posted
No, not really. It teaches a lot about what OSC thinks government is like, and perhaps even should be. But doesn't really cover what government actually IS. Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
Actually, I hoped that the reverse would be true. I thought I showed the many ways power is obtained, misused, used, and exercised, but by no means did I show what it SHOULD be, since I have no idea what the ideal form of government would be, or how we could ever get to such a condition from where we are now.
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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posted
So what you're saying is that governments are actually run by adolescent megalomaniacs. Things are starting to make a lot more sense now... Posts: 2149 | Registered: Aug 2000
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posted
*shrugs* My stepfather is the right-hand-man of the mayor of my island, and judging by the stories he tells of the behind-the-scenes workings of local government, the Shadow series was almost creepily accurate in describing what government is, at least in my experience.
This aspect of the series was actually what I found most fascinating about it. While I was very interested in what happened to Bean and Petra and Peter and all the others (who seemed like old friends, since I've been reading the Ender series since I was in middle school), I think the way OSC juggled showing the absolutely huge range of tiny personal, emotional factors that influence the Big Events That Effect Everyone was pretty darn amazing. Giant was by far my favorite book in the series (not only because it focused more on Peter, who I thought was the most interesting character this time around) because to me it really showed how governments are made up of individual people trying desperately to make a stable community for their families and friends (or, in the case of people who I'd call "bad", bend the world to serve themselves exclusively) in a harsh world filled with people with radically different ideas.
In fact, Giant has helped clarify my own thoughts on government quite a bit. *grin* I watched WAY too much TV and movies when I was a kid, and instead of actually observing the world around me, I bought in to what they told me to think for a long time (about all sorts of things, from True Love to How The World Works). I basically learned from bad-comic-book-plot-style shows that there was indeed a THEM, a secret conspiracy of Bad Guys who made all the crappy things in the world happen, instead of individual people usually doing their best to form stable communities whose efforts as often as not go bad. (Which isn't to say that there ARE no Conspiracies Of Bad Guys, just that I thought of things much more simplistically and black-and-white back then *grin*)
I suppose most thoughts on what government Really Is Like are mostly opinions, though.
posted
All thoughts about what reality is are opinions. If enough people hold sufficiently similar opinions, then you are "sane."
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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The nice thing is we can select subsets of humanity in general, so most people can find groups to belong to in which their views are "sane." As long as you avoid actually listening to someone with contrary views, but instead classify them as "madmen" or "evil" or "stupid," you can go along with your cobelievers, convinced of your shared sanity no matter how many people outside your group insist the world is round, Elvis is dead, Jews don't secretly run everything, George W. Bush didn't invade Iraq to enrich the oil lobby, or "creation science" is an oxymoron.
Let's see ... is there any group left that isn't forced now to reject MY sanity?
Posts: 2005 | Registered: Jul 1999
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Although, come to think of it, I'm not really sure what a "lalala" is, or if I'd really want to plug it. Posts: 1595 | Registered: Feb 2003
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posted
See, now you're getting all existential, and we'll have to discuss the idea of consensual reality....
Posts: 3141 | Registered: Apr 2000
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Could anyone explain the term "consensual reality", please? (at least I have a good reason for not knowing)
Posts: 132 | Registered: Mar 2005
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Nobody knows everything (extreme view: Nobody actually KNOWS anything). But we trust others to know what we don't know. So in telling each other stories about how the world (and/or the universe) works, we build up a shared view of the world. We all agree more or less on what the color "blue" is or how bananas taste or how tall you have to be before you can be called a "tall man" and how much shorter a woman can be and still be called a "tall woman." Things that are simply subjective, but yet we treat as if we "knew" what these words mean and how these things should be judged and understood.
So within our immediate community - the 130-or-so people that we know well - we develop a consensus about how reality works, opinions we hold in common. Our "consensus reality."
Nowadays, with access to opinions and views from all over the world, we might find more challenges to that consensus reality, forcing the whole village we belong to (those 130 people) to adapt our view of reality to come closer to the "worldwide" consensus; or we can decide that the worldwide consensus is evil or insane and cover our ears or declare our religion to be true or ... however we adapt.
But WITHIN our community with its consensual reality, our own confidence (our "faith," whether it's a religion or not) is boosted by being surrounded by people who seem to share our worldview.
This is why it is such a powerful (and potentially dangerous) thing when our mass media is controlled and operated, not by a conspiracy, but by people who live in the same village, but it happens to be a village that holds views that to many of us seem to be insane: For example, the politically correct but mutually exclusive ideas that ordinary gender differences between men and women, which are tied to the reproduction of the species, are nevertheless completely the product of our culture and not genetically imprinted on us; while sexual orientation, which does NOT directly promote the reproduction of the species, is COMPLETELY genetically controlled and is not voluntary or cultural in any way. If both these propositions were true, it would be miraculous that our species managed to reproduce so successfully. Yet I daresay that the vast majority of our news media and subject-free university faculty members believe both propositions and have no idea that there might be a logical problem with believing both. So our news media and educational establishment are, arguably, insane on some core issues that influence public policy. SOMETHING in this conundrum needs to be reanalyzed, but it is absolutely forbidden to do serious discussion of either proposition, because you are instantly branded either sexist or homophobic. And thus real information gathering disappears in order to protect the consensual reality of an elite community that refuses to adapt to other communities' views - because they have already decided that anyone who disagrees with them is insane.
There are such examples in every community - complete madness that nevertheless persists for a very, very long time, unchallenged because the community is sure that anyone who questions their consensual reality is either insane or evil. For instance, in the Mormon community, we were avid anti-Communists for a long time primarily because Communist-Party-ruled countries were oppressed and religions within them were suppressed and persecuted.
But in the effort to argue against Communism, Mormons became committed to supporting capitalism. This fed into an ideology that first became common in the LDS Church with Heber J. Grant, who was a very successful businessmen. Prior to his time, though, the Mormon Church was definitely an anti-capitalist, pro-communist church (using OLD meanings of those words). We did not believe in "the free market"; the Doctrine & Covenants (revelations and teachings of [mostly] Joseph Smith) are crystal clear about the Lord's hostility to unfair distribution of wealth, and promote "The Law of Consecration," the Mormon alternative to capitalism.
Today, Communism as an anti-Christian ideology is basically over, replaced by other anti-Christian ideologies (i.e., Islam and Political Correctness); but Mormons still cling to a commitment to capitalism as if it had something to do with our religion. It doesn't; in fact, readers of the Book of Mormon should realize that the opposite is the case, that this celebration of the unequal gathering of wealth and condemnation of the poor for their own poverty is the beginning of the decline of a godly community.
But any Mormon who writes as I have just done in the past couple of paragraphs is treated like the anti-Christ by a very large number of Mormons. It is obvious I MUST BE EVIL.
And the hilarious thing is that almost all of the Mormons who just HATE it when someone talks like this have actually made solemn promises to obey the Law of Consecration. Ironic.
No community has a monopoly on self-delusion - on collective insanity. And EVERY community that has real power in the lives of its members builds a consensual reality that forms part of why they maintain a high degree of allegiance to that group. It is inevitable that the consensual reality will be challenged, usually by ACTUAL reality; eventually, the community will either adapt or die. But in the meantime, you get weird phenomena like the religious fervor with which the dogma of global warming was spread through the world, despite the utter dearth of evidence that the phenomenon, as described, was actually happening.
The need to have a powerful consensual reality is a part of how humans form communities. It has a strong evolutionary advantage - communities that can achieve a consensual reality have a far higher chance of survival than communities that can't. But they must also have the ability to CHANGE their consensual reality or they will also die.
Therefore we need both forces in all communities: The orthodox force, that tries to hold the consensual reality against all challengers; and the radical force, that tries to bend it to fit challenges, real or perceived.
When the challenge is real - i.e., the consensual reality has come up against REAL reality - then successful communities eventually stop resisting the change, and the orthodox almost always pretend that THEY BELIEVED THE NEW WAY ALL ALONG <grin> or that it was never a big deal.
But when the challenge is spurious - i.e., one community's consensual reality is challenged by the c.r. of another community, which is LESS connected with real reality - the orthodox forces can protect the community from changing to an ideology that is actually even stupider than the one they have.
It's such a balancing act, trying to keep a community alive ...
posted
*ponder* Can the sum total of (hypothetical) individuals who have decided (for different, non-mutually shared reasons) to reject the world consensus still be called a community? They have no shared idealogy beyond their mutual rejection of the prevalent worldview.
I'm actually not quite sure what I'm trying to say, but writing it down makes it a wee bit clearer, and this is a pretty darn interesting subject.
I must say, I myself am rather fond of the Hatrack Consensual Reality (TM), which is based on the idea that OSC is a cool cat and that diverse individuals can discuss subjects passionately without starting to hate each other.
Posts: 3141 | Registered: Apr 2000
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I have to say, thanks for the idea that capitalism and Mormonism don't have to go together. I remember as a teenager asking my dad, "Isn't communism kind of like the law of consecration?". He said no, they were COMPLETELY different, communism is evil, consecration would be nice but not something we have to worry about now, etc. I wish he had been a little less emotional about it, and we could have rationally compared the ways they were the same and the ways they were different, and what we should actually do in our lives.
Instead, I always secretly used the Communist government in Civ II, hoping to somehow learn more about this thing that could make my dad so upset. :-) Only when I read your Storyteller in Zion essay did I realize that I was actually on the right track as a teenager. I probably should have just read some books or something, but it's a hard subject to find impartial views on.
posted
LOL! I always use the Communist govt as well. Like c'mon! Try conquering the world as a democracy and see how far you get! And you don't get the "Totalitarian Democracy" option either so so sad... Heh, after conquering... I mean liberating the oppressed workers and peasants who are so suffering from the decadent capitalist pigs the English and the Spanish, evil individuals set to collapse the Union of Soviet Socialist republics to chaos by curropting the people with "democracy" and it almost resulted in the callapse of the USSR, so after brutally crushing the coup and executing the traitors to the workers and peasents I have succesfully restored the Soviet Union to its full glory... and now America looks nice... (Psst, prepare the nukes)
Posts: 1567 | Registered: Oct 2004
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quote:Prior to his time, though, the Mormon Church was definitely an anti-capitalist, pro-communist church (using OLD meanings of those words).
I agree with the overall post here, but I wanted to point out that the Law of Consecration isn't Communism. A prophet (probably President Grant but I really don't remember) stated that the difference is free will, that communism gives no choice and the Law of Consecration is entered into only with the freely given covenant of every person involved. But I also agree that capitalism is a lot farther from the scriptural Mormon ideal than communism, and the vast majority of the Church has a stigma of anti-communism/pro-capitalism from both the reaction to religious suppression in communist nations (well at this point it's worth noting that really I up until this very last mention of it, I should have used "socialism" instead of "communism") and probably also from the vast, anti-communist movement secularly at the same time.
[EDIT: I realize that you never actually equated the Law of Consecration with Communism, I was clarifying for my own benefit ]
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