Short sightedness
I've been trying to write fantasy lately, partly because I am bad at it and am trying to come to an understanding. One of the main tenets of science fiction is that you have to follow your conclusions to their logical ramifications. You can't have a single idea; you have to have a system. If you go too far in applying this to fantasy, your magic does not feel magical and your story does not satisfy the larger needs of a person who wants to read fantasy instead of sci fi. On the other hand, if you don't go far enough, your magic has no weight and feels like a lazy application of surrealism.
So I've been trying not to think in a sci fi worldbuilding way as I write. I'm just not applying it. However, it's still a deep part of my brain structures, and it automatically informs how I view the real world outside my writing.
Two things have been nagging at me lately, even though they are not such a big deal. The first is the number of people who have said things along the lines that there is a major conspiracy of people with money running the government. On the one hand, this is true, insofar as the general need to bail out Wall Street, and also in the degree to which political pressures have shifted. Party affiliation has become incredibly important, because in most areas of the country, simply getting on the ballot with the right letter by your name is enough to win. Therefore, you don't have to worry about the voting public; you have to worry about whether the party is going to back you. Representing your constituents is irrelevant; what matters is satisfying the ideologues that decide whether they'll allow you to run. It is rule by a handful of guys with money, a new sort of aristocracy who get to decide what's best for us little people.
On the other hand, this is really not true, or not true in a "conspiracy of bankers determined to control the government" way. It's a natural effect of a system which we could and can change both through our behavior and through the normal workings of legislature. It's worth trying to change, not worth panicking over or giving up on. But I'm hearing more and more people accept as fact that there is a secret and sinister conspiracy behind the scenes profiting from the current disaster. There may be facts to back this up in some places, although some of them are likely coincidence. What's disturbing about it is not the idea itself, which is always an idea that lurks around, but the idea's surge in popularity. An individual person believes it because of things they've heard and seen, but on a deeper level, people are primed to believe it now in a way they weren't a few years ago when it was just as true, because currently we are in a chaos. And when there is chaos, it is less frightening to believe it is actually a plan by someone we don't know, who could therefore be stopped. Or who could not be stopped, but who is a controlling intelligence - God who must have a reason for sending the tornado which we can't figure out because we are only people.
Conspiracy thinking was certainly popular in the late '60s, after the wave of assassinations and at the height of the nuclear standoff. But this kind of conspiracy thinking hasn't been so popular since the deflation of the 1930s, when the idea of a banking conspiracy was widely accepted and the Mafia was assumed to control all crime. I don't think the same Naziism is going to arise, particularly since it's harder now to scapegoat the bankers - they don't seem as much to have their own culture, and are not as easily marked out by ethnicity. But I think a lot of Fritz Lang's movies about Dr. Mabuse, and the audiences that loved them, and it makes me sad that nobody much remembers that history.
My other frustration is more direct - a few days ago, a NY Times food columnist was on the Colbert Report promoting his book about ways to make the food industry more sustainable, and ways we need to change our approach to consumption of agricultural products. He said a lot of smart things, along with some silly things, and I particularly liked his acknowledgment of the fact that market trade across countries and regions is not a bad thing - that some food does need to be shipped because some areas can grow much more than they can eat and others can't grow enough. Solid economics.
However, his main thrust was that we can't consume as we have been consuming - that there is a huge amount of waste involved in pre-prepared food. The average person spends 30 minutes a day preparing food, he said. Maybe that needs to be more like 2 hours.
This sounds difficult but reasonable. However, it's a misleading average. The average person spends either 2 hours a day preparing food, or no time at all, because the average meal preparer cooks for a family - they're not each working for half an hour. Separate out the zeroes and multiply that meal preparer time by 4, and you're talking about 8 daily hours of food prep. Which is exactly what the average adult woman did before industrialization - spent all day in the kitchen shelling peas and soaking beans and putting up preserves and making pastry. And this is what would have to happen again if we returned to a model without the convenience of pre-prepared short cuts. It would fall disproportionately on women, who would have to leave the workforce. Get back to the kitchen, women. Otherwise you are going to kill the planet. This is even better than "God says so."
Look, idiot. Economies of scale apply to cooking, too. I would rather work at a job I love and then use my money to pay somebody else at a packaging plant or a restaurant.
I'm sure I could put this better if I had time, but I have to go to work now.
So I've been trying not to think in a sci fi worldbuilding way as I write. I'm just not applying it. However, it's still a deep part of my brain structures, and it automatically informs how I view the real world outside my writing.
Two things have been nagging at me lately, even though they are not such a big deal. The first is the number of people who have said things along the lines that there is a major conspiracy of people with money running the government. On the one hand, this is true, insofar as the general need to bail out Wall Street, and also in the degree to which political pressures have shifted. Party affiliation has become incredibly important, because in most areas of the country, simply getting on the ballot with the right letter by your name is enough to win. Therefore, you don't have to worry about the voting public; you have to worry about whether the party is going to back you. Representing your constituents is irrelevant; what matters is satisfying the ideologues that decide whether they'll allow you to run. It is rule by a handful of guys with money, a new sort of aristocracy who get to decide what's best for us little people.
On the other hand, this is really not true, or not true in a "conspiracy of bankers determined to control the government" way. It's a natural effect of a system which we could and can change both through our behavior and through the normal workings of legislature. It's worth trying to change, not worth panicking over or giving up on. But I'm hearing more and more people accept as fact that there is a secret and sinister conspiracy behind the scenes profiting from the current disaster. There may be facts to back this up in some places, although some of them are likely coincidence. What's disturbing about it is not the idea itself, which is always an idea that lurks around, but the idea's surge in popularity. An individual person believes it because of things they've heard and seen, but on a deeper level, people are primed to believe it now in a way they weren't a few years ago when it was just as true, because currently we are in a chaos. And when there is chaos, it is less frightening to believe it is actually a plan by someone we don't know, who could therefore be stopped. Or who could not be stopped, but who is a controlling intelligence - God who must have a reason for sending the tornado which we can't figure out because we are only people.
Conspiracy thinking was certainly popular in the late '60s, after the wave of assassinations and at the height of the nuclear standoff. But this kind of conspiracy thinking hasn't been so popular since the deflation of the 1930s, when the idea of a banking conspiracy was widely accepted and the Mafia was assumed to control all crime. I don't think the same Naziism is going to arise, particularly since it's harder now to scapegoat the bankers - they don't seem as much to have their own culture, and are not as easily marked out by ethnicity. But I think a lot of Fritz Lang's movies about Dr. Mabuse, and the audiences that loved them, and it makes me sad that nobody much remembers that history.
My other frustration is more direct - a few days ago, a NY Times food columnist was on the Colbert Report promoting his book about ways to make the food industry more sustainable, and ways we need to change our approach to consumption of agricultural products. He said a lot of smart things, along with some silly things, and I particularly liked his acknowledgment of the fact that market trade across countries and regions is not a bad thing - that some food does need to be shipped because some areas can grow much more than they can eat and others can't grow enough. Solid economics.
However, his main thrust was that we can't consume as we have been consuming - that there is a huge amount of waste involved in pre-prepared food. The average person spends 30 minutes a day preparing food, he said. Maybe that needs to be more like 2 hours.
This sounds difficult but reasonable. However, it's a misleading average. The average person spends either 2 hours a day preparing food, or no time at all, because the average meal preparer cooks for a family - they're not each working for half an hour. Separate out the zeroes and multiply that meal preparer time by 4, and you're talking about 8 daily hours of food prep. Which is exactly what the average adult woman did before industrialization - spent all day in the kitchen shelling peas and soaking beans and putting up preserves and making pastry. And this is what would have to happen again if we returned to a model without the convenience of pre-prepared short cuts. It would fall disproportionately on women, who would have to leave the workforce. Get back to the kitchen, women. Otherwise you are going to kill the planet. This is even better than "God says so."
Look, idiot. Economies of scale apply to cooking, too. I would rather work at a job I love and then use my money to pay somebody else at a packaging plant or a restaurant.
I'm sure I could put this better if I had time, but I have to go to work now.