Fiction as a Worldview
This post was inspired by this video⤻ and its companion article⤻ by Hilary Lane. Check out the rest of her YouTube videos as well when you get a chance.
It was also inspired by this tweet⤻, reproduced here in text because it's easy enough, and links love to break:
Liberals don’t know things. They don’t read history, they don’t obsess over stats, the few data points they do see they forget. Their entire world is driven by the consumption of fiction.
memetic_sisyphys, May 8, 2023
Honestly, I have such a tough time writing these kinds of posts because... I don't have the time/energy to do such a topic justice. Hilary put hours of research into this. Compiled sources. Wrote a script. Recorded it. Edited it. But the best I can do is dump my thoughts, nearly unaltered, into a text document and then publish it.
My insight on this matter is 1) watch the video... and 2) I just want to make an additional example that only got a passing mention in the video but is really easy to point to. Gun laws. How much does your average voter really know about firearms, how they work, and how they are used? Probably not very much. But plenty of voters, in both directions, have very strong opinions on the matter. So the question becomes, if they don't actually know the facts, where did their opinions come from? For some, obviously it was just fed to them from the people around them. But for others, the basis of their understanding of firearms is likely from movies. Watching Rambo wield a heavy machine gun that never runs out of bullets and can shoot through cars and walls. Watching John Wick use a silenced pistol to shoot someone without the person in the next room hearing the shot. And so, is it any wonder that some people think that these kinds of things should never be in the hands of civilians?
But here's the thing... it doesn't actually work that way. No one has infinite ammunition, or heat seeking bullets, or silencers that actually reduce the sound that much. It's fake. But that doesn't stop it from being influential. People don't actually know about firearms, so when a politician such as Kevin de Leon says⤻ 'This is a ghost gun. This right here has the ability with a .30-caliber clip to disperse with 30 bullets within half a second. Thirty magazine clip in half a second.', someone who's only ever seen firearms in a movie says 'wow that sounds just like the scary thing I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger use' and then votes to ban it. But if you know anything, and I mean literally anything, about firearms, that quote was probably the funniest thing you've read all week. I'm not going to debunk it all here, but suffice it to say almost every word is a fabrication. And here's the real kicker. These movies weren't 'anti-gun propaganda'. They just used firearms as a story telling tool. But viewers absorb the way guns are portrayed as how they actually are in real life.
So to wrap it all up, and leave a bit of a cliff hanger for a potential future post: Consider how you know the things you 'know'. And if your source is fiction, then perhaps that's worse than no source at all.
Yours Truly,
[Redacted]