Thought Experiment : Neutral Room
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Monthly Archives: September 2014
Why all the orphans?
(This was inspired by this very awesome Cracked podcast. Listen to it! It’s the best podcast around. )
Why are there so many orphans amongst our popular protagonists?
Harry Potter? Orphan. Conan the Barbarian? Orphan. Luke Skywalker? Orphan. The three most popular superheroes in the world… Batman, Superman and Spider-man? All orphans.
In fact, Spider-Man is an orphan one and a half times over (lost both parents then Uncle Ben) and Luke Skywalker is a full fledged double orphan (both parents then aunt and uncle… and then Obi-wan!).
Even spookier are the undeclared orphans, where were are never told that a character is an orphan, but their parents are never seen or even mentioned, even in situations where you would think they would show up.
This is especially prevalent in kids-oriented media. A lot of children’s entertainment seems to take place in a world where children’s lives neither include nor require adults, let alone actual parents.
And don’t even get me started on the bizarre world of Duckburg, where Uncle Scrooge can be Donald’s uncle and Donald can be Huey, Louis, and Dewey’s uncle without any apparent need for any actual parents to be involved.
So what’s the deal? Why do we have so many orphans, declared and undeclared, in our media? What is so appealing about the orphan character that it becomes so commonplace that you barely even notice it any more? What’s killing fictional parents?
As usual, I have a number of theories, any of which and/or any combination of which may form a full explanation.
The murderer of all these fictional parents is, of course, their writer(s), so we have to start from the writer’s perspective in order to get a grip on the issue. What does the writer get from having his protagonist(s) be orphaned?
First of all, having your character be an orphan is an instant, easy way to generate sympathy. Loss of one’s parents is one of the most primal childhood fears and it does not go away when we become adults. Therefore, making a character an orphan is an instant road into people’s hearts because in one word – orphan – you establish that this person has had one of the worst possible things happen to them.
The literary furniture we still have in the collective subconscious of the English speaking world of the Dickensian orphan has, over the years, become part of this.
Another advantage of orphaning your protagonist is that it simplifies things enormously. It is way easier to write for a character when you don’t have to take into account complicated things like multi-axis family relationships.
But this is not mere laziness on the point of the writers. It is actually a solution to a very difficult moral conflict.
See, the classic hero’s journey requires that the hero leave home and travel far, far away. They have to put themselves in danger and risk all. They have to leave behind all they know in order to do What’s Right.
This would all be extremely irresponsible if you have living parents and an extended family who are all relying on you to do your part for the family unit. It makes for a far cleaner narrative arc, without complicated moral questions about family and duty, if your main character has, through no fault of their own, been severed from all primary family responsibility.
Witness Spider-Man’s issues with being a superhero while also looking after his Aunt May.
Another reason to kill off your protagonist’s parents is that it forces your hero or heroine to be independent, and one of the deepest messages of modern, individualist culture is that the only acceptable hero is the one who is the most individual. That means our heroes cannot have any help or guidance from anybody, as that would diminish their individuality.
I mean really, would you be able to respect a protagonist who is part of a huge extended family, including two living parents, and everything they do is with enormous help from a gigantic support network, of which they are only a small part?
How would we decide who was the winner and who was the loser then?
The only acceptable form of assistance is from the mentor character, and even that is bent towards individualist aims, because the mentor is never allowed to provide anything like literal, direct, physical help.
Instead, they provide deep but vague wisdom that serves mostly to aid the hero in their journey of self-discovery. This effectively turns the mentor into an individualist net gain, as their advice makes the hero even more of an individual.
Clearly, any kind of permanent, strong connection to living parents and relatives would suggest that our hero actually needs somebody, and we are far, far too addicted to the simple and satisfying tale of the rugged individualist hero who does it all themselves to willingly accept such a complication.
A darker potential reason for the plethora of orphans is that, for whatever reason, a lot of us have a lot of both latent and blatant hostility towards our parents, writers included (especially?). By orphaning one’s main character, a writer might be acting out that hostility in a morally acceptable way by creating a world where their parents are already dead.
As you can see, there are a lot of different reasons why a writer, especially a lazy one, would orphan their protagonist. It satisfies so many of the demands of both the writer and the audience, both of whom, of course, are products of the selfsame highly individualistic culture as the rest of us.
At this point, the truly original and independent thing to do is create media in which people are fully dependent on one another and freely admit it. The radical move is to pierce the illusion of autonomy by showing just how thin and phony it is, and how much of what we believe about ourselves is based upon this lie.
Who knows, I might be the one to do it.
Meanwhile…. I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.
Repeal nudity laws
Fiction : Power Switch
Only fifteen minutes after I woke up, I turned myself On.
I know I am not supposed to do that. The doctors and med techs say that the mind is not ready to be electrically stimulated into the On state until at least an hour after waking, and preferably after a hearty breakfast. But NO COFFEE.
They tell us that every time we check in at Control, as though the urge to drink coffee was some sort of primordial instinct that required constant reinforcement to suppress. But I have always been a green tea gal myself.
Besides, only a genuine mental defective would imbibe anything caffeinated when, with a touch of a button, they can be more awake than any human being has ever been in the history of humanity.
But I’m not addicted. I could stop right now and never miss it. I only turned myself On early because I was working on a very interesting chess calculus puzzle when I timed out and the system turned me Off last night, and I want a chance to finish it before I have to go to work.
As usual, my morning routine seems like it is happening to someone else. While I am On, it is absurdly easy to delegate routine tasks, ones for which you have strong muscle and reflex memories, to a lower, subconscious level of your mental muscle, leaving your conscious mind free to focus on higher level thinking.
So I am my own servant. I only have to tell my body to do something and it does it. Psychologically, the experience is subjectively identical to having someone else do the work. Only the physical sensations of movement and touch differentiate it from the actions of another.
Thus, I can do almost anything routine while keeping my conscious mind in the state of relaxed alertness that is required by the kind of work we of the Electric Lizard program are called upon to do.
I am in my favorite breakfast spot, the Nook, before I have to take any mental CPU time away from my chess calculus calculations. In theory, I could decide upon and order my breakfast from one of their charming waitresses without taking myself off autopilot, but one of the strongest and most inflexible rules of the program is that you never, ever interact with another human being that way. In order to preserve our humanity, we Lizards are trained to make a very specific and concentrated effort to emotionally connect with every human being we interact with.
Agents who forget this rule end up the real Lizards, and lose not only their humanity but a good deal of their sentience as well. It happened to my favorite bunkmate during training. I saw her drifting away from humanity and I regret to this day that I chose loyalty to her over her own wellbeing, and did not report her increasing detachment to the docs until it was far too late, and she was a shrieking, babbling madwoman.
That’s why I never, ever forget. The On state has many wonderful characteristics, but it dampens one’s empathy in the process. And without empathy, we become lost in our own minds.
I am just finishing my meal when a purple-green flash in my peripheral vision tells me that the system that controls my implants thinks it has just turned me On. I smile inwardly at this. It was child’s play to hack the firmware of my implants so that they always told Control what Control wanted to hear and left the actual On and Off switch to me. And they had to have known that we would all figure it out in short order. Yet the charade persists.
The soft, neutral voice of my implants tells me that my assignment today is to monitor a potential hotspot near the edge of the Wentworth neighborhood. Analysis has assigned this area, around six square blocks, a high probability of some kind of flareup, and I am to travel there, assess the situation, and intervene if necessary.
That is too big an area for just one agent, but one of the peculiarities of my kind is that we cannot tolerate one another’s company when On. This necessitates becoming adept at working solo, which tends to suit us just fine.
Oh, and by “my kind” I mean, of course, those of us in the Electric Lizard program. Not that we are a separate species, or anything. We are as human as you are.
After some deliberation, I decide to walk to my assigned area. It will take eleven minutes longer, but the crisis point is not predicted until fifteen minutes from now, so I have time.
And I am not in the mood to interact with a cabbie or bus patrons. The very idea of having to not just put up with their mindless nattering but also to try to connect with them emotionally makes my head ache. People rarely attempt to interact with you when you are walking alone, especially if you do so while looking focused and purposeful.
I love my fellow human beings. I value each and every one of their precious, vulnerable lives. The whole purpose of the program is to keep them safe from harm. They are all valuable and it is neither my job or my right to judge them.
It’s just that sometimes. I find them rather hard to take. But that’s true of all us humans, right?
I swear I’m not drifting off. I’m not. I adore all my little blind sheep. I would never dream of viewing them as anything less than full, valid, worthwhile human beings.
And if, hypothetically, I were to start feeling like they were worthless stumbling disgusting drooling morons who don’t deserve a nanosecond of my time or attention, Control would find out, turn off my implants, and that would be it. I would never be On again. I would spend the rest of my life bleating and excreting in a heavy fog of ignorance and idiocy, just like them.
And that is simply…. unthinkable.
I reach my assigned area and find a bus bench to sit on while I monitor the area near the predicted epicenter of the disturbance. To the outer world, I am just another businesswoman in a business casual suit, staring at her laptop while she waits for a bus.
But I know that I am so much, much more than that. If any of these human cattle start causing trouble, I will know, and apply whatever kind of force is needed to defuse the situation.
I am not drifting off.
The 4th R
Lost at sea
It’s the middle of the afternoon and I feel like crap. What a coincidence.
I feel very lost right now. I often feel lost. Lost is sort of my default state. But right now, it’s worse than usual.
In addition to feeling lost, I feel dizzy and disoriented. And I don’t think that this is a purely existential feeling. As you know, I have been getting nasty earaches lately, and that has caused me to focus on my ears a lot more than I usually do.
And that has got me thinking about these periodic spells of feeling very disoriented and dizzy that I have had for my whole life, and wondering if there is a physiological cause. Maybe there is something deeply wrong with my sinuses that causes them not just to fill up and get clogged, but for those clogged sinuses to put enough pressure on my skull to warp the bloodflow and give me these periods of disorientation and confusion.
It’s not a pleasant thought, but it’s entirely possible that I have been suffering from a form of mild, chronic brain trauma for my whole life. The pressure coming on then going off would certainly be enough to throw one off balance in more than one sense. The dizziness could easily be a product of fluid pressure in the inner ear.
Then again, the answer might not be so dire. It could simply be that I am so goddamned sedentary that I am prone to staying in the same position for so long that I experience blood pooling in various parts of the body, and then when I move, its like standing up too fast… too much blood moving at the same time causes a purely vascular form of disorientation.
And then there’s the chronic abuse my poor battered cardiovascular system gets from my untreated sleep apnea and my semi-treated type 2 diabetes. In many ways, it’s a miracle I am still alive and kicking.
I credit my love of fresh fruit for that, and my lack of drinking and smoking and drinking coffee and so on.
Always be grateful for the bad habits you do not have.
Low blood sugar can also cause dizziness and disorientation, of course, as can dehydration, both of which can happen to me on a summer afternoon. I am ninety percent certain that I don’t feel nearly as bad in the afternoon during the winter months, so heat is probably a big factor. Not in the lifelong issues with periods of disorientation, of course, but with the very modern problem with afternoons being the worst time of the day for me.
Basically, I am a fairly unhealthy person. I have a lot of things wrong with me, and those are just the problems that I have diagnoses for. And the older I get, the less forgiving of my self-neglect and general inattention life is going to be. This big fat meat robot I pilot around is not a very well maintained machine.
Of course, I can’t let psychology completely off the hook. I have felt lost at sea emotionally for a long time too, probably ever since I started school without having gone to kindergarten first, and my world got much harsher and colder as I got bullied and harassed and the school didn’t seem to give a damn.
Hence my feelings of abandonment. School was a real fall from grace for me. Before that, I was something of a golden child. Adults were amused and bemused by me and I spent each day with a babysitter to pay attention to me. People treated me like I was special because I was so bright, and in my own way I really enjoyed that.
Then school came, and everything went to hell.
And as we all know really, really well by now, I reacted to that by turning my back on a cruel and senseless world and retreating into the world of books and TV and video games. This is a not uncommon defense mechanism and in more healthy people, it simply forms the bedrock of their bookish personality.
But I fear that my utter social isolation left me with very little to use to resist this eternal inward plunge. There was (and still is) so very little actual real world content within me that it leaves a soul very vulnerable to the slightest breeze, a ghost on the wind.
And that, of course, just makes you retreat inside yourself all the more.
I have also been thinking about my own lack of structure and how it comes from a lack of anyone giving me structure as a kid. Sure, there was school, and if I had been a more normal kid, just getting my shit together enough to pass my classes might have forced me to develop my own life structure.
But I was not a normal kid. I got great grades without ever having to even crack a book to study. So school imposed no structure or discipline on me… and neither did anything else.
And so when you have no structure and no real experiences and very little in terms of emotional development inside you, you are then free to retreat very far into your own mind indeed. And while this offers a certain kind of protection, it also leads to such a high degree of isolation that you lose the vital inputs from the extra-mental world that regular, healthy folk use to remain connected and oriented relative to their position in the world.
And you end up feeling lost at sea.
I think it is this sense of being lost that is speaking when I talk about not knowing what to do with myself or not knowing how to get from point A to point B in my life. It is never that I literally do not know how to get there. I always know. Knowing things and/or figuring them out has never been hard for me.
It’s always that this sense of being lost, and all my other mental issues, that spring up to block my goal from my view and make it feel like I have no idea how to get there.
My dreams are just lights on distant hills to me.
And I am forever lost at sea.
I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.
This might seem familiar
The Escape Hatch
Today was a therapy day, so you know what that means. Fire up the Angst Machine!
My therapist and I were talking about my problem with doctors – you know, the one where I can’t ever seem to communicate with them properly and so I end up feeling like they don’t listen – when I suddenly figured out what the real problem was.
It’s simple : when I am taking to my doctor, I get very nervous and tense, and so I want to get out of the situation as soon as possible. It’s an animal reaction. That’s why whatever concerns I might have had going in just vanish in a puff of smoke when I am talking to the doctor and why I don’t realize that I had a ton more questions for the doctor until I am long gone.
It’s a panic reaction, at its root. And it lies at the root of a lot of my self-destructive behaviour. I get in a stressful situation, I panic, and whatever overarching goals I have disappear as I frantically look for the nearest exit.
It doesn’t necessarily look like panic, not even to me. That is how good I have gotten at smooth-talking through the situation. I fool even myself into thinking everything went normally. I suppose that, in a sense, it did, because it happened just the way it always happens : with me panicking.
It is the soul of the dangerous form of escapism. Like I keep saying, if you don’t endure, you don’t adapt, and if you become addicted to hitting the escape key on even the slightest amount of tension, you never hang around long enough to realize that the situation was not nearly as bad as your hair-trigger escape reflex makes it seem.
In fact, it is your panic, not the nature of the situation itself, that is making you miserable in the first place. You are fleeing from your own shadow and blaming the light that casts it.
Every time you give in to the panic, you feed it. The panic grows fat because it always gets what it wants. It wants the situation to end as fast as possible, and it gets it. Never mind the consequences to your life or the damage done by its insatiable selfish shortsightedness. Never mind that letting it run your life only leads to further weakening of your soul and your spirit and makes it all that much harder to get anything you want. Never mind that the disease eventually results in an inability to stick with or follow through on nearly anything and so you end up in a tiny shadow land where only the simple and the instantly rewarding are a possibility.
The panic doesn’t care about any of that. All it cares about is keeping you from ever having to learn to grow up and stick with things until they are done. As long as you always flee at the slightest sign of complication or scariness, you will never hang around long enough to realize just how temporary and superficial and contingent all your fears were and just how much fun you could have had if you stayed.
The fear would have evaporated the moment you made the firm decision that you were staying no matter what. That would have told the panic that its old trick of ringing your alarm bells very loudly was not going to work. You were not going to be scared off by those pale ghosts of panic any more. And just like that, you smash the fear with a brick of determination.
So not only do you hang around long enough to have fun, you send a message to yourself that you will not be bullied by your fears any more and that, in turn, makes you feel good about yourself, which boosts your confidence… and makes it even easier to smash your fears again the next time.
Of course, it’s not that easy. It’s that simple, but it’s not that easy. You won’t win against the panic every single time. After all, it has been around for a long time and had total control over you for every minute of its reign. That is not the sort of force that you defeat in one big act of will.
In fact, wanting to defeat it in one big act of will is symptomatic of the very lack of sticktoitiveness that you are trying to address. Life is too short to always be looking for the easy way out. That goes double for quitting if there isn’t one.
It’s time to nail that goddamned escape hatch shut and deal with things.
Tall order. I am so used to just letting my panic have its way that I have no idea what to do without it.
Take the doctor’s office… please. If I am not, subconsciously, aware that I will be trying to get out of there as soon as possible, that kind of suggests that I should plan out what I want to talk about and not be satisfied with a superficial and/or unsatisfactory answer, but actually insist on sitting there till I understand.
That idea scares the hell out of me. Not only does it mean I have to be far more assertive than usual, it means I have to stay present in the moment and really focus on reality, and that is not something I usually do unless I have no choice.
Because that’s the real escape, isn’t it? The escape into your own mind, the retreat from the harsh stimulation and frightening complications of reality into the calm safe stale space between your ears. It’s the escape hatch that you can carry with you everywhere, the shell you can always retreat into, like a turtle.
The thing is, though, is that if that shell is your real home and you can barely function outside of it, then it is not an escape any more… it is the trap.
When you learn to escape from THAT trap… then you are truly free.
I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.
A vidya for today
I don’t know my own strength
And I never have.
I was born with a very powerful brain. This brain was further encouraged in its growth by by parents. By the time I went to elementary school (bypassing kindergarten), I towered over my peers on the intellectual plane.
A different sort of person, I suppose, would have taken that advantage and run with it. They would have become a type A overachiever, using their intellectual advantage to get the highest possible grades as part of a grand plan to soar to the highest heights of intellect and status by getting scholarships to all the best schools and meeting the right kind of people and blah blah blah, the usual yuppie life cycle.
But I’m not like that. I honestly do not want to feel superior to others. I want to connect with people, and superiority (and/pr inferiority) precludes that. I am only comfortable in a position of equality. Anything else weirds me out.
And it honestly never occurred to me to work hard to get the best possible grades. I got high marks without even studying. It seemed to me that to sacrifice my carefree ways in order to buckle down and raise my grades by five percentage points was an investment with insufficient returns.
Of course, I see the benefits now. But school was always so easy for me that I never learned to take it seriously.
It’s not like there were immediate rewards for higher grades. My parents wouldn’t have noticed and the school would not have really cared. So my marks went from “very good” to “great”. Big frigging deal!
As a result, I have never really known what to do with this big intellect of mine. Like I have said before in this space, it has just always been there. It never felt like a powerful advantage to me. I never stopped to think “You know, it’s awesome that I don’t have to study or work hard in school. ”
If anything, it felt like a disadvantage. Even in elementary school, I grasped that it was a big part of what separated me from my peers. And even more obviously, it led to me being staggeringly bored in class most of the time.
Bored, and often depressed. Hmmm. Tag that thought. It seems important. I will have to come back to it in a different post.
Because of this disconnect from my intellect, and my social isolation, I never learned the vital lesson of how to play with others. Specifically, I never learned how to moderate the output of my intellect in order to compensate for the power differential between myself and others.
Consequently, dealing with me could be a little like playing tag with the Hulk. In my innocent attempts to just do what others do, I ended up hurting or at the very least bewildering a lot of people. When you give someone a playful punch on the shoulder and they respond by hitting you so hard it bounces your skull off two walls, you kind of don’t want to play with them any more, even if they have no idea what they just did.
Actually, especially if they have no idea what they just did.
“In the last two weeks, Tsu Zei, ” said the Master, “you have cracked the ribs of three students, dislocated the shoulders of two others, and insured that poor Li Tao will not be able to walk for several weeks. ”
“But Master!” protested Tsu Zei, “I’m just doing what all the other students do!”
Of course, I was not trying to hurt or confuse anybody. I was trying to get along with them. It wasn’t my fault that I was the biggest and the strongest, mentally speaking. I wanted to have friends and be gentle with everyone and be happy.
But no matter how pure his intentions, the giant just can’t pretend to be a pygmy and hope to blend in.
I think that is the dark side of my attempts at egalitarianism. By not socially acknowledging my intellect and holding myself to an ideal of equality, my motive was not purely an attempt to do the right thing.
It also neatly sidestepped any need to really take responsibility for the elephant in the room. I could maintain my posture of innocence and not have to accept the burden of greater responsibility that comes with greater power.
But there is only so many times that big elephant can innocently crush your sofa before “sorry!” just doesn’t cut it any more.
Increasingly, I see my innocent attitude as less of an artifact of lofty ideals and more as a refusal to grow up and acknowledge that I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else.
It’s like the classic Superman plotline where a teenaged Clark Kent joins his high school football team and, of course, does amazingly well because he’s fucking Superman.
After the Big Game, he goes home, happy to be the hero of the game and so on, to find Pa Kent waiting there to talk with him and explain that it was not fair at all for Superman to play football against regular humans, and that Clark’s victory was meaningless because of that.
It would be like a grown man crowing over beating a small child at arm-wrestling.
Now if Clark was an asshole, he could have said “Hey, I played the game by the same rules as everyone else. I just happen to be awesome at it. Why should I hold back and not get the same rewards as any other star athlete? How can that be fair?”
And he would be right. It’s not fair. By pure chance, he ended up the guy with the superpowers. Like Spider-Man’s Uncle Ben said, with that great power came great responsibility, far greater than most people are asked to bear.
And that’s not fair.
But that’s the reality of the situation, and the thing is, responsibility does not ask permission. If you have the power, you have the responsibility. Period.
And it’s up to me to figure out what that means for me.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.