It was written without fear and without research.
Dorothy parker
Patient readers know that I hate doing research.
I have often joked, in fact, that the lack of research needed is one of my favorite things about writing science fiction.
Nobody can say “Snargulons aren’t purple!” if you just made them up.
I can clearly remember the moment I realized research was not a thing I liked. I was in the stacks of the main library at UPEI, looking for some bit of information for the research paper I had to do for the stupid “English 101” course they made me take and I had not been having a lot of success and suddenly i was seized by this surge of sweeping emotion and I looked around at the rows and rows of identical bookshelves filled with thuddingly dull information and said ‘I HATE THIS!’.
To myself, that is. After all, it was the library.
That’s when I realized consciously that while I was highly intelligent, articulate, and knew a great deal. I was not a scholar.
This came as a mild shock because I was the kid who got an A on every test without studying and therefore thought of myself as the academic type by default.
But being a scholar is far more about finding information and/or placing it where it can be found than it is about knowing things, and that shit bores me to tears.
That’s also why I had such a bad (and dickish) reaction when I had to do the “place your work in the context of other research” part of my psychology courses at Kwantlen.
I actually said something like, “I don’t have to to this, I do original work. Other people can figure out where to file it. ”
I am both embarrassed and amused by that.
I don’t have a lot of moments when I express my latent arrogance out loud, but when it happens, it tends to be memorable./
Truth was, I was finding it super hard to do. My mind just plain doesn’t run in that direction. I have trouble even beginning to answer the question.
My brain, it seemed, was more specialized than I knew.
Now of course, being an intellectual, I would never say research doesn’t matter, or that people who do extensive research are stupid to do so, or that my disdain for doing research somehow makes me better than other creatives, or any of that.
This is my own disposition of which I speak. Other people operate on entirely different sets of principles and that’s fine too.
Whatever floats your goat, man.
The only time I (begrudgingly) do research is when I am afraid of being wrong about something. The idea of being “dinged” by a fellow pedant really bothers me.
Normally, I avoid this via keeping things very precisely vague.
People can’t catch you out on facts you don’t supply.
But there are times when specifics are unavoidable and then I will take the time to actually Google the damned thing.
But I am never happy to do it.
More after the break.
There’s no such thing as “people”
Let me explain.
I talked recently about how I thought of misanthropy as the ultimate bigotry and how nobody could possibly know enough about the 7.5 billion humans on this planet to make absolutely any generalization about them deeper than “they’re carbon based lifeforms”.
Further along that line of thought is how there is this nebulously defined category called “people” in the minds of the populace that honestly makes no sense.
Call it the infinitive “people”. It shows up in statements like “People can be so cruel”, or “people are in such a hurry these days” or the ever popular “I hate people. ”
When used as a pronoun to refer to an undefined segment of the population, it’s not too bad. It still leads to erroneous conclusions and specious logic, but it’s not so bad.
It serves a function. Carefully defining exactly who you are talking about is tedious. And most people who use “people” that way will admit, if pressed, that they are not actually referring to literally every human being ever.
But when it is really is used to refer to a generalized conception of all humanity, like in misanthropy, it becomes less a philopshical position and more of a concession of one’s own poor social development.
It reminds me of studies forever burned into my mind where monkeys were raised in isolation since birth then introduced to a general monkey population later on.
Invariably, they freaked the fuck out. Screamed when any monkey approached them, fled to the corner of the cage furthest from the other monkeys, attacked any monkey that got too close, and so on.
i am so very much that poor little monkey.
That monkey, if we would ask it, would no doubt also express a general loathing of the rest of its species. If it is a very bright monkey,. it might even be able to produce rational sounding arguments for why other monkeys are just awful.
But we’d know the real story. We’d know the monkey had been the victim of lack of proper socialization and that it was the one with the problem, not “people”.
This is how I view misanthropy. It amounts to a confession that you are terrified of your fellow humans and have invented a way to stick a halo on it.
Psst. It’s not working.
Like I said, I am that poor little monkey. I therefore entirely understand the “sour grapes” emotions that lead to misanthropy as a defense mechanism.
People freak me out too.
The difference is that I know the problem lies in me. I know that, in reality, people are fine.Not a threat to me at all,. And I know,that my fear is unjustified.
And I know in my heart that no matter how much smarter I might be than someone,. just by dint of being properly socially integrated, they know a lot of things I don’t.
And that means I have a lot to learn from them,
i will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.