OK, the November election is long over and everyone has simmered down.
But nobody, even the winners, are really satisfied, and the people who voted for the winners aren't even satisfied. Those who voted for the losers are gearing up to "fight again."
Most of us look at "politics" as a toxic swamp that functions more like a field of World War I muddy foxholes than like a managerial team.
But just as I pointed you toward studying the phenomenon of Glenn Beck -- NOT Beck himself, mind you, but the generating mechanism that caused the phenomenon which impacts so many in such a strange way -- I now have to point you to the study of politics.
This is an exercise in what screenwriters call SUBTEXT.
Philosophers, linguists and semanticists have other names for it. But we're fiction writers here, and we're trying to solve the problem of how and why the HEA, Romance and particularly Paranormal and Science Fiction Romance got such a horrid reputation among those who never (ever) even read it.
I mean, if you don't read Romance, how can you have an opinion about it?
See where I'm going with this?
People don't know politicians, but have opinions about them.
People don't understand economics, but have opinions about it.
Even professors don't understand economics -- they're making it up as they go along and winning Nobel Prizes for it, but they're all clueless about how economies actually work. If that were not the case, we wouldn't have a problem with the economy would we?
Does that sound like the field of professional fiction writing? Everyone has an opinion, but nobody understands it.
Yes, "economics" and "politics" and "government" and getting elected are an "artform" and actually close to writing because working as a politician is being a performing artist.
As I've told you, Alma Hill clued me in to the actual category of the writing craft -- writing is a performing art.
Well, so is politics.
And "selling" a politician or even just a political idea or stance (not even the whole philosophical package behind those ideas -- the whole "theme" of the created piece the politician is performing) works just exactly like selling books.
It's all about popularity.
And as any screenwriter will tell you up front, to get a film over the hump and into "popularity" one must be a virtuoso at subtext.
If your dialog is "on the nose" (putting the subconscious assumptions into delineated, direct, conscious expression) it won't work.
Men (or the masculine tendencies in everyone) are especially put off by this. Emotions must not be articulated. Emotional content has to be sub-subtext or they will run away before you can make your point.
Subtext carries the message, the theme, the point of the whole thing.
And that can be just tone of voice, or choice of vocabulary.
Actors master this early. You can say one thing, but convey another, and the audience will pick up on and believe the other.
Now if you've been studying commercials as I suggested long ago in these writing craft pieces, you already see this point.
The key to selling product in a commercial is tone of voice, music, -- the images and articulated message are there just to distract the audience so that the real message can be rammed into the subconscious where it will control behavior against the audience's will.
That's how it works, and it is now a practice reduced to a mathematical formula.
The Overton Window that I talked about is derived from that mathematical study of the behavior of large groups of people.
Individuals can't be controlled. But large groups can. The more uniform the individuals in the group, the more easily the larger group can be controlled -- like cowboys herding cattle. That's why they're called "cowpokes." They poke here and there, and five of them can control a thousand head of cattle.
Now what's happened on the political scene in 2010 was the result of a court decision regarding how money spent supporting candidates can be collected, spent and accounted for. In effect, the laws instituted to try to "clean up" elections turned out to be unconstitutional. So that opened the spigot for all kinds of funding to flow in all kinds of ways that the general public is not to be allowed to know about.
It's raining on the field of World War I muddy foxholes and the battlefield just got a whole lot more toxic.
As any writer knows, to generate a really great mystery plot, just re-analyze the events in terms of "follow the money" -- that's where murder motivations seethe.
Publishing likewise is all about making money.
Winning high political office sets people up to become wealthy themselves -- and I'm sure most of the deals they swing are perfectly legal which is what lures them into swinging shadier deals and eventually getting caught.
Lots of plot ideas in that, but let's stand way back and watch the publishing field as the color Nook and Barnes & Noble rule the roost for a while before they get shot down (maybe by Amazon?) It's warfare, trench warfare in publishing now.
And it's all about advertising.
Advertising is the war against readers.
The point of advertising is to get a reader to buy a book they don't want, just as advertising lures people into buying all sorts of other things they don't want or need. We are now an admittedly consumer driven economy (which I don't think is the best thing to be, but that's another discussion.)
Remember we're writers, and we write stories. The essence of story is conflict -- conflict generates both plot and story, and how that conflict plays out to a resolution states the theme. In other words, conflict is theme-driven.
Think back over this election and all the particolored junk that came in your snailmail and the flashing advertisements on TV, the posters and bill boards, handbills given out at grocery stores, and so forth.
Advertising is the war against voters.
Advertising is done by someone who wants to change someone else's behavior to be in accord with the benefit of the advertiser -- REGARDLESS of whether that benefits the recipient of the advertising or not.
And sometimes it does benefit the recipient. Here's a better cold remedy. Here's a way to get spots out of your carpet. Here's a more delicious coffee. Here's a really cheap shampoo that works better.
Sometimes ads tell the truth.
Sometimes they don't.
Regardless of the truth contained, advertising is more efficient at herding humans than cowpokes are at herding cows.
Cowpokes use bovine instinct to get results. Advertisers use subtext.
To become a popular writer, you must master the use of subtext.
To "sell" (by advertising) the theme "Love Conquers All" to those who disbelieve it, you must bury it deep in subtext and use it in your advertising (i.e. what screenwriters call a pitch).
That means you must study successful use of subtext in advertising.
The most efficient way to learn something is to watch someone else use it.
They still teach the Medical Arts by the "See One, Do One, Teach One" method, and there's a reason for that buried in the human brain's learning process.
But in writing, the best way to learn a technique is to see it, do it, and teach it in an artistic context different from the one where you intend to apply it.
That's why I did the long series of 20 posts on the Tarot which I hope you've finished reading and absorbing by now. Instead of focusing directly on writing techniques, you learn by focusing attention elsewhere and absorbing the essential lesson on writing from the subtext.
That's the drill that's most effective in absorbing any writing technique I've discussed "on the nose" in previous posts here.
So now look closely at the field of political advertising and the effectiveness of it, and think in terms of the "message" we are trying to get across about the HEA.
Here below is a brief excerpt from an email begging for contribution money for a "cause" rather than a "candidate" - just substitute HEA for the cause.
Note I chose this one, but the exact same language and subtext are in every one of these fund-raising emails -- I subscribe to one or two from every flavor of the political spectrum and study them for techniques. (one day you might need to write one as part of a plot, so study carefully.)
--------FROM DICK MORRIS--------
From the desk of Dick Morris
Dear Reader:
Let me tell you about the devastating ad we’re running right now to defeat THREE Pelosi Democrats from Arizona. It’s called “Stop the Arizona Three!”
You can be proud of this ad because donations from friends like you made this ad possible.
The ad is simple. It exposes the three Democratic politicians for voters to see. It says that Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell, and Gabrielle Giffords:
Voted for Obama’s massive healthcare takeover
Voted for a $500 billion Medicare cut
Voted for $1 trillion in wasted stimulus funds
Supported Nancy Pelosi
The ad ends with an appeal to “stop Obama’s tax hikes, his amnesty for illegals, and his job-killing policies.” And it closes with these words: “Vote for the candidates who share your values.”
The beauty of this ad is that we hit three birds with just one stone! For the cost of one ad, we can defeat three Pelosi Democrats!
And, thanks to your donations, we’re also running similar ads against Pelosi Democrats in Florida, West Virginia, Minnesota, Tennessee, Wisconsin and elsewhere. The ads all follow the same successful formula.
--------END QUOTE---------
Did you detect the subtext?
It's the same subtext you see in every single political fundraiser.
"I can get people to do what you want, not what they want, and all you have to do is give me money."
Now if you're any kind of writer, you've also studied carefully all the techniques used by grifters, confidence artists, to finesse you out of your money.
This is the same subtext used to victimize the retired folks who don't have enough money. "give me your money and I'll double it."
This is the same subtext used to hoodwink anyone into doing anything that is against that person's best interests.
MONEY CAN BUY ANYTHING.
And it's a subtext that's believed by a lot of people, but it's especially believed by the pragmatic people who pay attention to politics. The winner is always the one who has raised the most money. That's how we got George Bush as President. That's how we got Barak Obama as President.
And all the lesser offices work the same way.
It is so rare that the under-funded politician wins that when it does happen it's a national news story even if the office is local. It's the "man bites dog" story -- when "dog bites man" is not a news story.
I can make things the way you want them to be if you pay me money. Well, that wasn't enough money, give me more. Confidence men (women) can get people to give them entire fortunes a little at a time -- it wasn't enough, give me more. It's working, see? Every ponzi scheme works that way.
The pragmatic truth is that as politics is run today, political offices are for sale to the highest bidder. (this isn't new)
That happens not because of campaign funding laws, but because of the mathematicians behind The Overton Window.
Here's where I wrote about that:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
These people are changing the behavior (NOT THE MINDS) of vast herds of people by snapping a whip over their heads. (whip-snapping can be described mathematically).
Parents know the subtext technique because it's taught by all the parenting books and coaches and advisers about how to defuse the fights with teenagers.
This behavior control via subtext is built into human beings. (what if an alien species comes along that doesn't respond?)
So one of the elements we must master in order to change the perception of the romance genre in the eyes of the larger, general public (especially men) is subtext.
Dick Morris's (and the other fund-raisers) message is "give me money and I'll make the world the way you want it to be."
As I read it, that is the exact opposite of the message the Romance Genre carries. I've rarely encountered an HEA ending that carries the theme "money can buy happiness."
Nevertheless, the vast majority in America does behave as if money can buy happiness. Look at all the hundreds of millions of dollars given to political campaigns. Lots of it is given by businesses, and they know they will make a profit on that investment as will the politicians. (Look at those who give money to their own campaign chests!)
Look at the very rich who give away all their wealth to a "Foundation" -- well, even though other names may appear on the letterhead the person who gives the funds to the foundation controls the way that wealth is used. Giving it away doesn't lessen their "power" -- it increases it. And the maneuver keeps the control of that wealth from the government.
Control of money, "power" can buy happiness, satisfaction, or an HEA. But "Love" can't.
That's the behavior.
That behavior is at odds with the professed, "on the nose" statements articulated by these same people.
Everyone says they accept the scientific studies that show health, long life, satisfaction and a sense of being "successful" come from binding family relationships. But faced with an email like Dick Morris's - they readily give money. (by the millions of dollars, too)
Is the problem with the Romance HEA that it's "on the nose?"
How do we get HEA and Love Conquers All into subtext, then bullet point it into an advertisement modeled on Dick Morris's successful fundraising campaign? Controlling all those millions of dollars gave Morris's organization (a non-profit) the kind of "power" that comes from controlling money.
Why does controlling money bestow power?
That question brings us to the philosophical core of the essence of all fiction, but it's especially relevant to Romance because the flip-side of "Romance" is sex, and sex is power personified (for humans; maybe aliens function differently?)
When a person harbors a belief that is at odds with their behavior, you have the main ingredient for a main point of view character for a novel.
When you can define the exact conflict between the belief and the behavior in such a way that it mirrors a conflict resident and active in a large demographic, you have a best seller that can be made into a blockbuster, opens-everywhere film such as Blake Snyder analyzes in his Save The Cat! series.
Ultimately, the resolution of that conflict between belief and behavior bestows upon an individual power over their lives.
That is the essence of the HEA -- power over your own life.
People may be futilely pouring money into poltical campaigns responding to the subtext promise that this act will gain them power over their own life.
Since it never happens, how can those same people buy a Romance novel and expect to read how to resolve their conflict in such a way that they will gain power over their own life and thus achieve the HEA depicted in the novel?
We need to move the Overton Window (I do hope you've read my post on that and the links in it or you won't understand what I'm talking about here) -- we need to alter the perception of what is possible and how to achieve it.
Look closely at the Soul Mate concept and you will see that the philosophy behind it, (the Soul exists), implies individuality and a unique individuality at that.
Each of us is half of some whole. The other half is our Soul Mate.
Read the Tarot posts, or remember them. Here are 2 posts listing the 20 Tarot posts.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_23.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me.html
The writer learns to parse people into characters to write about by distinguishing between what we all share in common and that carefully defined uniqueness of individuality. Lots of philosophies do this, but I've round Tarot the fastest way to learn to use it in writing. (not fortune telling or telling the future -- understanding the present nature of human experience)
That Soul Mate concept makes no sense to people whose individuality has been worn away. It makes no sense to the nail that stuck up and got hammered down - to those taught "conform or die" and "different is dead."
If you believe that individuality is wrong, and that the individuality of others is a danger to you and must be controlled by "the government" or whatever instrumentality you fund, the whole HEA concept will just not seem plausible, realistic or desireable. It certainly won't be entertaining.
Love is a phenomenon of the uniqueness of an individual. Love happens when you percieve that uniqueness in another.
See my post "What Does She See In Him" for more on that.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/08/what-does-she-see-in-him.html
The terrible urgency of Romance derives from the uniqueness of the experience of this ONE INDIVIDUAL PERSON in your life. There will never be another.
That's the love that generates Romance leading to an HEA where the couple mutually and individually exercise power over their own life.
The ambience of "Romance" blurs the very existence of "the real world" around one so the individuality of That One Unique Other is the total focus. You don't see how we are all the same when you are focused on that uniqueness.
That "blurring" is the result of a Neptune Transit which represents a very spiritual state that not everyone can handle well. Either you see reality with utter clarity for a time, or you become completely befuddled and confused.
Here is a list of some of my posts on Astrology Just For Writers that discuss how a writer can use Astrology as a plotting tool by understanding how it describes the elements in us all that bind us, that make our life experiences identical.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/pausing-for-you-to-catch-up-with-me_30.html
We are a herd of identical people. Exploiting that attribute of humanity makes these political fundraiser efforts successful.
We are unique individuals.
Exploiting that attribute of humanity makes the Romance Genre, the HEA and the Love Conquers All theme profitable for publishers.
Study the political fundraising techniques and the results. Study the popularity of Glenn Beck and whatever new phenomenon personality appears on the scene. Don't study the text Beck presents, study the subtext and more important than the content of his subtext study how his promoters use that subtext.
Apply your discoveries to your writing.
The younger your target readership, the bigger the effect you will have on the future of humanity, so be very careful what you encode into subtext.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Showing posts with label Glenn Beck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Glenn Beck. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 01, 2011
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part III
Whew! Now the election's over we can drop politics because it's not important anymore, right? Ooooo. Ummmm. Oy, I don't think so.
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm not arguing either side of this issue. I'm examining why the HEA is so universally scoffed at.
We began in Part I of Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice on October 26, 2010, discussing Glenn Beck and noted:
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
And to whom does it matter? And what can we do with that information?
In my blog post "Glenn Beck Did Not Invent The Overton Window" (October 19, 2010, aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com ) I mentioned that I disagree (personally) with some of what Beck is "selling" (and he uses a "hard sell" technique right out of his enemy's playbook). But I don't disagree with all of it.
So what do I disagree with and why should you care?
As I pointed out in the October 19th 2010 post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com Glenn Beck is moving the Overton Window, or trying to, or maybe just doing it inadvertently in response to commercial demands and pressures.
He got the concept of the Overton Window from a Think Tank which got it from some mathematicians researching how to describe the behavior of large numbers of people making decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory
That mathematics is employed by advertisers to make people buy products. It's proven stuff and it works.
The Mackinac Center http://www.mackinac.org/7504 -- uses this math to describe the political behavior of people by the millions while advertising uses it to shape preferences for brands of toothpaste or perfume. There isn't enough profit in novels to afford to hire those folks to sell a novel -- but film producers definitely use their services.
This math is not just statistics, it's a method of changing what the majority hold to be true and unquestioned. It can change what is deemed "politically correct."
And it has.
The entire technique is rooted in a view of the universe based on the "zero-sum-game" -- which is why this branch of mathematics came from and informs game-theory. (which is why video games have become so popular; they depict and infuse the player with the zero-sum-game philosophy).
That the physical universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
That the social universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
That the economic universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
Nowhere in our mainstream, Hollywood films, Manhattan publishing, nowhere in the big money, high capital cost/high profit margin business models do we see evidence of anything but a zero-sum-game model of the universe.
The biggest TV audiences are drawn by sports - and every professional sport is based on the zero-sum-game model of reality. I win means you lose.
I win causes you to lose.
"There Can Be Only One"
In Part II we noted that it seems (to me, and others) that the Socialist and Communist views of the world are based on this zero-sum-game model.
The reason that some people are poor is that other people are rich.
That's connected as cause-effect. The only way that rich people get rich is by taking away from (oppressing) "workers" who work themselves to death for bare subsistence wages and there is no way for these hard working, upstanding, deserving workers to get rich other than to demand justice from the rich who have stolen the product of the worker's sweat and tears. (That's not all pure fantasy either. There is proof it has happened, but not that it must be the only way it can ever happen.)
The theory is that there is a limited amount of "rich" -- You win means I lose.
Well, I won't stand for that. I'm taking your win away from you right now! And that's only justice. I demand justice.
The clear, clean, beyond question obviousness of this point of view is simply irrefutable.
If you are inherently incapable of questioning the unconscious assumption about the nature of reality rooted in the zero-sum-game model, you can not rationally come to any other conclusion than that the rich are rich because they suck the life-juices out of the poor.
The rich are "winners" and the poor are "losers."
Put another way, the poor are "losers" BECAUSE the rich are "winners." AND THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
It's simply too obvious to be denied by any rational person.
The HEA, the HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending, can not be had by all!
It's pie in the sky. Only certain "chosen" golden children ever dare aspire to happiness, and YOU ARE NOT CHOSEN. Therefore you must fight yourself, using all your energy to subdue your inner self. See the example I found involving oral sex in Part II (posted November 2, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com).
But why is it obvious?
Well, look at marriage, especially through the prism of that item on oral sex in marriage. Look at our most intimate relationships. Look at how parents raise children. Look back on how your parents raised you.
From the child's point of view, "because I said so" is how parents rule -- and parents get their way because they're big.
If parents "negotiate" with a child before the child is really old enough to process all the variables at once, the parent is seen as weak, incompetent, manipulatable, and the child gets an inflated view of Self.
There is a corporate executive training program that companies pay thousands and thousands of dollars to put their trainees and new hires through. The program teaches "YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU DESERVE; YOU GET WHAT YOU NEGOTIATE."
And it teaches the art of negotiation as a form of warfare.
Warfare has always been practiced as a zero-sum-game. Our professional sports are modeled after warfare. Corporate culture is modeled on football.
Our culture has forced us to adopt the zero-sum-game model of the universe by excluding any other style activities from your notice (yes, such activities exist but you are flimflammed into not-noticing or not-recognizing them).
Now look at the dust-up recently on bullying in the school yards and how much damage that does to children that then subsequently shapes their potential as adults.
Parents have come out passionately against bullying in school yards. Teachers and school administrators must stop the bullying - it's the school's responsibility to protect my child against bullies.
But where do bullies come from?
How many really creative people have admitted in biographies that they were bullied, and thus forced to learn a response?
How many chimp studies have examined chimp tribes and bullying, or jockeying for pecking order among say, ducks.
Should we intervene in the society of children to stop bullying?
It's an unexamined assumption among parents that their child must not be bullied. (which doesn't mean it's wrong; just not thought out carefully)
It's an unexamined assumption among the parents of children that do the bullying that their child is showing leadership potential, a winner's profile, not a loser's profile, and their pride (however secret even from themselves) knows no bounds. WINNER means NOT LOSER.
Why must our children not "be bullied?"
Recent research on mice has shown us a possible chemical mechanism for the end result of having been bullied.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 12, 2010 titled GENETIC MECHANISM BY WHICH LOVE CONQUERS ALL
Yeah, we're still on the HEA subject.
The mice that had repeated lost fights with other mice in that experiment showed a later life tendency to be timid, not to fight for their place, and not to explore.
Dissection of their brains revealed a chemical in the submissive mice's brains, wrapped around their genes, that wasn't present in the mice that had not lost the fights. These chemicals wrap around the genes and allow or suppress expression of the genes.
So we have a purely chemical (not spiritual or soul-based) explanation of how it is that kids who are bullied in school yards grow up to become submissive - and don't explore.
"Explore" for a mouse is a kind of boldness.
We're talking about the kind of boldness that makes human beings explore questions, that makes human beings question unconscious assumptions being "sold" to them by clever mathematicians manipulating the Overton Window. To question authority, such as teachers.
Because of human creativity, artistic talent, a lot of bullied kids turn out to be the boldest questioners. Maybe they get bullied because they are artistic?
But most don't turn out to be artists.
Allowing school-yard bullying while assuring the parents "we're doing all we can" (God Forbid anyone in this world should heroically exceed their abilities and actually grow as a person and a hero by doing something they can't do - something outside their job description!) is one of many ways to create a pliable and obedient population.
Allowing schools to teach "the truth" (carefully editing textbooks) keeps children from being confused, feeling threatened, and needing to think before deciding or expressing an opinion.
They grow up to be adults who want "the government" (or someone) to keep them safe.
Since they never learned in school that one of the basic principles that made the USA successful as a country is that the police do not prevent crime, they expect to live in a crime free world where police prevent crime.
However, in principle, the police (and all criminal statutes) are aimed only at people who have actually done criminal deeds -- and thus the police (an arm of government) can act only after the fact, lest government gain power over individuals. That is, the majority must never inhibit the exploration activities of any individual. Freedom of thought, religion, speech - all rests on the concept that the Police must not prevent any activity.
Under no circumstances can any arm of government ever be allowed to prevent anyone from doing anything. Government must not be allowed control.
Yeah, they don't teach that in school any more, but it was a core principle in the civics classes in my grammar school, and today it is a fully examined and questioned assumption of mine -- though it started out as unquestioned.
Today, however, "Crime Prevention" (another sobriquet promulgated by those with a very specific political agenda) is lauded, and when it fails people are so offended they throw out their elected officials who failed to prevent crime. Remember we're talking about the plausibility of the HEA here. You can't have happiness if your expectations regarding safety and predictability are not met.
We're missing a social mechanism that damps down if not prevents aberrant behavior, keeps it at a tolerable level where expectations are mostly met.
Today huge, massively funded federal agencies are devoted to public safety - and to protecting consumers.
The government's role is primarily to protect us (seal the borders, for example). Very often we are being protected from ourselves -- pharmaceuticals legal in Europe can't be sold here because they would undercut the market of some big pharma company here, but we're told we are being protected from potential harm caused by our own bad decisions.
But big corporations are seen as bullies because they're big.
Glenn Beck showed (I caught a quick clip of this channel surfing) a cartoon line-drawing animation that is being shown in schools to instruct kids on the relationship between corporations and government.
The government was shown as a small image, a neat, clean straight line drawing, of I think, a building. The corporation was shown as a huge, round, blown-up quasi-human image -- something like humpty-dumpty is often drawn. Bloated and distorted.
The corporations were noted to be bigger than government, and positioned by artistic composition to be menacing the little government.
Any reasonable person, especially someone bullied as a child, would conclude that government must be grown bigger to face down the ugly big bully corporations. That's how we conquer schoolyard bullies - we grow larger, hit harder or get friends to gang up on them with us.
This is a truth that becomes internalized as an unquestioned assumption. Government must grow or the world won't be safe. (maybe so, but who knows?)
Worse, the assumption becomes unconsciously processed because of the graphics - and I could see the art of this Overton Window mathematics behind that composition in the cartoon. As I said previously I don't see what most viewers see when I watch TV. This image of the relationship between government and corporations becomes UNQUESTIONABLE TRUTH, not merely an assumption, a hypothesis or a theory subject to revision according to new facts unearthed.
An assumption can never be called into question because you don't know it's there.
It has been presented to the very young in their own language, the language of the bully in the play yard, and presented to be true by authority in the form of the teacher.
Every time a parent says, "listen to the teacher" "sit still in class" "don't act out" "don't pester the teacher with questions, you'll get bad grades" -- every time a parent reinforces a teacher's authority, the result is more assumptions driven into the child's mind that will become unquestionable assumptions later in life (which might be good if the assumptions stay reliable throughout the child's lifetime).
Was this done to you?
Are you doing it to your children?
Have you ever had to change any "fact" you learned in school?
Look at this: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/11/discovery-pushes-human-tool-use-years/
Every so often, we have to revise what we know to be true. Are you preparing your children to do that?
What has all that to do with the HEA?
If you live in the world I've described above, you have been taught by these zero-sum-game based philosophical methods that you are not qualified to live the HEA - that it's not realistic to expect your life to reach HEA. It's not even "right" to try because if you get an HEA life, that means you took it away from someone else! (zero-sum-game - there isn't enough happiness in the world to go around - you win, someone else loses.)
It's not realistic because not everyone can be a winner.
How do you know that?
Because in that same grammar school class that taught you about big bad corporations, you learned that only some kids in class can get an A, and a few more a B, most will get C's, and a few D's and F's -- or whatever numerical or euphemistic substitute for those grades is used.
The use of euphemisms like "needs improvement" "excels" etc does not mask the fact that it's a zero-sum-game. School is graded on a curve, and eventually we learn what that means. A few are chosen to be winners, and all the rest of us lose because those winners took away our right to win.
There can be only 10% or fewer A's, or "Excels" in a class. Not everybody can "excel" or "excel" means nothing.
Whether they know it or not, all teachers are taught that statistically humans fall on a bell curve and it's their job to sort out the top 10% for college bound.
The rest are "workers." Oppressed, you will see, if you read the first part of this series WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE on October 26, 2010.
The only way you can ever begin to even wonder if any of that is true is to question the assumption that reality is a zero-sum-game, inherently, intrinsically and realistically, there really is only so much good crop land, only so much drinkable water, only so much gold mine country, only so much uranium, only so much zinc, copper, oil, and only so many can be happy. The only way to be happy is to "win" -- so that means half lose.
But if you win, you did it by being a bully, so you have to be miserable with what you've won. Which half of humanity then can have an HEA?
We have to organize into countries big enough and mean enough to fight and win those critical resources or we will die.
Our big, muscular HE-MAN MEN must "fight for us" and win, so we can be protected to raise our children to fight and win.
It's all about competing and winning. Competition is the only correct way to organize human beings. It brings out the best in us.
We MUST compete with each other, and we must be the winner. And only winners then get to have children.
Therefore, if you hold the unconscious assumption (possibly implanted, possibly actually true) that you are not a winner, you have only one logical recourse - rise up and smite the winners and take what they have (i.e. raise taxes on the rich).
In that universe, there can be no HEA for anyone.
If you win Happily Ever After, it won't bring you happiness because you got it by taking it away from someone else. And you know in your heart that the someone you deprived will rise up and take what you took from them.
Why would it bother you that you caused someone pain so you could win? If you didn't snatch what happiness you can, someone else would take it - probably waste it, too. After all, you can do better with resources than others.
If you live in a universe where the only way to satisfy your heart's desire is by preventing someone else from satisfying their heart's desire -- i.e. you have to GET A MAN by "winning" him away from some other woman in a contest of beauty or fellatio, and the only way to hold a man (whether he prefers to be held or not) is by doing something you'd really rather not do because "men can't help it" -- then your happiness is achieved at the expense of someone else's misery.
Now we elevate this discussion to a dimension few are willing to access.
As far as I know, the only universe of discourse where the zero-sum-game assumption about reality can be questioned (not dispensed with, just questioned) is the universe where the Soul is real.
The part of you that prevents you from exulting totally in causing others misery is what we call the Soul.
OK, maybe SPIRIT. Conscience?
Maybe some other term applies. But it's a non-tangible, immortal part of Self that matters more than "here and now" because its joy and its pain is eternal. It's the part of you that's miserable when you lose, and can't be happy when you win because that means someone else lost. It's the non-sportsman in you. It's where your Charity comes from, where your Hope and Joy reside.
And there is some part of every human's awareness that connects to that dimension.
But that connection is like a switch. It's not always open. Sometimes it rusts shut.
In my personal philosophy, judging whether that rusted-shut switch's condition is good or bad for you is above my pay grade. I just use it in characterization.
I think there are people who need to be cut off from their awareness of the existence of their Soul, Spirit or whatever you want to call it, at least for part of their life.
There are people who need to be fully in touch. Sometimes switch's rust can be dissolved by Love.
Most people are sporadically and partially aware, or just aspire to repeat moments of contact through an open connection.
Whoever you are and however you are, you're just fine. You'll change when you're ready - opening or closing that contact as you need to in order to accomplish your purposes in life and beyond.
My attitude is, it's none of my business. I have enough on my own plate.
But given the notion that there exists such a thing as a non-material part of a human being, the whole "model of the universe" thing changes.
The worlds you can, as a writer, build to tell stories in become richer, deeper, more complex, harder to handle, but ever so much more realistic (to me anyway).
If the Soul is real, there may in fact be SOUL MATES -- in which case, the HEA becomes an inevitable end-point for each of us, not a ridiculous fantasy that's not "realistic."
If you live your life wearing blinders, refusing to question the zero-sum-game model of the universe because answers would be dangerous, confusing, or doom you to being a loser, then you don't dare accept the HEA except as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy achievable in real life only by the chosen few, and then only temporarily.
If you live your life totally aware of your own Soul, and can see the Soul behind the eyes of others, and know there is a Divine Spirit somehow intimately interacting with this world and your personal life, then when you get to the HEA in a novel that reflects the particular Soul hypothesis you are using, you are emotionally satisfied.
If you live your life putting your blinders on to function in a corporate environment, in the world of science, and peeking around them during your family time, then quickly taking them off for an hour once a week to worship, then the HEA will attract you, reassure you, seem somehow RIGHT, but it's just a novel. Real life is not so simple. But you'll never stop striving for your own happiness without taking it away from others.
Awareness of Soul makes people unable to tolerate being the agent of deprivation and pain to others.
Now, it's true, many people who scoff at the notion of Soul and are committed to explaining all human behavior with brain chemistry and science, people who have been successful commanding the Overton Window to move to where they want it, are equally unable to tolerate being the agent of pain to others.
In fact, MOST of the people involved in "Progressive" or "Liberal" causes, helping the poor, running free clinics, fighting AIDs in Africa, bravely standing up to corporate bullies with Green Peace ships are purely motivated to alleviate human suffering everywhere once and for all and forever.
And frankly, I'd stand with them, put my life on the line with them. I hold nothing back from these causes. They are my causes and always have been. Green energy, anti-global warming measures, reducing our collateral ecological damage -- walking softly in the world, caring for our environment, all of that is core principle with me.
But how many of them are fighting with all their might because they see the world as a zero-sum-game while at the same time feeling their Souls aching for the unfortunate, the poor, and the victims of corporate greed (which is also very real).
How many of them have a good solid plan for what they'll do when they've WON and thus caused someone else to lose?
On the one hand, you feel your Soul, you know it's real.
On the other hand, you feel your Body, and you know you must fight for the resources to stay alive.
Something is telling you it isn't right, it isn't just, that some people don't have and it's up to everyone to keep all humans safe.
You demand your HEA and won't give up your zero-sum-game fight-and-win scenario.
There's a High Concept film in that conundrum. Think about it.
Turn around now and take another look at politics.
My stand on politics is that no politician should ever be allowed to hold public office.
The steering decisions for a whole country, state, even county, should not be made by compromise. You can't find the right answer to a problem by partially giving up a principle.
I don't want anyone fighting for me, or fighting for my rights, or my anything.
You can't get anything worth having by winning.
So what do you do instead?
Become more interested in what is right rather than who is right.
Argue until you, cooperatively as a group, figure out a right answer. (not THE right answer - there are lots of right answers, usually only a very few really wrong ones)
Govern by consensus not compromise? That's never yet worked, though compromise has sputtered along for the 200 years or so the USA has used it. We need to think some more.
The problem is this Overton Window thing that allows a few people to manipulate consensus to be what they want it to be. So everyone has to be armored against unconscious assumptions in grammar school, trained to be very aware of their personal philosophy but knowing theirs isn't any better or worse than anyone else's.
We'd have to immunize our children to the Overton Window. It would take a new philosophy. (Isn't that what SF/F writers are supposed to be doing?)
Some philosophies though, are more effective and efficient at producing an HEA style life. Fiction exploring the possibilities could be a "pen mightier than the sword" moment for humanity.
Think of the Blind Men And The Elephant. The men are all correct, all have an opinion that isn't the truth, but they won't know it until they stop fighting and start cooperating to create the total holographic, 3-dimensional image from all the fragmented points of view.
Right now, we don't combine our philosophies, we fight to win by cramming our philosophy down someone else's throat.
The zero-sum-game assumptions require that we must fight.
Look again at this entire election process and the results, scrutinize everything that's being said, everything "they" are making you feel, and try to see how to question the underlying zero-sum-game philosophical assumption they are cramming down your throat.
Ask yourself who benefits if you swallow their assumption that all life is fighting and not everyone can win.
Now think about all the discussions we've had about Love, and how Love Conquers All isn't just a novel theme, it's actually true about real reality.
Love is the most powerful binding force in the universe.
If the universe is constructed in such a way that Love Conquers All, how can it possibly be a zero-sum-game?
If "All" is conquered, there is only one winner -- ALL.
What is "all"? - it includes you but is not limited to you.
You see why I don't want politicians fighting for me? The more fighting, the less Love.
Fighting doesn't conquer anything, least of all All.
You can't win by fighting, just as you can't get rid of starfish in your clam beds by cutting the starfish in half and throwing the halves back in the water. The more you fight, the more enemies you have.
When you start to fight, you lose. If you win, you're miserable because you caused someone else misery. If you lose, you're miserable because you don't have what you went after.
It's the zero-sum-game model of the universe that causes people to reject the HEA, to be unable to feel the emotion generated by novels that lead, however logically, to the HEA.
The zero-sum-game model of the universe has become an unquestionable assumption at the bottom level of our subconscious minds. You don't even know you believe it, or how it limits your actions.
To gain acceptance for the HEA, artists must successfully challenge the zero-sum-game philosophy by worldbuilding with Fire and Ice.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm not arguing either side of this issue. I'm examining why the HEA is so universally scoffed at.
We began in Part I of Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice on October 26, 2010, discussing Glenn Beck and noted:
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
And to whom does it matter? And what can we do with that information?
In my blog post "Glenn Beck Did Not Invent The Overton Window" (October 19, 2010, aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com ) I mentioned that I disagree (personally) with some of what Beck is "selling" (and he uses a "hard sell" technique right out of his enemy's playbook). But I don't disagree with all of it.
So what do I disagree with and why should you care?
As I pointed out in the October 19th 2010 post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com Glenn Beck is moving the Overton Window, or trying to, or maybe just doing it inadvertently in response to commercial demands and pressures.
He got the concept of the Overton Window from a Think Tank which got it from some mathematicians researching how to describe the behavior of large numbers of people making decisions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_choice_theory
That mathematics is employed by advertisers to make people buy products. It's proven stuff and it works.
The Mackinac Center http://www.mackinac.org/7504 -- uses this math to describe the political behavior of people by the millions while advertising uses it to shape preferences for brands of toothpaste or perfume. There isn't enough profit in novels to afford to hire those folks to sell a novel -- but film producers definitely use their services.
This math is not just statistics, it's a method of changing what the majority hold to be true and unquestioned. It can change what is deemed "politically correct."
And it has.
The entire technique is rooted in a view of the universe based on the "zero-sum-game" -- which is why this branch of mathematics came from and informs game-theory. (which is why video games have become so popular; they depict and infuse the player with the zero-sum-game philosophy).
That the physical universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
That the social universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
That the economic universe is a zero-sum-game becomes an unconscious assumption.
Nowhere in our mainstream, Hollywood films, Manhattan publishing, nowhere in the big money, high capital cost/high profit margin business models do we see evidence of anything but a zero-sum-game model of the universe.
The biggest TV audiences are drawn by sports - and every professional sport is based on the zero-sum-game model of reality. I win means you lose.
I win causes you to lose.
"There Can Be Only One"
In Part II we noted that it seems (to me, and others) that the Socialist and Communist views of the world are based on this zero-sum-game model.
The reason that some people are poor is that other people are rich.
That's connected as cause-effect. The only way that rich people get rich is by taking away from (oppressing) "workers" who work themselves to death for bare subsistence wages and there is no way for these hard working, upstanding, deserving workers to get rich other than to demand justice from the rich who have stolen the product of the worker's sweat and tears. (That's not all pure fantasy either. There is proof it has happened, but not that it must be the only way it can ever happen.)
The theory is that there is a limited amount of "rich" -- You win means I lose.
Well, I won't stand for that. I'm taking your win away from you right now! And that's only justice. I demand justice.
The clear, clean, beyond question obviousness of this point of view is simply irrefutable.
If you are inherently incapable of questioning the unconscious assumption about the nature of reality rooted in the zero-sum-game model, you can not rationally come to any other conclusion than that the rich are rich because they suck the life-juices out of the poor.
The rich are "winners" and the poor are "losers."
Put another way, the poor are "losers" BECAUSE the rich are "winners." AND THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!!!
It's simply too obvious to be denied by any rational person.
The HEA, the HAPPILY EVER AFTER ending, can not be had by all!
It's pie in the sky. Only certain "chosen" golden children ever dare aspire to happiness, and YOU ARE NOT CHOSEN. Therefore you must fight yourself, using all your energy to subdue your inner self. See the example I found involving oral sex in Part II (posted November 2, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com).
But why is it obvious?
Well, look at marriage, especially through the prism of that item on oral sex in marriage. Look at our most intimate relationships. Look at how parents raise children. Look back on how your parents raised you.
From the child's point of view, "because I said so" is how parents rule -- and parents get their way because they're big.
If parents "negotiate" with a child before the child is really old enough to process all the variables at once, the parent is seen as weak, incompetent, manipulatable, and the child gets an inflated view of Self.
There is a corporate executive training program that companies pay thousands and thousands of dollars to put their trainees and new hires through. The program teaches "YOU DON'T GET WHAT YOU DESERVE; YOU GET WHAT YOU NEGOTIATE."
And it teaches the art of negotiation as a form of warfare.
Warfare has always been practiced as a zero-sum-game. Our professional sports are modeled after warfare. Corporate culture is modeled on football.
Our culture has forced us to adopt the zero-sum-game model of the universe by excluding any other style activities from your notice (yes, such activities exist but you are flimflammed into not-noticing or not-recognizing them).
Now look at the dust-up recently on bullying in the school yards and how much damage that does to children that then subsequently shapes their potential as adults.
Parents have come out passionately against bullying in school yards. Teachers and school administrators must stop the bullying - it's the school's responsibility to protect my child against bullies.
But where do bullies come from?
How many really creative people have admitted in biographies that they were bullied, and thus forced to learn a response?
How many chimp studies have examined chimp tribes and bullying, or jockeying for pecking order among say, ducks.
Should we intervene in the society of children to stop bullying?
It's an unexamined assumption among parents that their child must not be bullied. (which doesn't mean it's wrong; just not thought out carefully)
It's an unexamined assumption among the parents of children that do the bullying that their child is showing leadership potential, a winner's profile, not a loser's profile, and their pride (however secret even from themselves) knows no bounds. WINNER means NOT LOSER.
Why must our children not "be bullied?"
Recent research on mice has shown us a possible chemical mechanism for the end result of having been bullied.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 12, 2010 titled GENETIC MECHANISM BY WHICH LOVE CONQUERS ALL
Yeah, we're still on the HEA subject.
The mice that had repeated lost fights with other mice in that experiment showed a later life tendency to be timid, not to fight for their place, and not to explore.
Dissection of their brains revealed a chemical in the submissive mice's brains, wrapped around their genes, that wasn't present in the mice that had not lost the fights. These chemicals wrap around the genes and allow or suppress expression of the genes.
So we have a purely chemical (not spiritual or soul-based) explanation of how it is that kids who are bullied in school yards grow up to become submissive - and don't explore.
"Explore" for a mouse is a kind of boldness.
We're talking about the kind of boldness that makes human beings explore questions, that makes human beings question unconscious assumptions being "sold" to them by clever mathematicians manipulating the Overton Window. To question authority, such as teachers.
Because of human creativity, artistic talent, a lot of bullied kids turn out to be the boldest questioners. Maybe they get bullied because they are artistic?
But most don't turn out to be artists.
Allowing school-yard bullying while assuring the parents "we're doing all we can" (God Forbid anyone in this world should heroically exceed their abilities and actually grow as a person and a hero by doing something they can't do - something outside their job description!) is one of many ways to create a pliable and obedient population.
Allowing schools to teach "the truth" (carefully editing textbooks) keeps children from being confused, feeling threatened, and needing to think before deciding or expressing an opinion.
They grow up to be adults who want "the government" (or someone) to keep them safe.
Since they never learned in school that one of the basic principles that made the USA successful as a country is that the police do not prevent crime, they expect to live in a crime free world where police prevent crime.
However, in principle, the police (and all criminal statutes) are aimed only at people who have actually done criminal deeds -- and thus the police (an arm of government) can act only after the fact, lest government gain power over individuals. That is, the majority must never inhibit the exploration activities of any individual. Freedom of thought, religion, speech - all rests on the concept that the Police must not prevent any activity.
Under no circumstances can any arm of government ever be allowed to prevent anyone from doing anything. Government must not be allowed control.
Yeah, they don't teach that in school any more, but it was a core principle in the civics classes in my grammar school, and today it is a fully examined and questioned assumption of mine -- though it started out as unquestioned.
Today, however, "Crime Prevention" (another sobriquet promulgated by those with a very specific political agenda) is lauded, and when it fails people are so offended they throw out their elected officials who failed to prevent crime. Remember we're talking about the plausibility of the HEA here. You can't have happiness if your expectations regarding safety and predictability are not met.
We're missing a social mechanism that damps down if not prevents aberrant behavior, keeps it at a tolerable level where expectations are mostly met.
Today huge, massively funded federal agencies are devoted to public safety - and to protecting consumers.
The government's role is primarily to protect us (seal the borders, for example). Very often we are being protected from ourselves -- pharmaceuticals legal in Europe can't be sold here because they would undercut the market of some big pharma company here, but we're told we are being protected from potential harm caused by our own bad decisions.
But big corporations are seen as bullies because they're big.
Glenn Beck showed (I caught a quick clip of this channel surfing) a cartoon line-drawing animation that is being shown in schools to instruct kids on the relationship between corporations and government.
The government was shown as a small image, a neat, clean straight line drawing, of I think, a building. The corporation was shown as a huge, round, blown-up quasi-human image -- something like humpty-dumpty is often drawn. Bloated and distorted.
The corporations were noted to be bigger than government, and positioned by artistic composition to be menacing the little government.
Any reasonable person, especially someone bullied as a child, would conclude that government must be grown bigger to face down the ugly big bully corporations. That's how we conquer schoolyard bullies - we grow larger, hit harder or get friends to gang up on them with us.
This is a truth that becomes internalized as an unquestioned assumption. Government must grow or the world won't be safe. (maybe so, but who knows?)
Worse, the assumption becomes unconsciously processed because of the graphics - and I could see the art of this Overton Window mathematics behind that composition in the cartoon. As I said previously I don't see what most viewers see when I watch TV. This image of the relationship between government and corporations becomes UNQUESTIONABLE TRUTH, not merely an assumption, a hypothesis or a theory subject to revision according to new facts unearthed.
An assumption can never be called into question because you don't know it's there.
It has been presented to the very young in their own language, the language of the bully in the play yard, and presented to be true by authority in the form of the teacher.
Every time a parent says, "listen to the teacher" "sit still in class" "don't act out" "don't pester the teacher with questions, you'll get bad grades" -- every time a parent reinforces a teacher's authority, the result is more assumptions driven into the child's mind that will become unquestionable assumptions later in life (which might be good if the assumptions stay reliable throughout the child's lifetime).
Was this done to you?
Are you doing it to your children?
Have you ever had to change any "fact" you learned in school?
Look at this: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/08/11/discovery-pushes-human-tool-use-years/
Every so often, we have to revise what we know to be true. Are you preparing your children to do that?
What has all that to do with the HEA?
If you live in the world I've described above, you have been taught by these zero-sum-game based philosophical methods that you are not qualified to live the HEA - that it's not realistic to expect your life to reach HEA. It's not even "right" to try because if you get an HEA life, that means you took it away from someone else! (zero-sum-game - there isn't enough happiness in the world to go around - you win, someone else loses.)
It's not realistic because not everyone can be a winner.
How do you know that?
Because in that same grammar school class that taught you about big bad corporations, you learned that only some kids in class can get an A, and a few more a B, most will get C's, and a few D's and F's -- or whatever numerical or euphemistic substitute for those grades is used.
The use of euphemisms like "needs improvement" "excels" etc does not mask the fact that it's a zero-sum-game. School is graded on a curve, and eventually we learn what that means. A few are chosen to be winners, and all the rest of us lose because those winners took away our right to win.
There can be only 10% or fewer A's, or "Excels" in a class. Not everybody can "excel" or "excel" means nothing.
Whether they know it or not, all teachers are taught that statistically humans fall on a bell curve and it's their job to sort out the top 10% for college bound.
The rest are "workers." Oppressed, you will see, if you read the first part of this series WORLDBUILDING WITH FIRE AND ICE on October 26, 2010.
The only way you can ever begin to even wonder if any of that is true is to question the assumption that reality is a zero-sum-game, inherently, intrinsically and realistically, there really is only so much good crop land, only so much drinkable water, only so much gold mine country, only so much uranium, only so much zinc, copper, oil, and only so many can be happy. The only way to be happy is to "win" -- so that means half lose.
But if you win, you did it by being a bully, so you have to be miserable with what you've won. Which half of humanity then can have an HEA?
We have to organize into countries big enough and mean enough to fight and win those critical resources or we will die.
Our big, muscular HE-MAN MEN must "fight for us" and win, so we can be protected to raise our children to fight and win.
It's all about competing and winning. Competition is the only correct way to organize human beings. It brings out the best in us.
We MUST compete with each other, and we must be the winner. And only winners then get to have children.
Therefore, if you hold the unconscious assumption (possibly implanted, possibly actually true) that you are not a winner, you have only one logical recourse - rise up and smite the winners and take what they have (i.e. raise taxes on the rich).
In that universe, there can be no HEA for anyone.
If you win Happily Ever After, it won't bring you happiness because you got it by taking it away from someone else. And you know in your heart that the someone you deprived will rise up and take what you took from them.
Why would it bother you that you caused someone pain so you could win? If you didn't snatch what happiness you can, someone else would take it - probably waste it, too. After all, you can do better with resources than others.
If you live in a universe where the only way to satisfy your heart's desire is by preventing someone else from satisfying their heart's desire -- i.e. you have to GET A MAN by "winning" him away from some other woman in a contest of beauty or fellatio, and the only way to hold a man (whether he prefers to be held or not) is by doing something you'd really rather not do because "men can't help it" -- then your happiness is achieved at the expense of someone else's misery.
Now we elevate this discussion to a dimension few are willing to access.
As far as I know, the only universe of discourse where the zero-sum-game assumption about reality can be questioned (not dispensed with, just questioned) is the universe where the Soul is real.
The part of you that prevents you from exulting totally in causing others misery is what we call the Soul.
OK, maybe SPIRIT. Conscience?
Maybe some other term applies. But it's a non-tangible, immortal part of Self that matters more than "here and now" because its joy and its pain is eternal. It's the part of you that's miserable when you lose, and can't be happy when you win because that means someone else lost. It's the non-sportsman in you. It's where your Charity comes from, where your Hope and Joy reside.
And there is some part of every human's awareness that connects to that dimension.
But that connection is like a switch. It's not always open. Sometimes it rusts shut.
In my personal philosophy, judging whether that rusted-shut switch's condition is good or bad for you is above my pay grade. I just use it in characterization.
I think there are people who need to be cut off from their awareness of the existence of their Soul, Spirit or whatever you want to call it, at least for part of their life.
There are people who need to be fully in touch. Sometimes switch's rust can be dissolved by Love.
Most people are sporadically and partially aware, or just aspire to repeat moments of contact through an open connection.
Whoever you are and however you are, you're just fine. You'll change when you're ready - opening or closing that contact as you need to in order to accomplish your purposes in life and beyond.
My attitude is, it's none of my business. I have enough on my own plate.
But given the notion that there exists such a thing as a non-material part of a human being, the whole "model of the universe" thing changes.
The worlds you can, as a writer, build to tell stories in become richer, deeper, more complex, harder to handle, but ever so much more realistic (to me anyway).
If the Soul is real, there may in fact be SOUL MATES -- in which case, the HEA becomes an inevitable end-point for each of us, not a ridiculous fantasy that's not "realistic."
If you live your life wearing blinders, refusing to question the zero-sum-game model of the universe because answers would be dangerous, confusing, or doom you to being a loser, then you don't dare accept the HEA except as a pie-in-the-sky fantasy achievable in real life only by the chosen few, and then only temporarily.
If you live your life totally aware of your own Soul, and can see the Soul behind the eyes of others, and know there is a Divine Spirit somehow intimately interacting with this world and your personal life, then when you get to the HEA in a novel that reflects the particular Soul hypothesis you are using, you are emotionally satisfied.
If you live your life putting your blinders on to function in a corporate environment, in the world of science, and peeking around them during your family time, then quickly taking them off for an hour once a week to worship, then the HEA will attract you, reassure you, seem somehow RIGHT, but it's just a novel. Real life is not so simple. But you'll never stop striving for your own happiness without taking it away from others.
Awareness of Soul makes people unable to tolerate being the agent of deprivation and pain to others.
Now, it's true, many people who scoff at the notion of Soul and are committed to explaining all human behavior with brain chemistry and science, people who have been successful commanding the Overton Window to move to where they want it, are equally unable to tolerate being the agent of pain to others.
In fact, MOST of the people involved in "Progressive" or "Liberal" causes, helping the poor, running free clinics, fighting AIDs in Africa, bravely standing up to corporate bullies with Green Peace ships are purely motivated to alleviate human suffering everywhere once and for all and forever.
And frankly, I'd stand with them, put my life on the line with them. I hold nothing back from these causes. They are my causes and always have been. Green energy, anti-global warming measures, reducing our collateral ecological damage -- walking softly in the world, caring for our environment, all of that is core principle with me.
But how many of them are fighting with all their might because they see the world as a zero-sum-game while at the same time feeling their Souls aching for the unfortunate, the poor, and the victims of corporate greed (which is also very real).
How many of them have a good solid plan for what they'll do when they've WON and thus caused someone else to lose?
On the one hand, you feel your Soul, you know it's real.
On the other hand, you feel your Body, and you know you must fight for the resources to stay alive.
Something is telling you it isn't right, it isn't just, that some people don't have and it's up to everyone to keep all humans safe.
You demand your HEA and won't give up your zero-sum-game fight-and-win scenario.
There's a High Concept film in that conundrum. Think about it.
Turn around now and take another look at politics.
My stand on politics is that no politician should ever be allowed to hold public office.
The steering decisions for a whole country, state, even county, should not be made by compromise. You can't find the right answer to a problem by partially giving up a principle.
I don't want anyone fighting for me, or fighting for my rights, or my anything.
You can't get anything worth having by winning.
So what do you do instead?
Become more interested in what is right rather than who is right.
Argue until you, cooperatively as a group, figure out a right answer. (not THE right answer - there are lots of right answers, usually only a very few really wrong ones)
Govern by consensus not compromise? That's never yet worked, though compromise has sputtered along for the 200 years or so the USA has used it. We need to think some more.
The problem is this Overton Window thing that allows a few people to manipulate consensus to be what they want it to be. So everyone has to be armored against unconscious assumptions in grammar school, trained to be very aware of their personal philosophy but knowing theirs isn't any better or worse than anyone else's.
We'd have to immunize our children to the Overton Window. It would take a new philosophy. (Isn't that what SF/F writers are supposed to be doing?)
Some philosophies though, are more effective and efficient at producing an HEA style life. Fiction exploring the possibilities could be a "pen mightier than the sword" moment for humanity.
Think of the Blind Men And The Elephant. The men are all correct, all have an opinion that isn't the truth, but they won't know it until they stop fighting and start cooperating to create the total holographic, 3-dimensional image from all the fragmented points of view.
Right now, we don't combine our philosophies, we fight to win by cramming our philosophy down someone else's throat.
The zero-sum-game assumptions require that we must fight.
Look again at this entire election process and the results, scrutinize everything that's being said, everything "they" are making you feel, and try to see how to question the underlying zero-sum-game philosophical assumption they are cramming down your throat.
Ask yourself who benefits if you swallow their assumption that all life is fighting and not everyone can win.
Now think about all the discussions we've had about Love, and how Love Conquers All isn't just a novel theme, it's actually true about real reality.
Love is the most powerful binding force in the universe.
If the universe is constructed in such a way that Love Conquers All, how can it possibly be a zero-sum-game?
If "All" is conquered, there is only one winner -- ALL.
What is "all"? - it includes you but is not limited to you.
You see why I don't want politicians fighting for me? The more fighting, the less Love.
Fighting doesn't conquer anything, least of all All.
You can't win by fighting, just as you can't get rid of starfish in your clam beds by cutting the starfish in half and throwing the halves back in the water. The more you fight, the more enemies you have.
When you start to fight, you lose. If you win, you're miserable because you caused someone else misery. If you lose, you're miserable because you don't have what you went after.
It's the zero-sum-game model of the universe that causes people to reject the HEA, to be unable to feel the emotion generated by novels that lead, however logically, to the HEA.
The zero-sum-game model of the universe has become an unquestionable assumption at the bottom level of our subconscious minds. You don't even know you believe it, or how it limits your actions.
To gain acceptance for the HEA, artists must successfully challenge the zero-sum-game philosophy by worldbuilding with Fire and Ice.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, November 02, 2010
Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice Part II
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet.
Furthermore, I'm not at all sure I know what my politics is. I just know that I'll know it when I see it - and haven't seen it yet. What my political position is, though, is very relevant, so if you pay attention you may discover something about me that even I don't yet know. Listen carefully now.
Previously in Part I, Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice,
posted on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 26th, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
we noted how "Communists" had taken over Hollywood and McCarthy went after them in a Witch Hunt mode and created "blacklist" status for people who didn't deserve or earn that exclusion.
I told you that if you don't recall learning about the McCarthy Hearings in school - google it up. It's important to understand that he created an "Inquisition" atmosphere, "demonizing" people and institutions.
The personal, raging passion he poured into that project obscured any actual truth he might have discovered. He destroyed the innocent and very often missed the guilty, setting the stage for a real takeover of Hollywood by a very specific group with a very specific philosophy.
Eventually, decades later, anyone who stood against their philosophy was denied success in Hollywood.
Today, projects which would reach vast audiences have to be shaped to exemplify that now institutionalized philosophy.
Audiences are just looking to be entertained, value for a buck. They don't care about philosophy. It's abstract and irrelevant to the thrill, kick, payoff of the "ending." But when everything you entertain yourself with conforms to a certain philosophy, it becomes an unquestionable truth within the unconscious part of your mind. It becomes your philosophy by which you make judgments and behave, regardless of what you think you believe or want or prefer to believe.
It's the steady diet that does that.
The entertainment diet has become steady, and it projects the philosophy (via the theme) that there's no such thing as an HEA in real life, and you are a fool or idiot if you believe there is. You're a mark, a patsy, a sub-standard human being if you can't accept "reality" and understand that you will never be rich, beautiful, or successful.
Only "superheros" or fantasy characters ever achieve. Enjoy it in a story but understand that it's not real, and you can not have it.
Glenn Beck is pointing out (with a copy on his website glennbeck.com ) that the Weather Underground manifesto declares, as an article of faith, that the rich are rich because they "oppress" the poor. Only certain people are chosen to become rich, and your name is not on that list.
Being rich (i.e. successful, popular, powerful) is only for the elite in this world, and that elite makes it their business to see to it that you never become one of them.
The sobriquet is "class warfare."
Forget the "class" part of that and wrap your mind about the "warfare" part of that concept.
That concept is built on a specific view of the universe, and can be "sold" only to those who share that view of the universe.
I've discussed that view of the universe in many, many posts here, since my first post in June of 2006.
It is called the "zero sum game" view of the universe.
In that view of the universe (that philosophy) to have anything means that someone else does not have it.
If you win, that means I lose. Everything has to balance out to zero. There is only a limited amount of any resource, and it is "human nature" (inescapable) that "life" means fighting to the death with each other over possession of limited resources.
The only spiritual and just solution that Communists and Socialists and other ists and isms can see to this problem (total failure of imagination there - or deliberately misleading?) of Life Is A Zero Sum Game is to take your resources from you.
The view of the universe is simply that the reason "I" don't have is that "You" do have.
The Universe is finite, resources scarce and exhaustible.
That is as obviously true as it is obvious that the world is either flat or bowl shaped, but certainly not round. I mean, I can see it. How can seeing not be believing?
And that's how people now view the HEA -- nobody has a Happily Ever After life! The divorce rate is 50 percent after 5 years. When was the last time you saw a celebrity magazine displaying a perfect celebrity marriage?
A few decades ago, in the Babyboomer generation, the birthrate of females outstripped the birthrate of males, and as a result we have an adult population with a lot of single women living alone.
The "nuclear family" has disintegrated. "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Brady Bunch" "The Waltons" were the last of their ilk on TV. Films do not depict family life, raising kids, and a conflict that originates outside the family unit that the family must pull together to resolve.
Occasionally, there's a heart-rending film of a dog saving some kid's life, of a couple moving to Alaska and learning hard lessons about independence from civilization.
But watch the old classics rerun on TV or downloaded, and you'll see they depict a different world, thematically.
There has been a tectonic shift in the underpinnings and belief systems of the world we live in, and this is reflected in both fiction and non-fiction.
I'm not passing "judgment" on the nature of this shift, just noting it as part of "the problem" we have set ourselves to solve, the problem of the HEA and its place in the entertainment world.
I was in a waiting room recently, and picked up a women's magazine because there was no TIME or NEWSWEEK or WIRED or DISCOVER. I learned a lot just looking at the advertisements, the ink colors, the composition of pages, the COST vs. PRICE of the magazine, the number of words on a page and the size of the fonts used. I didn't get a chance to do the same to FIELD AND STREAM.
But the women's magazine had several Q&A sections where putative readers send in questions some "expert" then answers. It's an article style. The truth is the authors create the questions for most of those columns and use few of the questions actually sent in by readers.
One question was from a woman asking if she really-really had to give her husband oral sex to prevent her marriage from breaking up citing an "ick factor" in the process.
The answer was an unequivocal YES YOU DO and specific instructions on how, when, where, how to get over the "ick factor" and how much pleasure she could get from getting over her neurosis that is preventing her from giving her husband pleasure which is the only true basis for a marriage.
That is advice geared to or representing a non-HEA worldview. It is advice that comes straight out of the "zero-sum-game" view of the universe. There is only one way to win, and you must win or you lose and someone else will get your "possession" that you treasure most (i.e. another woman.)
If you don't win, you lose Happiness.
Furthermore, if your personal preferences and beliefs aren't exactly just precisely SO, then you deserve to lose -- because you aren't qualified to be one of the winners.
Or worse yet - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HAPPINESS, there is no HEA, you have to pretend you have it by doing something repugnant to you. It will always be repugnant to you, but you must do it to keep what you have. Just get over it and be an adult about it.
It is natural to men to demand a woman do something repugnant to herself; (actually the answer said this) - MEN CAN'T HELP IT. All women have to give in to male "natural" inclinations or lose their husbands. (this article is talking to young women who live among a 50% divorce rate and celebrities who can't stay married more than a couple years).
Again, I'm not passing a value judgment here. I'm illustrating how a PHILOSOPHY materializes as a "show don't tell" -- which soaks in and becomes an unquestioned assumption.
Assumptions aren't in and of themselves bad.
We need our assumptions, our shortcuts, or we couldn't function in this rapid-fire world. Our brains are hardwired to solve complex problems by applying a series of pre-created assumptions to the problem -- you live or die by your assessment of the danger of the saber toothed tiger.
What is problematic (not bad, mind you, problematic and thus fodder for plot-conflicts and resolutions gallore including the inevitability of the HEA) is the "unquestioned" part of the "assumption" matrix that commands behavior.
The "unquestioning" part of our assumption matrix is the meat-and-potatoes of the artist, the writer. It's the area where you can manipulate your readership - but only if you've questioned your own assumptions to a fair-thee-well.
How do you learn to do that? Aha, Election Season is an ideal time! Watch candidate commercials and read the literature carefully, listen to your emotions, watch how they jerk you around, play on sympathies, make their answer to problems seem inevitable, natural, obvious, and the only choice of reasonable people.
"Only" being the operative word - there are no other solutions because it's a zero-sum-game; we know that because "reality" is all based on football, isn't it?
At the moment, politicians and their advertising and publicity teams are using your unquestioned assumptions against you. Elections are a zero-sum-game - one wins, the other loses, and that's obvious isn't it? You have an either-or choice to make, black and white, zero-sum.
Elections are set up that way, maybe on purpose. The reason for that is an unquestioned assumption in our world (one of those assumptions I haven't caught Glenn Beck questioning, and therefore his rants don't touch me persuasively) Life is a zero-sum-game, like football or all sports. One wins, the other loses, and it has to be that way. Don't you dare question that. You might get confused.
Many of these unquestioned assumptions are implanted in school (no matter how long ago you went to school).
Schools are set up to "make it clear" to young people so they won't be confused by things like whether the theory of Evolution is true, or really Creationism is true -- of course, only one can be true which makes the other false, a zero-sum game so it'll all be clear. We have to tell children the truth so they won't be confused.
Some of your unquestioned assumptions have come from the "steady diet" of entertainment mentioned above. Having only one philosophy represented in your entertainment (Traditional Publishers are pretty close to that now) keeps things clear in your mind. We can't have you getting confused.
Some other assumptions came from your parents, your religious training, your college buddies, your first sexual experience.
Some have come from corporate training and on-the-job-training in how to behave in a corporate culture.
Many sets of these assumptions contradict each other and thus introduce anxiety sources that are very confusing, so we learn to keep our minds compartmentalized -- religion is only for an hour on Sunday, whew! We can't have religion in the workplace or workplace values in Sunday School.
We've been carefully trained from grammar school up never, ever, to let ourselves get confused. Anyone's opinion is just as good as anyone else's, regardless of what unconscious assumptions they're basing their opinions on because we all share the same unconscious assumptions (sobriquet, "Political Correctness.")
In previous posts we've been exploring how we might be able to boost a true Romance Genre film into "High Concept Opens Everywhere Blockbuster" status and "sell" the HEA to the general audience as a true depiction of real life, a plausible and necessary story-ending.
It may be happening as we speak. Check out this film which I discovered on thegalaxyexpress.net
The Adjustment Bureau
We "know" the HEA is real and true, it's our unconscious assumption, but not shared by everyone. The artist, the performing artist, the writer must be able to see the world through the eyes of people who have unconscious assumptions (Philosophies) different from the writer's and explain one reader's assumptions to another reader who does not share those assumptions.
I've said this before. The artist's subconscious communicates with the art-customer's subconscious directly, and does that best when the conscious mind is directed elsewhere (as a magician points at something to prevent you from noticing something he's doing on the other side).
Philosophy resides in the subconscious and over-rides the conscious mind's decisions (that's why it's so hard to stick to a diet unless your subconscious has decided to do it). That's why married folk have affairs against their conscious will and desire. The subconscious rules, and so the philosophy programmed into the subconscious is the deciding factor in the HEA problem and argument.
The method we have to figure out how to employ is the method the publicity and advertising folks who work for politicians are using against us -- our unexamined, unquestioned, unknown-to-us ASSUMPTIONS. A philosophy that lurks within the subconscious, unknown to us, can command our life-decisions -- and determine what fiction we enjoy.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Furthermore, I'm not at all sure I know what my politics is. I just know that I'll know it when I see it - and haven't seen it yet. What my political position is, though, is very relevant, so if you pay attention you may discover something about me that even I don't yet know. Listen carefully now.
Previously in Part I, Worldbuilding With Fire And Ice,
posted on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on October 26th, 2010,
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/worldbuilding-with-fire-and-ice-part-i.html
we noted how "Communists" had taken over Hollywood and McCarthy went after them in a Witch Hunt mode and created "blacklist" status for people who didn't deserve or earn that exclusion.
I told you that if you don't recall learning about the McCarthy Hearings in school - google it up. It's important to understand that he created an "Inquisition" atmosphere, "demonizing" people and institutions.
The personal, raging passion he poured into that project obscured any actual truth he might have discovered. He destroyed the innocent and very often missed the guilty, setting the stage for a real takeover of Hollywood by a very specific group with a very specific philosophy.
Eventually, decades later, anyone who stood against their philosophy was denied success in Hollywood.
Today, projects which would reach vast audiences have to be shaped to exemplify that now institutionalized philosophy.
Audiences are just looking to be entertained, value for a buck. They don't care about philosophy. It's abstract and irrelevant to the thrill, kick, payoff of the "ending." But when everything you entertain yourself with conforms to a certain philosophy, it becomes an unquestionable truth within the unconscious part of your mind. It becomes your philosophy by which you make judgments and behave, regardless of what you think you believe or want or prefer to believe.
It's the steady diet that does that.
The entertainment diet has become steady, and it projects the philosophy (via the theme) that there's no such thing as an HEA in real life, and you are a fool or idiot if you believe there is. You're a mark, a patsy, a sub-standard human being if you can't accept "reality" and understand that you will never be rich, beautiful, or successful.
Only "superheros" or fantasy characters ever achieve. Enjoy it in a story but understand that it's not real, and you can not have it.
Glenn Beck is pointing out (with a copy on his website glennbeck.com ) that the Weather Underground manifesto declares, as an article of faith, that the rich are rich because they "oppress" the poor. Only certain people are chosen to become rich, and your name is not on that list.
Being rich (i.e. successful, popular, powerful) is only for the elite in this world, and that elite makes it their business to see to it that you never become one of them.
The sobriquet is "class warfare."
Forget the "class" part of that and wrap your mind about the "warfare" part of that concept.
That concept is built on a specific view of the universe, and can be "sold" only to those who share that view of the universe.
I've discussed that view of the universe in many, many posts here, since my first post in June of 2006.
It is called the "zero sum game" view of the universe.
In that view of the universe (that philosophy) to have anything means that someone else does not have it.
If you win, that means I lose. Everything has to balance out to zero. There is only a limited amount of any resource, and it is "human nature" (inescapable) that "life" means fighting to the death with each other over possession of limited resources.
The only spiritual and just solution that Communists and Socialists and other ists and isms can see to this problem (total failure of imagination there - or deliberately misleading?) of Life Is A Zero Sum Game is to take your resources from you.
The view of the universe is simply that the reason "I" don't have is that "You" do have.
The Universe is finite, resources scarce and exhaustible.
That is as obviously true as it is obvious that the world is either flat or bowl shaped, but certainly not round. I mean, I can see it. How can seeing not be believing?
And that's how people now view the HEA -- nobody has a Happily Ever After life! The divorce rate is 50 percent after 5 years. When was the last time you saw a celebrity magazine displaying a perfect celebrity marriage?
A few decades ago, in the Babyboomer generation, the birthrate of females outstripped the birthrate of males, and as a result we have an adult population with a lot of single women living alone.
The "nuclear family" has disintegrated. "Leave It To Beaver" and "The Brady Bunch" "The Waltons" were the last of their ilk on TV. Films do not depict family life, raising kids, and a conflict that originates outside the family unit that the family must pull together to resolve.
Occasionally, there's a heart-rending film of a dog saving some kid's life, of a couple moving to Alaska and learning hard lessons about independence from civilization.
But watch the old classics rerun on TV or downloaded, and you'll see they depict a different world, thematically.
There has been a tectonic shift in the underpinnings and belief systems of the world we live in, and this is reflected in both fiction and non-fiction.
I'm not passing "judgment" on the nature of this shift, just noting it as part of "the problem" we have set ourselves to solve, the problem of the HEA and its place in the entertainment world.
I was in a waiting room recently, and picked up a women's magazine because there was no TIME or NEWSWEEK or WIRED or DISCOVER. I learned a lot just looking at the advertisements, the ink colors, the composition of pages, the COST vs. PRICE of the magazine, the number of words on a page and the size of the fonts used. I didn't get a chance to do the same to FIELD AND STREAM.
But the women's magazine had several Q&A sections where putative readers send in questions some "expert" then answers. It's an article style. The truth is the authors create the questions for most of those columns and use few of the questions actually sent in by readers.
One question was from a woman asking if she really-really had to give her husband oral sex to prevent her marriage from breaking up citing an "ick factor" in the process.
The answer was an unequivocal YES YOU DO and specific instructions on how, when, where, how to get over the "ick factor" and how much pleasure she could get from getting over her neurosis that is preventing her from giving her husband pleasure which is the only true basis for a marriage.
That is advice geared to or representing a non-HEA worldview. It is advice that comes straight out of the "zero-sum-game" view of the universe. There is only one way to win, and you must win or you lose and someone else will get your "possession" that you treasure most (i.e. another woman.)
If you don't win, you lose Happiness.
Furthermore, if your personal preferences and beliefs aren't exactly just precisely SO, then you deserve to lose -- because you aren't qualified to be one of the winners.
Or worse yet - THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS HAPPINESS, there is no HEA, you have to pretend you have it by doing something repugnant to you. It will always be repugnant to you, but you must do it to keep what you have. Just get over it and be an adult about it.
It is natural to men to demand a woman do something repugnant to herself; (actually the answer said this) - MEN CAN'T HELP IT. All women have to give in to male "natural" inclinations or lose their husbands. (this article is talking to young women who live among a 50% divorce rate and celebrities who can't stay married more than a couple years).
Again, I'm not passing a value judgment here. I'm illustrating how a PHILOSOPHY materializes as a "show don't tell" -- which soaks in and becomes an unquestioned assumption.
Assumptions aren't in and of themselves bad.
We need our assumptions, our shortcuts, or we couldn't function in this rapid-fire world. Our brains are hardwired to solve complex problems by applying a series of pre-created assumptions to the problem -- you live or die by your assessment of the danger of the saber toothed tiger.
What is problematic (not bad, mind you, problematic and thus fodder for plot-conflicts and resolutions gallore including the inevitability of the HEA) is the "unquestioned" part of the "assumption" matrix that commands behavior.
The "unquestioning" part of our assumption matrix is the meat-and-potatoes of the artist, the writer. It's the area where you can manipulate your readership - but only if you've questioned your own assumptions to a fair-thee-well.
How do you learn to do that? Aha, Election Season is an ideal time! Watch candidate commercials and read the literature carefully, listen to your emotions, watch how they jerk you around, play on sympathies, make their answer to problems seem inevitable, natural, obvious, and the only choice of reasonable people.
"Only" being the operative word - there are no other solutions because it's a zero-sum-game; we know that because "reality" is all based on football, isn't it?
At the moment, politicians and their advertising and publicity teams are using your unquestioned assumptions against you. Elections are a zero-sum-game - one wins, the other loses, and that's obvious isn't it? You have an either-or choice to make, black and white, zero-sum.
Elections are set up that way, maybe on purpose. The reason for that is an unquestioned assumption in our world (one of those assumptions I haven't caught Glenn Beck questioning, and therefore his rants don't touch me persuasively) Life is a zero-sum-game, like football or all sports. One wins, the other loses, and it has to be that way. Don't you dare question that. You might get confused.
Many of these unquestioned assumptions are implanted in school (no matter how long ago you went to school).
Schools are set up to "make it clear" to young people so they won't be confused by things like whether the theory of Evolution is true, or really Creationism is true -- of course, only one can be true which makes the other false, a zero-sum game so it'll all be clear. We have to tell children the truth so they won't be confused.
Some of your unquestioned assumptions have come from the "steady diet" of entertainment mentioned above. Having only one philosophy represented in your entertainment (Traditional Publishers are pretty close to that now) keeps things clear in your mind. We can't have you getting confused.
Some other assumptions came from your parents, your religious training, your college buddies, your first sexual experience.
Some have come from corporate training and on-the-job-training in how to behave in a corporate culture.
Many sets of these assumptions contradict each other and thus introduce anxiety sources that are very confusing, so we learn to keep our minds compartmentalized -- religion is only for an hour on Sunday, whew! We can't have religion in the workplace or workplace values in Sunday School.
We've been carefully trained from grammar school up never, ever, to let ourselves get confused. Anyone's opinion is just as good as anyone else's, regardless of what unconscious assumptions they're basing their opinions on because we all share the same unconscious assumptions (sobriquet, "Political Correctness.")
In previous posts we've been exploring how we might be able to boost a true Romance Genre film into "High Concept Opens Everywhere Blockbuster" status and "sell" the HEA to the general audience as a true depiction of real life, a plausible and necessary story-ending.
It may be happening as we speak. Check out this film which I discovered on thegalaxyexpress.net
The Adjustment Bureau
We "know" the HEA is real and true, it's our unconscious assumption, but not shared by everyone. The artist, the performing artist, the writer must be able to see the world through the eyes of people who have unconscious assumptions (Philosophies) different from the writer's and explain one reader's assumptions to another reader who does not share those assumptions.
I've said this before. The artist's subconscious communicates with the art-customer's subconscious directly, and does that best when the conscious mind is directed elsewhere (as a magician points at something to prevent you from noticing something he's doing on the other side).
Philosophy resides in the subconscious and over-rides the conscious mind's decisions (that's why it's so hard to stick to a diet unless your subconscious has decided to do it). That's why married folk have affairs against their conscious will and desire. The subconscious rules, and so the philosophy programmed into the subconscious is the deciding factor in the HEA problem and argument.
The method we have to figure out how to employ is the method the publicity and advertising folks who work for politicians are using against us -- our unexamined, unquestioned, unknown-to-us ASSUMPTIONS. A philosophy that lurks within the subconscious, unknown to us, can command our life-decisions -- and determine what fiction we enjoy.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
Tuesday, October 26, 2010
Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice Part I Failure of Imagination Part IV
Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice Part I
Failure of Imagination Part IV
Politics is surely fire, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Philosophy is surely ice, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Mix in pair-bonding in any variety or style, especially if you include Soul Mates which implies some dimension of spirituality, immortality, possibly reincarnation - i.e. a larger point to your life than is apparent in this life itself --
Stand back and just admire the mushroom cloud.
And that tall mushroom cloud creates the potential for a huge audience "reach."
But you (the writer) have to make the mushroom cloud comprehensible as a mushroom cloud.
You have to show-don't-tell your readership and audience that it's beautiful and captivating and they should just sit back and enjoy the show.
How, exactly, does a writer do that? How does a reader become a writer?
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/are-commercial-writers-born-or-made.html
What is the transformative moment when the passive person who just imbibes and enjoys fiction becomes the active creator and purveyor of that inner pleasure we all know but can't name (probably because English doesn't have a word, or the word has fallen into disuse).
As I've explained and explored in a number of posts, the key ingredient in the writer's craft tool box is philosophy.
That's why it's so hard to explain to a new writer what a "Concept" actually is (as opposed to an Idea For A Story) and how to identify a "High" concept. A High Concept is that cap on the mushroom cloud mentioned above. At that moment of recognition: "My Idea Is Actually A High Concept" a reader may be spurred to write, if not become a writer. Very often a reader sees a novel they are reading as a movie -- or a movie as a novel -- or a TV show as missing a "story" (hence fanfiction).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html
The artist's job, role in "society" is to translate the abstract into the concrete, to make theory visible, to make aspirations and dreams tangible, to give the customer a whiff of what life on Earth will be like when they reach "success" (whatever that might be for the individual) -- which for us means the elusive HEA.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html
Right now, the USA has returned to a knife-edge balance, half passionately convinced that one philosophy is the only honorable and true philosophy, and the other half convinced that the opposite philosophy is the one and only honorable and true philosophy. A hefty percentage of the electorate stands in the middle of this half-and-half split, convinced that neither side is right, but both sides are right.
Few, if any, are doubting or questioning what they "know" to be true.
Leaders, entertainers, and information vendors (i.e. "news") are using every sophisticated tool in their toolboxes to sell their ideas, to convince a lot more people that this one idea is correct. But they aren't thinking in terms of Concept - the highest crest of that mushroom cloud that can be seen from afar.
Read again this description of High Concept and why it serves so well to convey Idea to so many.
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2006/02/02/the-death-of-high-concept/
Read Sarah Beach's comment of Sept 9th on that page where she says:
---SARAH BEACH----
I’ve always felt that High Concept was like seeing a line of mountains on the horizon. You know exactly what is in front of you, and even at a distance, you can see the main features of it. Low Concept was like a rolling landscape where features are hidden, waiting to surprise you.
Notice that High Concept can also have surprises in the detail (like hidden canyons and rivers). But you still have a very clear idea of what you’re heading into.
-----END QUOTE-----
Or you can think of it as the top of that huge mushroom cloud formed by the explosive force of Fire and Ice, Politics and Philosophy.
But there are some whose work is extremely effective and efficient who are indeed thinking in terms of Concept rather than Idea.
My blog post on October 19, 2010, "Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window"...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
...flicked past this issue which I'm going to explore now from the point of view of the Failure of Imagination preventing the popularization of the Happily Ever After concept of real life.
See my post FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART III, September 28, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
Failure of Imagination Part II is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part I is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Where Imagination has Failed is in questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality.
We saw in Where Expert Romance Writers Fail that when asked, ordinary people say the reason they refuse to read "Romance genre" novels is that the HEA isn't "realistic" or is a requirement of the genre that just does not satisfy them in their hunt for an emotional payoff.
We discussed that "emotional payoff" problem referring to a blog post by an SFR writer reviewed on thegalaxyexpress.net chaffing at the "restriction" of the HEA requirement for storytelling.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on September 21, 2010 titled "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA"
From our point of view the HEA is not a restriction or formulaic requirement but the natural, inevitable, unavoidable point at which "the story" is over. Until you get to the HEA, you haven't finished the story. Would you think you'd finished having sex if you didn't finish?
From our point of view, it's inconceivable that anyone could possibly even think, nevermind actually say, that the HEA is a recipe for boredom.
But that's a point of view, not a fact of life.
It's hard to understand how it might be possible for anyone to fail to understand that the HEA is NOT a "fact of life."
But that's what writers (artists of all stripes) do for a living. Understand the alien. Explain it.
We have to put yourselves into the mind of "other" people - people who really do live in "alien" universes, who look out of their eyes and do not see what we see.
We have to be able to understand how different people see the world, then create a piece of art that explains one kind of people's views to the other kind of people.
What kinds? Men. Women. Gay. Bi. Rich. Poor. Democrat. Republican. Independent. Christian. Muslim. Hindu. Jew. Human. Non-human. (WRITING EXERCISE: extend that list to 10 more kinds of viewpoints.)
Take any category from that list, and explain it to another category.
To achieve that explanation, you will find yourself grappling with politics, philosophy, religion, sexuality, morality, ethics, -- all manner of intangibles that must be made tangible in order to tell the story. Show Don't Tell.
To present that story, you must worldbuild.
You must create the "world" that one kind sees that the other kind does not see, and create it in show-don't-tell so that it can be understood by those who can't see it, won't believe it if they do, and must suspend disbelief to enter the story.
Neither one of those worlds will be your own world (most of the time).
But your own world, your point of view on reality, your essential take on Creation, The Soul, Evolution, Justice, Ethics, Morals, will show through.
Not only can you not help it - you should not help it, because that show-through is the carrier wave of your own ART. It's your "voice" - the thing that makes you distinctive as a writer.
OK, now back to the "real" world.
It has been noted any number of places, the Glenn Beck show in particular in 2010, that in the last 50 years or so, the "Liberal" political viewpoint has become utterly dominant in Hollywood.
There was a whiff of Liberalism in "Hollywood" in the 1950's which sparked the Witch Hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy - if you're too young to have studied the McCarthy Hearings in school, go google it up. Hold your nose and read carefully.
McCarthy was right - Communists and proto-Communists and pre-Socialists, and people who were generally critical of and obstinately against many of the values held most dear in the USA during the 1800's had begun infiltrating the entertainment media. Or perhaps the entertainment media had summoned them because they had a High Concept to display.
Being writers, creative types, they re-invented the entire vocabulary by which their vision of how a country should organize its economy and government could be discussed, a vocabulary of images and characters, of symbols. They renamed philosophies without changing the tenants much. They set out to use their artistic skills to change the "image" of the then-demonized philosophies.
Three generations later, according to Glenn Beck, they've succeeded. He's made a huge fortune exploiting the absolute lack of his point of view in the media. He has hit on a High Concept and tickled imaginations into gear with it. Remember, this man is an actor who got his start in comedy, exploiting his ADD tendencies to advantage, and never lets you forget he's a recovering alcoholic. He's a performer who presents himself as an overgrown child, but does that in and of itself totally invalidate what he's saying? After all, he employs 40 researchers in addition to the Fox News resources. His imagination hasn't failed. And he's making money from it. He's holding out, as a carrot on a stick, the inkling of a suspicion that the HEA might be possible in real life, and it's making him a fortune.
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm a writer. I build worlds to ask entertaining questions. You have to do the answering.
If you let yourself get all wound up in Glenn Beck's politics, you'll never be able to discern the mechanism he's using behind that smokescreen. So take a few deep breaths, cool off (yeah, it's hard, but being a writer is not an easy life), and study the phenomenon Beck has created with his High Concept.
That's the kind of phenomenon we need to create for the HEA driven fiction that is the core of the Romance and SFR and PNR genres.
Part II of Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Failure of Imagination Part IV
Politics is surely fire, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Philosophy is surely ice, especially in the run-up to an Election.
Mix in pair-bonding in any variety or style, especially if you include Soul Mates which implies some dimension of spirituality, immortality, possibly reincarnation - i.e. a larger point to your life than is apparent in this life itself --
Stand back and just admire the mushroom cloud.
And that tall mushroom cloud creates the potential for a huge audience "reach."
But you (the writer) have to make the mushroom cloud comprehensible as a mushroom cloud.
You have to show-don't-tell your readership and audience that it's beautiful and captivating and they should just sit back and enjoy the show.
How, exactly, does a writer do that? How does a reader become a writer?
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/09/are-commercial-writers-born-or-made.html
What is the transformative moment when the passive person who just imbibes and enjoys fiction becomes the active creator and purveyor of that inner pleasure we all know but can't name (probably because English doesn't have a word, or the word has fallen into disuse).
As I've explained and explored in a number of posts, the key ingredient in the writer's craft tool box is philosophy.
That's why it's so hard to explain to a new writer what a "Concept" actually is (as opposed to an Idea For A Story) and how to identify a "High" concept. A High Concept is that cap on the mushroom cloud mentioned above. At that moment of recognition: "My Idea Is Actually A High Concept" a reader may be spurred to write, if not become a writer. Very often a reader sees a novel they are reading as a movie -- or a movie as a novel -- or a TV show as missing a "story" (hence fanfiction).
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2006/11/converting-novel-to-screenplay.html
The artist's job, role in "society" is to translate the abstract into the concrete, to make theory visible, to make aspirations and dreams tangible, to give the customer a whiff of what life on Earth will be like when they reach "success" (whatever that might be for the individual) -- which for us means the elusive HEA.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/03/worldbuilding-from-reality.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/02/how-does-intelligence-work.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/03/beauty-and-beast-constructing-hea.html
Right now, the USA has returned to a knife-edge balance, half passionately convinced that one philosophy is the only honorable and true philosophy, and the other half convinced that the opposite philosophy is the one and only honorable and true philosophy. A hefty percentage of the electorate stands in the middle of this half-and-half split, convinced that neither side is right, but both sides are right.
Few, if any, are doubting or questioning what they "know" to be true.
Leaders, entertainers, and information vendors (i.e. "news") are using every sophisticated tool in their toolboxes to sell their ideas, to convince a lot more people that this one idea is correct. But they aren't thinking in terms of Concept - the highest crest of that mushroom cloud that can be seen from afar.
Read again this description of High Concept and why it serves so well to convey Idea to so many.
http://www.blakesnyder.com/2006/02/02/the-death-of-high-concept/
Read Sarah Beach's comment of Sept 9th on that page where she says:
---SARAH BEACH----
I’ve always felt that High Concept was like seeing a line of mountains on the horizon. You know exactly what is in front of you, and even at a distance, you can see the main features of it. Low Concept was like a rolling landscape where features are hidden, waiting to surprise you.
Notice that High Concept can also have surprises in the detail (like hidden canyons and rivers). But you still have a very clear idea of what you’re heading into.
-----END QUOTE-----
Or you can think of it as the top of that huge mushroom cloud formed by the explosive force of Fire and Ice, Politics and Philosophy.
But there are some whose work is extremely effective and efficient who are indeed thinking in terms of Concept rather than Idea.
My blog post on October 19, 2010, "Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window"...
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/10/glenn-beck-didnt-invent-overton-window.html
...flicked past this issue which I'm going to explore now from the point of view of the Failure of Imagination preventing the popularization of the Happily Ever After concept of real life.
See my post FAILURE OF IMAGINATION PART III, September 28, 2010 on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
Failure of Imagination Part II is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
Part I is
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
Where Imagination has Failed is in questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality.
We saw in Where Expert Romance Writers Fail that when asked, ordinary people say the reason they refuse to read "Romance genre" novels is that the HEA isn't "realistic" or is a requirement of the genre that just does not satisfy them in their hunt for an emotional payoff.
We discussed that "emotional payoff" problem referring to a blog post by an SFR writer reviewed on thegalaxyexpress.net chaffing at the "restriction" of the HEA requirement for storytelling.
See my post on aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com on September 21, 2010 titled "Do Your Lovers Live The HEA"
From our point of view the HEA is not a restriction or formulaic requirement but the natural, inevitable, unavoidable point at which "the story" is over. Until you get to the HEA, you haven't finished the story. Would you think you'd finished having sex if you didn't finish?
From our point of view, it's inconceivable that anyone could possibly even think, nevermind actually say, that the HEA is a recipe for boredom.
But that's a point of view, not a fact of life.
It's hard to understand how it might be possible for anyone to fail to understand that the HEA is NOT a "fact of life."
But that's what writers (artists of all stripes) do for a living. Understand the alien. Explain it.
We have to put yourselves into the mind of "other" people - people who really do live in "alien" universes, who look out of their eyes and do not see what we see.
We have to be able to understand how different people see the world, then create a piece of art that explains one kind of people's views to the other kind of people.
What kinds? Men. Women. Gay. Bi. Rich. Poor. Democrat. Republican. Independent. Christian. Muslim. Hindu. Jew. Human. Non-human. (WRITING EXERCISE: extend that list to 10 more kinds of viewpoints.)
Take any category from that list, and explain it to another category.
To achieve that explanation, you will find yourself grappling with politics, philosophy, religion, sexuality, morality, ethics, -- all manner of intangibles that must be made tangible in order to tell the story. Show Don't Tell.
To present that story, you must worldbuild.
You must create the "world" that one kind sees that the other kind does not see, and create it in show-don't-tell so that it can be understood by those who can't see it, won't believe it if they do, and must suspend disbelief to enter the story.
Neither one of those worlds will be your own world (most of the time).
But your own world, your point of view on reality, your essential take on Creation, The Soul, Evolution, Justice, Ethics, Morals, will show through.
Not only can you not help it - you should not help it, because that show-through is the carrier wave of your own ART. It's your "voice" - the thing that makes you distinctive as a writer.
OK, now back to the "real" world.
It has been noted any number of places, the Glenn Beck show in particular in 2010, that in the last 50 years or so, the "Liberal" political viewpoint has become utterly dominant in Hollywood.
There was a whiff of Liberalism in "Hollywood" in the 1950's which sparked the Witch Hunt conducted by Senator McCarthy - if you're too young to have studied the McCarthy Hearings in school, go google it up. Hold your nose and read carefully.
McCarthy was right - Communists and proto-Communists and pre-Socialists, and people who were generally critical of and obstinately against many of the values held most dear in the USA during the 1800's had begun infiltrating the entertainment media. Or perhaps the entertainment media had summoned them because they had a High Concept to display.
Being writers, creative types, they re-invented the entire vocabulary by which their vision of how a country should organize its economy and government could be discussed, a vocabulary of images and characters, of symbols. They renamed philosophies without changing the tenants much. They set out to use their artistic skills to change the "image" of the then-demonized philosophies.
Three generations later, according to Glenn Beck, they've succeeded. He's made a huge fortune exploiting the absolute lack of his point of view in the media. He has hit on a High Concept and tickled imaginations into gear with it. Remember, this man is an actor who got his start in comedy, exploiting his ADD tendencies to advantage, and never lets you forget he's a recovering alcoholic. He's a performer who presents himself as an overgrown child, but does that in and of itself totally invalidate what he's saying? After all, he employs 40 researchers in addition to the Fox News resources. His imagination hasn't failed. And he's making money from it. He's holding out, as a carrot on a stick, the inkling of a suspicion that the HEA might be possible in real life, and it's making him a fortune.
Maybe he's right - maybe not. Our question is, "Does it matter?"
CAUTION: don't for a moment think that I'm a "Conservative" -- or for that matter "Progressive" or "Liberal" -- the "politics" that describes my personal philosophy does not exist on this Earth and as far as I know never has yet. I'm a writer. I build worlds to ask entertaining questions. You have to do the answering.
If you let yourself get all wound up in Glenn Beck's politics, you'll never be able to discern the mechanism he's using behind that smokescreen. So take a few deep breaths, cool off (yeah, it's hard, but being a writer is not an easy life), and study the phenomenon Beck has created with his High Concept.
That's the kind of phenomenon we need to create for the HEA driven fiction that is the core of the Romance and SFR and PNR genres.
Part II of Worldbuilding with Fire and Ice next week.
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Glenn Beck Didn't Invent The Overton Window
It's OK if you don't want to read this because it's polluted with Glenn Beck.
But this is about a novel written entirely for commercial purposes targeting a very specific and huge audience that's been #1 on Amazon and NYTimes and gosh knows where else for weeks and weeks. It's about how and why that sales record was achieved, not about politics.
I have loads of opinions about the persona Glenn Beck shows on TV, positive, negative, neutral, plus professional opinions and a lot more opinions -- all of which are irrelevant to the point of this blog post, but let's get some of them out of the way first.
1. He says things I know to be true about American History
2. He says things I know to be false about American History
3. He says things I know to be irrelevant about American History
4. He says things I know to be uninteresting about current events
5. He says things I know to be highly commercial, very slick pitches
6. He says things I DO NOT KNOW and have to go look up.
7. He says things I forgot but really need to keep in mind.
8. He says things I need to create an opinion about, but don't have one
9. He says things I'd rather not create an opinion about
10. He does NOT say the things I would like to hear him say, and the lack puts his work in the "Failure of Imagination" category I've blogged about here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
He digs up facts and carefully leaves out facts so the scattering of facts will seem to make sense and then lead people to a particular conclusion.
But if you include all the facts, you would come to a different conclusion.
I have opinions about the conclusions he appears to be leading his audience to but my opinions don't matter one whit.
If I understand the mechanism of what he's doing correctly, he's not leading that audience, he's following it by careful analysis of instant ratings of his shows. His techniques are worthy of careful study by anyone who wants to gather a pro-Romance readership into a coherent force in the commercial world.
Professional writers study like this for a living. Leave your opinions at the door like muddy galoshes and walk into someone else's life.
Glenn Beck's pick-and-choose facts to make a point is the technique used in every textbook I can think of offhand. I use it myself, on this blog, to clarify writing craft issues, and to put some spring in the springboards I build into story-ideas I hope someone will dive into.
Pick-n-choose is a technique which is fun and works fine if everyone is in on the joke, as I pointed out here where I discussed how history is being lost:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/emigrating-to-future.html
Glenn Beck and the organization behind him are really, really GOOD at "working" his audience. I can see that because sometimes on a couple of things I'm part of that audience. I'm just the sort who doesn't like to be "worked" so I wait to get the point, then flip the channel.
But the "Glenn Beck Phenomenon" is something to be studied, carefully.
It's not worth forming a political opinion about the content of Beck's shows. But it's worth studying that content because it reveals a great deal about audiences, not just his audience.
Read my post on targeting a readership, and the posts cited in it.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html
Here though we are focusing on finding and engaging an audience. We are not focusing on "who" Glenn Beck is or wants to be.
Occasionally, I have the TV on when he's on and I comparison shop news broadcasts, surfing from one channel to another to avoid commercials or analyze commercials. Sometimes I watch most of his segments, though, and it is very instructive.
As a writer, I don't see or hear the same things readers and viewers do. I see an entirely different world, a world of mechanisms that produce illusions rather than the illusions themselves.
Beck produces and projects a powerful illusion which I'm certain has nothing at all to do with who he really is.
His technique would work for any subject. He's combined the "reality show" with the "news commentary" shows that have become so popular.
I could fill this blog with an analysis of the acting, directing, writing, and research on his TV show. But why bother? I'm not in the business of shaping your opinions!
I just want you to notice
a) that he's invented a genre
b) that he's popularized it just as we want to popularize SFR and PNR
I would recommend, though, that if you don't understand what that "Glenn Beck" TV show is, take a look at the spiffy, flashy glennbeck.com top page.
Also note they'll sell you, for about $75/year, access to exclusive web broadcasts of Beck's shows via Insider Extreme. His TV show in the late afternoon spot (it's rebroadcast later at night, too) pulls 3 million viewers, his radio show reaches more. It's amazing how many have turned away from TV to radio! Relative to other TV broadcast or cable shows' audience sizes, we're talking a major audience here. Sports pulls more, as do live-disasters, but for a boring lecture complete with blackboards, this audience size is huge. And they read. They buy books at amazon!
Note the masthead on Glennbeck.com --
THE FUSION OF ENTERTAINMENT AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Doesn't that sound like the mixed-genre PNR or SFR that we love so much?
THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND LOVE
THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND ROMANCE
THE FUSION OF ROMANCE AND LOVE (not the same thing, but few know that)
THE FUSION OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
THE FUSION OF HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN
THE FUSION OF NORMAL AND PARANORMAL
Do you begin to see what fascinates me about this Glenn Beck Phenomenon?
We need to do that. So we need to figure out what he did and how. And why it works so well. We need to avoid having our imagination fail just because of the content of a message. We need to focus on how the message is delivered, to whom, and why they eat it up.
Notice the ART behind the graphic displays, the colors, the words, the images, and the html behind that display on glennbeck.com .
It takes tremendous art and technical expertise (I mean extremely expensive expertise) to achieve that trashy look. It's so expensive it looks cheap, which is its whole point. Glitzy. Slick. Ooozing money from every pixel.
You need to look rich to attract riches.
But riches aren't the point. Examine that top page closely, all the way to the bottom margin. The art of that page actually depicts the projected Glenn Beck persona (I don't know this man, or really anything about the real person. I am examining only the created persona, not the real person. Think of him as a character in a book you didn't like. Now figure out why you didn't like it (or why you did).)
Now go to amazon.com and check out Glenn Beck's books.
Glenn Beck Books
Next check out his 2010 novel, THE OVERTON WINDOW on kindle
The Overton Window
Note that The Overton Window by Glenn Beck has over 500 customer reviews (nevermind the fulminating - the number is what counts here)
Here's the link to the Hardcover page which has a "look inside" feature
The Overton Window by Glenn Beck
Check the Acknowledgements page, page VII.
Look at all the people - with names.
Note JACK HENDERSON "for pouring his heart and soul into this project"
I have read this book, every word, cover to cover.
I read it because of the title, and a sound-byte I heard in passing on Beck's TV show -- that he got this "Overton Window" concept from a think tank.
I went to the think-tank's web page:
http://www.mackinac.org/11398
And I googled and found via wikipedia that there is an entire mathematical branch devoted to calculating the behavior of large populations. Well, I knew that, but not the research of the last few years.
The Overton Window is an application of those mathematical principles which form the basis of "Madison Avenue" advertising (and all political advertising, especially now the YouTube videos). One of the founders of the Mackinac Center think tank named Overton codified the application to make it useful for politics.
The objective of the application is to MOLD PUBLIC OPINION - and then to MOVE PUBLIC OPINION toward the objective you have chosen.
It doesn't matter what the objective is, this principle and process applies to changing the behavior of large masses of people.
The think tank applies it to politics, as Beck's novel illustrates (but without the mathematical clarity that would allow you to use it yourself). I'm sure you've seen that Overton Window principle being aimed at you from your TV screen - magazine covers, articles, books.
It lends itself to use by those who use the technique I described Beck using - selecting certain facts from the mish-mosh of history in order to illustrate a point. The point may be true, but not the only truth worth considering. Having someone who sees such a point select the facts that describe that point is a convenient way to learn - provided you don't forget that there exist OTHER facts that might muddy the picture.
But this principle of the Overton Window is THE touchstone, gut-level, seat-of-the-pants intuitive knowledge used by all successful publishers and editors. Just read about it on the Mackinaw website. And note how THEY are yelling about Glenn Beck popularizing their technique! It was obscure and known only to scientists before Beck put it on TV and in a novel.
He reached down and selected this ONE technique that supports his overall point - that someone is manipulating you to a plan you didn't know existed.
But now many millions of people know the term OVERTON WINDOW (even if they have no clue what it means) and they didn't know it before.
The book is a best seller even though it's very badly scarred. It's full of expository lumps, badly designed scenes, and rewrite scars. I felt as I read it that there was a powerful writer involved who desperately wanted to say something, but had no idea how to SHOW DON'T TELL, and at least two other hands who tried desperately to tame that exposition into an actual plot. There are flashes of brilliance squashed by exposition. But there is a hand in it that is strong and experienced at "Intrigue" genre. That hand plastered over the cracks so well very few readers would know or care that they're there. The whole book would never make it without Glenn Beck's marketing machine behind it. It's just not good enough.
This Overton Window technique is the primary tool of political campaign strategists. And that strategy is designed to get you to do what they want you to do, even if (or especially if) it is against your best interests to do that.
If you've heard of Glenn Beck's 8/28 gathering in Washington, you've heard of it because that event was formulated to illustrate The Overton Window technique, though I've never heard Beck say so (but I don't listen to every word).
That's what happened with STAR TREK - it moved The Overton Window for the imagination of the American (and eventually worldwide) Public.
Understanding how "they" use this "Overton Window" technique to change the behavior of huge numbers of people, to create "movements" out of scattered opinions, clarified a lot for me about what happened when Star Trek hit the airwaves. Star Trek went on the air before color TV was widely distributed, before Cable TV was anything but a curiosity.
It's impossible for me to determine the cause-effect chain between Star Trek and coincident and subsequent events and technological applications, or even the flow of basic research dollars.
But in the Astrological view of the universe, cause-effect does not work along a time-line as it does in the scientific view of the universe.
In Astrology, effect can precede cause. It's called an "orb of influence" - and before the actual transit contact happens, an Event described by that symbolism can materialize as an effect caused by that whatever might happen at the contact. That concept spooks scientists, but Fantasy writers and readers have no problem with it.
So leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, looking at the timeline of history from 1950 to 2010, you can see the sweeping eruption of creativity subsequent to Star Trek's being greenlighted for production.
20 years after first airing, when those in college when Trek first aired had achieved positions of power in the scientific community, technological innovation exploded. The basics were laid down by college age kids during the first airing of Trek.
We, as a culture, went through an OPENING OF A WINDOW INTO THE FUTURE - a glimpse of what we might do energized creativity and thousands of very intelligent people surged through that window into our future.
Star Trek opened the technological window into our future.
But Star Trek fans opened another window, a window into emotional maturity in Relationships, a window into Romance, Love, and what Gene Roddenberry kept expounding on, "Wisdom" -- he would say, "In the future, WHEN WE ARE WISE,..." we will do this and that differently.
It's now up to the Romance community which has embraced SF and Paranormal formats to pry open that Overton Window, and shove it along the track in the direction of HAPPILY EVER AFTER being a logical, reasonable, normal expectation of life.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
But this is about a novel written entirely for commercial purposes targeting a very specific and huge audience that's been #1 on Amazon and NYTimes and gosh knows where else for weeks and weeks. It's about how and why that sales record was achieved, not about politics.
I have loads of opinions about the persona Glenn Beck shows on TV, positive, negative, neutral, plus professional opinions and a lot more opinions -- all of which are irrelevant to the point of this blog post, but let's get some of them out of the way first.
1. He says things I know to be true about American History
2. He says things I know to be false about American History
3. He says things I know to be irrelevant about American History
4. He says things I know to be uninteresting about current events
5. He says things I know to be highly commercial, very slick pitches
6. He says things I DO NOT KNOW and have to go look up.
7. He says things I forgot but really need to keep in mind.
8. He says things I need to create an opinion about, but don't have one
9. He says things I'd rather not create an opinion about
10. He does NOT say the things I would like to hear him say, and the lack puts his work in the "Failure of Imagination" category I've blogged about here:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/06/where-expert-romance-writers-fail.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/failure-of-imagination-part-ii-society.html
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/09/failure-of-imagination-part-iii.html
He digs up facts and carefully leaves out facts so the scattering of facts will seem to make sense and then lead people to a particular conclusion.
But if you include all the facts, you would come to a different conclusion.
I have opinions about the conclusions he appears to be leading his audience to but my opinions don't matter one whit.
If I understand the mechanism of what he's doing correctly, he's not leading that audience, he's following it by careful analysis of instant ratings of his shows. His techniques are worthy of careful study by anyone who wants to gather a pro-Romance readership into a coherent force in the commercial world.
Professional writers study like this for a living. Leave your opinions at the door like muddy galoshes and walk into someone else's life.
Glenn Beck's pick-and-choose facts to make a point is the technique used in every textbook I can think of offhand. I use it myself, on this blog, to clarify writing craft issues, and to put some spring in the springboards I build into story-ideas I hope someone will dive into.
Pick-n-choose is a technique which is fun and works fine if everyone is in on the joke, as I pointed out here where I discussed how history is being lost:
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2010/07/emigrating-to-future.html
Glenn Beck and the organization behind him are really, really GOOD at "working" his audience. I can see that because sometimes on a couple of things I'm part of that audience. I'm just the sort who doesn't like to be "worked" so I wait to get the point, then flip the channel.
But the "Glenn Beck Phenomenon" is something to be studied, carefully.
It's not worth forming a political opinion about the content of Beck's shows. But it's worth studying that content because it reveals a great deal about audiences, not just his audience.
Read my post on targeting a readership, and the posts cited in it.
http://aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/2009/11/astrology-just-for-writers-part-6.html
Here though we are focusing on finding and engaging an audience. We are not focusing on "who" Glenn Beck is or wants to be.
Occasionally, I have the TV on when he's on and I comparison shop news broadcasts, surfing from one channel to another to avoid commercials or analyze commercials. Sometimes I watch most of his segments, though, and it is very instructive.
As a writer, I don't see or hear the same things readers and viewers do. I see an entirely different world, a world of mechanisms that produce illusions rather than the illusions themselves.
Beck produces and projects a powerful illusion which I'm certain has nothing at all to do with who he really is.
His technique would work for any subject. He's combined the "reality show" with the "news commentary" shows that have become so popular.
I could fill this blog with an analysis of the acting, directing, writing, and research on his TV show. But why bother? I'm not in the business of shaping your opinions!
I just want you to notice
a) that he's invented a genre
b) that he's popularized it just as we want to popularize SFR and PNR
I would recommend, though, that if you don't understand what that "Glenn Beck" TV show is, take a look at the spiffy, flashy glennbeck.com top page.
Also note they'll sell you, for about $75/year, access to exclusive web broadcasts of Beck's shows via Insider Extreme. His TV show in the late afternoon spot (it's rebroadcast later at night, too) pulls 3 million viewers, his radio show reaches more. It's amazing how many have turned away from TV to radio! Relative to other TV broadcast or cable shows' audience sizes, we're talking a major audience here. Sports pulls more, as do live-disasters, but for a boring lecture complete with blackboards, this audience size is huge. And they read. They buy books at amazon!
Note the masthead on Glennbeck.com --
THE FUSION OF ENTERTAINMENT AND ENLIGHTENMENT
Doesn't that sound like the mixed-genre PNR or SFR that we love so much?
THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND LOVE
THE FUSION OF SCIENCE AND ROMANCE
THE FUSION OF ROMANCE AND LOVE (not the same thing, but few know that)
THE FUSION OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE
THE FUSION OF HUMAN AND NON-HUMAN
THE FUSION OF NORMAL AND PARANORMAL
Do you begin to see what fascinates me about this Glenn Beck Phenomenon?
We need to do that. So we need to figure out what he did and how. And why it works so well. We need to avoid having our imagination fail just because of the content of a message. We need to focus on how the message is delivered, to whom, and why they eat it up.
Notice the ART behind the graphic displays, the colors, the words, the images, and the html behind that display on glennbeck.com .
It takes tremendous art and technical expertise (I mean extremely expensive expertise) to achieve that trashy look. It's so expensive it looks cheap, which is its whole point. Glitzy. Slick. Ooozing money from every pixel.
You need to look rich to attract riches.
But riches aren't the point. Examine that top page closely, all the way to the bottom margin. The art of that page actually depicts the projected Glenn Beck persona (I don't know this man, or really anything about the real person. I am examining only the created persona, not the real person. Think of him as a character in a book you didn't like. Now figure out why you didn't like it (or why you did).)
Now go to amazon.com and check out Glenn Beck's books.
Glenn Beck Books
Next check out his 2010 novel, THE OVERTON WINDOW on kindle
The Overton Window
Note that The Overton Window by Glenn Beck has over 500 customer reviews (nevermind the fulminating - the number is what counts here)
Here's the link to the Hardcover page which has a "look inside" feature
The Overton Window by Glenn Beck
Check the Acknowledgements page, page VII.
Look at all the people - with names.
Note JACK HENDERSON "for pouring his heart and soul into this project"
I have read this book, every word, cover to cover.
I read it because of the title, and a sound-byte I heard in passing on Beck's TV show -- that he got this "Overton Window" concept from a think tank.
I went to the think-tank's web page:
http://www.mackinac.org/11398
And I googled and found via wikipedia that there is an entire mathematical branch devoted to calculating the behavior of large populations. Well, I knew that, but not the research of the last few years.
The Overton Window is an application of those mathematical principles which form the basis of "Madison Avenue" advertising (and all political advertising, especially now the YouTube videos). One of the founders of the Mackinac Center think tank named Overton codified the application to make it useful for politics.
The objective of the application is to MOLD PUBLIC OPINION - and then to MOVE PUBLIC OPINION toward the objective you have chosen.
It doesn't matter what the objective is, this principle and process applies to changing the behavior of large masses of people.
The think tank applies it to politics, as Beck's novel illustrates (but without the mathematical clarity that would allow you to use it yourself). I'm sure you've seen that Overton Window principle being aimed at you from your TV screen - magazine covers, articles, books.
It lends itself to use by those who use the technique I described Beck using - selecting certain facts from the mish-mosh of history in order to illustrate a point. The point may be true, but not the only truth worth considering. Having someone who sees such a point select the facts that describe that point is a convenient way to learn - provided you don't forget that there exist OTHER facts that might muddy the picture.
But this principle of the Overton Window is THE touchstone, gut-level, seat-of-the-pants intuitive knowledge used by all successful publishers and editors. Just read about it on the Mackinaw website. And note how THEY are yelling about Glenn Beck popularizing their technique! It was obscure and known only to scientists before Beck put it on TV and in a novel.
He reached down and selected this ONE technique that supports his overall point - that someone is manipulating you to a plan you didn't know existed.
But now many millions of people know the term OVERTON WINDOW (even if they have no clue what it means) and they didn't know it before.
The book is a best seller even though it's very badly scarred. It's full of expository lumps, badly designed scenes, and rewrite scars. I felt as I read it that there was a powerful writer involved who desperately wanted to say something, but had no idea how to SHOW DON'T TELL, and at least two other hands who tried desperately to tame that exposition into an actual plot. There are flashes of brilliance squashed by exposition. But there is a hand in it that is strong and experienced at "Intrigue" genre. That hand plastered over the cracks so well very few readers would know or care that they're there. The whole book would never make it without Glenn Beck's marketing machine behind it. It's just not good enough.
This Overton Window technique is the primary tool of political campaign strategists. And that strategy is designed to get you to do what they want you to do, even if (or especially if) it is against your best interests to do that.
If you've heard of Glenn Beck's 8/28 gathering in Washington, you've heard of it because that event was formulated to illustrate The Overton Window technique, though I've never heard Beck say so (but I don't listen to every word).
That's what happened with STAR TREK - it moved The Overton Window for the imagination of the American (and eventually worldwide) Public.
Understanding how "they" use this "Overton Window" technique to change the behavior of huge numbers of people, to create "movements" out of scattered opinions, clarified a lot for me about what happened when Star Trek hit the airwaves. Star Trek went on the air before color TV was widely distributed, before Cable TV was anything but a curiosity.
It's impossible for me to determine the cause-effect chain between Star Trek and coincident and subsequent events and technological applications, or even the flow of basic research dollars.
But in the Astrological view of the universe, cause-effect does not work along a time-line as it does in the scientific view of the universe.
In Astrology, effect can precede cause. It's called an "orb of influence" - and before the actual transit contact happens, an Event described by that symbolism can materialize as an effect caused by that whatever might happen at the contact. That concept spooks scientists, but Fantasy writers and readers have no problem with it.
So leaving aside the issue of cause and effect, looking at the timeline of history from 1950 to 2010, you can see the sweeping eruption of creativity subsequent to Star Trek's being greenlighted for production.
20 years after first airing, when those in college when Trek first aired had achieved positions of power in the scientific community, technological innovation exploded. The basics were laid down by college age kids during the first airing of Trek.
We, as a culture, went through an OPENING OF A WINDOW INTO THE FUTURE - a glimpse of what we might do energized creativity and thousands of very intelligent people surged through that window into our future.
Star Trek opened the technological window into our future.
But Star Trek fans opened another window, a window into emotional maturity in Relationships, a window into Romance, Love, and what Gene Roddenberry kept expounding on, "Wisdom" -- he would say, "In the future, WHEN WE ARE WISE,..." we will do this and that differently.
It's now up to the Romance community which has embraced SF and Paranormal formats to pry open that Overton Window, and shove it along the track in the direction of HAPPILY EVER AFTER being a logical, reasonable, normal expectation of life.
Live Long and Prosper,
Jacqueline Lichtenberg
http://www.simegen.com/jl/
http://jacquelinelichtenberg.com
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