yet it's stories where such inevitability is real that we somehow find illuminating of the human condition the ones where chance rules are "unsatisfying" and "scattered" and often quite boring
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
so i might suggest that these stories often don't illuminate the human condition so much as provide us with a reassuring fantasy of the human condition one where our character really does determine the course of our life, not dumb and meaningless stuff
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
Does it have to be a deep statement about character to be about causality?
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Replying to @chrysopoetics @arthur_affect
in more detail, a situation where the causal influence of one's character dominates the influence of one's environment, and especially "random" aspects of the environment
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Replying to @perdricof @arthur_affect
Ah, legit! I wouldn’t assume that’s necessarily what’s in play from “in retrospect, it couldn’t have happened any other way”, I guess, especially when the person-involvement is a relevant % just “how they react to the arbitrary things they didn’t control”
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Replying to @chrysopoetics @arthur_affect
there is a metal support strut; its load limit is 200 pounds. you put 300 pounds of weight on it. a few days later, it snaps. now there is a story--a very chaotic and arbitrary one--about the specific micromolecular forces that led to it snapping at that time, in that way, etc
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but that's not an illuminating story. all of those things could have gone completely differently, and the strut would still have snapped, because it was over its load limit and that was inevitable.
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the kind of stories arthur is talking about are like that. they take the utter chaos of a human life and show us the inherent inevitabilities of it. that's what makes them satisfying: we feel as if they illuminate a deeper truth
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now it's not necessarily character; it might be features of one's social situation, race or class or family. i shouldn't have talked about character specifically. but the point is that we see an intelligible principle in operation, not the mad hand of chance
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what i've suggested is that this is also basically bullshit! there aren't that many inherent inevitabilities in human life, and they rarely read as satisfying and illuminating. we are more at the mercy of chance than we like to admit.
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Douglas Adams' thing in Mostly Harmless about the planet where everyone looks just like a human but completely lacks the human need for purpose or meaning and this slowly drives Arthur mad
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He reads one of their novels and the main character just dies 2/3 of the way through the book and then the book just continues talking about random shit until it runs out of pages at exactly 500 (which is the length of all books)
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Replying to @arthur_affect @perdricof
It’s fairly in character that my response is “oh right, I remember liking those!”, here
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