recently i have been in the background categorizing fiction on a spectrum from "literally trying to keep me trapped in the matrix" to "reminding me what my deepest desires and values are"
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oh, one more relevant old tweet
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I've been probing a little into the actual foundations of my ethics the last week and I seriously can't rule out that the answer is "Saturday morning cartoons."
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the focal point of what fucks me up about this "reality vs. fiction" interface is "magic"
like we obviously love magic in fiction, we can't stop writing about it, meanwhile unless you hang out explicitly with people who are into magic you are not supposed to believe it is "real"
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i didn't write about this because it was like the 4th most important thing that came up but last time i did acid i learned that i sincerely and deeply believe that the real universe is fundamentally devoid of magic
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moreover i never went through a childhood phase where i believed otherwise. i never for a second believed that i was actually going to get a hogwarts letter or anything like that. and like... where did i get such a strong anti-magic prior from???
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i don't have a better guess than these Big Books About Science i read when i was maybe 8, that pretty much purported to tell me how the entire universe worked and i pretty much believed them 100%
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the ultimate visual dictionary of science had a big impact. the two stephen hawking books were great. and i had a big black glossy book on astronomy i won't be able to track down because it was called "astronomy" or some shit. all these books sunk in real deep i think
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and it's worth pausing for a second to note explicitly that this was basically just indoctrination. it's not like i independently verified any of the claims in these books. the scientific materialist worldview was just shoved into my head
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there is this magnificent and beautiful concept in japanese called "chuunibyou" which refers to a young teenager who believes they have magic powers or w/e. it's supposed to be cringe but in some sense these are just kids who refuse to be compartmentalized about fiction
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anyway one takeaway i'm tentatively winding my way towards is that people who are in positions to tell children stories have a truly absurd level of power and responsibility
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also that maybe i should try writing fiction 🤔
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i have this old thread about fiction and escapism and i think when i wrote it i was not really respecting what i was getting out of the fiction. there really was content in the specific choices of fiction i was "consuming" (what a gross word btw)
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The anime, manga, and hentai were because I mostly could not stand to look at real people with real faces. Cartoon people with cartoon faces were infinitely safer and more soothing. The sci-fi and fantasy were arguably similar; safety in the unreal.
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from @tasshinfogleman digging into one particular story that’s stuck with him and taught him a lot
For the first time in a long time, it gave me a felt sense of what’s been lost as we take fiction less and less seriously, & treat our stories as just boredom-blockers
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oh i should add this too
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when we tell stories about magic but coat those stories with a layer of "btw magic is impossible" we are saying that having power and helping people is impossible twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/st…
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Stories are just all the things a being can do. All the strategies, behaviors, tricks, whatever. They are the best way to extract the most important information from reality and guide a being's optimum behavior. Only reality is real, but stories help us act until we fully see it.