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Our Favorite Cliché: A World Filled with Idiots

132 points by omnibrain 12y ago

jrapdx3 12y ago
It's hard to disagree, fiction is made-up stuff having only so much in common with actual reality. And sure there's good and not-so-good fiction and the movies show it. When he brought up the possibility of a great story not based on idiotic behavior I too immediately thought of Apollo 13, truly spellbinding in its entirety. Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority, though if only limited to movies, there wouldn't be much to write about. The bigger thing it points to is the way really important discourse has increasingly become infested with the very same attribute. After all, in recent years TV news has become more or less devoid of authentic news reports. Calling TV news "sensationalistic" is hard new, not only failing to qualify as factual, but even if intended as entertainment, it's lousy fiction every bit as idiotic as a B-movie. People do watch it though, and that what counts. To the extent idiot plots are the standard in national and local politics, it's far more damaging than the movies, but perhaps the point is the same roots underlie a whole gamut of idiotic forms. But where are the rest of us who are not idiots? What trouble do we go to express our non-idiotic ideas where it does some good? (I suspect posting here is more or less like preaching to the choir.) Ultimately fiction is so much less compelling than real life. I love a good story well told, but it pales next to the meaning of actual experience, provided one is tuned in to experience as it is. The article hints at something not quite said. We humans so often accept fiction and discard reality, we don't or even refuse to see what we are seeing. Maybe that's the definition of real-time "idiot plots" playing out all around us. Easy enough with movies to know fiction when we hear it, the trick is to hear our own inner voice, and make that distinction within.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  A related problem in society is the assumption of ignorance; if someone expresses a passionate opinion and you demur, it seems more and more common for your interlocutor to assume you don't know some key fact in their worldview rather than solicit the basis of your disagreement. Of course you can use this to your advantage, insofar as it's easier to get people to give you information by expressing disagreement than by asking questions. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law
- icebraining 12y ago
  Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority But on the other hand, the phenomenon doesn't seem to have nearly the same effect on a much more commercial platform that films: TV, which is filled to the brim with shows showing teams of cops, medics, etc working hard and unbelievably competently to "save the day" again and again.
  - dkarapetyan 12y ago
    Ah but there it is again the same problem but reversed. Most of the public is retarded and helpless and needs constant saving.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    That used to be the case. Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues. And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you.
    - icebraining 12y ago
      Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues. While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me. They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc). I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law & Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap. And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you. Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.
angersock 12y ago
A well-written article, but I disagree with a few of the premises. First, author mentions that a lot of directors and whoever will still call 911 when things go south. That in no way invalidates general suspicion of cops, especially by citizens not pulling in over seven figures a year. Further, the alternative is to call who, exactly--the article doesn't admit those people any other options, so it's a void point to claim that they pick the only available option and still go on to say that it's a high-quality one. That phone call could still result in action maybe thirty minutes later if at all, as many citizens in poor parts of a city may attest. So, yeah, it's completely reasonable to portray police as overworked/corrupt/incompetent in many situations. Second, the bit about Star Trek vs Star Wars is cute, but should've also included a comparison with Babylon 5: government agencies (secret and public) alike are shown all along the range of competence, and progress is only made through working together across groups. Author completely neglects to mention modern depictions of competent government agencies (X-Files, Breaking Bad, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, The Crazies, The Siege, Heat) Author completely neglects to mention past depictions of competent and robust government agencies (A Clockwork Orange, 2001, Starship Troopers, Brazil, A Clear and Present Danger). Basically, there was a lot of cherry-picking to support the author's point.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Brazil? You'll need to elaborate because I don't think we watched the same movie.
  - arethuza 12y ago
    I'm pretty sure A Clear and Present Danger relies on individual heroics to undo the work of completely unreliable government agencies (i.e. troops being sent to interdict drug shipments at source then dropping all support for them once it becomes politically unpopular)?
  - angersock 12y ago
    Well, consider--the system worked, despite some glitches. Recall the ending. Perhaps the only hero that actually helped was Tuttle, and on a scale too small to matter.
rayiner 12y ago
Love this article, especially given how common it is for people in the tech community to succumb to these ideas.
hliyan 12y ago
A story, almost by definition, is an exception. If you went through your day without incident and all institutions performed as expected, there would be nothing mention-worthy. Stories are anomalies. If a serial depicts its society as consisting of idiots, that would be open to criticism. But I'm not sure if works that revolve around a single event (or a set of related events) can be criticized the same way. I prefer to imagine that in the universe of such stories, for each such event, hundreds of days go by without incident.
- williamcotton 12y ago
  Stories are not exceptional by their nature. There are plenty of daily routines and ceremonies carried out throughout the day that operate on an intrinsic and perhaps unconscious level. What you see as uncommon is an event that breaks the regularly scheduled narrative but there is more to storytelling than entertaining novel experiences. Stories are not anomalies. They guide us through almost every action we take. We are creatures of narrative and constantly hear, tell, act out and create stories, calling them either fact or fiction depending on the circumstance.
UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
"Fahrenheit 451... served up chilling warnings that helped to stave off the very scenarios [it] portrayed, by girding millions of... readers to think hard about the depicted failure mode, and to devote at least some effort, throughout their lives, to helping ensure that it never comes to pass." Ray Bradbury said... "In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction." (From Wikipedia)
- tedks 12y ago
  Ray Bradbury is just a luddite, though. For all he knows she was listening to a news broadcast or a play. If that happened now she might have been listening to Farenheit-451 on audiobook. In general, anyone who needs to bring up how their preferred medium of information transmission smells is not going to give you useful information about what technologies to favor over others. Nostalgia is fun but not something you can reliably use to judge usefulness of technology.
  - UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
    Disagree. The whole point was not what she was listening to. The point is she was ignoring the world around her. It isn't a mode of information transmission issue - it is a human interaction issue.
    - chiph 12y ago
      A lot of what was in F451 has come true. Cellphones that people are just glued to. And wall-sized televisions, such as the 90" HD models you can buy at Costco.
terranstyler 12y ago
"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem IOW, it's a fundamental problem of Western democracy and any other "representational" system that is not based on voluntary agreement and/or immediate feedback. Unfortunately, people do not have a sufficient degree of control over authorities, hence a frustration and its emergence in culture.
- bildung 12y ago
  "Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states. In my experience "the society never works" feeling is by no means uniformly distributed in Western societies, but mostly a phenomenon in the USA. When I started reading American political discussions on the net 10 to 15 years ago, I was really shocked how widespread this randian view on society is in the US. OTOH that could be a self selection of a certain mieleu of people...
  - arethuza 12y ago
    "the society never works" It's a fairly common view in the UK - notably Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" thing - which isn't actually as bad as it sounds if you listen to it in context (and I'm probably to the left of most people on HN and I'm not a particular fan of Thatcher). Personally, I constantly struck by how the public sector here in the UK seems to contain both the absolute best of society (military, emergency services, a lot of NHS front line staff) and some of the absolute worst (mostly self serving bureaucrats).
  - pluma 12y ago
    This. This attitude feels most alien to me as a European in discussions about gun control ("the cops can't protect you"), freedom of speech, social welfare, public health care, public education and so on. As an outsider it feels as if individualism is valued over the common good to an almost impractical extent sacrificing innumerable benefits to some ideal of personal freedom. But of course this perception isn't unbiased. It just feels strange to observe a culture that seems very similar but then and again shows facets that couldn't feel less natural to me.
anigbrowl 12y ago
And yet, directors like Cameron, Nolan, Spielberg and their peers clearly don't think they are lying, or doing harm, or insulting the public or civilization or the dedicated professionals they depend upon. I doubt the thought even crosses their minds. It's like they're...idiots! Really, I don't think this criticism is well-founded. I'll give him Cameron, but most of Nolan's characters are self-consciously transgressive of society that seek some sort of re-integration with it, while Spielberg has numerous positive depictions of institutions or their representatives, from the benign scientists if Close Encounters to Sheriff Brody in Jaws (I picked two older movies but think they are good collective and individual examples). Certainly the idiot plot is widespread, and I am as sick as Brin of people who have just discovered the imperfection of the world running around yelling 'wake up sheeple!' but he rather undermines his argument with shallow jabs such as this. Did I allude to exceptions? In literature, you could look to the novels of Iain Banks, which depict our descendants having rollicking, dangerous adventures despite living in a near-utopia thanks to the hard work and genius of their ancestors. (You're welcome, kids.) Vernor Vinge, in Rainbows End, portrays near-future citizenship becoming tech-empowered art in a society that's getting better all the time... yet, drama is not killed. Er...in most of Banks' Culture novels (which made up only about half his output, but which are obviously what Brin has in mind here), the mass of people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete, with the protagonists usually being cynics of some sort who have found themselves blackmailed by one or other of the Culture's hyper-utilitarian espionage outfits, who (of course) never do things by the Kantian book that the general public subscribes to, insofar as they ever think about ethics when they briefly lurch out of a hedonistic haze. It's been a while since I read Rainbow's End (although I have read it a couple of times) but I seem to remember major plot elements including Bad Guy Administrators whose approach to library preservation is to feed all the books into a giant combination shredder/scanner/captcha processor, who are inadvertently thwarted by competing MMORPG players who are engaged in a virtual battle on the same university campus as the bibliocidal authorities while a 1337 hax0r5 save the world in the background. I'm having real trouble seeing how these examples are supposed to support his point; to my mind they epitomize the trope of 'burdensome knowledge borne by a few.' There are some great ideas in this piece and as an occasional screenwriter I think these are quite Important Ideas, but it needs to back into the oven for a while.
- 12y ago
Htsthbjig 12y ago
I believe that probably the assumptions that everybody is stupid is totally right. This does not mean that every individual person is stupid. They could be very very smart, but when they join a macro organism they could behave very very stupid following emotions like nationalism, pride, being part of the group, fear and hatred, power or sex. The advertisement industry operate under the assumption that human beings operate under irrational forces that are stronger than anything else and they are right because people buy things that they advertise. It probably does not make rational sense that because people see a tennis player like Federer using a specific razor, people are going to buy this razor, but it just happens. There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so on), and kill millions of Germans in the process. It was Freud who wrote the "Mass Psychology" because it became obvious for him that intelligent individuals could become totally irrational when they take part on masses after the experience of Nazism that made this highly intelligent individual to lose his job because he was jew. Not so hard to understand, we know that very smart individuals could become totally irrational in their personal lives. For example a beautiful women or man could seduce them and they knowing rationally that they are being manipulated not being able to escape. Look at the economy today: we are following a path of printing money and increasing our debt that won't make sense for any person with half a brain. The same happens with Ukraine, Europe(their leaders) are following US in trying to make war with Russia, what makes zero economic interest for Europe. Less sense makes a military confrontation with Russia or China, but we are following this path.
- elorant 12y ago
  There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so on), and kill millions of Germans in the process. That's the most naive oversimplification of what happened in Hitler's Germany I've ever read.
deleted 12y ago
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rpenm 12y ago
To what extent is this driven by the rise of youth culture and and the rising market value of adolescent consumers?
DanielBMarkham 12y ago
"...Hence the Iron Rule: Society never works. Along with its corollary: Everyone is stupid..." Yes, if you are 12, and you need some simplistic way of looking at things. Since most entertainment is actually written for teenagers, if you had to paint with a super-broad brush this would be accurate. More accurate, however is "Institutions are always sub-optimized, people who are much smarter than you live and thrive in these institutions and do sub-optimal things for good reason, and it's the distributed, self-optimizing facile, and overly self-confident nature of the critical individual, which the author seems to deplore, that gives us increases in efficiencies and the re-factoring necessary to continue evolving." 100 guys think the system sucks, that they are smart and society is full of idiots. 99 are wrong. The other guy is still no smarter than the rest of us, but he just came up with the next thing we need to continue moving forward as a species. Western society has made a call on this: smart people in large groups do dumb things. It's our job to continue to be suspicious and point them out. In fact, the system depends on it.
dschiptsov 12y ago
It is not a cliche, it is another notion of the famous general 20/80 rule. Like, in any field of knowledge (or just any human activity, including sports) 20% of participants are worthy, while 80% are, well, idiots. And in some special cases, like Java...)
TeMPOraL 12y ago
A few thoughts: "This kind of thought experiment — that Einstein called gedankenexperiment — is the fruit of our prefrontal lobes, humanity's most unique and recent organ, the font of our greatest gifts: curiosity, empathy, anticipation and resilience. Indeed, forward-peering storytelling is one of the major ways that we turn fear into something profoundly practical. Avoidance of failure. The early detection and revelation of Big Mistakes, before we even get a chance to make them. (...) an endeavor best performed by science fiction." This. I read a fair amount of books and there is this one distinct feature I found in science fiction - they are humanity's concept simulator. It's all about setting up series of gedankenexperiments, and then simulating their outcomes and interactions between the outcomes. Whether an author is writing about effects of a new technology on society or testing new ways to structure civilisation or elaborating on how physical limits are affecting day-to-day life of a space-faring race, the art becomes a way to explore new ideas free of constraints like political correctness, corporate interest, or social taboos[0]. I wish people stop treating sci-fi genre as "stupid fiction tales that are obviously inferior to thinks like Pride and Prejudice, etc." These people are often the same that walk around saying "go read books, you'll be smarter", and yet they dismiss the primary field of non-fiction that is pretty much designed to make you smarter. Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and metaethics. ---------------- It has been said that [1] Star Trek: The Next Generation was the last sci-fi hopeful about the future. I tend to agree with that, and I'd like to expand that statement into: somewhere in the early 2000s we have collectively lost faith in humanity. I just finished re-watching Early Edition (a lightweight story about a guy who gets tomorrow's newspaper today, complete with a cat) and I must say I'm angry. People in the 80-s/90-s used to have faith in the better future and in other people. That you don't have to shoot people to solve problems, but you can ask them instead. People used to help others. How strange does that sound today? This total reliance on individual performance, violence as a means to achieve everything and assumption that everyone else is either stupid or malicious (or both) is fucking annoying. We're raising a new generation of people on such message, and I'm afraid this literally screws up our (and their) future. I so do want some positive, hopeful message in TV shows back. ---------------- And since the author mentioned how Star Trek world is different from your garden variety space opera - one thing I absolutely loved about Star Trek series is that the crew of Enterprise/DS9/Voyager were not the heroes. They were the protagonists, but you could see that they all acted on behalf of the United Federation of Planets - a huge, competent, powerful sociopolitical structure that they were proud to be part of and that would always have their backs. It's the Federation that was the hero in Star Trek. The whole show made you believe that good people could come together and create something more powerful than the sum of its parts, and that it would work out ok. I think that as a culture we've given up that belief. We're society of no hope, no trust and no shared vision. And I'm afraid this is going to hurt us massively in the next decades. ---------------- Oh, and since I'm venting, I need to share my pet peeve of 2000+ film making - the Batshit Insane Hollywood Morality. That it is a right thing to do for hero to kill a couple thousand strangers to save one person, just because this person is family. That it is ok for a hero to go and murder a few dozen poor schmucks just to get revenge on a guy that hurt you. Or - and I'm not making this up, it's an actual plot of a known 2009 movie - we're supposed to applaud the protagonist who shut down the global economy, likely killing a few billion people withing minutes of movie credits rolling down, just because he wanted to have sex with his wife. I mean, Hollywood, what the fuck? ---------------- Footnotes: [0] - It even makes for a nice trick - you take a current taboo, frame it as "aliens in space" and suddenly no one complains the way they would if you try to endorse the same ideas in an essay. Early Star Trek is famous for running that trick to criticize racial and gender prejudices which were more common in the US back then. [1] - http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-generation-future http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-gene... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363
AnimalMuppet 12y ago
I think that there's a big force driving this: personality. Society is impersonal. Institutions are impersonal. The purely scientific view of human beings is impersonal (we're just matter obeying the laws of physics, and we can't be anything more, because there's nothing more that exists). As far back as Rousseau, there has been a current of thought that rejected science and glorified the individual. Far too often, technology is impersonal. ("For a list of the ways that technology has failed to improve the quality of life, press one.") As technology replaces persons with machines, we interact with machines in situations where we used to interact with humans. (Getting a tweet from your friend is nice, and there really is another human on the other end of that tweet, but it isn't the same as a face-to-face conversation.) But people still crave the personal touch, even if the structure of society provides less of it. I think this is what'd driving the trend that Brin observes.
tempodox 12y ago
I find this a worthy read. I think it's inspiring and thought provoking about more than just movies and novels. It sheds a light on how many of our narratives are built.
crusso 12y ago
Institutions are boring. Audiences typically want to identify with characters, so it's only natural that strong character-based stories will favor individuals over faceless institutions.
tedks 12y ago
I used to think David Brin made good points when I first read him. Now I just think he cherry-picks to support his own political views, which I find fairly distasteful. He makes a large amount of totally far-off claims and doesn't cite them at all. There are only a handful of links in this entire thing and that speaks to how supported it is. If you rely on priming and the availability heuristic to make your point about cultural trends you've already lost. I get that David Brin wants to live in a world full of competent people; I get that he wants to be able to trust every human with literally everything; but we aren't there yet and no amount of complaining about culture will make that happen.
- AnimalMuppet 12y ago
  "People are angels" may be as false as "people are idiots". The idea that we can build a perfect society out of humans is a profoundly false reading of human nature.
michaelochurch 12y ago
The original, ancient, meaning of the word "idiot" was "private person", i.e. a selfish, narrow-minded, ignoramus unconcerned with (and unsuited for) public life. Not "stupid person". We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word (unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are, but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers. (Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.) All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"-- they're plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important question: what should we do with the value thus created? Hence, instead of curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative, we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.
PaulHoule 12y ago
An odd thing is that the institutions are incompetent meme serves the interests of institutions. Once people believe it they expect less from institutions and don't believe they can change them. Martin Buber wrote that the Israel/Palestine conflict supports the polticial class; so long as there is a siege mentality, the Israeli government is not held to account and hamas can buy legitimacy by firing missiles. Similarly in the united States, the Democrats and Republicans buy legitimacy by opposing the other party on a handful of issues (guns, abortion, etc.) They never need to pass legislation because they blame the other guys.
- spopejoy 12y ago
  Agree strongly with this. It's a long-standing anti-socialist tactic to underfund and undermine solid, working government programs, and then denigrate those same programs as more proof that "big government doesn't work". US Postal system is a great example, everyone finds plenty to criticize, and yet standard mail delivery is more reliable than email (and getting more expensive by the second as neo-liberal ideology dictates USPS should be "profitable". I've heard the same nonsense is at play with Deutsches Bahn, leading to the demise of the S-Bahn in Berlin). But also there's the cultural side, which is the emphasis in advertising from the 1950s onward to portray an individual self-disambiguating from monolithic society tastes and norms, by buying a Beetle, or smoking a Marlboro, or chewing a different gum. This plus tie-ins to James Dean-style Hollywood efforts, and it's a very unified message that is nonetheless somewhat invisible. The article is correct to note the attitude that "it's not propaganda if you agree with it", it's been a huge win for advertising to promote and co-opt this attitude with subtle directions toward consumerism, and its close affinity with deeply conservative anti-socialist tactics is worth further investigation.
squozzer 12y ago
Brin makes his points but neglects counter-evidence, both fictional and non-fictional, so I will supply a few examples: 1) Support The Troops / First Responders 2) Religion 3) Law & Order TV series 4) Nearly everything on The History Channel Nearly all of the above glorify institutions, or more accurately, indivividual working within institutions.
protonfish 12y ago
The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll. I love movies and books where authority is the villain because it mirrors my own (and most other people's) struggles in real life. Children strive for freedom from overprotective parents and overworked and misunderstanding teachers that don't have time to listen to them as individuals. Adults have to deal with bosses, cops, politicians, preachers and other banana dictators who hold the keys to their freedom and prosperity. Anyone who has read Parkinson, The Peter Principle or Dilbert knows organizations have issues. This is not fiction, but unfortunate reality and one that your audience can easily identify with. It doesn't help that he uses more talented and successful film makers as bad examples. Star Wars had the rebel alliance - a well organized, powerful, and benevolent organization. Even the Empire was competent (until Tarkin and the other senior leadership were destroyed in the first Death Star.) And what does teenagers splitting up in horror movies have to do with the struggle against incompetent and uncaring authority? That example doesn't work but it does make this sloppily-written rant gratuitously longer - an excellent technique to keep readers that disagree with you from being able to finish it. A technique that many commenters here also seem to be abusing. Silence of the Lambs was a poor example as well. Dr. Chilton (the head of the facility where Hannibal was kept) was as 2-dimensional a corrupt bureaucrat as you can get. In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose.
- zo1 12y ago
  "The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll. [...] In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose." Likewise. I was thoroughly disappointed with the article. It started off as a hopeful "hint" at social commentary about the underlying nature of how movies/stories/epics affect us in subtle ways. And it turned out to be a glorified, overly verbose rant against the "distrust of authority". Maybe I should take a leap and suggest that perhaps this author is currently having a bit of a political crisis in his life and is trying to reconcile democracy with how he views what the article refers to as "idiots". Either he accepts that the majority are "idiots", or he constructs a narrative around how they're not really "idiots", and that it's just the "propaganda" that tricks us into thinking so. Or it could be just me, projecting.
jqm 12y ago
I don't think there is much of an argument that many institutions in the West appear broken and corrupt. Maybe institutions have always been this way... I don't know. It seems to happen like this: a person or group comes along with a new idea or a vision. It catches on. It becomes institutionalized and then come the parasitic bureaucrats taking control of the organization. If the original vision was good, it sustains the parasites for a time but eventually the organization succumbs. Rinse and repeat.

132 points by omnibrain 12y ago

It's hard to disagree, fiction is made-up stuff having only so much in common with actual reality. And sure there's good and not-so-good fiction and the movies show it. When he brought up the possibility of a great story not based on idiotic behavior I too immediately thought of Apollo 13, truly spellbinding in its entirety. Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority, though if only limited to movies, there wouldn't be much to write about. The bigger thing it points to is the way really important discourse has increasingly become infested with the very same attribute. After all, in recent years TV news has become more or less devoid of authentic news reports. Calling TV news "sensationalistic" is hard new, not only failing to qualify as factual, but even if intended as entertainment, it's lousy fiction every bit as idiotic as a B-movie. People do watch it though, and that what counts. To the extent idiot plots are the standard in national and local politics, it's far more damaging than the movies, but perhaps the point is the same roots underlie a whole gamut of idiotic forms. But where are the rest of us who are not idiots? What trouble do we go to express our non-idiotic ideas where it does some good? (I suspect posting here is more or less like preaching to the choir.) Ultimately fiction is so much less compelling than real life. I love a good story well told, but it pales next to the meaning of actual experience, provided one is tuned in to experience as it is. The article hints at something not quite said. We humans so often accept fiction and discard reality, we don't or even refuse to see what we are seeing. Maybe that's the definition of real-time "idiot plots" playing out all around us. Easy enough with movies to know fiction when we hear it, the trick is to hear our own inner voice, and make that distinction within.

anigbrowl 12y ago
A related problem in society is the assumption of ignorance; if someone expresses a passionate opinion and you demur, it seems more and more common for your interlocutor to assume you don't know some key fact in their worldview rather than solicit the basis of your disagreement. Of course you can use this to your advantage, insofar as it's easier to get people to give you information by expressing disagreement than by asking questions. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham's_Law
icebraining 12y ago
Then again, if idiocy sells, it's natural that producers will make idiotic plots a priority But on the other hand, the phenomenon doesn't seem to have nearly the same effect on a much more commercial platform that films: TV, which is filled to the brim with shows showing teams of cops, medics, etc working hard and unbelievably competently to "save the day" again and again.
- dkarapetyan 12y ago
  Ah but there it is again the same problem but reversed. Most of the public is retarded and helpless and needs constant saving.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  That used to be the case. Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues. And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you.
  - icebraining 12y ago
    Nowadays you have teams of two or three, which are at the same time up against the external threat and the institution within which they work. Lone heroes saving the day in spite of the incompetence (or corruption) of their colleagues. While they are small teams (were they ever big?), with regard to "fighting the institution", frankly, that's not the impression they leave me. They have their moments of rogue colleagues or corrupt departments, but for the most part, what I see is a small team backed up by a larger institution fighting Evil (criminals, terrorists, etc). I'm talking about the mass market, mind you, not The Wire but NCIS, CSI, Law & Order, Hawai Five-o, Criminal Minds and all that crap. And then there's this recent influx of zombie movies - the libertarian paradise, where no one tells you what to do, there is perfect free trade facilitated by the proliferation of firearms within general population, and where everything that moves in a group larger than 20 is a mindless mass trying to kill you. Which movies? I had to admit I haven't watched recent zombie flicks, but The Walking Dead has been the most successful show, and it's pretty much the opposite of that description. It's constantly reinforcing how much the breakdown of The System sucks and gets people to kill each other.

angersock 12y ago

A well-written article, but I disagree with a few of the premises. First, author mentions that a lot of directors and whoever will still call 911 when things go south. That in no way invalidates general suspicion of cops, especially by citizens not pulling in over seven figures a year. Further, the alternative is to call who, exactly--the article doesn't admit those people any other options, so it's a void point to claim that they pick the only available option and still go on to say that it's a high-quality one. That phone call could still result in action maybe thirty minutes later if at all, as many citizens in poor parts of a city may attest. So, yeah, it's completely reasonable to portray police as overworked/corrupt/incompetent in many situations. Second, the bit about Star Trek vs Star Wars is cute, but should've also included a comparison with Babylon 5: government agencies (secret and public) alike are shown all along the range of competence, and progress is only made through working together across groups. Author completely neglects to mention modern depictions of competent government agencies (X-Files, Breaking Bad, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica, The Crazies, The Siege, Heat) Author completely neglects to mention past depictions of competent and robust government agencies (A Clockwork Orange, 2001, Starship Troopers, Brazil, A Clear and Present Danger). Basically, there was a lot of cherry-picking to support the author's point.

dkarapetyan 12y ago
Brazil? You'll need to elaborate because I don't think we watched the same movie.
- arethuza 12y ago
  I'm pretty sure A Clear and Present Danger relies on individual heroics to undo the work of completely unreliable government agencies (i.e. troops being sent to interdict drug shipments at source then dropping all support for them once it becomes politically unpopular)?
- angersock 12y ago
  Well, consider--the system worked, despite some glitches. Recall the ending. Perhaps the only hero that actually helped was Tuttle, and on a scale too small to matter.

rayiner 12y ago

Love this article, especially given how common it is for people in the tech community to succumb to these ideas.

hliyan 12y ago

A story, almost by definition, is an exception. If you went through your day without incident and all institutions performed as expected, there would be nothing mention-worthy. Stories are anomalies. If a serial depicts its society as consisting of idiots, that would be open to criticism. But I'm not sure if works that revolve around a single event (or a set of related events) can be criticized the same way. I prefer to imagine that in the universe of such stories, for each such event, hundreds of days go by without incident.

williamcotton 12y ago
Stories are not exceptional by their nature. There are plenty of daily routines and ceremonies carried out throughout the day that operate on an intrinsic and perhaps unconscious level. What you see as uncommon is an event that breaks the regularly scheduled narrative but there is more to storytelling than entertaining novel experiences. Stories are not anomalies. They guide us through almost every action we take. We are creatures of narrative and constantly hear, tell, act out and create stories, calling them either fact or fiction depending on the circumstance.

UrMomReadsHN 12y ago

"Fahrenheit 451... served up chilling warnings that helped to stave off the very scenarios [it] portrayed, by girding millions of... readers to think hard about the depicted failure mode, and to devote at least some effort, throughout their lives, to helping ensure that it never comes to pass." Ray Bradbury said... "In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction." (From Wikipedia)

tedks 12y ago
Ray Bradbury is just a luddite, though. For all he knows she was listening to a news broadcast or a play. If that happened now she might have been listening to Farenheit-451 on audiobook. In general, anyone who needs to bring up how their preferred medium of information transmission smells is not going to give you useful information about what technologies to favor over others. Nostalgia is fun but not something you can reliably use to judge usefulness of technology.
- UrMomReadsHN 12y ago
  Disagree. The whole point was not what she was listening to. The point is she was ignoring the world around her. It isn't a mode of information transmission issue - it is a human interaction issue.
  - chiph 12y ago
    A lot of what was in F451 has come true. Cellphones that people are just glued to. And wall-sized televisions, such as the 90" HD models you can buy at Costco.

terranstyler 12y ago

"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem IOW, it's a fundamental problem of Western democracy and any other "representational" system that is not based on voluntary agreement and/or immediate feedback. Unfortunately, people do not have a sufficient degree of control over authorities, hence a frustration and its emergence in culture.

bildung 12y ago
"Suspicion of Authority" and "Society never works" are not something arising from culture, they are consequences of the principal agent problem in Western states. In my experience "the society never works" feeling is by no means uniformly distributed in Western societies, but mostly a phenomenon in the USA. When I started reading American political discussions on the net 10 to 15 years ago, I was really shocked how widespread this randian view on society is in the US. OTOH that could be a self selection of a certain mieleu of people...
- arethuza 12y ago
  "the society never works" It's a fairly common view in the UK - notably Thatcher's "There is no such thing as society" thing - which isn't actually as bad as it sounds if you listen to it in context (and I'm probably to the left of most people on HN and I'm not a particular fan of Thatcher). Personally, I constantly struck by how the public sector here in the UK seems to contain both the absolute best of society (military, emergency services, a lot of NHS front line staff) and some of the absolute worst (mostly self serving bureaucrats).
- pluma 12y ago
  This. This attitude feels most alien to me as a European in discussions about gun control ("the cops can't protect you"), freedom of speech, social welfare, public health care, public education and so on. As an outsider it feels as if individualism is valued over the common good to an almost impractical extent sacrificing innumerable benefits to some ideal of personal freedom. But of course this perception isn't unbiased. It just feels strange to observe a culture that seems very similar but then and again shows facets that couldn't feel less natural to me.

anigbrowl 12y ago

And yet, directors like Cameron, Nolan, Spielberg and their peers clearly don't think they are lying, or doing harm, or insulting the public or civilization or the dedicated professionals they depend upon. I doubt the thought even crosses their minds. It's like they're...idiots! Really, I don't think this criticism is well-founded. I'll give him Cameron, but most of Nolan's characters are self-consciously transgressive of society that seek some sort of re-integration with it, while Spielberg has numerous positive depictions of institutions or their representatives, from the benign scientists if Close Encounters to Sheriff Brody in Jaws (I picked two older movies but think they are good collective and individual examples). Certainly the idiot plot is widespread, and I am as sick as Brin of people who have just discovered the imperfection of the world running around yelling 'wake up sheeple!' but he rather undermines his argument with shallow jabs such as this. Did I allude to exceptions? In literature, you could look to the novels of Iain Banks, which depict our descendants having rollicking, dangerous adventures despite living in a near-utopia thanks to the hard work and genius of their ancestors. (You're welcome, kids.) Vernor Vinge, in Rainbows End, portrays near-future citizenship becoming tech-empowered art in a society that's getting better all the time... yet, drama is not killed. Er...in most of Banks' Culture novels (which made up only about half his output, but which are obviously what Brin has in mind here), the mass of people are dissolute or self-absorbed to the point of naivete, with the protagonists usually being cynics of some sort who have found themselves blackmailed by one or other of the Culture's hyper-utilitarian espionage outfits, who (of course) never do things by the Kantian book that the general public subscribes to, insofar as they ever think about ethics when they briefly lurch out of a hedonistic haze. It's been a while since I read Rainbow's End (although I have read it a couple of times) but I seem to remember major plot elements including Bad Guy Administrators whose approach to library preservation is to feed all the books into a giant combination shredder/scanner/captcha processor, who are inadvertently thwarted by competing MMORPG players who are engaged in a virtual battle on the same university campus as the bibliocidal authorities while a 1337 hax0r5 save the world in the background. I'm having real trouble seeing how these examples are supposed to support his point; to my mind they epitomize the trope of 'burdensome knowledge borne by a few.' There are some great ideas in this piece and as an occasional screenwriter I think these are quite Important Ideas, but it needs to back into the oven for a while.

12y ago

Htsthbjig 12y ago

I believe that probably the assumptions that everybody is stupid is totally right. This does not mean that every individual person is stupid. They could be very very smart, but when they join a macro organism they could behave very very stupid following emotions like nationalism, pride, being part of the group, fear and hatred, power or sex. The advertisement industry operate under the assumption that human beings operate under irrational forces that are stronger than anything else and they are right because people buy things that they advertise. It probably does not make rational sense that because people see a tennis player like Federer using a specific razor, people are going to buy this razor, but it just happens. There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so on), and kill millions of Germans in the process. It was Freud who wrote the "Mass Psychology" because it became obvious for him that intelligent individuals could become totally irrational when they take part on masses after the experience of Nazism that made this highly intelligent individual to lose his job because he was jew. Not so hard to understand, we know that very smart individuals could become totally irrational in their personal lives. For example a beautiful women or man could seduce them and they knowing rationally that they are being manipulated not being able to escape. Look at the economy today: we are following a path of printing money and increasing our debt that won't make sense for any person with half a brain. The same happens with Ukraine, Europe(their leaders) are following US in trying to make war with Russia, what makes zero economic interest for Europe. Less sense makes a military confrontation with Russia or China, but we are following this path.

elorant 12y ago
There was a politician called Hitler that used this hiphotesis: "masses are stupid", and he got to control Germany entirely(probably the better educated country in the world, with the smarter people like Einstein, Von Braun, and so on), and kill millions of Germans in the process. That's the most naive oversimplification of what happened in Hitler's Germany I've ever read.

deleted 12y ago

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rpenm 12y ago

To what extent is this driven by the rise of youth culture and and the rising market value of adolescent consumers?

DanielBMarkham 12y ago

"...Hence the Iron Rule: Society never works. Along with its corollary: Everyone is stupid..." Yes, if you are 12, and you need some simplistic way of looking at things. Since most entertainment is actually written for teenagers, if you had to paint with a super-broad brush this would be accurate. More accurate, however is "Institutions are always sub-optimized, people who are much smarter than you live and thrive in these institutions and do sub-optimal things for good reason, and it's the distributed, self-optimizing facile, and overly self-confident nature of the critical individual, which the author seems to deplore, that gives us increases in efficiencies and the re-factoring necessary to continue evolving." 100 guys think the system sucks, that they are smart and society is full of idiots. 99 are wrong. The other guy is still no smarter than the rest of us, but he just came up with the next thing we need to continue moving forward as a species. Western society has made a call on this: smart people in large groups do dumb things. It's our job to continue to be suspicious and point them out. In fact, the system depends on it.

dschiptsov 12y ago

It is not a cliche, it is another notion of the famous general 20/80 rule. Like, in any field of knowledge (or just any human activity, including sports) 20% of participants are worthy, while 80% are, well, idiots. And in some special cases, like Java...)

TeMPOraL 12y ago

A few thoughts: "This kind of thought experiment — that Einstein called gedankenexperiment — is the fruit of our prefrontal lobes, humanity's most unique and recent organ, the font of our greatest gifts: curiosity, empathy, anticipation and resilience. Indeed, forward-peering storytelling is one of the major ways that we turn fear into something profoundly practical. Avoidance of failure. The early detection and revelation of Big Mistakes, before we even get a chance to make them. (...) an endeavor best performed by science fiction." This. I read a fair amount of books and there is this one distinct feature I found in science fiction - they are humanity's concept simulator. It's all about setting up series of gedankenexperiments, and then simulating their outcomes and interactions between the outcomes. Whether an author is writing about effects of a new technology on society or testing new ways to structure civilisation or elaborating on how physical limits are affecting day-to-day life of a space-faring race, the art becomes a way to explore new ideas free of constraints like political correctness, corporate interest, or social taboos[0]. I wish people stop treating sci-fi genre as "stupid fiction tales that are obviously inferior to thinks like Pride and Prejudice, etc." These people are often the same that walk around saying "go read books, you'll be smarter", and yet they dismiss the primary field of non-fiction that is pretty much designed to make you smarter. Or maybe I'm unaware of romance novels dealing with game theory and metaethics. ---------------- It has been said that [1] Star Trek: The Next Generation was the last sci-fi hopeful about the future. I tend to agree with that, and I'd like to expand that statement into: somewhere in the early 2000s we have collectively lost faith in humanity. I just finished re-watching Early Edition (a lightweight story about a guy who gets tomorrow's newspaper today, complete with a cat) and I must say I'm angry. People in the 80-s/90-s used to have faith in the better future and in other people. That you don't have to shoot people to solve problems, but you can ask them instead. People used to help others. How strange does that sound today? This total reliance on individual performance, violence as a means to achieve everything and assumption that everyone else is either stupid or malicious (or both) is fucking annoying. We're raising a new generation of people on such message, and I'm afraid this literally screws up our (and their) future. I so do want some positive, hopeful message in TV shows back. ---------------- And since the author mentioned how Star Trek world is different from your garden variety space opera - one thing I absolutely loved about Star Trek series is that the crew of Enterprise/DS9/Voyager were not the heroes. They were the protagonists, but you could see that they all acted on behalf of the United Federation of Planets - a huge, competent, powerful sociopolitical structure that they were proud to be part of and that would always have their backs. It's the Federation that was the hero in Star Trek. The whole show made you believe that good people could come together and create something more powerful than the sum of its parts, and that it would work out ok. I think that as a culture we've given up that belief. We're society of no hope, no trust and no shared vision. And I'm afraid this is going to hurt us massively in the next decades. ---------------- Oh, and since I'm venting, I need to share my pet peeve of 2000+ film making - the Batshit Insane Hollywood Morality. That it is a right thing to do for hero to kill a couple thousand strangers to save one person, just because this person is family. That it is ok for a hero to go and murder a few dozen poor schmucks just to get revenge on a guy that hurt you. Or - and I'm not making this up, it's an actual plot of a known 2009 movie - we're supposed to applaud the protagonist who shut down the global economy, likely killing a few billion people withing minutes of movie credits rolling down, just because he wanted to have sex with his wife. I mean, Hollywood, what the fuck? ---------------- Footnotes: [0] - It even makes for a nice trick - you take a current taboo, frame it as "aliens in space" and suddenly no one complains the way they would if you try to endorse the same ideas in an essay. Early Star Trek is famous for running that trick to criticize racial and gender prejudices which were more common in the US back then. [1] - http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-generation-future http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/star-trek-the-next-gene... + https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797363

AnimalMuppet 12y ago

I think that there's a big force driving this: personality. Society is impersonal. Institutions are impersonal. The purely scientific view of human beings is impersonal (we're just matter obeying the laws of physics, and we can't be anything more, because there's nothing more that exists). As far back as Rousseau, there has been a current of thought that rejected science and glorified the individual. Far too often, technology is impersonal. ("For a list of the ways that technology has failed to improve the quality of life, press one.") As technology replaces persons with machines, we interact with machines in situations where we used to interact with humans. (Getting a tweet from your friend is nice, and there really is another human on the other end of that tweet, but it isn't the same as a face-to-face conversation.) But people still crave the personal touch, even if the structure of society provides less of it. I think this is what'd driving the trend that Brin observes.

tempodox 12y ago

I find this a worthy read. I think it's inspiring and thought provoking about more than just movies and novels. It sheds a light on how many of our narratives are built.

crusso 12y ago

Institutions are boring. Audiences typically want to identify with characters, so it's only natural that strong character-based stories will favor individuals over faceless institutions.

tedks 12y ago

I used to think David Brin made good points when I first read him. Now I just think he cherry-picks to support his own political views, which I find fairly distasteful. He makes a large amount of totally far-off claims and doesn't cite them at all. There are only a handful of links in this entire thing and that speaks to how supported it is. If you rely on priming and the availability heuristic to make your point about cultural trends you've already lost. I get that David Brin wants to live in a world full of competent people; I get that he wants to be able to trust every human with literally everything; but we aren't there yet and no amount of complaining about culture will make that happen.

AnimalMuppet 12y ago
"People are angels" may be as false as "people are idiots". The idea that we can build a perfect society out of humans is a profoundly false reading of human nature.

michaelochurch 12y ago

The original, ancient, meaning of the word "idiot" was "private person", i.e. a selfish, narrow-minded, ignoramus unconcerned with (and unsuited for) public life. Not "stupid person". We tend to conflate this first type of "idiot" (selfish person, unsuited to hold power) with "constitutionally stupid" and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. The people in power are idiots in the first sense of the word (unsuited to hold power, narrow-minded, provincial, etc.) but they are not unintelligent. In fact, they're quite cunning and adept when it comes to holding power (those who aren't, don't last) and taking it from them is much harder than we expect it to be. They turn out to be just as smart as we are, but their intelligence is applied to getting and keeping power rather than whatever we claim to value (e.g. making the world better). This makes them formidable opponents, and we underestimate them at our peril. To crib from Paul Graham's "Why Nerds Are Unpopular", they spent all their energies on becoming popular while we spent ours on being smart and getting right answers. (Where Graham is wrong: "the adult world" is far more like high school than he admits. You have to be rich to get out of high-school-esque drama and into the utopia he mistakes for the whole adult world.) All that said, we're right (in technology, and in the arts) when we point out that society is corrupt and run by people who are generally out of their depth and unconcerned with general social advancement, aesthetics, or doing the right thing. It's not that they lack the genetic ability or "IQ"-- they're plenty bright enough, hardware-wise-- but that they're lazy and self-interested. We're wrong when we (as technologists) assert some tribal superiority, like we wouldn't make the same mistakes, just because we have higher IQs. History doesn't support this claim; it refutes it. Venture capital is a feudalistic, relationship-based business. Most of the companies we've built in the past 20 years have god-awful cultures. Silicon Valley (the physical place) is an overpriced lack-of-taste writ large. We mock "the paper belt" while failing to realize that we've created a worse one. We've mindlessly chased "efficiency" while failing to answer the most important question: what should we do with the value thus created? Hence, instead of curing cancer or coming up with an environmentally sound energy alternative, we're stuck helping businessmen unemploy people.

PaulHoule 12y ago

An odd thing is that the institutions are incompetent meme serves the interests of institutions. Once people believe it they expect less from institutions and don't believe they can change them. Martin Buber wrote that the Israel/Palestine conflict supports the polticial class; so long as there is a siege mentality, the Israeli government is not held to account and hamas can buy legitimacy by firing missiles. Similarly in the united States, the Democrats and Republicans buy legitimacy by opposing the other party on a handful of issues (guns, abortion, etc.) They never need to pass legislation because they blame the other guys.

spopejoy 12y ago
Agree strongly with this. It's a long-standing anti-socialist tactic to underfund and undermine solid, working government programs, and then denigrate those same programs as more proof that "big government doesn't work". US Postal system is a great example, everyone finds plenty to criticize, and yet standard mail delivery is more reliable than email (and getting more expensive by the second as neo-liberal ideology dictates USPS should be "profitable". I've heard the same nonsense is at play with Deutsches Bahn, leading to the demise of the S-Bahn in Berlin). But also there's the cultural side, which is the emphasis in advertising from the 1950s onward to portray an individual self-disambiguating from monolithic society tastes and norms, by buying a Beetle, or smoking a Marlboro, or chewing a different gum. This plus tie-ins to James Dean-style Hollywood efforts, and it's a very unified message that is nonetheless somewhat invisible. The article is correct to note the attitude that "it's not propaganda if you agree with it", it's been a huge win for advertising to promote and co-opt this attitude with subtle directions toward consumerism, and its close affinity with deeply conservative anti-socialist tactics is worth further investigation.

squozzer 12y ago

Brin makes his points but neglects counter-evidence, both fictional and non-fictional, so I will supply a few examples: 1) Support The Troops / First Responders 2) Religion 3) Law & Order TV series 4) Nearly everything on The History Channel Nearly all of the above glorify institutions, or more accurately, indivividual working within institutions.

protonfish 12y ago

The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll. I love movies and books where authority is the villain because it mirrors my own (and most other people's) struggles in real life. Children strive for freedom from overprotective parents and overworked and misunderstanding teachers that don't have time to listen to them as individuals. Adults have to deal with bosses, cops, politicians, preachers and other banana dictators who hold the keys to their freedom and prosperity. Anyone who has read Parkinson, The Peter Principle or Dilbert knows organizations have issues. This is not fiction, but unfortunate reality and one that your audience can easily identify with. It doesn't help that he uses more talented and successful film makers as bad examples. Star Wars had the rebel alliance - a well organized, powerful, and benevolent organization. Even the Empire was competent (until Tarkin and the other senior leadership were destroyed in the first Death Star.) And what does teenagers splitting up in horror movies have to do with the struggle against incompetent and uncaring authority? That example doesn't work but it does make this sloppily-written rant gratuitously longer - an excellent technique to keep readers that disagree with you from being able to finish it. A technique that many commenters here also seem to be abusing. Silence of the Lambs was a poor example as well. Dr. Chilton (the head of the facility where Hannibal was kept) was as 2-dimensional a corrupt bureaucrat as you can get. In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose.

zo1 12y ago
"The premise of "distrust of authority is propaganda" is so self-contradictory that I wonder if this article is a deliberate troll. [...] In conclusion: the thesis made no logical sense, the examples were poor, and the writing was needlessly verbose." Likewise. I was thoroughly disappointed with the article. It started off as a hopeful "hint" at social commentary about the underlying nature of how movies/stories/epics affect us in subtle ways. And it turned out to be a glorified, overly verbose rant against the "distrust of authority". Maybe I should take a leap and suggest that perhaps this author is currently having a bit of a political crisis in his life and is trying to reconcile democracy with how he views what the article refers to as "idiots". Either he accepts that the majority are "idiots", or he constructs a narrative around how they're not really "idiots", and that it's just the "propaganda" that tricks us into thinking so. Or it could be just me, projecting.

jqm 12y ago

I don't think there is much of an argument that many institutions in the West appear broken and corrupt. Maybe institutions have always been this way... I don't know. It seems to happen like this: a person or group comes along with a new idea or a vision. It catches on. It becomes institutionalized and then come the parasitic bureaucrats taking control of the organization. If the original vision was good, it sustains the parasites for a time but eventually the organization succumbs. Rinse and repeat.