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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Sarah Hoyt: Meaning |
| 2018-04-17 |
| You aren’t G-d, and thank heavens, neither am I. Not that I’m putting Stranger in a Strange Land down. on a scale of Heinlein books, we’ll say it was my favorite at 14, not so much at 55, but still, you know, yeah "Thou art God" and all that might have been the zeitgeist of the time (or to quote Heinlein at a later date "what some writers will do for money!’) but Heinlein still missed the most outrageous implications of the idea. ...Humans weren’t designed that way. We’re creatures of the band. Our remote almost-human ancestors would have been born into a rigid hierarchy, because ape bands have a rigid hierarchy. It can change, but it can’t go away. We were designed to obey rules and boundaries, learned and instinctive. And the very keeping of body and spirit together, in more primitive times, imposed an order on a primate’s life, whether pre-human or human. There was food to forage for, and things to hunt, and young ones to look after, and someone had to look out for the lions. ...This opening of our minds till our brain fell off left those people not fortunate enough to be raised by people of strong principles floating in a sea of tedium and lack of purpose. Since the only firm principle they have is that there was never anyone as enlightened or perceptive as themselves, they can’t examine their own beliefs and actions for errors. They also can’t find reality with two hands and a seeing eye dog, which is why they think reality changes with what you believe, and therefore think that your refusing to engage in their preferred speech, or saying things they don’t like is a literal aggression. Because they believe words an stories can tear the world apart and put it together in another shape. It’s not that they’re gods ‐ though they might think they are ‐ but that they’ve reverted to the mind of the primitive savage, unable to connect cause and effect outside themselves, and therefore living in a world they think thoughts or intentions can alter for good and ill: buffeted by the thoughts and intentions of others, looking in vain for the safe room that will allow them to remake the world anew with their thoughts. That is what is behind their attacks on those who don’t think the same way they do. That is what is behind their bizarre displays like trying to levitate the Denver Mint. It is definitely what is behind their belief that if they erase history and remake it in their image, and install a regime that has brought death wherever it was tried, this time there will be utopia. They’re savages, in a haunted world, blindly offering sacrifice to forces they can’t understand and trying to think the world in their image and semblance, then finding scape goats when it doesn’t work. Which is always, because that’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |