The Necessity of False Narratives

[Solid Snake]

Lately I've been exploring an intriguing sort of philosophical phenomenon that simultaneously is engaging and more than a little frightening: Namely, our ability as human beings to actively deceive ourselves into believing our lives are headed in a positive direction or that hope still exists in the universe in the wake of all evidence to the contrary.

The video game series Danganronpa explores this through the competing influences of the emotions of 'hope' and 'despair.' It's simplified, as it tends to be in most videogames, into a dichotomy of good and evil. Even still, thematically speaking, Danganronpa explores the necessity to feel 'hope' even in hopeless, despair-inducing situations; when characters are objectively in life-or-death situations, to succeed in even a limited capacity they need to essentially lie to themselves regarding their own dire circumstances. The characters that do comparatively well are the ones who are able to find some silver lining in their predicaments, while those who panic through a sheer acknowledgment of reality struggle and ultimately tend to be disproportionately killed off regardless of their talents or strengths.

Here's the unrelenting, inescapable reality, though: Things are bad and are only decaying in every possible aspect of life. We can talk about this in the macro or the micro, by looking at gradual changes or sudden ones, by looking at the personal or the global.

Climate change is the obvious example that I know only too well, but it's worth reiterating here if for no other reason than its sheer importance in the scheme of...everything. We are doing absolutely nothing of substance or value to combat rising global temperatures over the aggregate and changing climate patterns as a result of increased emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. In the wake of all this our climate is slowly deteriorating as we speak. It is only getting worse. It will never, ever get better. The minimal degree of action we are capable of taking is insufficient to combat the enormity of the problem. We have already crossed a threshold in which our planet -- the only planet we've ever known to be hospitable to human civilization -- has been diseased and the damage is insurmountable. Life itself will likely adapt and survive, but our infrastructure and our socioeconomic systems are far too fragile to cope. A series of natural disasters in the form of droughts and floods, heat waves and earthquakes (fracking will only exacerbate the latter), and rising ocean tides will cause untold economic damage first, and eventually incredible losses of human lives as our ozone layer evaporates at a rate that exposes us to dangerous rays of sunlight. We'll end up living fucking underground if we're lucky. And nobody cares. Even Democrats don't seem to care. Do you think Hillary Clinton even slightly cares? I do not get the impression that she cares.

It isn't just climate change. You need only to see Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton's respective rises to power to see similar trends of anti-intellectualism, media soundbites and valuing personality over substance slowly eroding our system of governance; corporatism is encroaching upon our civic spaces at such a rate that the profit motive increasingly is the only value left in our socioeconomic relationships; Facebook and Twitter are reducing and simplifying communication to such an extent that pretty soon none of us will bother to read literature or understand language anymore, lest we invest in anything worth more than 140 characters of our time; discourse in general is being reduced to a series of emoticons and abbreviations that are at best easy to misunderstand and at worst destroying the intrinsic value of interpersonal communication; the reduction of discourse to soundbites has enabled anti-intellectual movements among conspiracy theorists and confident con men to take off, equipping movements against vaccines and only empowering the loudest and most bigoted voices on the internet at the expense of the most well-reasoned and substantive counterpoints; our awful and destructive foreign policy initiatives in the Middle East has indirectly led to an influx of refugees and migrants that has led Europe and America to only harden its bigotry against them and has strengthened right-wing racism across the west; Russia's devastating war in Ukraine has emboldened it and Putin and his cronies exert more influence than ever in a corrupt despotic society; the United States is a democracy only in name, and a hegemonic corporate oligarchy in reality; China's monolithic capitalist-communist hybrid strangles its citizens and denies them basic human rights, and together, China, Europe, the U.S. and Russia are the leading nation-states corrupting the world; in spite of material excesses even the wealthy among our societies report they're more unhappy than ever; all our institutions are mired in such complex self-perpetuating legal systems that any kind of systemic change is functionally impossible; the historic oppression of ethnic minorities, women, and the LGBT community sees nominal improvements but faces inexplicable and vitriolic opposition from assholes who find loopholes and pass local and state legislation to erode any true progression.

It isn't just global, either; in the past several years NPF has been transformed from a bustling little community of great importance to me to a virtual wasteland of comparatively small importance. I think about what NPF meant to me years ago, and what it means to me now, and I shudder at the implicit consequences of growing more and more apathetic. Similar degradation has infested just about every social sphere in my life, as my circle of friends and acquaintances gradually narrows. Friends are vanishing from my life at a rate far quicker than they are being replaced, and this only seems to be going faster and faster as my energy and enthusiasm to invest in new friendships fades with every lost cause. Confidence in a flourishing legal career or in any kind of meaningful romantic relationship vanish with every job application and every date that inevitably leads to failure. In fact, my dating life only seems to function when I adopt a perspective of total apathy; to care is to put myself in a position to be hurt, and to be hurt is in inevitability when the opportunity arises. It'd be one thing if this was a trend over weeks or months, but this has been an ongoing narrative of existential despair for years now, soon to be decades.

What little is left, constantly eroding like a cliffside falling into the waters beneath it with every passing year, grows older every year, and with every passing year more and more is lost; my extended family shrinks, soon my immediate family will shrink, and the only inevitability I can depend upon with any satisfaction is that everything and everyone will die.

In the wake of all this, the only coping mechanism is found through false narratives to retreat to; increasing permanence of entertainment options only gives us the opportunity to waste more and more time escaping our reality and retreating to the artificial hospitality of narratives crafted and created to coddle us and reassure us that our lives, insignificant in the broader cosmic reality of existence, have some greater 'meaning' and 'purpose.' And so I invest time and thought and energy into stories like Danganronpa and Uncharted and the latest anime I'm watching and the latest Marvel movie, feeling some degree of kinship with superheroes and protagonists who do not exist and who have no objective value beyond what I assign to them. I spend spare time obsessing over fan theories and losing myself in fictional What If's...what if I lived in Westeros? What would I do as Persona's protagonist in this situation? What choices do I make in Dragon Age? What kind of superpower would I wield if I fought alongside Captain America? Who does this character love, and who does he hate, and who's a good match for him, and who'd be a good match for me if I lived in that universe? What solution would I reach in this situation, and does this conclusion satisfy me or leave me wanting? How would I rate this videogame or this television show, how would I compare it to others I've played and seen, what would my Top Ten list be, who's my favorite, what aspects were written well or written poorly? What does this plotline say about our current sociopolitical situation, or what does this story borrow from real-world tragedies, why do I find her so pretty, why do I relate with her or what do I see in him? How would I solve all the aforementioned conflicts, personally or professionally, if I wielded any sort of power? What kind of story would I write for myself if I have the capacity to influence my own life in any meaningful way? How would I change the past? Where would I travel back to in time or travel forward to if the rules simply didn't apply to me?

This is all that's left...the false narratives concocted to provide some degree of useless, meaningless comfort and security when confronted with the void. Is that right? Is that ethical? Is that practical? Should I hate myself for investing so much in the fictitious, in finding personal value in worlds that exist only in my mind, in retreating and isolating myself from the 'real world' which has proven only to be so cold and callous through countless experiences? Are these narratives necessary to cope with the despair of living a life that is ultimately useless and lacks any intrinsic value or merit beyond the subjective values I assign to it? Is there any continued meaning in continuing to exist if only to see all that I care about continue to erode, continue to degrade, continue to die off, like a tree shedding all its color and vitality as winter arrives? Is there any such thing as a community that eternally thrives, as a nation eternally at peace, as people progressively growing and maturing and moving forward instead of dying off and failing in every passing moment?

...Forgive me, I'm just in this kind of mood today.

[Krylo]

[rpgdemon]

Originally Posted by Solid Snake

Here's the unrelenting, inescapable reality, though: Things are bad and are only decaying in every possible aspect of life. We can talk about this in the macro or the micro, by looking at gradual changes or sudden ones, by looking at the personal or the global.

That's definitely not true. Politically, things are shit in a lot of ways. But we're definitely not worse off on a macro scale than we were like 20 years ago. You're getting misled by the immediacy of information, and the fact that we actually give a damn about the problems now, as opposed to back when America was "great", where we just didn't care about them.

Ironically, that's the same narrative that Trumps supporters buy into - "We never had these problems of police brutality against black people back in the 80s! We never had transgender people being oppressed! These weren't even issues, let's bring it back to how that was!"

I don't want to talk politics though, or how the world itself is, in terms of good and bad people, because that is exhausting.




I was giving this concept some thought recently. A favorite restaurant recently changed owners, and that made me think, "Oh, well of course everything is always getting worse the longer it goes on - You will always be losing favorite restaurants, favorite game series, et cetera, because the people involved are humans who will live their lives (or die ) and move on" I realized that it's not really true, though.

Everything changes constantly. And that makes it seem like things are getting worse, to a certain mindset. Even when those changes are bringing new and exciting things to you.

It's really hard to describe this in the abstract, so I'm going to use a metaphor of Magic cards. If you don't now, MTG is most often played in what's called "Standard", which consists of approximately the previous two years worth of sets.

This means, every year as the new set is released, you lose an entire set's worth of cards! The deck that you used to love gets ostensibly worse. Maybe you were playing Elves, and the new plane that we're on this year has NO ELVES. (Maybe that happens for night on five years in a row. Maybe I'm a little bitter about this.)

Cue: "Magic is now WORSE! There are no elves! This sucks! I love elves! My deck is worse now! The game is just losing out, every year as more and more of my elves leave Standard!"

That's the mindset that leads you to think, "Everything gets worse each year." You crave for the old thing that you used to love. That old thing was awesome. And you don't have it anymore, which sucks. But it needed to rotate out, to make room for a new thing.

But let's not look at the new thing. Your elf deck crushed faces at Friday Night Magic. You replace the old cards with new filler, and yes, your deck just gets worse over time. Each set that rotates out takes out large chunks of your deck. Thus, "The world gets worse, every passing year."

So, Magic sucks now. You lost everything you used to love about it. The game is just bad, there are no elves anymore.

It turns out that Goblins are a ton of fun now! They reprinted all these awesome old Goblin cards, and now you get to experience that! You get to rediscover the game in a small way, as you build a completely different deck.

So yes: The old thing that you love may be getting worse - But that may just be because there's a new way to interact with it, that you'll fall in love with just the same.




The other issue thing is - The things that stay the same get stale.

Even if the thing you love stays EXACTLY the same, you don't. If you go back to preschool, the playground that you used to love is tiny and boring now.

A different example: Say you LOVE steak. On your birthday, you get a kobe beef steak, done at this one restaurant, by this one chef, and it was paired with the perfect wine, and was the best dining experience of your life.

You go back to the restaurant next day, because of how WONDERFUL that experience was. And, it is still really freaking good.

So, you go back the next year. And the next year. And, you realize, "These steaks are no where near as good as they were when I started. This restaurant is going down hill."

The only thing that's really changed, however, is you. You've got this memory: When you eat this steak, you are floored by the most wonderful meal of your life, and now you can't recapture that. You'll still enjoy it, but it will never be the first one, that you're remembering. It's not that the steaks are getting worse though, it's the fact that you've gotten used to them.

Or, going back to the first point, maybe the head chef changes, and they take your steak off the menu. The restaurant, for you, just got worse. And, realistically, we all know that your favorite restaurant will eventually change owners, because nothing lasts forever. This makes it seem like we're constantly losing these favorite personal things, and the world is constantly turning shittier. But we're also constantly gaining new things to try.

That's not some optimistic wishy washy platitude - That's the truth of how the world works. You lose your favorite things, and you get new favorite things, because the world is constantly in flux.

[pochercoaster]

Can lawyers get high in Colorado?

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

Originally Posted by rpgdemon

This means, every year as the new set is released, you lose an entire set's worth of cards! The deck that you used to love gets ostensibly worse. Maybe you were playing Elves, and the new plane that we're on this year has NO ELVES. (Maybe that happens for night on five years in a row. Maybe I'm a little bitter about this.)

You know there's a totally viable Elf deck in standard right now right? I mean, it gets utterly crushed by my ultra-radical Grixis Madness deck, but still, Elves man!

[Solid Snake]

Originally Posted by pochercoaster

Can lawyers get high in Colorado?

I've never actually gotten high in my life. A sad or happy truth depending upon your perspective.
RPG, I'll respond to your well-reasoned perspective tomorrow. I need to sleep on this melancholy before I rant more.

[rpgdemon]

Originally Posted by Hawk

You know there's a totally viable Elf deck in standard right now right? I mean, it gets utterly crushed by my ultra-radical Grixis Madness deck, but still, Elves man!

Okay sure, the cycle was broken in Battle For Zendikar but I was referring to the dark period between original Innistrad and, well, Battle For Zendikar.

Innistrad - No elves. Return To Ravnica - Might as well have had zero elves. Theros - No elves. Khans of Tarkir - No elves. Finally, BFZ brings some elves back. Then Shadows Over Innistrad - No elves.

[The Artist Formerly Known as Hawk]

You're probably not going to like going to Kaladesh next set then eh?

[Solid Snake]

...Goddamn it, now my mother needs major surgery and my grandfather's gouged his leg.
Never make "Life sucks" posts because life will always find a way to suck even more because it is nothing but unceasing torments

[tacticslion]

Snake, basically a reworded variant of krylo's and rpgdemon's posts were what I was thinking of writing, but since the gifs and great analogies are taken, I'll just note I'm praying for you and your family, man. That sucks.

In a real-world history sort of way, however, I was recently confronted with the reality of his shattering the ending of copper mining would have been to England a couple of thousand years ago.

I was reading this article and the enormity of the time scale they're talking about hit me.

Copper was first mined ~4,100 years ago, and petered out in all except the Great Orme ~3,500 years ago. That's six hundred years of copper mining. That's not an unfathomably ancient time scale... but really it kind of is. Imagine a world without school or literacy as we understand it or most anything we take for granted today. Look at six hundred years from that perspective. When did time start? When did history begin? Grandfather, great grandfather, and great-great grandfather and people before him have "always" worked this mine, as have I. But now it's dry? Flooded? Collapsed? Otherwise impossible? That's kind of insane, in a mind-be dong way. Everything you've spent your entire life doing - everything you've ever known that you or your distant ancestors have ever done as far back in history as any living people could guess existed, and now it's just... gone.

Six hundred years. Our country isn't that old, yet, and we, in the modern day and age, have created myths and tables about those long-done people who founded it.

But, you know, the Great Orme continued - it hit its stride when everything else was failing, flooding, collapsing, and petering out. I can only guess that many mining families went there in an attempt to preserve their way of life. Many did not, of course - they couldn't leave the places their ancestors had been; or perhaps they were finally free of the backbreaking labor and decided to go or do something else. Either way, entire cultures and societies shifted and economies collapsed with the loss of the mines. The worlds for people or entire families, groups, and communities ended.

But the Great Orme endured. It endured for another thousand years. Taking that into perspective, the Great Orme kept producing copper for almost twice the length of time as the entire copper mining industry had existed after the rest had ended prior, and it had been running for as long as they had. That's generations (about, what, fifty? Sixty?) of people that knew the truth that, when all else failed, the Great Orme endured.

And it did endure. Until it didn't. One day, the last hammer was swung. The Great Orme had run dry. It was empty, and ~1,600 years of history were over. I don't know how people took that day. Perhaps they had slowly drifted away. Perhaps there was celebration. Perhaps mourning. Perhaps nobody cared by that point. But a 1.5k year old culture and society and economy ended. That's devastating and world ending all at the same time.

And yet... the people endured. In that endurance, they found new generations. New trade with foreign people. New ways to love their life. New ways to have friends and be among others. And I, for one, am glad they did. Because now I've got a life in this modern world and get know and love and rage at or with and frustrate or get frustrated by or disagree with or argue with or whatsoever I do... but especially love... everyone in my life. Including you guys.

If those prior generations had not endured the ending of their entire worlds and economies and societies and all that, none of us would be here. Giant meteor humor aside, I'm glad they did.