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I wonder what Tolkien would say of so much of the symbolism from his novels being used to bootstrap a horrible dystopian control grid? Would he approve or disap
by ParentiSoundSys 9mo ago
I wonder what Tolkien would say of so much of the symbolism from his novels being used to bootstrap a horrible dystopian control grid? Would he approve or disapprove? The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder.
- usrnm 9mo ago> The way that orcs are dehumanized Orcs aren't human, though. If anything, they were deelfized
- gambiting 9mo ago>>The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder. If anything, it's their portrayal in the Rings of Power that is idiotic(trying to humanize them) - they aren't human, they don't have families or friends or internal lives and psychological doubts going through their heads - they are meant to be a force("force" like in "force of nature") of evil, not a misunderstood and exploited race of intelligent beings. For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Ringbearer I will however agree with you that it's truly insane how we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it?
- avadodin 9mo agoare we the baddies?
- ParentiSoundSys 9mo agowink wink
- klondike_klive 9mo agoThere must be some pretty industrial strength compartmentalising going on.
- Cthulhu_ 9mo agoPalantir, Anduril, Istari, and there's even a home security one called Sauron, you can't make this shit up. Back in my day, LotR names were used for cool metal bands like Gorgoroth, Amon Amarth, Cirith Ungol, Carach Angren, Burzum, etc.
- ekianjo 9mo agoThere is band called Silmarils as well
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo agothe tolkien metal world continues: One of Nine put out a killer record on Profound Lore last year. https://oneofnine.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-the-iron-shadow https://oneofnine.bandcamp.com/album/dawn-of-the-iron-shadow (skip the first track if you don't care for "dungeon synth"). i'm not a big fan of keyboards in metal but the rest of the instrumentation is so good i can forgive it :)
- Ntrails 9mo ago> we have a global survailence company that is used to spy on citizens and destroy democracies worldwide that is literally called Palantir. Like, no one working there is seeing it? The Palantir are not evil creations in the book iirc. They were used by the great kings to see whatever they wished. Heck, even in the book Aragorn uses the Palantir to make a critical decision turning the tide of battle.
- actionfromafar 9mo agoIn the book the Palantir are technically neutral devices for Seeing things, that, it turns out, are inherently prone to misuse and once used for Evil, are incredibly difficult to use in any other way. A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen.
- wyldfire 9mo ago> A better metaphor (accidental or not) for surveillance technology I've never seen. "We are easily corrupted" [1] https://www.westword.com/opinion/opinion-palantir-technologies-puts-colorado-at-center-of-future-of-ai-23822908/ https://www.westword.com/opinion/opinion-palantir-technologi... [2] https://www.pogo.org/investigates/stephen-miller-conflicts-of-interest#:~:text=Ethics%20experts%20say%20Miller%27s%20deep%20involvement%20in,in%20Palantir%20raises%20conflict%20of%20interest%20concerns. https://www.pogo.org/investigates/stephen-miller-conflicts-o...
- actionfromafar 9mo agoEdit: it just occurred to me that the book describes a kind of filter bubble, too. The Palantir stones are inherently incapable of showing false data. But they became tuned over time to show highly editorialized video clips which supported a specific (Evil) narrative. That (IIRC) included future projections of possible outcomes. Denethor (?) tried to use a Palantir for good, but went mad after viewing its selections for years.
- Ntrails 9mo agoDenethor was allowed to see what Sauron wanted him to see and nothing more, because he lacked the ability to control the stone away from Sauron. The parallel falls apart somewhat since here his access was essentially controlled by a third party. (you might argue it reflects certain social media outcomes ofc)
- Finbel 9mo agoIt sounds like Tolkien didn't quite agree with the simplified take that Orcs are "just" a force of evil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma
- gambiting 9mo agoTo me it sounds more like he really wanted to give them some agency and the ability to speak, but then was unable to resolve the moral dilemma that came out of it - with different works suggesting different "solutions" to it. As the Wiki article points out, Tolkien was a devout Christian and part of his world view included beings which were wholy and irredimably evil while still able to speak and reason on some level. When you look at Christian iconography, you don't really have theologians saying "well when you have angels slaying demons, are the demons really evil or are they just misunderstood". That's your orcs. Since Tolkien really cared about world building he wanted to make it fit neatly in the myth of creation but as far as I can tell - he was never able to do it neatly.
- mwcz 9mo agoI've not seen Rings of Power and I don't plan to, but I'd just point out that the Silmarillion describes the origin of orcs as being an exploited race of intelligent beings, elves who were captured and tortured until their forms became what we know as orcs. "... all those of the Quendi [elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes."
- gambiting 9mo agoAnd as this wiki article posted in other comments very nicely explains, Tolkien never came to a good and final conclusion on how this all really worked, with different explanations in different works of his. The "they were just evil force that could be killed without remorse" theme is the dominant one, because it works in the context of the story and the worldbuilding that he did for it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma
- mwcz 9mo agoFully understood and appreciated. I'm just replying to a comment stating that orcs were forces of destruction and not exploited intelligent beings with evidence to the contrary from the Silmarillion. Tolkien's dilemma is even more concrete evidence.
- the_af 9mo agoLike the sibling comment remarks, Tolkien never fully embarked on this path. He had a problem: as a Catholic [1], he thought every creature deserved pity and second chances (you can see this when Gandalf rebukes Frodo when he says "it's a pity Bilbo didn't kill Gollum"). If the Orcs are really "fallen Elves", they deserve pity and maybe mercy; they are worthy of redemption. Yet Orcs in LotR are to be killed on sight; there's only one passage in all of LotR where the Hobbits reflect on the corpse of an Orc with any kind of attempt at insight. For Orcs to be a thing to be destroyed without mercy, unworthy of redemption, they must have not be corrupted souls. Yet here Tolkien found another stumbling block: according to his Catholic-influenced vision, Evil cannot create, only corrupt and destroy. So Morgoth couldn't have created Orcs, he must have used existing souls as raw material. Tolkien never resolved this conundrum. ---- [1] someone in another comment argued quite convincingly that Catholics at times had no trouble murdering other Christians over doctrinal affairs, so let's add a qualification here: "Tolkien's Catholic-influenced morality, which was his own nonetheless".
- bell-cot 9mo ago> Like, no one working there is seeing it? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" - Upton Sinclair (1878 - 1968) "Because Pharaoh is paying daddy, and we need the money." - Unknown laborer at the Pyramid of Djoser, c. 2660 BC, explaining to his son why he's making a giant pile of rocks in the desert.
- folkrav 9mo agoI mean, I did leave a role because the things we were doing clashed heavily with my principles (ad-tech adjacent). I had the luxury of doing so - an opportunity arose somewhere else, I could afford to make the move, etc. But it's also hard for me to imagine someone that today, chooses to interview and take a job at Palantir, and not know what they're up to, who Thiel is and what he stands for.
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo agoi think anyone on HN employed by arms manufactures or surveillance tech has a resume good enough to get hired pretty much anywhere that doesn't do those things.
- the_af 9mo ago> For an actually interesting take on "hey what if the orcs are actually intelligent people" there is The Last Ringbearer by a Russian author, presenting LOTR from the perspective of Mordor(it's not a good book, but was an amusing read) I found The Last Ringbearer a book good! Of course it's not in the same league as LotR, it's not engaging in vast myth- and world-building, but it's a well-written, fun book that manages to be engaging. Even knowing it was an alternative take to LotR, I wanted to know what happened! For everyone who has not read it, it's not simply a "let's retell LotR, only from the perspective of the Orcs". It's a brand new "adventure" so to speak, which shifts the point of view but also describes new events. It starts at the end of the War of the Ring, with Mordor defeated.
- gambiting 9mo agoI mean, I really did actually enjoy reading it. But like with a lot of Russian literature - it does have a habit of spending several pages just monologuing here and there - but it is a "fun" read.
- bananaflag 9mo agoI'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien%27s_moral_dilemma
- ParentiSoundSys 9mo agoFascinating thank you. I was only aware of the surface level concern around the orcs.
- mwcz 9mo agoThat's both a very good description of Tolkien's struggles with orcs, and a writing style that feels out of place in an encyclopedia. The Halls of Mandos are described as a halfway house.
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- bell-cot 9mo ago> J. R. R. Tolkien, a devout Roman Catholic, created what he came to feel was a moral dilemma for himself with his supposedly evil Middle-earth peoples like Orcs [...] so killing them would be wrong without very good reason. Orcs serve as the principal forces of the enemy in The Lord of the Rings, where they are slaughtered in large numbers in the battles of [...] Admitting that there's a very wide diversity of beliefs under the "Roman Catholic" banner - historic Roman Catholic armies have been eager participants in well-documented battles for the past 1,500 or so years. I'd assume that Tolkien would have had a wide variety of perfectly historic Roman Catholic arguments to chose from, to justify his fictional slaughter. (If I recall, the orcs slaughtered in LoTR are pretty much all soldier or near-soldiers. Do orc women, children, or other non-combatants ever appear in the story?) In many ways, that Wikipedia article feels like a Hays Code-era whitewashing of Roman Catholicism.
- the_af 9mo agoYour criticism of Catholicism is valid, but regardless: this dilemma of Tolkien is real, and well-documented (e.g. in his letters, etc). He really did struggle with this, re: the origin of the Orcs, whether they had souls, whether it was ok to default to massacring them without second thought, etc. He never really resolved it. Most Tolkien fan communities are aware of this dilemma, it's one of those well-known things, along with "did Balrogs have wings?", "couldn't they just fly to Mount Doom and drop the ring?" and "why did Sauron need to put his power within a ring, anyway?".
- KineticLensman 9mo agoTolkien’s orc dialogue in TLOTR is actually very humanised in some ways – the orcs moan about their bosses, complain about rival teams, are concerned about completing their tasks, being punished for failure, etc, etc. When they aren’t fighting, they come across as petty functionaries in a totalitarian state.
- FridayoLeary 9mo agoIt's a fantasy novel written primarily for entertainment. It's hard enough to write dwarves and elves, orcs are a necessary plot device. If you want you can imagine them as pitiable creatures who have been deprived of free will and have no choice but to act the way they do and loath themselves for it.
- the_af 9mo ago> It's a fantasy novel written primarily for entertainment On one hand, you're right. On the other, it's unfair to Tolkien and to the scholars who study his work. He spent a lot of his life and effort towards developing this world, he deeply pondered the moral implications and theology of his world, and for all his denial of there being any analogies to the real world, you can see he considered them (he did describe modern men in the modern world as "Orc-ish", etc). All of this to say we cannot just dismiss it as "it's a fantasy novel".
- gregw2 9mo agoDo you mean the palantir or the rings?
- gregw2 9mo agoI find Tolkein's depictions on his original jacket covers of the Rings of Power and the one ring and the "all seeing eye" that accompanies them quite evocative: https://imgur.com/CZSNpiS https://imgur.com/CZSNpiS https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/The_Fellowship_of_the_Ring_cover.gif https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/8e/The_Fellowshi...
- gregw2 9mo agoAs many of you no doubt know, some people (did you know even 3 days after Hiroshima?![1]) likened Tolkein's One Ring to the power of the atomic bomb developed in the same era: a technology molded by hidden genius, capable of unspeakable power so deadly it must actually /not/ be used, but instead, must be carefully guarded by a small band until it can be destroyed. So that true peace is possible again. Tolkein of course denied this[2] .... and the timing wasn't right[3] and ... he wasn't a big fan of allegory[4], right? However, perhaps he foresaw, however unconsciously or through shadow knowledge shared by others or Bentham's Panopticon[5] or seen too by Orwell' 1985[6], the coming surveillance state. After all, in the trenches of WW1 he took his place managing signals communications in a battalion[7] and when WW2 arrived was approached to be a cryptographer, (even taking four days of preparatory courses on the subject![8] Before getting turned down[9].). Foresaw what and shared how you ask? That other, subtler, great Tool of Power to come out of WW2 -- the use of, and covert exposure of, signals encryption. Encryption exerts its power in a manner not unlike one of the key functions of the rings... Anyone bearing the One Ring or the nine, who then puts on the ring -- like using encryption -- instantly makes themselves "hidden" to the mortal fellows around you. But tragically, the prolonged use and reliance upon such power deepens and ensures ever increasing temptations and corruptions. And such ring (encryption) use -- most unintuitively and dangerously -- makes you more, not less visible to the maker of the rings. (Just as cyphertext stands out in a sea of plaintext.[10] (See Tor today[11], or in WW2 the then-novel phenomena known as radar traceback.[13] Or the then-novel-but-even-more-covert encryption traffic analysis[14].) Perhaps he saw. And knew. ... And why too the numeric gap between 1 ring, 3 for elves, 7, and the 9? Nobody knows for sure[15]. Perhaps too some linguistic colleague had whispered to the maker-of-languages (languages as obscure at that time as those of the Apache Code Talkers[16] and similarly perhaps unappreciatedly utilitarian) that... we already had "5 Eyes"[17]?? Perhaps then Tolkein knew? And passed on the word, for those willing to hear... Poor Tolkein, he became beloved by the very Morlocks[18], err, 'easily corruptible men of middle earth" he warned about. ... [1...18] Out of time! References available upon request. Or web search... Don't get me started on how this all connects to the Eye of Providence[19] or the Eye of Horus[20]! ;)
- rdtsc 9mo ago> I wonder what Tolkien would say of so much of the symbolism from his novels being used to bootstrap a horrible dystopian control grid? What is that referring to? Some new LotR adaptation or some new game? > The way that orcs are dehumanized you have to wonder. Why would they be humanized, they are not human?