> On Jan 30, 2025, at 12:32, glen <geprope...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Is it virtue signalling or an occult handshake to wear a T-shirt with > Maxwell's equations on it? I just don't know anymore.
Ha! Wonderful. I think there is an early age (say, beginning undergrad, or for those from civilized places, maybe later high school), when it is an aesthetic delight in the will to power, and not awful. After that, it’s insecurity. I ended up in a conversation with somebody — a NASA roboticist maybe? can’t remember whom — a month or so ago, and the person told me that Frank Herbert had been annoyed at how many of his readers totally missed the point of the anti-hero casting of Paul. Of course, whenever I read it, I missed it too, seeing Paul as, at most, a standard tragic figure. But, tasked with understanding _why_ most people would miss it, and thinking (as I do) that the natural readership for that kind of book is early-teen boys, I wanted some just-so-story about how missing the point would be the expected default. My story was: As a kid, you are under everybody. You can’t do things, and the things you actually are a superhero at (learning languages), the adults in your world are too dumb to recognize (mostly). You are also smaller and not as strong or as fast, and being more agile doesn’t get you much. If you are an early-teen boy, maybe smart enough to think a little and have ideas, maybe strong enough to feel some imaginings of potency, you can get caught up in the sense that things are possible for you, and of you. I am not inclined to blame that. It can cause problems when out of hand, but to be oriented against it seems life-hating to me, in many of the ways that Christianity always seemed life-hating to me. So one wishes for people what sense of hope, joy, or vigor it can provide, and tries to manage them through that age so they somehow grow up decent and not assholes. Hit a book about the unknown-talents boy about to discover that in him is all sorts of unsuspected power and potency, and it strokes that fantasy of “what might be possible of me”. Of course, books for readers that age are written by writers much older, and for them, the collapse of the proto-hero into the anti-hero is the big story. But I would expect the boys mostly to miss it, and that’s okay. I bet the writer still has that boy as a large part, anyway; else he could not have written that angle in a way that compels. Eric .- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ... --- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-.. FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom https://bit.ly/virtualfriam to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/ archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/ 1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
