Author: Sarah A. Hoyt

Perfectionism should be classified as a disability.

It has blighted more lives than autism, destroyed more potential work than brain damage, stopped more achievement than miss-education. It can devour entire civilizations, and arguably has.

I don’t know how we managed to infect both boys with it, though arguably both of us have it, and also arguably perhaps it’s genetic.  In their case it causes this weird veer between insecurity and what might come across as boastfulness: first by thinking they’re not good enough for even the simplest things, and then by overestimating their competence compared to other people when they figure out that they can in fact do some things. Then they get disabused of that and go back to insecurity.  It’s a hell of a cycle.

I solve it by being permanently trapped in insecurity.

If you’re an artist or even just a “creator” or worker: a writer, an artist, a programmer, a cook, holy heck, even a house cleaner, you know exactly what I’m talking about.

There’s this odd tendency to be more dissatisfied with our work the better we do and then to decide not to do things because, what the heck, it will never be good enough.

The way it blights lives is… interesting.  As in I’ve seen perfectionists utterly ruin themselves by doing nothing.  Oh, you want to write/create/climb your work ladder? But you look at your work and you know you’re not good enough because you can see flaws, so why even try. And then you do nothing. And then… and then you’re 65 and you’ve done nothing and achieved nothing in your life, and it’s a miracle if you came close to supporting yourself. (And the only reason you’ve done so is because you did some job you considered was menial and didn’t matter, so your perfectionism didn’t infect THAT.)

If you’re a true perfectionist, you also never had any relationships. Because even though you’re far from the ideal mate, you judge every potential by tagging up defects.  If you can’t have perfection, why bother.

The very smart are extremely susceptible to this, but everyone can fall into the trap. If you care or know enough about any field, the flaws in your own (and others) work will stand out glaringly and in relief and then you can’t do ANYTHING.

Of course, the more you practice and know the more flaws you see. And it eventually shuts you down.  I catch myself in this trap frequently to the point of being amazed when semi-pro anthos buy my work, because I’m sure it’s the worst thing ever written.  And I can shut myself down for years.  (I’m not alone, I know you know other writers with this problem.)

Which, sorry to bring up Peterson again, but he’s the only person I’ve seen who said this, if you’re by nature creative can make you mentally ill. It can turn you into a depressed zombie.  And the way through it and out of it is NOT to give up the art/work even though that feels like the only way. It makes life worse.

In fact, perfectionism kills. The fact it leaves an animated corpse behind only hides the crime.

And yes, it can kill societies.  There is an age when people can see all the flaws in society but are too young to know what the alternatives are. Also our schools are deliberately not teaching history as it really was, so it’s really hard to know that the alternatives are worse, or that no society was ever perfect, because humans aren’t and every law is a double edged sword that cuts more on the not-intended side.

Throughout most of history that age is called “adolescent” and “young adult.” But in the US it’s called democrat or — in the rest of the west — socialist or communist.

The illusion that you can create a perfect society usually empowers the worst sort of tyrant and brings about hell on Earth. For the recent hit parade see Cuba, Venezuela and soon South Africa. Though frankly it can go back further and it has claimed more than 100000000 victims in the 20th century alone.

And that’s the active perfectionism, the let’s get out on the street and kill everyone who isn’t fully onboard (or send them to camps to die) form of it.

The passive, depressed perfectionism of “I could try something but it would be worse” is the social this and social that of Europe.

For a continent that gave the world innovation (and fire and blood, but those usually are linked) for centuries, they are now reduced to a continent that tries to improve all its little flaws and ends up creating more, and sinks more and more in morass, to the point they have stopped reproducing, are a virtual 3rd age home, and are in the process of being actively invaded by a far worse (in terms of the lives of common people under it, which is the only universal criterium) culture. And think they deserve it.

The problem perfectionism can’t be solved by rational analysis. That only gives the demon of perfectionism another place to attack, this time your character. “You can’t ever be perfect, so why bother?” And deepen the depression.

The only way to get past it is to do.  Just do. Sure, it will never be perfect. The world isn’t perfect.

For a while there, don’t even try “for the best you can.”  You’re wounded, bleeding, and you don’t feel it.

One way you can tell is it infects everything even slightly creative or artisan. Hell, in the depths of this, I can’t even cook.

All you can do is create. Don’t judge it.  If you’re a self-publisher or an artist who sells your work directly, find someone relatively unbiased, or someone who was right about your work in the past, and put them in charge of saying “good enough/not good enough” before it goes for sale.  Even if you think they’re being crazy or incredibly lenient. JUST DO IT. And keep doing it.

Because perfectionism is sterile, dead, and deadly.

Human endeavor, as messy, imperfect and all thumbs as it is, it alive and nurturing. It will keep your mind alive, and the risks you take allow you to have A LIFE, instead of death in life.

Be not afraid.

Too depressed to create, work and do? Why should you be different from the rest of all the all-too-human clay.  Just do it.

Do it through the depression, the tiredness, the meaninglessness.  Do it.  You can only start from where you are now. The longer this goes on, the worse it gets. So, just start.

Does the perfectionism ever let up?  No, not really. But you get used to keeping it in its place, reduced only to spurring your growth, but not interfering with work day to day.  And sometimes looking back at something you created while half-dead with worry and self-loathing, you realize it’s ALMOST perfect and a good thing.  And sometimes people email to tell you how much it meant to them. And sometimes, sometimes, you realize you don’t suck, and it gets marginally, slightly easier.

And sometimes it comes back. A reverse. Bad sales. A truly spectacular bit of bad luck, and there it is, grinning at you with its perfect, gleaming and — you’ll realize — skull like face. And if you let it, it will kill you and destroy everything you have.

Don’t let it.  Nothing mortal is perfect. Don’t even try to make it perfect. You don’t know what is perfect either. You’re just mortal.

Give life a chance. Give yourself a chance to have a life.

Go and do. Create. Work. Do it now, do it today.  What if it sucks? What is sucking? What makes you think you know?

Be not afraid!

*I’m hearing a lot of the doom and gloom again, and heck, I’m feeling the doom and gloom myself, partly because of the shenanigans going on in my state, and because I know better than most how deep the fraud is and how hard it’s going to be to get a victory against it in 2020 no matter what. And how we might not be able to, after which if we’re lucky — and it’s still awful even if we are — all hell breaks lose. If it doesn’t, we’re going to hit Venezuela before we come up for air.
These are not pleasant thoughts, but please, please, please, be aware that in the long term it doesn’t mean we’re losing. If you expected our so called “elites” i.e. the people who want to be the boss of you to give up without a fight, you might be too optimistic o live.

Weirdly, man on man, woman on woman, on the street, the freedom-people are starting to win the culture. But we’re deeply screwed at the institutional level, and have been for a long time. It’s going to take a long time to do what my military friends would call unf*cking ourselves.  We must be in this for the long haul. Which means we must not give up and become suicidal now, when the tide is turning (for several reasons.)

If we work very hard, one way or another, our grandchildren will be free. And that’s a good enough reason not to give up.

I’ll do a more cogent post tomorrow.  Today I have SO MUCH to do, and until I can, I want this post to remind you things could be far worse. In many ways the peak of the “progressive” project was in the seventies. Thank heavens that’s past. – SAH*

Don’t Jump Off That Ledge II – A Blast From The Past From June 24 2013

At Least It’s Not The Seventies

Those of you too young to remember the seventies – looks towards the kiddy table – might not realize why this is a good thing.  Yes, I do agree with the Professor that at this point Carter is an (unattainable) best case scenario.  However, that’s politics, and politics is always several decades behind life.

Yes, I know tons of scientific advances and amazing stuff were being one in the seventies, but – either because the mass media controlled the dissemination of what it wanted to show – or (and having lived through that time I incline to the second) people really believed this bizarre stuff, a lot of odd ideas got credence in the seventies that right now only apply in highly specialized areas… like in colleges, or among the very young and the very stoned.

–          This is the dawning of the age of aquarius was semi-respectable.  No, the religious and the older people didn’t really buy into this, but “what’s your sign?” WAS a normal gambit for opening conversations.

I’m not going to discuss the relative merits of astrology, but I’m going to say when an entire civilization formed on the enlightenment principles chases after it, things have gone seriously wrong.

–          Psi power is the future.

It might be – but if it is it needs to be tamed and brought within the realm of the “studyable” (totally a word, shut up.)  It wouldn’t be the first odd knowledge to become mainstream and studied, HOWEVER – and this has been discussed ad nauseum on these pages before, both by me and the commenters when they were intent (for reasons known only to their psychiatrists) on creating a brand new magical world – the way we’ve gone about it is clearly wrong, and event he “best scientific efforts” of places like the USSR have failed to do anything.  “But Sarah,” you say.  “All the scientific advances from the USSR proved to be the ones they’d stolen, pretty much.  So their process was wrong.”  Oh, sure, as Solyndra proves top-down scientific research doesn’t work.  Also, note I’m not saying there are no psi-phenomena.  I couldn’t.  And any writer who can uses a different process.  BUT as discussed here, right now it seems to be powered by something that’s notoriously observation-shy.  This causes it to be a hot bed of trickster activity (some of it psi – read The Trickster and The Paranormal.)  But in the seventies, any number of otherwise educated people (Heinlein!) believed that a lot of our science could be profitably replaced with psi-stuff.  Even scientists believed that.  Again, maybe this is possible in the far distant future, when we tame the unobtanium that powers psi, but they thought they were in the process of doing that, and it was just around the corner.  Again, when a lot of people believe that, at our current level of knowledge of it, something has gone seriously wrong.

–          Communism is the future.

Yes, even a lot of people on the right believed this.  No, seriously, they really did.  You see, there were all those figures coming out of the USSR (like the ones coming out of China now – snort!) that said how much more efficient a controlled economy was, so of course, in the end they won.  A lot of the race on the right was to create a parallel, equally controlled but more humane system, so that in the end our system would win.  This was essentially social democracy (and sometimes Christian democracy.)  A lot of the GOP cut their teeth in this era (those older than me by a few years.)  This is why they act the way they do.  (Juan McCain, say.)  This is why their whole attitude is “the same, only slower.”

The fact they were wrong wrong wrong takes a while to percolate and might necessitate their death.  Whether we collapse before that, who knows, but at least we’re no longer there and the new generation doesn’t assume controlled is better.  Which is good because:

–          All tech is mass tech.

Even though things like Future Shock talked of micro manufacturing, no one believed it.  Now it looks likely to be the thing of the future.  Also things they didn’t know were in the future include blogs, information transfer, the ability for the individual to do more and have more power than ever before.

This makes the future horrifying, upside-down, and very much OURS.  “Ours?”  Yep, the odds, because dahlings, when the going gets weird, the weird get pro.

–          All Children Must Go Through State Indoctrination School

Yes, I know the homeschooling movement began in the seventies.  It was also mostly “unschooling” which only works if your kid is self-motivated and driven.  (I suppose in the end what I did with younger son came close to that.  He would spend the morning sprawled on my bed – it’s largest and my office is across from it – reading golden age SF, then write me essays about how the science and tech have changed, and that was a school day.  Or he lectured me on Greek Myth while we gardened, and that was a “test”.)  But now it is respectable, it’s becoming the default in some places, and there are so many resources.

-If You Don’t Want To Have Sex With Everyone, You’re Repressed &

In The Future There Is No Marriage.

Turned out those were only true in France.  Okay, only the second one.  Despite the statistics, etc, and despite the spectacular damage that the economy and the crazy fems have done on our kids’ chances of marriage, I believe we might have turned the corner.  At least there are fewer movies pushing general, forced promiscuity as the only way to be sane.

Mind you, now the feminists believe having sex with a man at all is a betrayal of the cause, but that’s something else, isn’t it?  When the most idiotic thing around is political neo- Victorianism it’s not good, but it’s considerably better than the Brave New World Assumption that you must have sex with everyone, all the time.  When THE gay cause is the securing of the benefits of marriage to same sex couples… We’ve won.  No, I know some of you don’t feel that way, but compare it to the “marriage is just a piece of paper” cause.  We’ve won.  In the future, we’re all married.  (But not to each other, en masse, because that would be icky.  Some of you don’t wear pants.)

–           UFOS

I leave it as a class exercise whether there are UFOs.  I mean, some of Puppet Masters’ is right on it, there could be real ones, in the mass of insanity.  But by the late seventies, we were getting the “UFOs are a spiritual phenomenon and these aliens tell us how to save the Earth” BS and no, really, no. Even Marxism is more rational or at least “integrated” as a religion.

–          Things Just Get Worse

I know that this is hard to believe, but it was expected then that double digit employment rates would last forever, that the economy would just get worse.  We had too many people, see, and the future was grey, starving and awful.  Again, they’re trying to resurrect that.  Don’t buy it.  It’s a lie.  (Though in most of Europe, which never had a Reagan, the 70s now look like a high point for stuff like savings and employment – not in the PIIGS though, they got tons of money from EU and…  Okay, those indicators still suck, but they do have more consumer goods.)

–          Bell bottoms, that particularly horrible brown that was everywhere.  That particularly

horrible orange that was everywhere, too.  Afro perms, even for guys.  Psychedelic wall paper. Yoko Ono.  No, this is not a “tastes cannot be disputed.”  It’s a “EWWWWW”

–          We’ve Learned

We’ve learned.  At least those of us not in the political class.  Most of these ideas bring out a half-laugh, sometimes embarrassed because we bought into them when we were very young.  Reading some of middle Heinlein does the same.  “Oh, sensitives, RAH, really?”  It’s hard to remember this was “respectable” at the time.  And though our kids are indoctrinated into Marxism, now they’re told it didn’t go right before, not that it’s the way of the bright and shiny future.  And the kids have a reckoning coming (poor things.  Unfortunately those of our kids who have been brought to reality have to go through it with them) and they will learn.  Some already are.

The most important thing we’ve learned is that communism is not our inevitable future.  And that’s enough.

Don’t jump off the ledge.  It’s not the seventies.  We’ve learned some, and the years between have proved us right and opened new tech options that are on our side.

In the end, we win, they lose.  Whoever tells you otherwise, just wants you to stop fighting.

One of the things I did a lot, growing up in a village and seeing the unending generations stretching back — some in the village, in various houses, some in the nearby cemetery — was to think about ancestry.

Oh, not in the sense of eugenics, though that too a bit, as anyone who grew up in farm country.  But in the sense of “who was here before me?”

I still think that way a lot, hence the interest in historic fiction/non fiction, and in alternate history.

As far as I can tell we live in the world in slices of time.  The world I live in is not the world my grandmother lived in.  This also worries me a little, because I am one of those who believes the soul goes on, and I’d like to see grandma some day, but I’m not sure we’ll have any points of contact left, when we meet.  Not that it matters. I could sell years of life just to sit in grandma’s kitchen and have tea out of the good cups just once more (after I was about about twelve she insisted on bringing them out for me and the good “bought” cookies too. Sometimes Ferrero Rocher chocolates, since we both had a weakness for hazelnuts.) But I also realize it’s probably like a two year old worrying about what he’ll do for a living. I think on the other side of eternity things are so different they’re unimaginable to us, here on this side.

So, concerning ourselves with this side, which we know we have, we live in slices in time.  They overlap a little, and the physical circumstances make you think it’s all the same, but it’s not.  I suspect even people who died in the mid twentieth century, were they brought forward now, would find our world hard to understand.

Anyway, when you live surrounded by the leavings of other generations: Roman mines, medieval ruins; when your walks in the woods take you into abandoned farmhouses and millhouses, it’s impossible not to think in terms of ‘where I came from’.

And when you get to meet a lot of your ancestors, either in person (we’re a long-lived family. For the much younger child of a younger child, I still got to meet one of my great grandmothers.) or in others’ stories (grandma was as close to her grandma as I was to mine, and apparently the chain goes on, ad infinitum, and so do the stories.  It took me some time to realize stories of the napoleonic wars weren’t her grandmother’s but probably her granmother’s grandmother’s, though making sure of that would necessitate actually doing genealogy and I can’t be bothered.

But there was also talk about people in the village that went back generations.  How do I put this?  My mom’s grandmother for good and sufficient reason took off for Brazil with her husband’s best friend.  Not only were all her daughters carefully studied for evidence of flightiness, but her granddaughters had to prove they were extremely pious and well behaved (yeah, mom failed that so badly. I’m a pale copy compared to mom. Mom … well, mom is mom. And if G-d in his infinite wisdom hadn’t had her be born a girl in poverty in Portugal, she’d probably be supreme leader of the world by now) or they were tarred with their grandmother’s offense.  In fact the only reason I wasn’t (and I probably was a little. Only that explains the village thinking my geeky, solitary self was juggling foreign boyfriends and local ones too) is because mom moved to dad’s village, and I wasn’t in her neighborhood to be pointed out as “so and so’s granddaughter.”  It helps too that unlike mom’s family which tends to the small and lythe (at least until middle age) I took after dad’s family, which tend to be tall, ungainly and of elephantine proportions. So I was more Almeida than anything else.  Bookish, depressive, large, with a gift for words and just enough of mom’s nervous creative energy to run me into writing for good or ill.

You see that above? I thought of people in terms of heredity.  Not unbreakable heredity as the crazy eugenicists, no. Just heredity. Because mom’s family (not unusual for their genetic origin) throws out both morons and geniuses (though I think the morons were nutritional or probably disease. But I might be wrong.) And dad’s hovers from normal to genius and back again to normal and I’m not sure why.  And let’s not forget the village family that was low-normal (at best) until the farmer’s daughter met the proverbial city slicker.  Her child was a prodigy.  Was it his father?  No one remembered him as that brilliant.  Sometimes thing meet and spark in a different way. Genes, most of all. Hybrid vigor and all that.

I also grew up with a sneering disdain for the entire idea of races as separate entities, because even in the village I’d seen people who married black people from the colonies, and three generations later you couldn’t tell, and in three more it would be forgotten.

Recently I was shocked to find that your great grandkids might be only marginally related to you.  Two percent or so, at a level that is barely above other people in highly genetically connected regions, like the one I came from.  And my 23 and me report at the fourth level includes a lot of English, French and German people who aren’t aware of and don’t test for any Portuguese/Iberian ancestry. (Sure, ggggggggdaddy was a traveling man. Probably. Whoever the sod was. Like I know.)

It shocked me, because, as I said, in the village you thought in families.  In fact, if the village still existed and hadn’t long since been subsumed into a suburb of Porto, overwhelmed with stack a prol apartments filled with “foreigners” (anyone from more than ten miles away) my kids could walk down the main street without introduction or explanation and be pointed to the family houses because “they’re Almeida right enough.” (Curiously, other than being a lot taller, they also have the same characteristics as my husband’s family.  Since he recently got 2% Portuguese on his 23 and me test, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop and determinedly staying out of “your relatives” page. Because. Look, that’s the other thing you know, growing up in a village.  Everyone is cousins, it’s the degree that matters.)

Of course, your descendants can also have a lot more of your DNA.  The shuffle is kind of random, and we’re in the early days of figuring out what is what, and where heredity fits in.

All this to say that it doesn’t matter.

Because, you know what? Even if you’re as close to an ancestor as to be them come again (sometimes with a sex change.  If older son hadn’t been born while grandma was still alive, and got to meet her, I’d be a convert to the idea of reincarnation.  In the same way, my younger son is as much my dad as someone can be while being a different person. If he’s seen dad for more than a cumulative two months (maybe) over his lifetime, I’d say he’d just modeled himself on dad. As is, nothing explains it except very odd genetics.) you live in a very different world.

Perhaps the world is more different for my kids and my parents than it would be normal, because immigration came in in the middle, as well as tech innovation.  Maybe.  But I think my world is that much different than grandma’s, and always was even before I came here. Look, grandma had gone to the city 20 minutes away by train a total of five or six times by the time I was in my teens.  And I lived there except for sleeping. Yes, she read a lot, but it in her day it was “books suitable for young ladies” not the kind of thing I read… No judgement, just completely different.

So, even allowing heredity a lot of influence, even in the fifty some years between grandma’s birth and mine, the world had changed a lot.  And the way it changed allowed me a range of options (college!) a village girl of grandma’s time never had.  It closed others too, by societal disapproval.  My parents would have been rather miffed if I had the grades for college prep and chose to marry in the village and work with my hands.

Our starting ideas, our options, the food we ate, everything we learned at that age before we’re fully conscious of learning, was different. Even if you grant the exact same innate interests and abilities (I don’t, I knew grandma. We were similar, but not anywhere near the same) the result would be very different.  And not just in opinion but in impulse and the basic way of processing the world. (I got a good dose of mom’s temper.)

Which means, while I was very aware of my ancestors, and it amused me to find a resemblance in a portrait, or to be told I was just like paternal grandad’s mom (not the flighty one, the terrifying one, who could knit an entire sweater in an evening and kept her daughters in law in fear and awe)  I knew whatever characteristics of her I had, I wasn’t her.  She was in the cemetery, in a very handsome family tomb, before I was even a gleam in daddy’s eye.

So.  Reparations.

There is no doubt, if you read history, that people in the past treated other people very badly.  We still do, too, but I guess it’s much more awful when society is not quite so affluent and when being on the bottom can mean starving to death.  It is impossible to read history, particularly primary sources, and not to be horrified.

But part of that is that we’re imposing our values on the past. Look, history is looked at backwards, while we live forward.  Take slavery (I don’t want it.)  Yes, it was a horrible institution. It was also pervasive in human history, and as far as we can tell pre-history, world without end. Hell, still is in well, considerably less of the world than it was, but in Africa it’s pretty much still a thing, and not just in Arab countries.

Romans had complex rules to deal with it, and lived in fear of slave revolts.

It required mental gymnastics, because it was obvious to anyone that slaves were as human as their masters, and so a complex set of rules and philosophical separations were instituted and once any idea of the equality of man (or that man ought to be equal before the law (and G-d) the whole thing was doomed, sooner or later.

Americans tend to have a bizarre idea that slavery was always by race. I blame public school. I don’t know if it’s deliberately obscured, to emphasize the specialness of racial victimhood, or just because race and slavery are so associated in American history that it overshadows everything else. (Yes, again, is it malice or stupidity? Perhaps we should formulate an axiom that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.)

Men and women of all colors were enslaved throughout history.  Heck, in the peninsula, in the long centuries in which it was a frontier between Christian and Moor, the slaving went on both ways.  One of my favorite medieval “songs” starts with “To war, to war oh moors, I want a Christian slave.”  The person speaking is a Christian “queen” married to a moorish “king” (whatever that meant at the time) who doesn’t trust her moorish slaves not to poison her, and so wants a Christian slave.  (Yes, the story goes on to have her sister be captured and enslaved. Never mind.)

Roman slaves were often blond, and the citizens often of African origin. But even there, it wasn’t tied to race. (Though celts were apparently in general fairly cheap, from what I can figure.)

So. All of us have slave ancestors. ALL OF US.  All of us have slave owners in our ancestry.

Even in the US — though rare — there were black slave owners.  And if you’re going to parse quadroons and octaroons who might very well be slaves, you’re going to assume race is one-drop but only for non-white races.

Again, reparations.  In the twentieth century. For evils done to people who looked vaguely like people alive today and who might or might not be their ancestors.

No? Then what? Are we going to institute a policy that everyone has to prove they have a slave ancestor? No, not every black person in the US does. Obama, for instance, mostly has slave owners in his ancestry (probably having nothing to do with his attraction to Marxism, but permit me an amused smirk.)

And there were a lot of black immigrants, too, in the last almost century. Who had no slave ancestors in the US.

Only the left who thinks in tribes (because it’s easier to make tribes into client groups, than to make individuals into serfs) could think “reparations” makes any sense.

Do black people in America as a whole suffer from the after-effects of slavery?

What? Compared to what and to whom?

Only a philosophy who thinks of people as widgets can think it’s possible for everyone to start out tabula rasa and that those of us who aren’t VISIBLY minority (well, I read minority, but that’s a whole other story having to do with the government breaking people into categories) have some kind of advantage at the get go.

We’re all individuals. What advantage did I have coming in, away from family, friends and all possible connections and at a time it was a pain to even get my education certified? Or for that matter, what advantage did I have, when most people have truly bizarre ideas about Portugal, (including but not limited to thinking it’s a country in South America.)

What advantage did my husband have, setting out into math and computer programing? His parents were not particularly interested in any of his interests. He had no head start.

Sure, a lot of people do start out ahead, with inheritance, but weirdly that doesn’t tend to help in the long run (Heinlein’s dictum about making your children’s life too easy would seem to apply.) And a lot of people start out with nothing and either climb, or more likely, stay at nothing.

None of which, in this year of our Lord 2019 seems to have anything to do with the color of your skin, or at least not in America.

If reparations made any sense, as in compensating you for the psychological wounds done to your ancestors that still hamper your progress/ability to thrive (okay, it’s unlikely but possible. Families as well as countries have cultures, and it influences you very early on) how far would they have to go. Does the baneful influence of past enslaving/oppression vanish? when does it vanish? How many generations? Should I demand the people who happen to live in Rome compensate me for some long-distant enslaved Celtic or Greek ancestor?  No? How about I present a bill to Saudi Arabia for the enslaving of my ancestors? Do people now living in Portugal but descended from slaves get to present me a bill for the enslaving of their ancestors, presuming one of my ancestors was a slaver captain (maybe. I don’t know of any, and we weren’t at the societal level where we’d have a lot of slaves. But according to some accounts of 18th century Portugal even beggars had slaves), or do I get to present some other Portuguese people the bill for presumed slave ancestors?

Or how about, given the mating habits of slave owners, just pass money from one pocket to the other and pat ourselves on the back?

It is time we say enough is enough. Yes, America as founded had slavery. Yes, it was an awful thing.  Yes, people bled and died to end the institution.  Are we going to let the guilt mongers destroy the best thing on Earth in the name of that long ago — and expiated — sin?

Or are we going to tell them shove it, and take a long walk off a short pier?

Black, white, yellow and possibly pink pokadotted, Americans are Americans. Isn’t it enough to stop all the crazy obsession with race and the past, and instead now — at least four generations after anyone was enslaved — look at people as people? How about we yes admit that the past had horrible things in it, but also consider so does the present. We’re all human and tainted by the fact that we’re living forward and we can’t see injustices the future might find glaring.

Instead of standing in judgement of our ancestors, let’s absolve them. They were just human, doing the best they could. Sure, some were outright villains, but they’re gone now.

Our sins are ours alone, and we can only account for those.

What sense does it make to hold people whose ancestors weren’t even here back at that time for the sins of other people who looked vaguely like them? Or to consider people perpetual victims because they look like people who were victimized in the past.

I will gladly pay reparations to any slave I’ve ever owned.

I will demand no reparations for things done to my ancestors who were not me.  And while I feel great sympathy for the great grandmother who took off for Brazil (her husband was a loon and inordinately fond of axes and menacing) I am not her. Her oppression and the terrible decision she made were not mine.  All she contributed to me, besides a little bit of genetic material at the maybe 4th cousin level, is she might have given the village reason to get really creative with gossip about me.  Which in the end harmed me not at all and provided some minutes of amusement every time it was brought up.

I am not my ancestors. Nor are you.  Ancestral guilt is a lie used by would-be rulers to keep the serfs in line. It is they who ought to feel ashamed and guilty of trying to bind free men and women with the shackles of heredity, of a past they had no say upon, of a skin color they did not choose.

They, these would be masters of our fate, are in fact the same old evil in a new shiny package. (And again, it’s probably just coincidence that so many are descended of slave owners, but I’m allowed to smirk.)

We owe them nothing, except a “Leave me alone.”  Nothing. They have no power over any of us, whatever our skin color.

We are Americans and therefore inheritors to freedom.  They can take all those shackles and shove them where the sun don’t shine.

The shackles don’t fit. They never will.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: position

The most shocking thing my — admittedly very odd — sons ever told my brother was that the Beatles weren’t all that.  Imagine supercilious teens saying “oh, they were all right, I suppose.”

This tied in with something we were talking about here yesterday.  The internet, while seemingly innocuous and unobtrusive has changed our lives at such a fundamental level that even those of us who grew up through the shift don’t fully understand how different things are now.  particularly for writers.

There is one well established author, for instance, whom I found myself fuming at because instead of simply looking up archaic forms of common names for her supposedly “alive since the middle ages” characters, just sort of made modern names sound old timey.

Now, I had some reason to fume, because even pre-internet I knew how to find this. But then I was trained in linguistics and my mind contained concepts like “find a book with archaic forms and tracing of given names.” Also, given the erratic nature of book supply and demand in the 80s, I was probably just immensely lucky to find THAT book in a used bookstore near home.

Which probably means that she wasn’t as sloppy as I thought.

But for people younger than me, this is a really difficult concept.

Can I see my sons listening to the Beatles and going “Yeah, that’s okay.”  Sure. I mean, how do you take what the band did away from “but they were the first to do it this way” and/or “Oh, but I remember listening to ‘I wanna hold your hand’ while holding hands with my first crush.”  For some people, they’ll always be very special. but not for everyone.

In the same way, I ADORED McCaffrey’s Pern when it first came out.  I read the books as soon as they were released.  Then — well, kids, life — I wandered away from them for a while.  Now a lot of my audio buying are what I call “nostalgia trips.”  Books I read as a young woman, or books that meant a lot to me get an edge of newness by being experienced for the first time in audio.  So I bought Pern.  I couldn’t.  I think I listened to half the first book before giving up.

There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with the books, and I know that intellectually.  The problem is that so many people (mostly meh fantasy) have imitated her style and plots, and taken some of the vocabulary that me-now keeps thinking “oh, this is so derivative.” Even if I know it isn’t. The books are just victims of their massive success.

So, what does any of this mean?

Nothing, really.  We’re all now competing in a “all time” market.  Pixels on screen don’t show their age.  I find it interesting that I’m discovering some classic mysteries, and I don’t know if I’m reading books written in the era compared to books written now set in the era.

The only way I’ve found to distinguish is when a description trips me.  You see, writers writing in the era didn’t describe some things that sound odd to present day readers.  I no longer remember which series, but one of the ones I was reading tripped me with the assumption that OF COURSE a car was open, except for a windshield. Went to check, and it was written in the 20s (I THINK.)

Of course, the author at the time couldn’t say “and this car didn’t have a roof” even if he/she had been a clairvoyant because people at the time would think he/she was zany.  It would be like us writing, say “and the suit fabric didn’t have adjustments to keep the ideal temperature.” Or “and the wall didn’t have treatment to repeal dirt.”  People reading it now would go “what in heck world do you come from, buddy, that you need to tell us that.”

All this taken into account, how should a writer write to avoid this dread curse?  Meh.  Write the way you were going to, anyway.

I have this theory that in the fullness of time all the “sounds like Pern” books will be forgotten and McCaffrey’s work will again sound new, shiny and special to new generations.  I think Pern will endure (as far as it’s possible for us to predict what our great great great grands will like. I mean, maybe Chuck Tingle is writing for the ages.)

There is that too, you know, the amnesia of each new generation, or even a new market.  My brother was very mad at me when Harry Potter came out because “you could have written that.”

He was right to an extent. I could have written SOMETHING like that.  (What he missed is that there was no guarantee wit would go that big, because book marketing is as much a feature of luck and timing and the author catching the publisher’s eye as anything else.)

I grew up reading British Boarding School YAs. (Pratchett lampoons some of the stereotypical characters brilliantly in Pyramids.)  And I write fantasy.  Mashing the two was a concept I didn’t even think about because it was so OBVIOUS. And I assumed they would be obvious to everyone else, missing the fact that even when I was a kid these books were already passe and old fashioned and that for Americans they were completely innovative.

Note I’m not saying “I could have been Rowling.”  Even if I’d written books with that inspiration (and I probably wouldn’t have. I don’t write YA very easily) it is highly doubtful my execution would have been as appealing as hers.  My brother has the layman’s belief that the important thing about books is the idea.  Pros know it’s the execution.  I’m just illustrating the fact that everything old is new again, to a new generation or people far far away.

So, if you’re a writer, write whatever you want.  In the end, with a little bit of luck, cream will rise.  And heck, even not-cream can make a lot of money if it hits just right.  If you want immortal fame, otoh, that I can’t help with.  It’s all a matter of guessing what the future will like, which is even harder than predicting what the future will BE.

And if you’re a reader… exercise a little charity.  No one is asking you to suffer through a book you’re not enjoying. But keep in mind that sloppy author might not be so much sloppy as from a time far far away when information was more difficult to come by.

You know, I’m always surprised when I talk to anyone about how things have changed in the last 20 to 30 years and get something like “sure, we have computers, but that doesn’t make a big difference. It’s not like the introduction of the automobile, or flight.  Now if we had flying cars…”  It happens every time we’re talking about how technology has changed life, and yet it still puzzles me, because it’s a form of willful blindness.

I yield to no one in my disappointment that there are no flying cars, honeymoons on the moon, or even the long-sleep, Heinlein style.  Because yeah, that future would be shiny.

But in terms of the actual change, except perhaps for long sleep, I want to submit to you what is happening is as significant as the invention and widespread use of the automobile.  It’s just less… visible.

On the other hand it touches more intimate forms of the human life. In a way it touches everything, permeates everything, changes the way we think, live, experience relationships, or even have fun.

Cars? Sure, they changed how fast people could get somewhere, and how much work it took to keep your means of transportation (even permanently cranky cars don’t need to be fed or have their stalls mucked out every day [makes note for biological car stories.]) More people have cars than ever could keep a horse and carriage.  It made it possible for dating young people to get away from their families, and thus changed our dating and relationships (sociologists say. I think they’re full of flies. Same change happened at the same time in Portugal where no one had automobiles. I think it comes from other sources.)  The fact that it made distances shorter (in time to get there) also changed the character of manufacturing, which could now serve a greater area. Also, by allowing young people to range a greater distance around, it made the concept of moving for work or just because you want to more plausible.

In fact, as the only person here (I think) raised in a pre-automobile frame of mind (yes, there were trains and buses, but trains have been around a long time) I’m probably the only person who realizes how much cars, highways and ubiquitous driving changed our perception of the possible.

Before people think of doing something, that thing must be so obvious in their minds as to be in the realm of possibility.  All of us have things we know are perfectly possible, but which would never occur to us in every day life.  Usually because of money.  Say, Dan and I have some time off coming up (maybe in the end of the year), we can think “hey, we have a few days off, what will we do?”

Things occur to us that wouldn’t occur to my parents (who might think of driving or in the old days taking the bus to the beach all of 10 miles away.  And the fact I didn’t grow up on the seaside, and only went there for a month a year, and it was a major endeavor tells you how different things were.)  Like for instance we might think of going to our favorite hotel in downtown Denver and hitting all the museums.  Or we might think of staying at home and hitting various interesting exhibits all around a 200 mile range.

That 200 mile range still, for my parents, requires major planning and is considered a great endeavor, not something you’ll do every day.

Because they didn’t grow up with cars.

On the other hand, it would never occur to Dan and I in those circumstances to go “Hey, we could fly to–” mostly because we haven’t had that kind of money most time in our marriage. Even if it were possible now (it isn’t, but we have great hopes in one or two days) it’s not in the range of things we think about, unless someone reminds us/tells us.

In the same way moving out of your area (say the nearest 10 miles) didn’t use to be a thing.  People wouldn’t even think about it.  Trust me, growing up we knew that them foreigners five miles away lived in unspeakable ways, and who wants to live near them.

Automobiles and jaunts of 50 miles or so, made it possible for people to think of living elsewhere, and to know that over the hill the people are probably not unspeakable barbarians.

Some of that change is for the better, some for the worse and some is just change.  And even the better and worse is impossible to fully correlate until probably a century from now.  Because humans live in a world of unintended consequences.

So, what has changed in the last 20 to 30 years?  Sure, everyone has personal computers, but mostly we just use them as glorified typewriters and phones, right?

Ah, you sweet summer child.

Sure, mostly I use my computer as a glorified typewriter.  In fact, if you look up “uses computer like glorified typewriter” I believe they have a picture of me.

But even I…

Look, I usually start my day by checking in with my assistant… who lives in another state, in another city.

Depending on what I’m doing that day, I might also check in with a couple of friends who either want me to do something for them or want to work on something together.  One of those friends lives on the other side of the world, in Australia.  During possibly the worst time in my career (well, mostly because it was the first really bad time. After a while it only hurts when you laugh) that friend was one of the people who kept me going/kept me sane.  We’ve met three times in real life, but we are close friends.

That’s very personal and right there, and it has good and bad consequences.  I have a large, distributed and frankly loud circle on line. It’s easy to forget that I mostly worked locked in my office and see no one.

On the one hand having friends is better than not and the internet allows Odds and people in weird professions to have a circle “of their peers” perhaps for the first time in human history.  On the other hand, the monkey brain interprets not seeing people in the flesh as “we’re all alone. Our band cast us off, and we’re going to die.” So you’ll get very depressed and have NO idea it’s because you need to see people, interact with people, and let the monkey brain know everything is okay.  I need to consciously keep track of it, or I start spiraling into despondency and don’t even know why.

Next up, it’s changed the way we learn and work.

No, really. This was just starting up when I was homeschooling younger son (for a year) and even then it was really useful to be able to buy him a Latin course and a Greek course.  I took them along with him. I could never teach it.

Now I understand the options are infinite.

I realized how much this changes things, in the personal sphere, when I fixed my vacuum last year after looking the problem up on line, then watching a few youtube videos on fixing it.

From how to install wood floor to how to solve highly abstract problem, there’s a video that teaches it. Or various videos and wars over the best method.

Even in little things, like where to grab dinner, our old method of going through the yellow pages is vastly inferior to just hitting the net.  When we moved here, we used to work till  8 pm unboxing things, and then we had to figure out where to eat that was still open.  In a suburb, this is harder than it seems, and without the net, we’d probably have wandered around getting hungry and angry.

But it goes beyond that.  I have a bunch of friends who work remotely.  Which means the “gig economy” both good and bad is accessible to a wide range of people who before would need to contract and work in their employers building.

This is good and bad.  The good part is that all sorts of people whose options would otherwise be limited: people who can’t drive for some reasons, mothers of small children, the disabled, etc. can now have jobs remotely.

The gig part is good and bad, though I’ll note there are also several traditional jobs now, where you work most of the time remotely.  And “gig” doesn’t mean long down times provided you have a wide set of in-demand skills.

The real downside is that this opens our job market to the world.

Now, I understand in true third world countries most of the workers, even educated ones, won’t be as reliable, so not as desirable as Americans.  To an extent.  Because when you can pay someone in Elbownia $2 an hour and for the same skill you pay people in the US $50, how much better do Americans have to be to earn that? (The weird thing is they often are.)

But the ramifications from this will shake the world in the next century.  How? I don’t know.

Property values will change. How? I don’t know.  I know people that think cities will disappear. I don’t think so.  in fact, the drive towards more remote working has come with growth of cities.  Honestly, this doesn’t surprise me, because I’ve worked from home a long time. I can see if I worked in an office every day I would prefer a more remote location to live in. It would be more restful.  But that monkey brain thing?  Frankly where we live now, and my eyes being still too weird for me to drive, we live TOO remotely.  I can’t be sure of seeing someone I’m not related to in about a mile (the neighbors don’t walk much.)  We’ve lived in downtown areas most of our life, because I could go out the door, walk around the block and see enough people to appease that “must see human beings.” drive.  Also, if you work at home all the time, your entertainment moves outside the home. You want to be able to go out to eat, or to a museum, or a park, or whatever you do.  So…. will cities shrink or grow? I don’t know.

Will people move to more remote and cheaper cities, though? since they can telecommute to the big city and get the bigger salaries?  Probably. Some of them.

What about countries? Would we, for instance, consider buying a farm in Portugal and working remotely, so that our money went much further?

Well, no. Mostly because I know Portugal. Looking over the blogs of American expatriates in Portugal, I went “duh”.  Yes, it’s cheap, but you’ll have to work with a bunch of things that, like hiring dirt cheap labor in another country, might not be fully compensated for by the lower cost.  In Portugal’s case (and I’m not picking on Portugal. It’s just the place I know really well) the things that usually drive expatriates screaming back home are: insularity — you can move to a village there, but you’ll never be fully accepted except as a curiosity — unpredictable services like electricity and water or disaster preparation/mitigation; medical care; ability to get products and things we’ve come to expect in the US.

Will all this stuff equalize in time? Will the cost of living in the developed countries come down, other countries come up, and will — in general — the world become more unified in lifestyle and abilities.  Will it — say in my grandkids time — be trivial to say “We’ve been looking for houses, and we think instead of California, we’re buying a house in Sri Lanka?”

Possible.  Maybe even probable.  Though I don’t know that I buy it in that short a time.

But “the poor will always be with us” also applies to countries. There will always be a cheaper place to hire workers from.  This means the workforce and get very weird, very insecure.

Is this good or bad? I think in the longer term good.  Getting there, though, is going to be nothing short of horrendous.

And then there is my very specialized area, where I work and where I study and where I also amuse myself.

This morning Dan and I were talking about how the way we watch TV series, or read has changed drastically.

I like to look at these things every few months, because figuring all the details of how our experience has changed helps me figure out how to market.

One of the obvious things is the ability to “binge” be it in a tv series or a book series.

In fact, we’ve changed almost entirely to binge-watching.  I was always a binge-reader, but now more people are, and that changes things too.

Binge watching: for the last two/three months, we’ve been watching Midsommer Murders.  Not every night, because we often can’t take the night out. On the other hand on a lazy Friday or Saturday night, we might watch two or three episodes.

Why? why not pick a different series every day of the week? Because there’s comfort in a series, and it’s easier to go to a place you “know.”

How does that change things? Well, obviously we privilege long-running series. There are a lot of British mysteries, but most of them have one or two seasons. This doesn’t allow us to settle in for the long run.

It’s much the same with books. Every indie will tell you you need to bring the books out close together and you only start making real money after ten in a series.

Note that traditional still hasn’t realized this, and are continuing their old game of one or two books — or at most three — and you’re out.  And they don’t understand why their bottom is falling out. They also haven’t realized that bringing books out more than six months (and that’s pushing it) apart is a killing blow unless you’re going to promote the writer to a fare-thee-well.  Why? Because readers have a lot more options, and with the best will in the world, they’re not going to be aware when your next book comes out, or they’re going to be riding off on something else by then.  Traditional simply isn’t made to cope with this, which is why they look much like the dinosaurs staring at the asteroid and unable to figure out what to do.

Which means I need to re-learn the way I used to be and write faster.  Not as easy as it seems, after 20 years of being trained to one book a year.

As a reader, though, indie has changed my life even more.  I almost don’t re-read, unless you’re really an extraordinary favorite. I have too many options for new books. And instead of having five or six authors I check obsessively to see if anything new is out, I usually search by name until I find, yeah, a series. Then plunge into that series for a week and move on.  I might come back, but unless you hit really high on my personal tastes, I’m not going to personally look for you. Too many other options.  I’m more likely to look at a suggestion and go “oh, I like that series. Let’s see the new one.”

There are other things.  You know the trick many long-running authors got away with in trad, of writing essentially the same book?  Yeah. It doesn’t work so well when I’m binge-reading.  By book three I’m going “oh, good lord. I’m bored. Let’s find something else.”

The other thing — and I really need better and more detailed story bibles — is that glaring inconsistencies between books are more visible when binge reading.

In my field, things are in wild flux. The one time I was legitimately approached by a real movie company, it was on my facebook PM.  Used to be you had to have agents for them to find you. Now? Meh, they’ll figure it out.

But I bet they’re in as much turmoil everywhere.  I know some things like online shopping and ‘just in time’ supplies are changing everything down to every day retail.

What does it all mean? I don’t know.  I know that the revolution of instant worldwide communication and of private access to the public sphere (you don’t need to work for a newspaper to be read by thousands of people) is not done with us.

It’s more invisible a change than the automobile, but it might very well be more pervasive and more fundamental.

I won’t see the end of its second, third and tenth order effects. My grandkids might not.

We’re also all jumpy, because this is a very large, very unpredictable, and in historic terms very fast change.

It’s like walking through wild terrain that changes constantly.

Keep your eyes open. Only by being aware of how things change can you find your way.

Robert A. Heinlein said that a society that doesn’t know history has no past and no future.  Of course, we don’t have to listen to that, because Heinlein was after all racist, misogynistic and homophobic. Just ask any college professor or any leftist talking head (but I repeat myself) and they’ll inform you of this.  And, if, armed with knowledge of the man’s books and biography and works you dispute this, and they can’t wave it away with “you don’t see the hidden messages” (which is like “you don’t see the invisible demons”) and/or “you’re full of white male privilege,” they will just out and out attack you, and try to shame you as evil AND intellectually deficient because you went so far as to read Heinlein.

I started reading Chinese history late. Mostly because it wasn’t offered in school when I went through (at least not in any course I could choose in my college. I think History Majors might have had some) and I couldn’t find any books on it easily available until the mid nineties, when I joined (and ruined myself on) the History Bookclub. Sometimes it’s hard for people today to understand just how limited our pre-Amazon reading choices were.  Both these thing are part of the discussion above, yes.

You see, when I read Chinese history I was amazed at the recurring instances of burning all the books, and the overachieving emperors who went so far as to kill all the story tellers, including grannies telling traditional stories.

Oh, the reason makes perfect sense.  We have someone in the comments who spent part of her teen years in the DDR (East Germany) and she’ll tell you that the history they were taught had absolutely zero to do with reality.

In fact all communist countries (and friends tell me most Arab countries) have highly bizarre versions of history.

There are reasons to do this other than totalitarianism.  As I have pointed out before, there used to be/still is in healthy countries a highly necessary version of nationalism which is akin to thinking people of your family are the best people ever, in the whole world.

Most normal, average human beings aren’t going to set the world on fire.  Most of them don’t even really want to. They just want to live okay lives.  They don’t really have any ambitions to stand out or be amazing in anything.

Which means to keep from living lives of “quiet desperation” they need something more.  In highly religious times, (and/or countries and places) this is provided by religion. If you are a devout whatever, you know you might not succeed in this world, but there’s a crown/fifty virgins/etc. waiting for you on the other side.  I’m not mocking it, or saying it isn’t true, btw. As most of you know I’m a believer, myself.  I’m just saying that this helps to keep the crowd at large happy.  Which is why the idiot Marxists call it the opium of the people.  This is daft. It’s like saying “people need something more to carry them through everyday than just the ability to survive.”

But Marxists are daft.  And part of their reason for attacking religion is that they wanted to enshrine the state in its place.  This too was daft.

Nationalism was there all along, with religion. As in “our country is better than all the other countries.” It too gave people who otherwise had no reason to behave better than their instincts/no pride a reason to look up and imagine themselves part of a greater whole. Whether you’re more motivated by one or the other would depend on your personality, I guess.

Part of the neuroticism of current day is the changing or twisting of national histories is done in one direction only: it’s done to make the west ashamed/feel guilty of its history; and to make everyone else think the west owes them.

It is the latest phase of a propaganda attack that started with the USSR wanting its Imperial philosophy to be MISTAKEN for international communism. The only way to do that was to erase/twist all national narratives so no one but Russia were clean/great. (And Russia only after the creation of the USSR.)

Why? Well, because the only way that communism can survive is by pillaging.  But that’s not important right now.

The attacks used to be indirect/sideways, as in not telling people the whole story or strongly implying something else.  As a foreigner, for instance, I was shocked when I discovered America didn’t go to Vietnam under a Republican, that JFK was MOST CERTAINLY not about to stop the war when he died, that the Republicans were the ones pushing for the end of segregation and for civil rights, etc.

It’s not that I was taught lies in history.  It was just the teacher teaching the general narrative, and then throwing us to the arms of the media that echoed it.

My history book in the US didn’t mention party affiliations, and had bullshit like a chapter on how the American Dream was dead, if in fact it had ever existed.

By the time older son entered high school (and in the US) the lies were more blatant. It implied stuff like all wealth came from natural resources and the only reason we were richer than other countries was colonialism.
There was a weekend I spent giving the boy reading material and foaming at the mouth.

Three years later, when younger son hit the same material, it was yet more overtly anti-west and basically blamed all the evil in the world on capitalism and white people.  This occasioned months or ranting, throwing books against the wall, and mandatory reading and essays for son. (Who till hasn’t forgiven me for making him do graduate level primary source reading at 12.)

Now the combination of two techniques teaches the kids crazy sh*t such as that Hitler built the Berlin wall to keep out the Jews.  Sure, some kids are stupid, but these are not the stupid kids coming up with this.

Along the way, sometime in the 80s, the left realized that the fact that books set in times whose history they were distorting sometimes told the truth. And they came up with the most “beautiful” technique for killing historical knowledge of any totalitarian strand of thought EVER.  They couldn’t burn books. There were enough people around who’d sound the alarm on that.  They couldn’t forbid books, because this is the US and there would be more people screaming than you could silence.

Instead they used their unprecedented command of story and ability to disseminate it. Authors, ideas, entire times of history became so “problematic” that even reading them/about them made you a bad thinker and to be shamed and shunned.

Because the left follows shaming and shunning with very real world consequences, such as hounding you out of the ability to earn a living or physical attacks on your kids, not to mention sabotaging your career in any field they control, it became socially unacceptable to contradict the open narrative.  Which is how Heinlein — poor man, who was self-consciously inclusive and who, frankly, had a highly romanticized view of women — became stigmatized as racist/sexist/homophobic.

It’s also how we get the toppling of statues (including some statues of abolitionists, but they’re in uniform, so…) and hissy fits about lectures on local history, buildings named after past heroes, etc.

If there were good people in the past, then not everything about the west is horrible, and the SJW narrative falls apart.  The same, btw, if there were very bad people and nations who were not in any way Western nor even vaguely white. (And there were.)

This is why Columbus day must be eradicated, because otherwise you might find your opinions and the ill informed crap you were taught disputed by your relatives.  You have to make it so offensive that the older relatives don’t dare talk to you.

And many millenials claim to be socialists, but they think socialism is any collective endeavor, including roads and schools.  Which would surprise the hell out of most Romans, not to mention American colonials.

But that’s part of it.  The insanity has ramped up, not because it’s successful.  And the tearing down of statues and local pictures is not the work of an ideology that’s winning.  Nor is the ubiquitous “setting me straight on misinformation is an attack, and you’re violent.”

These are all crazy efforts at protecting what they thought they’d solidly won, until the internet fractured the mass-media power to keep the narrative going.  Sooner or later real history will trickle into even the densest, most indoctrinated skull. (Okay, maybe not. Occasional Cortex is paid for her stupidity.) And this terrifies the left.

As does the fact they have to have started realizing while the mass of people faked compliance even when their power was absolute, there was a not inconsiderable number of us thinking forbidden thoughts and reading forbidden books.  And there must be some more now. And they don’t know where.  (This, btw, feeds the paranoia and cannibal feasts.)

I’m afraid they’re going to get crazier the more power they lose.  Beware the wounded bear.

By which I mean “let’s make them crazier.”

Tell the truth and shame the devil.  Be not afraid.

This is a wee bit — coff — late because a family member had a routine procedure which required me to spend a lot of time in a hospital waiting room.

And while waiting, older son and I got to talking, and what we got to talking about was innate versus trained traits.

The truth is no one knows what the cause of the way any individual is: environment or genetics.  I mean, we know both go into it, but not what proportions, nor how easy it might be to train someone out of really counterproductive or difficult genetic traits.

We know humans aren’t cattle, whatever else we are.

What I mean is, as far as we can tell you can’t take the traits of the dam and the sire and get more or less consistently the same traits.  Part of it is because cattle is less genetically diverse than us.  Which btw means that they’re REALLY not diverse at all.

The Marching Morons effect — for lack of a better term — in which the least intelligent people reproducing over a long period of time would make the entire population moronic is possible. But it’s not possible over one or two generations, because intelligence in humans is not that simple. There are multiple traits that feed into it. And some of them are recessive and inheritance is complicated.

And then there’s environment.

Oy, environment. From what you ate as a child to how prioritized intelligence or a certain type of intelligence was in your culture all of it will affect how your present as an adult and how you express what you have.  If you talk to doctors and social workers, you’ll find any number of people who adopt kids of disparate backgrounds and all the kids mimic the parents’ IQ. Which is statistically unlikely for mere genetic inheritance.

So…

The reasons we were talking about it was agreeableness, particularly in familial settings, which older son and I were discussing because it’s sort of how were trying to figure out my er… “life transition.”

By which I don’t mean what most people mean by “change of life” for women.  That happened years ago surgically and kind of suddenly.

No, I mean as the boys are almost flying solo, and though it’s a highly anticipated and indeed delayed (because their professional track was difficult and protracted) change, it’s affecting me weirdly.

Part of this, is my “agreeableness.”

This is not quite altruism, but a tendency to set your goals and your identity in relation to other people, which in my case, for reasons genetic or of upbringing mostly is family or adopted family.

So I have a tendency to default to “mother of all living” but more so of course my biological kids.

Which means I find myself trying to reorient and figure not…. not who I am (because I know that, unless I’m busy being a character) but how to orient what I am and how much I like other people’s needs and expectations to affect me.

What I want to do is easy: I want to write.

But it takes time to ratchet away from “pleasing others” to “producing writing” (which also pleases others in a different way.) Because this type of internal turning takes time.  Humans, like societies, have inertia and it takes time to change direction.

I’m not proposing, mind you, to stop caring for or about my family and friends. That would take quite a lot and perhaps becoming not me.  What I wish to do is stop prioritizing all of my family and friends over me and my routine and the work I wish to do.

It’s harder than you think because agreeableness is both an innate and trained trait.

Also because despite the importance put on women having jobs, society also still expects us to care for others, perhaps more than in the past, since people today have this myth of the woman as universal nurturer. (Which is not true for all women.)

It feels bad and possibly evil to wish to take time for myself and pursue my goals.  Yes, I do understand it’s not either bad nor evil, it’s a way to achieve goals which are not in themselves bad or evil.

Feeling this is bad or evil is probably non functional and stupid.  But it is there, and it needs to be dealt with in its own language, which is something very difficult, since I neither communicate well with my brain nor with my emotions.

It’s hard to take all the psych-advice books that tell you to think of yourself as worthy and not feeling guilty for pampering yourself, because it always makes me think they’re just making people become selfish.

So, what I’m trying to say: that it’s difficult for cultural and genetic reasons to even believe that you must look after yourself.  And yet it is demonstrably true. And yet if you go too far that way it is also demonstrably bad and can rip societal structures apart.

So far, the best advice I’ve found, and what I’m trying to hew to is Peterson’s “Take care of yourself as though you were someone you love that you’re responsible for.”

It’s hard to understate how powerful that idea is.  It shouldn’t be. It should be common sense. But between the demands of pathological altruism that have been built into our society and the equal demands of pathological hedonism it’s sometimes hard to hew your way without fearing you’ll fall too hard into the other pole.

But that is a good way to evaluate.

If you were in charge of another person you loved, of course you’d give them their meds and not let them eat only candy.

In the same way, if you were in charge of another person you loved, and this person had a special thing they felt called to do (and which wasn’t, say, chopping up the neighbors and putting them in a trash bag, of course) you’d try to get them time and mental and emotional space to do so, right?

So, I’m now trying to do that.  Of course not as straight forward as it sounds.  Nothing human ever is.

Agreeableness might be both trained and genetic. But it is still our job to control and aim our traits of either kind.

I’m just having trouble with the idea it’s not either easy nor instant.

*I was looking for a BFP and this one made me sigh and think “I’ve been me for a long time. As you can see, I was groping towards being a wrong fan who had wrong fun already.”

A Myth of Humanity- A BLAST FROM THE PAST FROM FEBRUARY 2011

Lately, partly because I’ve been trying to kick off whatever bug has got me since November – it keeps coming back – and because when I’m tired or sick I can’t read fiction, I’ve been reading books on the proto- Indo-European culture.

Now, you go back long enough and it’s like reading tea leaves. Oh, okay, not tea leaves. Horse’s teeth and grave sculptures. However, through all this, it is possible to get a picture – vague and confusing though it is – of our most distant ancestors.

I’m not going to play psychologist, but themes emerge from what we can salvage of the very oldest tales: sacrifice and loss, love – often not eros, but agape or family love – blood and death.

Pratchett in a lot of his books says if you go back far enough you find that almost all the old stories are about the blood. I’ll add to that. The oldest stories are about blood, death and rebirth.

I think this is part of the reason that vampires are so popular, but that’s a side line I cannot pursue right now.

One of the things that surprised me is how the themes that echoed through the oldest fragments of legends we can find are the same themes we find again and again in science fiction and fantasy: twins; quests; bringing something magical/healing back; finding who you are.

Part of this, I think, is that humans are not like other animals creatures that live in a certain way because of instinct. Humans are domesticated creatures, as much as our dogs or our cats, but we domesticate ourselves. We are at the same time Fluffy who wants to pee on the sofa and the human who stands over her and tells her no. Only the human is often embodied in a myth.

Of course a lot of us believers get a lot of our morality from religion. But that’s an overt morality. It declares itself. It says “this you shall do” and “this you shall not do” and “here you shall go” and “here you shall not.”

Useful, of course, but it’s rather like the choke chain or the owner literally standing over you to prevent you from going on the sofa. The other part is more important – you don’t go on the sofa because you know you shouldn’t. You know you shouldn’t, because you’ve internalized the experience.

I was thinking about this and it all got tied up with different generations of science fiction and fantasy. Our myths are very much part of what we think the world should be. And what we think the world should be is both fed by and feeds the myth in our head that keeps us acting the way we think humans should act.

As I said, you find a lot of the themes of our oldest myths in fantastic literature… Until, that is fantastic literature decided its more important part was not dreaming of the future – or fantastic lands – but the last part of its name “literature”. It decided its most important function was to astonish the world. In doing so, it lost track of that “what humanity should be” and of reaching back into the sense of what humanity – or our branch of it – was and has been since we’ve had words and long before we had writing.

And so the self sacrifice was lost, and the discovery, and the sense of wonder. Instead we got either purposeless rambles, or people telling us life was brutish and nasty and then you die.

This is I think, an attempt to “count coup”, i.e. to claim to be superior to the vast uncounted multitude of our ancestors who first clawed their way to civilization and to an idea that there might be something better hereafter. And I think in that attempt we – as writers and as a civilization – only make ourselves mental and moral midgets.

Do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse, a novel – and go “and your point was?” Worse, do you ever get to the end of a short story – or worse a novel – and go “Uh… I followed these characters around for this long for you to either twist them beyond recognition and/or kill them? Do you ever get the impression the author veered away from the ending that could and should have been to go in search of a glitter in the weeds of disappointment and bitterness?
No, I’m not saying that happy endings or happy-go-lucky stories are the only ones worth telling. Why in heck would I? If you’ve read me, you know well that’s not my attitude. But even in the nastiest of settings it is possible to be caring, to be a hero, to fight on. Even in difficult – particularly in difficult situations – it is important to remind others of what it means to be human.
Why would a bad ending be considered more mature or deeper than a happy one, or one where the character acted honorably?

Was life ever simple? Or do we just see it that way looking back, because for good or ill all decisions have been made, and things are the course they are? I don’t mean just personally, but collectively, as for lack of a better term “a civilization.”

I know people — particularly the left, but the right too, in a sort of strange, wishful way — have a way of looking at the period of the thirties through the fifties as very simple, and clear.  Part of the reason the left thinks MAGA is “racist” is that they have in mind this time period where (they think) people of other races/cultures were shoved out of public or professional life, and all you saw was the perfect white family with two children, a dog and the — white natch — picket fence.

Life was never that simple or that clear, either in racial terms, or really, anything else.  First of all, humans mysogenate. It’s what they do. I’m fairly sure we haven’t had any aliens land, or we’d all have alien DNA.  Might be just a little bit, might not even be compatible with ours, but some ancestor would have found a way of doing the dirty dance with the alien, and now there would be “weird, we all seem to have some amphibian DNA of unknown provenance.”  Because humans.  We’re complicated, and we fall in love with the weirdest people/things.  In fact, I remember reading something about the heart being perverse, which I take is Biblical for what Jordan Peterson talks about.  We like to imagine ourselves as our conscious mind, ONLY, but heaven help me, the rest of you gets a vote too. And it’s very often a stupid vote.  My body for instance doesn’t seem to know how to communicate “we’re tired” or “We should take a break now” except by throwing a major wobbler that sends me to the emergency room.  And the non conscious parts of my mind, which is where my writing comes from?  Yeah, those are fun.

I am not, as it might sometimes appear by what I choose to write when completely gormless about what sells.

True, I don’t read many bestsellers.  Mostly that is because most bestsellers have an “easy pattern.”  Okay, not easy, but very common. There’s something to the pattern of their plot that ties in with the human mind so well, that it’s “intuitively obvious.”  Unfortunately, like my younger son’s, my mind sees patterns really easily.  Which means when I pick up your big hit thriller, I know every step of the plot in the first chapter.  So the only way I read those is when I’m marooned at some vacation resort and those are the only thing to read.  This is not likely now with the kindle, but it used to be that those were the books people bought and left behind, and that being in a constant situation of being broke, those were the only things I had to read for months on end.

The problem is that I’ll make plans on what to write and plan out the details, because I know what sells.  This came up because we were having a discussion with friends on facebook about what — for lack of a better term — sells best for a little bit of again for lack of a better word “kink.”

For instance, if you’re writing urban fantasy and add a gay male couple, you’ll probably sell better (yeah, even if you put in woke politics) because most of the readers of urban fantasy are women, and women don’t mind that (as long as you don’t go ridiculously, explicitly graphic.)

In the same way, if you’re writing adventure/action sf/f you’ll sell better if you add in a lesbian couple (sans politics) because most of your readers are male and that’s fine with them.  In fact, it might make the books marginally more interesting.  Again, if you don’t put in graphic stuff, not that males object to that but because they tend to prefer their erotica visual.

When I said that someone asked something like “So, Sarah, A Few Good Men? Why?”

Well, because the part that actually writes the books couldn’t give a good goddamn about my years of careful observation and tabulation of “what sells.”

And if I try to write something that part of me isn’t interested in, it just won’t. I get hours and hours of sitting and staring at the computer and nothing happens.  While if I write something it feels needs to be written, things flow out so fast that I have trouble keeping up with the 5k words a minute.

Which is why Peterson advises we bribe and reward that part of us.  Which is not really easy right now, because we don’t have money to bribe it (my writing self understands very few things as enough of a bribe.  One of the few things it “gets” is weekends away in a hotel.  Writing weekends away, even. But those set us back $500 a weekend, and right now we’re already overcommited, until younger son finds some sort of part time work to finance HIS part of the expenses.  (Not as easy as you think. There isn’t much in part-time engineering in our region. He’s doing what he can with his typesetting business, and he’ll soon have a website where you can see what he does and his work. But… well. We’ll manage. I just can’t bribe myself effectively to do what I must do to make money so I can bribe myself…)

It occurred to me it’s not just humans who are thus divided.  All of the world pretty much is.  There is this memory of “the simple times.”

And then you get hold of primary sources on the thirties or fifties.  Let’s say it’s particularly hilarious to read stuff from the right lauding that time of great freedom in either of those decades.  Let’s just say that if some of the things happening back then were happening now we’d all be talking about how we were ready for revolution.  (And the only reason they weren’t then is that the press was mass-media.  You think it’s bad enough now, with a lying press? They had the same, but no way to check it. It was that concentration and lack of individual communication or access to the public by individuals unfiltered by the media/publishers that put us in the situation we’re in, with what is functionally the enemy of western civilization in control of the vital organs of culture.  Before you get discouraged, it helps to remember, we’re only now fighting back.  Continue fighting, but remember things take time. The larger a movement is, the longer it takes for it to become noticeable, much less prominent in the culture.)

And as for the left thinking that everyone before the oughts were good white Christians or whatever…  Oh, sweet summer children.  Let’s say when they get their freak on, with witchcraft or being naked in public, or talking about their poli relationships, or whatever the actual hell they have in their heads that day, they rarely if ever (I’ve never seen it) would have managed to shock their ancestors or ancestresses 100 years ago.  Those Edwardians… well… Let’s just say they had fewer hangups.  Yes, I know what the public image is. But none of them would have worried about things that the left worries about now like “differential of power” or “implied patriarchy” which meant they were much freer to do whatever crossed their heads at the moment.  Of course they also thought they would have shocked their ancestors.  And I bet you they wouldn’t.

At some point, if you have a chance, read a book called Our Bones Are Scattered about the Indian revolt in Victorian times.  I only read it once because it’s a deeply disturbing book, one of those clashes of civilization where you feel sorry for both sides.  But it is very well written, and the beginning of the book is…. revealing.  The British commander was… well… sort of married to a woman who had been sort of married something like six times before and who went from man to man, collecting kids along the way.  Notwithstanding which, they were Victorian nobility and had a bunch of kids of their own and…

Let’s just say Victorians aren’t the way we’ve learned to think of them either.  In fact you can be sure pretty much no one ever was.  People kept and keep the front they need to, but behind the scenes things were always messy and complicated.

Which often makes finding our own way in this messy and complicated way very difficult.

I was talking to friends about finding the right marriage partner, and I had to explain that even if there is someone you’re “meant”to be with “before time itself” and you do go along with this plan, it doesn’t make it perfect or strife free.  In fact almost all the couples like this I know are… well, if they weren’t “meant” you’d think they were utterly unsuited.  (Take us, for instance.)  But there’s an undercurrent, something you can’t express or explain in words, because it isn’t a thing of words that makes it possible. And that would make anything else much harder.

I suspect it’s the same thing with career.  I know I hate, writing. Well, not writing. I love writing.  In fact we were joking that if we won the lottery it would give me “more time to write.” The fact this is a goal tells you how broken I am.  But I hate the business of writing.  When I came in, I felt like I was trying to climb a ladder that was dissolving under me.  In a way it was.  I was also perfectly clear on the fact that my politics were probably already hurting me and would hurt me more if I came out of the political closet.  Because our world was permeable, and there were acquaintances from before publication who knew my politics, it’s possible I was never in the closet.  Which frankly explains much.

Talking to older son yesterday, talking about changing “goals” — which is not quite right, but changing your goal within the goal — I told him my ambitions have been broken so many times I don’t even know what I’m aiming for right now, mostly because I’m having trouble believing in a goal or that I can reach it. (Yes, this is a personal problem. And don’t worry too much. I’ll figure it out. It’s just some psychological wounds are deep and take time to heal if you don’t want them to fester.)

But you need a goal. You need something that challenges you, that pushes you to excel.  You rational self must have something to strive for, or you can’t convince the mute, annoying part of you who actually does the work to work.

And I think that’s part of the issue, with our civilization at large.  You see, the world is very complicated, and people are given the impression that it’s never been this complicated — which is a lie — and know for a fact that things are changing very fast.  They no more find a path, than it dissolves and crumbles under them.

We’re preparing the new generation rottenly for this, too.  Look, every generation is educated according to what their grandparents thought was desirable. Which is why I had the education that would have helped an upper class Portuguese Lady in the mid 19th century to make a good marriage and shine in society. For practical purposes, other than diplomacy (which only my mother ever thought I was suited for and which elicits snort-giggle from most other people) the only use for my degree was academia by the time I took it. Though business desperately needed translators, we weren’t being taught office skills, or the terminology we needed to translate science or industrial stuff.  (I learned those on my own, through running into them head first, as I learn practically anything.)

Kids now are being educated to the dreams of the early twentieth elites: for a communitarian world with a strong central government.  They’re being told this is the future and what to expect, because when that idea made it into academia, and slowly worked itself through to curriculum and expectations, that was the future everyone EXPECTED. Even conservatives thought that the future would involve central planning. They just wanted to keep a little more individual freedom with it.

I remember blowing the world of Robert’s third grade teacher apart when we informed her that no, in the future there wouldn’t be a need for MORE group work, and that all creativity wouldn’t be communal (which frankly is funny. Creativity doesn’t work that way) but that it would be more individual, probably with people working on their piece of the project miles and miles away from the rest of the “team” and having to pull their weight alone.  Dan and I explained why based on tech and trends, and all the poor woman kept saying is “that’s not what we were taught.”

Our kids were prepared not only for a world that doesn’t exist, but the world that idiot intellectuals (all intellectuals are idiots. They mostly don’t know a thing of the real world or real people) thought would come about, somehow, automagically.  Think of Brave New World, but everyone is happy and doesn’t need the soma.  (rolls eyes.)

And then we sneer at millenials for not finding their way, when people my age, who are self-directed and battlers, and have vocations, find ourselves caught in the grinding gears of change and get our goals and work broken over and over again, and yeah, also don’t find it easier to find our way.

Talk to the kids. Help them find something they’re “meant” to do (that’s not how it works, so make sure they know there isn’t only one goal and only one vocation, but there’s almost always something that their skills and ability are useful for RIGHT NOW.  And the ability to learn more to change.)  If needed, hook them on multiple streams of income. Help them see it’s possible. Dispel their illusions that life was ever easy.

Sure, in the past there were people who got “the one job” and stuck to it through thick and thin to the golden watch at the end.  But I don’t think they were ever the majority. And by the time I came along, you couldn’t have any loyalty to your company, because it would have none to you.

But there was a way. There were paths.  You had to be nimble and stay awake (not woke, because that’s just an agrammatical word for the embracing of an irrational and ever changing philosophy proclaimed from above. So the opposite of what you need in a fast changing world.)  Acquire skills when you can. Learn new things.  And be ready to jump sideways, backwards and forwards, into a field of endeavor that might not even have existed when you started on your way.

Dream big. Dream of new and undiscovered ways to succeed.  And then chart your course and adjust it. Daily if needed. But it’s probably more productive to do it every few months.

How can you support yourself, but also how can you do something you find worthwhile in the middle of these choppy seas?

You’ll manage it. Your ancestors did. Tech change might not have been as fast for them, but I will promise you their lives were also no picnic.

Learn, think, change, but above all, do. Challenge yourself daily.

The winds are contrary and the compass is spinning like a top.

But if we stick through it, there is at least the possibility of a better future ahead.

Hands to the wheel.  Let’s go.