Tag Archives: ideology

Circles of Belief, Quick Thoughts

Posted on by Henry

I first heard the phrase “circle of belief” as a young teen, and have found it to be a useful mental model ever since. I thought I’d written about it here before, and was wrong. While looking for other sourcing for this post I found a lot of Slayer lyrics and not much else, so… here goes.

Someone’s circle of belief governs what they see as plausible, something they can follow along with, versus what they see as implausible or alien. There’s a lot of overlap with genre expectations or something similar, but they’re not quite the same. The key is that everyone has a circle of belief for any given context. When I’m trying to shape someone’s circle of belief I’m not trying to alter their genre expectations writ large—just their specific assumptions for a given story or game.

Note: this is more or less how propaganda and political messaging works. Here, though, I’m going to focus on fun fiction and story games.

Expected and accepted elements exist inside the circle of belief—they do not require any additional suspension of disbelief from the audience. Working inside a circle of belief is relatively low effort. Inside the circle of belief, you don’t have to convince the audience to agree with you. You don’t risk alienating your audience by including an element that doesn’t fit. Breaking an established circle of belief, however, may push someone out of the story.

When reading a fantasy story, elements like dwarves and elves probably fit inside most people’s circle of belief, while giant killer robots probably don’t. Similarly, a sober spy novel has lots of room within most readers’ circles of belief for skullduggery and betrayal. But if that spy story suddenly featured a goblin going on air and declaring herself a prophet, that might break the audience’s circle of belief and create cognitive dissonance. That cognitive dissonance can lead to confusion and disenchantment. Breaking the circle of belief can break audience members’ emotional investment in a story or their suspension of disbelief,  and a story which had been fun could become too bizarre to enjoy.

This isn’t to say that those examples above would be inherently bad stories. Each of those examples could exist and be done well. The audience’s circle of belief could be shaped to include them. But shaping that circle of belief requires specific work, and it takes more work the further the new circle of belief is from the audience’s existing circles of belief.

That work could involve carefully laying out clues and hints before some surprise reveal, a genre twist. Alternately, that work could require laying out the future story elements as early and blatantly as possible to prepare the audience for later. Tropes and foreshadowing, for example, offer more options for manipulating circles of belief—as does marketing copy. If I describe a story as “Harry Potter but ___,” the audience will probably assume they know large chunks of what to expect.

Each person’s expectations will be a little different, of course. Everyone has their own circles of belief.

In many ways, this laying-out-the-elements is what worldbuilding is about. Every little detail can build context for the larger story, and thereby shape the audience’s expectations. But it’s easiest to do this work at the very start of a story. That’s because, in general, the longer a given circle of belief remains static the more work you must do to change it.

In RPGs, and any time that you’re in a shared narrative space, it’s important to know what is inside and what is outside of your fellow players’ circles of belief. That could be for the structure of the game itself: I might assume that my character could die, or that the storyteller is my adversary, while someone else might assume that we’re playing a collaborative narrative game. It could also be for the fiction within the game: I presume that we’re playing a hard fantasy game, while the storyteller thinks this is a magical post-apocalypse full of the ruins of ancient civilizations. These assumptions aren’t all incompatible with each other, but you can probably see how they might cause trouble if unaddressed.

 The simplest way to handle this is to talk about the story elements everyone wants to play with (or avoid) before you play. You can also check back in about these things, and see whether there are any pieces people want to add or remove after any given session. I recommend checking in every once in a while. You’re less likely to be unhappily surprised that way, and more likely to make stories that everyone finds fun.

Advertisement

Hard Work Brings Rewards, National Narratives cont.

Posted on by Henry

When I brought up the Protestant work ethic in my previous post about National Narratives, I glossed over important details and context. The Protestant work ethic is more than “hard work brings rewards,” and it important to know where it came from and what else it’s informed. Its past continues to shape our naturalized beliefs today.

Before I dive in further, I have to define what I mean by “naturalized” (see ‘naturalization’).

First off, in this case ‘naturalize’ is a verb used in semiotics, and has little to do with immigration.

Naturalize (a sign): to make a sign or a set interpretation of signs (a code) appear natural or inherent truth; a naturalized arbitrary cultural arrangement will seem common-sense, normal, or self-evident.

These naturalized arbitrary cultural arrangements can range from deeply held ideological beliefs to surface level impressions. The degree to which codes are naturalized can vary as well, as can the degree to which a code is naturalized across a population. These codes can vary in their complexity and in their interpretation or justification. The important part, for our purposes, is that these codes are held as self-evident, normal, or common sense. Inherent, and natural.

Here are six concrete examples of arbitrary cultural arrangements in the US: “Irish people are drunks,” “WASPs are uptight,” “black people are lazy,” “people have a right to own firearms,” “there should be freedom of speech,” “all people are created equal.”

So let’s look at “hard work brings rewards” as it relates to the Protestant work ethic.

When you trace its roots, the Protestant work ethic is founded on specific beliefs about the possibility of reaching Heaven, and the difficulty of knowing who could or would reach Heaven. It relies on the belief that having true (Christian) faith is the only way to go to Heaven, and the assumption that good people want to go to Heaven. Furthermore, it is founded in the concept of good works, and the idea that true faith in God can only exist if faith is present in conjunction with those good works (provided there’s an opportunity for good works—there’s some disagreement among Christian sects about the necessity of good works for salvation, and about what defines “good works”).

In summary, this belief combines “true faith brings the reward of Heaven,” and “true faith requires good works,” into “good works bring the reward of Heaven.”

Not only that, but because possessing true faith in order to go to Heaven is presumably the ultimate goal of any good Christian (remember: “good people want to go to Heaven,” and “Christianity is the only way to Heaven”), therefore good Christians must perform good works.

Notice all the value statements here, all those ‘goods.’ We’ll come back to them later.

Let’s examine this belief from the inside—the naturalized belief that “good works bring the reward of Heaven.” What if we follow its internal logic when thinking about people in society?

True faith isn’t reliably visible. But a person’s actions are. If someone performs good works, we may reason that they may have true faith and may thus go to Heaven. Good works bring the reward of Heaven (we’ll assume that this person has faith).

Conversely, by this reasoning someone who does no good works lacks true faith. If they lack true faith, they are damned. While the arguments about this are long and varied, the usual answer is that their damnation is probably their own fault.

Thus, if “good works bring the reward of Heaven” is a naturalized belief—if we think it’s inherently true—then it should also be true that someone’s lack of good works means they won’t go to Heaven. It allows us to make a moral judgement about them: they’re not good enough. They might even be a bad person.

That’s a value statement which can be inferred from this naturalized belief.

But what if society reapplies this code, “good works bring the reward of Heaven,” in a secular context? It could be simplified to “work brings rewards.” Or perhaps “hard work brings rewards.”

But it still carries many of the same implications when thinking about members of society.

Again, let’s follow this belief’s internal logic.

If “hard work brings rewards” is inherently true, and someone works, we’d expect that they would be rewarded. If they’re not rewarded, they must not have worked hard enough—and their lack of rewards can’t be bad luck or adversity, because we know that “hard work brings rewards” is true. As with true faith, good works, and going to Heaven, if someone works hard enough they’ll be rewarded enough to overcome any amount of trouble. Like damnation from the exploration above, someone’s lack of prosperity is their own fault.

Moreover, if “hard work brings rewards” is true and someone isn’t rewarded, they must not be a hard worker. It isn’t difficult to make the leap from someone not being a hard worker to not being a good person. That’s especially true when your beliefs about the rewards of hard work are founded on moral beliefs about good works and going to Heaven. According to this belief, people who aren’t hard enough workers may be bad people. That’s another value statement—more on that in a moment.

There’s an important difference between the religious and the secular forms of these beliefs. It isn’t possible to see someone go to Heaven. But we can see people rewarded, or not rewarded.

According to the strictest form of these beliefs, when someone’s good works are lacking we can guess that they’re not a good person. But when someone lacks rewards, we know that they’re not working hard enough. We know that they’re not good enough to enjoy prosperity.

This is long, but hold on: because of the strong associations between rewards and goodness—and between lack-of-rewards and not-goodness—if someone is rewarded, wealthy, or prosperous it’s easy to believe that they’re a good person. And if they’re not rewarded, wealthy, or prosperous it’s easy to believe that they’re a bad person.

And all that reasoning is based on arbitrary cultural arrangements, codified interpretations of a series of signs that we think have specific meaning that is somehow inherently true… even when there’s nothing inherently true about any of it.

It’s easy see the legacies of these lines of thought. They’re deeply ingrained in American society, especially in the secular form. The belief that “hard work brings rewards” is often referred to as Achievement Ideology, and both are integrally linked to the American Dream.

The belief that people who haven’t been rewarded with prosperity may be moral failures or are otherwise to blame has been part of British and American legislation around poverty and welfare for centuries. The moral failing involved varies, depending on who makes the judgement, but it is often laziness, or sin, or some other behavior disliked by the person who believes “hard work brings rewards.” Drunkenness and addiction are often held up as examples, despite research suggesting that these are correlated with environmental stress, and may be reduced through reducing environmental stress.

Yet those moral failings are often taken as signs that people do not deserve aid or succor.

Carnegie’s The Gospel of Wealth, a basis for modern day philanthropy, very explicitly warns against giving charity to the “unworthy” (p.16, 18) and valorizes the “industrious workman [who says] to his incompetent and lazy fellow, ‘if thou dost not sow, thou shalt not reap,’” (p.6). Modern American welfare, with its work requirements and restrictions, is similarly caught up in the idea that giving to people who don’t deserve it is perilous. And Britain’s New Poor Laws in the Victorian Era intentionally made the support they offered no better than living in abject poverty, out of concern that people would rather claim support than work. These are the same laws which gave rise to Charles Dickens’ famous novels about impoverished people in Victorian England.

Yet it’s entirely possible to work hard and receive no reward. American slavery is an obvious counterargument to the naturalization of the idea that “hard work brings reward.” Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed delves into the experience of the low wage labor market in the 1990’s after the US’ 1996 welfare reform act, and how little reward hard labor brought.

The few existing experiments involving unconditional financial giving and support to members of communities (often called Universal Basic Income) suggest that the fear of laziness the New Poor Laws were based on, and which Carnegie articulated, was largely baseless. The Canadian experiments of the 1970s showed little decline in employment after the introduction of Basic Income, and Namibia’s experiments from 2008 to 2009 were successful on multiple fronts, including “facilitat[ing] an increase in employment and income” (BIG Assessment Report, p.68).

“Hard work brings rewards” is a naturalized code. It’s an arbitrary cultural arrangement, a belief that is not inherently true. Plenty of people work hard and get nowhere, while others work little and yet prosper.

I don’t write this to demean hard work, or to claim that people should not work hard. I am too much a product of our society to not value hard work, especially for a good cause.

But what might our world look like if we recognized that those who’ve prospered aren’t necessarily good, and those who’ve suffered aren’t bad? How much better might we treat each other? How much more willing might we be to make ways for us to support each other?

Last time, it took the Great Depression for us to have this epiphany—and we may be on track for another Great Depression. Last time, because of Southern Democrats (and others) clinging to racism, we only helped some of our fellows.

What if we did better this time?

National Narratives

Posted on by Henry

The US has got a doozy of a narrative shift in store for it. I think we’re either going to change our national narratives, or we’re going to find all the ways that our previous narratives don’t match our new reality well. Or both. We could definitely do both.

And that process is going to involve a lot of pain.

These aren’t unique or special thoughts. Most folks I’ve talked with recently have had similar ones. I know I’ve read things like them in other places. I think both John Scalzi and Chuck Wendig have been writing about things related to this, as has Graydon Saunders.

But I’m thinking about all of it from a particularly narrative-based focus.

The New Yorker article Reality has endorsed Bernie Sanders is particularly relevant here.

So, I suppose, is my post last week about finding hope in books.

Let’s talk specifically about narrative.

The New York Times has a piece on the surge in unemployment which includes some good words from Professor Alice Fothergill at UVM: “A lot of people in the United States are very proud of feeling self-sufficient and independent… This is something that is definitely going to be very, very difficult.” She also noted that those who feel ashamed about seeking help are often the ones who need it most.

That same article also had this marvelous quote:

“In its unsparing breadth, the crisis is pitting two American ideals against each other—the e pluribus unum credo of solidarity and its near-religious devotion to the idea that hard work brings rewards. Those notions coexist peacefully in prosperous times. Today, both are being put to the test, forcing the newly unemployed to re-evaluate beliefs about themselves and their country.”

Those ideals are two stories that we tell about what it means to be American. They’re our national narratives. They’re institutions and ideologies, if you want to get into the weeds. These narratives are not always well-rooted in or supported by reality, but being well-supported by reality isn’t a narrative’s job. The narrative, the ideology, isn’t here to accurately reflect our world; its role is to tell us where we fit in, and what we should do. These narratives are often more aspirational than descriptive.

Follow me as I wander through a few more articles:

Some businesses are pledging not to fire their employees. Some are going further to take better care of their employees. I don’t know that I believe the article’s supposition that there will be any reputation-based reckoning for the companies that callously fire their employees. I’ll wait and see. Personally, I’d *like* there to be something, but… yeah, I’ll wait and see.

The Economist has data from the Spanish Flu about how social distancing preserved economic function in the 1918 epidemic, which is both neat and reassuring.

And it’s sensible in light of FiveThirtyEight’s piece on the cost of life which basically agrees that human lives are individually expensive, or at least that we’re willing to put a large number of resources towards preventing human deaths. But I think another profound acknowledgement is buried in a side comment: large scale losses of life also strip society of other things which are entirely in excess of the value of an individual life (arts, culture, education, etc). While we can tally up what we’re willing to pay to prevent a death, we can’t actually account for the full cost of a life… and the loss of many lives creates a loss greater than the sum of its parts.

Wandering back…

That “e pluribus unum credo of solidarity” is the narrative bedrock on which phrases like “united we stand” are built. From many, one. It’s how we come together as a country, as a unified community. It’s no mistake that “e pluribus unum” is on so many official seals of our government. It was adopted as an official motto in 1782 by an Act of Congress. Even when people don’t know what e pluribus unum means, you can see this in the devotion and considerate care people give each other during and after natural disasters (here for article, here for meta-study).

That belief that “hard work brings rewards” moves hand in hand with Professor Fothergill’s point that many people in the US “are very proud of feeling self-sufficient and independent.” Those elements are stories that’ve been part of our national narrative for ages, often referred to as the Protestant work ethic. They fed the romanticized vision of the Western, among other things, and when taken to the extreme encourage focusing on work to the exclusion of most other aspects of life.

They’re also foundational to other more toxic narratives, as people reason out from these ideals as though they were unquestionable truths.

For the past decades, we’ve prioritized the narrative of hard work and independence over the narrative of from many, one. We’ve taken apart our social safety net. We’ve told ourselves that we wouldn’t be the ones needing help. We’d be the ones who were smart, who worked hard, who reaped the rewards of our own work unlike those shirkers over there—because if hard work brings rewards and someone isn’t rewarded, they must not be working hard enough. We were Aesop’s ant, not the grasshopper.

Except, maybe, we as a country were wrong. Maybe sometimes people suffer regardless of whether they deserve it. Maybe people saw the success of mid-century white America and forgot what it was built on, what made it possible. Maybe we saw the later continued growth of corporate America and told ourselves that everything was okay as long as the big numbers went up—because eventually that would help everyone, even the little people. Someday.

It turns out that removing the things that help others around us also weakens us. Avoiding human deaths is good. Not avoiding them—even stripped of ethical or moral judgment—is still expensive.

Look.

It’s fine to take pride in supporting yourself and doing well. That’s healthy. But I don’t think it’s healthy for that to be the only place we find pride in our lives.

It’s important for us to take pride in supporting each other, and others around us. And to remember that we don’t *only* support our fellow humans by giving them money (though money matters, especially given the society we live in). It’s high time we remember that E Pluribus Unum is as much a part of our national narrative as any other ideas are. And with that in mind, and as we take care of each other by not getting each other sick, let’s find ways to make our country a little better at being kind and supportive instead of embracing something as callous as “live and let die.”

Exploring Political Stories

Posted on by Henry

I spend a lot of time thinking about stories and what they offer us, their audiences and their authors.

It isn’t radical to describe a continuous circular relation between us and the stories we tell about ourselves. Nor is it radical to say that many stories we tell can be read as being about ourselves, whether they were intended to be or not.

Where am I going with this?

I’ve studied the creation and propagation of ideology through political speech. I’ve studied the creation of stories.

I don’t know why it took me so long to write something here about the political stories we tell ourselves.

Now, when I say political stories, I’m specifically talking about stories that are incorporated into political speech. I refuse to draw a line and say that these political stories are the only stories which are political—any story, like any art, is political. But I’m most interested in talking about the stories that we use, consciously or not, to ground our political arguments. I recognize that this is a somewhat mushy definition.

How much substance, and what sort, do I need before I’m willing to call something a story? Do I need to have an entire literal Horatio Alger novel about gaining wealth through the assiduous practice of Protestant capitalist virtue before I’m willing to call it a story? No. I’m willing to call most things that we tell ourselves about the world “stories” for the sake of this exploration. The important part, as far as I’m concerned, is that what we tell ourselves inform the way we see ourselves (or other people) and inform our actions going forward.

To clarify, “Some people have blue eyes,” doesn’t qualify. But, “People with blue eyes are good,” does. So does, “All men are created equal.”

Furthermore, you needn’t explicitly say “people with blue eyes are good” anywhere in your story if people are able to infer that from the text. And it’s possible to infer from a text stories that the author didn’t intend to include. Stories—and people—are tricky like that.

I suspect that’s part of why political ideologies aren’t static.

I’ve come to this late enough today that I’ll stick to this introduction for now. I already have some ideas of political stories I’d like to explore in more depth in the future, but I think any particular story I explore will deserve more time than I could give it today (and I want to post today). If you have a particular story you’d like me to write and think more about, feel free to leave suggestions in the comments below.

Two interesting articles instead of a big post

Posted on by Henry

I’ve been doing research for my History of Children’s Book Publishing class instead of writing an article today, and tomorrow I’ll spend as much of the day as I can cooped up in the Houghton Library at Harvard doing more research.  I should have gone there earlier, but for the past week and a half every single day that I planned to go (and haven’t been busy with other things) the library has closed because of snow.  Fimbulvetr has struck Boston, such is life.

In addition to that, I’ve been trying to figure out which story I want to continue for Chuck Wendig’s current flash fiction challenge.  I haven’t yet decided, as I’m still reading through some of the initial submissions.

But that doesn’t mean I have nothing interesting to share!  Two things have caught my attention today: one is an article about the ideological and theological underpinnings of ISIS / ISIL / Daesh, and the other is some super cool news about nanotech being used to fight cancer.  The cancer one is a super fast read and is worth checking out, and the other one is just straight up fascinating as an examination of the self-proclaimed caliphate as a fundamentally apocalyptic millenarian organization.