Is it something in the water, or a secret corrosive side-effect of too much reality TV? No compulsory logic classes in first year university anymore?
During the whole censorship / PayPal debate, over and over again, I read people equate and confuse real examples of illegal sexual behavior with fiction.
Hyperbolic comments like “Well, I’m glad that stuff is banned. Do you really want someone fucking your 12 year old sister?”
Huh? *BLINK*
I have no idea what is going on here, but it’s rampant. Blinding lapses in simple logic. Obvious inabilities to mentally separate fiction from reality. It was really quite chilling.
Were we always this stupid and I just didn’t notice it, or have people been slowly getting dumber? And what’s caused it?
….
Right, that’s it. I give up. When the mental separation line between fiction and reality blurs to that extent, I’m not sure I want to partake in discussions with these people anymore.
When cast members of reality TV programs got book contracts, it was over. People are getting dumber and dumber. In the US, you used to be able to count on a group of professional women to contain some readers of literary fiction. Now they’re reading YA (not just Twilight) and with hipster pride.These books, movies, TV, and their stupid conversations never deal with any moral complexity. It’s all knee-jerk good/bad. Bad=don’t do it, write about it, read about it, think about it, debate it, explore it (but maybe secretly get off on a cop TV show where viewer & writer & character together heroically try to stop the bad thing & deny that anyone is titilated. (Ever see a rape victim tell the cops what happened on something like Law & Order? There’s horrified head shaking & crying but it’s paced like smut!) But I digress. Shut up now, Wyeth. Love your post as usual.
“These books, movies, TV, and their stupid conversations never deal with any moral complexity”
Good point, Wyeth.
RG, I’ve was,for a while, on a dating site where the vast majority of women would not admit to read anything. They like ‘partying’ and ‘hanging out’. I feel sorry for people who watch reality TV. How can one learn watching that stuff? I think reading is a love earned early on in life. It’s a shame there are so many who are misinterpreting what is real and what is not. They have no life perspective.
People have always been that stupid, honest.
Remember, things are terrible, but not any worse than normal.
My immediate response was to agree with you; people now do seem to be stupider than they were. Perhaps being raised on a diet of instant ready meals, instant “opinions” on TV from “experts” has something to do with it; and of course, our attention span is now in nano-seconds. But then I remembered that Plato — or was it Socrates — said something similar:
The children now love luxury. They have bad manners, contempt for
authority, they show disrespect to their elders…. They no longer
rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their
legs, and are tyrants over their teachers.
so now I’m thinking it must be my age 🙂
It’s not just the reality TV, but the news where politicians of all stripes reduce complex issues to 140 characters and call the president a liar in the middle of his congressional address and news anchors applaud them. It’s the way we throw about powerful words like “love”and “hate” in the most mundane contexts. Almost everything is presented in the extreme today. I don’t think it makes people any dumber than they’ve always been, we just now have the ability to express our views instantaneously and anonymously in all sorts of venues online. Remember, highly educated men illogically blamed women and their innate vices for the downfall of Man and society, but simultaneously classified them as weak, irrational, and almost childlike in their mental capacity. These men were just as dumb in some regards as the commenters you describe, RG, if more eloquent.
I can’t help feeling that “intelligence/knowledge/facts” live where common sense once was. And our indelicate relationship to language means people can say things like “Well, I’m glad that stuff is banned. Do you really want someone fucking your 12 year old sister?” and not even think about it. It really doesn’t take a genius to see the different. Or, at least, it didn’t used to.
Hey RG,
As the official waterguy, I can tell you that nothing untoward has been added to the water. I think whats needed here is “Non-fiction” and “Fiction” distinction. I wonder if these people literally believe there is a Starship Enterprise flying somewhere above their heads when they read a Star-Trek novel? Do these people really not have a clue? Never heard of fantasy? Should we start to regulate peoples minds? Their ideas? Their fantasys? What about the fantasy they all espouse, the one where they believe in God? Lets ban any reference to him, because he is nothing but an idea someone dreamed up in their fantasy world. They make me sick.
Part of the problem is the increasing blurring between fiction & non-fiction: this goes back to the very first Hollywood biopics, and has accelerated over the last twenty years or so. We now routinely get fiction based upon actual persons and events (I am guilty of this myself), and true stories dressed up as dramatic narrative. There’s little doubt the internet hasn’t helped – an environment where the most insane bullshit can be presented as convincingly as the unalloyed truth will corrode people’s critical faculties. I don’t believe folks are necessarily more stupid now than they were before – I just think we have far more opportunities to be stupid these days…
Yeah, this is a toughie. I think all good writers incorporate realism into their stories. Bram Stoker wrote Dracula as epistolary in order to heighten its verisimilitude. Certainly Charles Dickens wrote his characters and story events from real people he’d known and situations he’d been in. The whole of Little Dorrit is taken from his own childhood. His own father was in Marshalsea.
I think we have started making real misery into entertainment, though. In news and reality tv. And there’s something essentially different about that.
My 180 square feet was adorned with one of those older heavy as fuck, models of electronic stimulation. I needed space for my sweaters and yoga books so I hefted that behemoth and put it to the curb.
Yet, I can’t escape as the dumbness remains just repackaged in a frightfully more accessible slim handheld version via Netflix, HBO Go, Showtime Anytime, and Itunes.
I prefer your lovely “smut” any day although, I am also a lover of the visual and verbal when it comes to erotica each having their own place in my heart. Have you considered writing/producing/directing/ for porn? It would be amazing fucking amazing.
Regards,
An adoring fan – Jennifer