a terraforming technique that could double as a weapon of mass destruction, just as one example of the sorts of things that could get these beings' attention.
They give us a list of things we need to correct and soon. The list includes religious fundamentalism, the desire for regional ethnic homogeneity, the use of fossil fuels, and the killing of animals for food. Maybe some other things as well. I'm flexible, just as long as the basic story gets told.
Our world leaders hop to it. Even the nations that would normally resist such things, however reluctantly, cooperate. They fear the ultimatum.
But there is a resistance and, to the surprise of Earth's leaders, it's not isolated groups of extremists. It's a unified and well coordinated resistance. They don't use terror but make direct attacks on the alien beings. Key operatives of Earth governments start to disappear without a trace and key elections around the world start to seem obviously rigged. Slowly but surely the Earth's ability to cooperate with the aliens is being destroyed.
Desperately the leaders of Earth turn to the best analyst they can find. Probably a quirky guy or gal who's quirkiness would only be tolerated because things are so desperate. Our hero sets out to find who's behind this sabotage of Earth's ability to cooperate with the Intergalactic Community and thus avoid being blasted back to the stone age, and how that goes is what makes the story interesting, worth reading, worth watching, or enduring whatever other medium it's told through. The only detail I offer here is that our hero discovers another alien is behind it, one that looks a lot like us.
Somewhere around the big climax, probably just before it, the hero discovers this alien who is working against the rest of them is Reason herself. You know, something like the Greek goddess Athena. Our hero then ends up helping Reason humiliate these other aliens along with many of Earth's leaders for their hubris.
In some sort of epilogue it is made clear these aliens were not the all-wise and powerful beings they claimed to be, even though they may have actually thought they were, and now that Earth has been freed from their attempted tyranny, we now enter the greater Intergalactic Community as a worthy peer. Worthy not because we did things the way some self-appointed judges told us too, but because we entered on our own terms with only Reason and our traditions as our guide.
------
I long for that story because I tire of the hubris of so many temporal movements. Just once I'd like to see them take it on the nose and be put in their place. History tells us that movements come and go, and most of them, no matter how important their participants think they were at the time, end up looking silly and misinformed in hind sight.
Only those movements that center around individual dignity and liberty last. The moral lessons of Homer and even the morals of folklore all continue while Alexander's beloved cause of Hellenism is long dead, Greek and Roman democracy left with whimpers, modern liberalism has become near hopelessly corrupt, and no current political cause except possibly libertarianism has any legitimate hope to reach across more than a few decades or at best a couple centuries. The lessons of history tell us this, if we are humble enough to listen.
There is no permanent residence for Reason in any collective movement or cause. That is why they don't last. The collective mind is the mind of an irrational beast. The rational mind, contrary to some modern philosophies, must be an individual mind. Productive group-think only occurs to best effect when each mind involved is distinctly individual. To paraphrase Stephen Covey's 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People, a group of individuals can become an interdependent and highly effective unit, but a group of collectivists become co-dependent and get less done as a group than even a typical set of individuals working apart would. The key is the individual in this, and any movement or cause that doesn't see the individual as greater in importance than the group is doomed to be swamped in time's wake.
I know this is a hard concept. How can the individual be more important than the group when the group is made up of multiple individuals? Here are just a few reasons why the individual is more important than the group.
(1) The group can cease to exist while all the individuals that comprised it remain. They can go their separate ways, the group is gone, but all of the individuals that were part of it still exist.
(2) The group exists to benefit individuals, not the other way around. If at least one individual doesn't benefit from a group, doesn't it go away?
(3) Groups are conceptualized entities. They have no concrete existence. They can be an easy illusion or delusion. One doesn't need to be mentally disturbed to believe one is interacting with a group that doesn't in fact exist. Some times perceived friends, people who you believe to be part of a group you call 'your friends', turn out not to be in that group. Individuals on the other hand, their existence is very concrete. They may not be in groups you believe them to be in, but their existence is undeniable, short of questioning your very grasp on reality.
Finally, there is a very important distinction to be made between "the individual" and "me as an individual". "The individual" is third person, meaning reverence of "the individual" is a reverence of others not of self. This fine point confuses many a highly regarded scholar.
Individualism is not self-centeredness, but quite the opposite. As an individualist I want you and others to have your individual dignity respected and your individual liberty maximized. The third person nature of this fixes the commonly perceived problems with individualism and liberty. Since I want to see not only your liberty maximized but everyone else's as well, I balance the extent of your liberty with that of others. You should essentially be free to do whatever you wish as long as it doesn't cause a critical problem for someone else.
e.g. You're free to own and use guns but your not free to use them to harm others except for defensive purposes. You're free to behave as you please in privacy with other consenting adults, but you're not free to bother people with public displays of what most think should be private behavior. The question of harm may be debatable, but it is reasonable for people to expect not to be blatantly offended in public places, unless of course the subject of their offense does not offend most others in the community.
Too often people have launched from the need to accommodate others into a collectivism that some how elevates the community above the individual, or at least attempts to put it on par. The launch is an irrational leap. I think we could use a good story told that helps more of us to see that.
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