Silver Adept (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
silveradept) wrote2022-12-15 11:56 pm
silveradept) wrote2022-12-15 11:56 pm
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December Days 2022 #15: Fantastic
[What's December Days this year? Taking a crowdsourced list of adjectives and seeing if I can turn them into saying good things about myself. Or at least good things to talk about.]
If you hear Christopher Eccleston's Doctor here, you're not alone.
There is something to say about the implausibility of humanity as a whole, and especially of any one given human at any time. You can trace the genetics and the lineage and map out genomes and otherwise fix what the probabilities were that any one given human will come into existence exactly as the person they are, and how they will be shaped by their environment to complement or oppose what genetics may have given them. After all of that is done, you have improbability after improbability all adding up to the full life of a person, sometimes sufficiently unique that there will likely never be another exactly the same (even if we develop Parental Replicates or make it possible to make digital copies of ourselves and inhabit robotic bodies with our digital brains.)
Beyond that, a lot of what I think about, write about, and opine about are fantastical things. They do not exist in the natural world in any quantity. Things like justice, mercy, fairness, morality. They are social constructs that exist because humans have decided they exist, and we dream them into reality, imposing our fantasies upon the world around us. Of course, we have a fair number of items in the world who think anyone who wants to play by those kinds of rules is a scrub, playing with self-imposed challenges and demanding that they limit themselves in the same way, rather than using whatever the system allows to gain advantage and win. (Some of those folks also have no qualms about using cheat codes and then insisting they got to where they are through pure skill, or they buy a fully-geared max level character with RMT and insist they got there through pure skill and good play.) To illustrate the point nicely, a few days ago, someone came into my workplace looking for the book called The 48 Laws of Power. Was didn't have a copy available, but from what I read of the synopsis and a critique of it from someone who I suspect is a competitor to the 48 Laws author, the 48 Laws themselves are presented as advice, but every one of them gives advice toward behaving amorally in the pursuit of power. The competitor critique didn't denounce the premise, but instead took offense to the efficacy of the laws and their attendant advice. Both of them are not people who I would necessarily want to hang out with, if I could recognize them, and I feel their adherents would see me less as a person with my own merits and more as a tool to help them gain power or a rival that needed to be completely destroyed to cement their own ascent or increase in power. Everyone gets to decide what fantasies they want to follow, but I would hope that those who pursue power in this way are forever kept away from achieving any.
If there were natural phenomena of justice, many of those people who have achieved power and money through corrupt or helpful ways would have already experienced the effects of justice and had their fortunes redistributed to those who needed the money or the assets more, or were harmed by the company's products, or who work for the company under an asshole, regardless of whether anything he did was illegal. If there were justice in the world, many of us, however you choose to parse that, would have had our fortunes and assets redistributed to those who needed it more, or were harmed by our actions, or worked for or with us while we were being assholes.
Just because a thing is fantastical does not mean it is undesirable. Catering to the fantastical desire is, after all, the underlying purpose of many a stag film, fashion magazine, advertising bit, fanwork, or kink practice between consenting adults. All of them have at least a subset whose intent is to get the viewer, reader, participant to believe the fantastic is obtainable, even if only by proxy (or three easy payments of 29.99 plus shipping and handling.) Tapping the fantastic and making it desirous unleashes the potential of a human, but the same things that make the combination powerful make it ungovernable. If you dangle the fulfillment of a fantasy in front of someone and don't deliver, or yank it away from them, expect to have not only made an enemy for life, but for that person to turn their entire social circle against you for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, this still holds true for someone who has unintentionally done this, and for people who were never in the business of being a fantasy, but someone else unilaterally decided they were an achievable fantasy and is now turning their energy to destructive ends based on that misinterpretation.
I'm the years of my existence so far, many of the fantasies of the people with power, whether the power of money, the power of whiteness, or the power of maleness, are encountering greater resistance to their fulfillment, if not a full stop or the destruction (or deconstruction) of the fantasy itself. Fantasies that had been fulfilled so thoroughly and often that they became assumptions about how society worked were refused, and those who had been assumed to be steadfast and staunch allies turned out to believe and act on refusing the fantasy for themselves and getting to stop others from achieving it. Or people who had been victimized by others acting out nonconsensual fantasy were able to gain some measure of power to themselves and use it to hold others accountable, and spread their message farther and faster, and with the receipts, than before. It feels like there's been more and more of the hostility of the destroyed fantasy pouring out and looking for whatever is available to absorb it. Unfortunately, the people who seem most capable of absorbing that energy are hucksters and grifters who will say whatever they want, promise whatever fantasy they have to, if it will mean they get the energy and the resources that people put in toward fulfilling fantasies they believe are achievable (or believe they are entitled to.) The prevalence of the grifters, though, hides the people who really and truly do have regressive fantasies they want to force on everyone else. The true believers have no qualms about using the grifters to gain power for themselves or to use the grifters as tools to get their agenda passed, appearing to their egos and fantasies and then laughing at them when the grifters come to receive their payment for doing the work. (It is heartening to see that, even against structural disadvantages, the people who would be hurt by the plans of the true believers can sometimes still trounce them, rebuff them, and prevent them from enacting their fantasies on others.)
The idea that I am fantastic is meant in the last of the definitions, for whatever reasons they may be that someone finds me or the things I write excellent. Perhaps we share dreams, possibly even in many of the specifics. Perhaps I continue to stay well above the actual floor while believing that I am barely above where the floor ought to be. Maybe I am fantasy material to someone(s), exactly as the person I am, or when I'm achieving what I'm striving for. I don't know, since fantasies are often intensely private things to people and we do not reveal them to others, for fear that those others will find them shameful. Even if it is none of these things, I think a lot of what I do is still fantastic, because a lot of what I do is try to bring something into existence that wasn't there before, based on little more than my belief that bringing that thing into existence will be good for myself or others. Without that as an animating idea, I think my life would be much less than what it is now.
- fantastic (comparative more fantastic, superlative most fantastic)
- Existing in or constructed from fantasy; of or relating to fantasy; fanciful.
- Not believable; implausible; seemingly only possible in fantasy.
- Resembling fantasies in irregularity, caprice, or eccentricity; irregular; grotesque.
- Wonderful; marvelous; excellent; extraordinarily good or great (used especially as an intensifier).
If you hear Christopher Eccleston's Doctor here, you're not alone.
There is something to say about the implausibility of humanity as a whole, and especially of any one given human at any time. You can trace the genetics and the lineage and map out genomes and otherwise fix what the probabilities were that any one given human will come into existence exactly as the person they are, and how they will be shaped by their environment to complement or oppose what genetics may have given them. After all of that is done, you have improbability after improbability all adding up to the full life of a person, sometimes sufficiently unique that there will likely never be another exactly the same (even if we develop Parental Replicates or make it possible to make digital copies of ourselves and inhabit robotic bodies with our digital brains.)
Beyond that, a lot of what I think about, write about, and opine about are fantastical things. They do not exist in the natural world in any quantity. Things like justice, mercy, fairness, morality. They are social constructs that exist because humans have decided they exist, and we dream them into reality, imposing our fantasies upon the world around us. Of course, we have a fair number of items in the world who think anyone who wants to play by those kinds of rules is a scrub, playing with self-imposed challenges and demanding that they limit themselves in the same way, rather than using whatever the system allows to gain advantage and win. (Some of those folks also have no qualms about using cheat codes and then insisting they got to where they are through pure skill, or they buy a fully-geared max level character with RMT and insist they got there through pure skill and good play.) To illustrate the point nicely, a few days ago, someone came into my workplace looking for the book called The 48 Laws of Power. Was didn't have a copy available, but from what I read of the synopsis and a critique of it from someone who I suspect is a competitor to the 48 Laws author, the 48 Laws themselves are presented as advice, but every one of them gives advice toward behaving amorally in the pursuit of power. The competitor critique didn't denounce the premise, but instead took offense to the efficacy of the laws and their attendant advice. Both of them are not people who I would necessarily want to hang out with, if I could recognize them, and I feel their adherents would see me less as a person with my own merits and more as a tool to help them gain power or a rival that needed to be completely destroyed to cement their own ascent or increase in power. Everyone gets to decide what fantasies they want to follow, but I would hope that those who pursue power in this way are forever kept away from achieving any.
If there were natural phenomena of justice, many of those people who have achieved power and money through corrupt or helpful ways would have already experienced the effects of justice and had their fortunes redistributed to those who needed the money or the assets more, or were harmed by the company's products, or who work for the company under an asshole, regardless of whether anything he did was illegal. If there were justice in the world, many of us, however you choose to parse that, would have had our fortunes and assets redistributed to those who needed it more, or were harmed by our actions, or worked for or with us while we were being assholes.
Just because a thing is fantastical does not mean it is undesirable. Catering to the fantastical desire is, after all, the underlying purpose of many a stag film, fashion magazine, advertising bit, fanwork, or kink practice between consenting adults. All of them have at least a subset whose intent is to get the viewer, reader, participant to believe the fantastic is obtainable, even if only by proxy (or three easy payments of 29.99 plus shipping and handling.) Tapping the fantastic and making it desirous unleashes the potential of a human, but the same things that make the combination powerful make it ungovernable. If you dangle the fulfillment of a fantasy in front of someone and don't deliver, or yank it away from them, expect to have not only made an enemy for life, but for that person to turn their entire social circle against you for the rest of their lives. Unfortunately, this still holds true for someone who has unintentionally done this, and for people who were never in the business of being a fantasy, but someone else unilaterally decided they were an achievable fantasy and is now turning their energy to destructive ends based on that misinterpretation.
I'm the years of my existence so far, many of the fantasies of the people with power, whether the power of money, the power of whiteness, or the power of maleness, are encountering greater resistance to their fulfillment, if not a full stop or the destruction (or deconstruction) of the fantasy itself. Fantasies that had been fulfilled so thoroughly and often that they became assumptions about how society worked were refused, and those who had been assumed to be steadfast and staunch allies turned out to believe and act on refusing the fantasy for themselves and getting to stop others from achieving it. Or people who had been victimized by others acting out nonconsensual fantasy were able to gain some measure of power to themselves and use it to hold others accountable, and spread their message farther and faster, and with the receipts, than before. It feels like there's been more and more of the hostility of the destroyed fantasy pouring out and looking for whatever is available to absorb it. Unfortunately, the people who seem most capable of absorbing that energy are hucksters and grifters who will say whatever they want, promise whatever fantasy they have to, if it will mean they get the energy and the resources that people put in toward fulfilling fantasies they believe are achievable (or believe they are entitled to.) The prevalence of the grifters, though, hides the people who really and truly do have regressive fantasies they want to force on everyone else. The true believers have no qualms about using the grifters to gain power for themselves or to use the grifters as tools to get their agenda passed, appearing to their egos and fantasies and then laughing at them when the grifters come to receive their payment for doing the work. (It is heartening to see that, even against structural disadvantages, the people who would be hurt by the plans of the true believers can sometimes still trounce them, rebuff them, and prevent them from enacting their fantasies on others.)
The idea that I am fantastic is meant in the last of the definitions, for whatever reasons they may be that someone finds me or the things I write excellent. Perhaps we share dreams, possibly even in many of the specifics. Perhaps I continue to stay well above the actual floor while believing that I am barely above where the floor ought to be. Maybe I am fantasy material to someone(s), exactly as the person I am, or when I'm achieving what I'm striving for. I don't know, since fantasies are often intensely private things to people and we do not reveal them to others, for fear that those others will find them shameful. Even if it is none of these things, I think a lot of what I do is still fantastic, because a lot of what I do is try to bring something into existence that wasn't there before, based on little more than my belief that bringing that thing into existence will be good for myself or others. Without that as an animating idea, I think my life would be much less than what it is now.