Conversation

Kinda makes sense that the end of history would be marked by terminal identitarianism. Consequence, not cause. If nobody can find a way to continue everybody’s identity evolution, history ends.
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Identitarian consensus: when everybody agrees what boxes everybody is in. It’s a much deeper state of stable equilibrium than everybody simply having a fixed identity. The way common knowledge is a deeper equilibrium than mere belief or even mutual belief.
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There was a funny Volkswagen ad where an Indian guy responds to some question about yoga with “just because I drive a Volkswagen you think I’m into yoga?” It’s funny because it simultaneously acknowledges and subverts an identitarian consensus Also Seinfeld anti-dentite joke
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An identitarian consensus is also a set of roles and permissions within a narrative. Stereotyping is just the shallowest layer. History ends at an identitarian consensus not because the narrative ends but because it becomes 100% tropey
Replying to
The instinct behind simple role-swaps (eg female or black superheroes) as a way to break out of an identitarian consensus equilibrium is solid but... naive. Like transposing a tune to a new key rather than composing a new one. Doesn’t restart history, just phase-shifts it.
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An example of a history-restart type shift is from Campbellian Monomyth hero to LeGuinesque Carrier Bag unheroine. Doctor Who pulled that off, though it has other weaknesses.
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The link between end of history and identitarian consensus also explains why “diversity” as a simplistic alternative to a straight-white-male-centric equilibrium doesn’t work for anything except post-apocalyptic survivalist stories. That’s just the aftermath of the end of history
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To extend the music metaphor, this is not a transposition, it’s a polyphony degenerating into a cacophony. Random noise around an EoH equilibrium.
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Experimenting with fiction has shown me just how terrible social identities are for writing believable, growing characters. It’s almost like trying to make an address behave like a house. A category error. An address can let you guess a lot about a house but isn’t itself a house.
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Otoh, you can’t just make up a character from, say, a set of archetypal inner paradoxes. The context matters in a way that becomes immediately obvious when you try to name a character. A name instantly induces a world.
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The thing about history-reboot level narratives is that any one local binding, like the name of a key character, immediately binds the rest of the narrative as well. Choosing any one thing is like choosing everything. And now the whole story is a clockwork deterministic universe.
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The best you can do is “glitch” the global binding a bit by simultaneously acknowledging/subverting a piece of it, like my Volkswagen-yoga example. This is not an archetypal paradox driving a character OR a world paradox driving a history. It’s the nexus *between* the two.
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This creates *just* enough room, like a 99.9% global binding instead of 100%, for history to get restarted. Tiny new root sneaking through the cracks of a tessellation defining a world.
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Note btw that most science fiction is only cosmetically a building of alternative worlds. Much of the average stuff is simple relabeling. The better ones just acknowledge it openly.
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An example of doing more is Dark Materials, where cosmetic similarities suggest a glitchy parallel universe that’s not quite like ours. Deepness in the Sky also pulls that off by constructing an uncanny valley of spider-beings whose story is told via overwrought human mapping.
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I’ve been trying to systematize these intuitions by playing with situated archetypes that work across a whole class of worlds rather than inducing a specific one. Then you suggest the whole universe via “beat” frequencies that emerge in juxtaposition with a familiar universe
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Getting back to history, a narrative is only a history if it’s not in an end-of-history identitarian consensus equilibrium. Good fiction has the feel of history.
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It’s not enough that the world changes (plot) or characters grow individually or in mutuality. The world and characters must change together in, for want of a better term, Turing complete ways. Even a strange attractor or brownian motion won’t do.
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It’s the entanglement that evolves irreversibly. And the characters don’t have to be “rich” in a literary sense for this. In fact that’s often a liability. Even 2d caricatures that are terrible by rules of “good” character dev can drive historic narrative if entangled right
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This stuff is very hard. That’s why only a few cases have been solved analytically. For example evil twins from evil parallel universes who differ in social identity only by a goatee (van dyke actually...) is a surprisingly sophisticated device if you dig a bit into it.
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“Good” and “evil” are shorthand codes/world-hashes for 2 different narrative equilibria, with a leak in either direction capable of restarting history. Good/evil is a property of the *entanglement* between the characters and home universes.
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Importantly, social identity is *only* an address. That is why a trivial marker (facial hair) works to distinguish the two universes. It happens to be gendered but that’s unimportant. It could be a nongendered trait like long hair.
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Interestingly, Marxist thought gets this whole idea in a degenerate way: “none of us is free until all of us are free” or “the oppressor requires liberation as much as the oppressed.” That’s a good special case of entangled history.
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Where it fails is treating aspects of the context, like class, as immutable. A workers paradise isn’t classless. It’s a degenerate one-class, end-of-history society. To transcend class-structure, you need something with equal expressive power that preserves Turing-completeness.
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