Empathy.
The ability to see people as creatures distinct and separate from yourself, with their own ideas and motivations, and from there to understand those
I swear some people lack this. Completely and utterly.
Like, not just the ability to understand how someone else feels, but the ability to understand that anyone could feel any differently about anything.
And, worse, they tell themselves that other people LIE about how they feel. For reasons.
There's a series of books which starts with 'The Black Jewels' trilogy and expands into several sequels and anthologies. They're extremely dark and disturbing in places, especially the first book, but there's one part that has always stuck with me, because it tickles the bit of my brain that is fascinated by human nature.
See, the bad guys are always coming up with plots, setting traps, sending spies. But nothing ever goes their way, and much of the time the good guys don't even know they've foiled a plot. Oh, they fought an enemy or something weird happened, but they don't put the pieces together for a while.
And the reason that the bad guys keep losing so badly is because they honestly believe the good guys think the same way they do. They even think that the good guys only pretend to value things like honour. Every single plan is basically, "I would react like this in that situation, so we'll do this to trap her".
Every single time. Like, "We'll get this guy to drug her so she's easy to seduce, trick her into getting married, and then she has to do what her husband says! And if we control the husband, we control her!"
Except the young woman in this equation has A) severe PTSD regarding sex (again, very dark books), and B) near-omnipotent magical power (which the bad guys are trying to control through this plot). So the seduction ends with the guy being pretty much vaporised.
And while I won't defend the darker aspects of the book, the inability of these characters to even comprehend that other people have different perceptions... it just rings true for me.
As Puck says in one of Neil Gaiman's Sandman stories, "It's true! It never happened, but it's true!" I may have paraphrased that, but it's the essence. And that's one reason books are so wonderful.
So where does that bring us? Well. Partly I've just been wanting to express that about Black Jewels for a while. But also, I swear I've seen the phenomena come up in the Hugos kerfuffle (yeah, lot of things revolve around the Hugos these days).
See, there seems to be this idea... well, first it starts with the assertion that the winners in recent years were somehow swayed by a secret cabal of liberals or SJWs or something. Which is weird enough, really, because people suck at keeping secrets and if anything like that had happened there'd be a lot more evidence than just 'This book won, that story got nominated'.
But then it seems like some people ride that bus into a corkscrew high dive off a cliff. They imply, or even assert, that some stories are ONLY voted for so the voters can show off how progressive they are. Like, they didn't REALLY like the story, they didn't REALLY rate it higher than anything else, they possibly didn't even READ it. But because there's a one-legged Korean transsexual hobo character, or some other combination of diversity and intersectionality it's the Holy Grail, and so of course all those brainwashed liberals will vote for it!
Except... that's not how people work? I mean, if we're doing it to show off... who are we showing off to? Each other? But if we don't really believe what we're doing, shouldn't we know that nobody believes it, and... what would be the point?
But that's what the Sad Puppies apparently believe. After all, their motto basically boils down to 'Vote for FUN!'. As if anyone votes for anything else. They really think 'lefties' are that stupid.
Personally, I'm inclined to believe they can't comprehend that things they don't like could be fun for someone else.
"Don't give me messages, give me entertainment!"
I believe they call that 'reality TV'.
Don't give me messages. Bah. Don't ask me to think, more like.
Honestly, I don't understand this idea that if you don't like something, you have to trash it into the ground, and assume the worst, the most stupid motivations, of people who do like it. That they don't REALLY like it. Secretly they agree with you, they're just PRETENDING not to. For reasons.
But maybe that's a lack of empathy on my part?
I think for some of them, they really -can't- conceive of the idea that social justice oriented people actually DO care about transexuals, or gay folk, or foreign folk. They've got some ideas rooted -deep- down, so deep they think, "This is -right-."
ReplyDeleteNow, it's also true that they're somewhat -right-, in that there is a contingent on the Left comprised of people bandwagoning on causes to look good. But that's also true on the Right--the Tea Party is one very confused bunch of people who jumped onto an Astroturfed bandwagon that's hitched to some pretty sickly mules. Lots of them will be very passionate about speaking using terms they picked up from the in-group, but that passion is oriented towards scoring points and seeming 'more right'. They actually have no real grasp of the nuances of a situation, because they're not playing the same game as the rest of the world.
It's interesting that those folks you speak of, have picked up 'SJW' as their rallying cry, considering the actual SJW part of the internet that they detest....um....talks and acts A LOT like them. Different words, same meanings.
Look at Winterfox/Requires Hate. She's not progressive or socially aware, she uses all her SJ vocabulary as weapons. People who defend her usually don't have the fundamentals of justice or progressiveness ingrained enough to act against someone who 'says the right things', so they believe she's being attacked for being a WOC, when she's really just an asshole with social justice livery on. She's practically a twin for Correia and Vox Day, when you get right down to it.
'SJW' isn't just by the Puppies. Gamergate and just jackasses in general have picked up on it and run.
ReplyDelete'CHORF', on the other hand, is all Puppy. 'Cliquish, Holier-than-thou, Obnoxious, Reactionary Fanatics'. The irony kills me.
Before I found out about how SJW was being used, my impression was much the same as yours, that it meant people who fought a cause but weren't REALLY part of it, they'd just adopted the customs and lingo.
Funny thing about Winterfox, I briefly followed her on Livejournal back before I visited you in Seattle. At the time she just seemed like someone with incisive, insightful things to say about fantasy literature.... Roads not travelled, eh?