But in shows like this, in quite a lot of sitcoms with more cringey aspects, the protagonist is not necessarily a good person and they are often undone by their own pettiness, selfishness etc. Certainly in UK comedy anyway. Look at Fawlty Towers, The Office... Blackadder to a certain extent.
So when the article says this -
> It’s natural when experiencing any story to identify and sympathize with the protagonist.
Yes and no - this is something that creators can play with and may make deliberately jarring. See 'Lolita' for an extreme example. The article even brings up Walter White, saying - "we are drawn to root for the primary subject of the story". If you're still rooting for Walter by the end of Breaking Bad... were we watching the same show?
By the end I was back rooting for him.
I wanted his plan to rescue Jessie (and to an extent Skyler) to work. It felt like a partial atonement[1] and allowed to show wrap up satisfyingly.
I feel the same way the same way about Tony Soprano. A terrible person with terrible behaviour but I still root for him at the end.
1. Of course nothing would really atone for his actions in reality but narrative isn’t reality.
Walt was still fascinating to watch and maybe I approved of or disliked some of his individual actions, and we definitely had deep insight to his character by then, but I don't think I'd describe myself as rooting for him or experiencing his story in a particularly sympathetic way. I wasn't experiencing the story through him by then as I might have been early on, if that makes sense.
Like you say, you experience the story through these dubious characters. Especially on multiple watch throughs you can really come to despise them but the series are so well made that the writers can bring you round multiple times.
There's something about the cognative disonence of how most people experience life there.
I was once told that most people that do bad things just convince themselves that what they're doing is actually OK.
So someone that steals from cars blames the car's owner for leaving it unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending their reality to justify their actions.
That's obvious criminality but I think that almost everyone is doing something like that to some extent.
For example, just look at the popularity of fast fashion that's almost certainly made with slave labour. At this point in time I don't think anyone buying from Shien[1] or Temu[2] could be in any doubt. They must know, they just don't care. They're still just everyday people.
> unlocked. That rings true for me. They're not sociopaths, they're bending
> their reality to justify their actions.
Thse are your words,
Isn't a stolen car Known as GTA or "Auto theft" ?
Where I live using the words Grand Theft Auto, with that capitalisation, implies the video game of the same name. We don't have the crime of the same name (we call it Taking without Consent).
Since there's been quite a bit in the news about video game censorship, including GTA, I mistook your comment as trying to change the topic to that. My appologies.
It was big of you to come back and discuss the way you did. Respect.
Butter the toast, eat the toast, shit the toast... God, life's relentless.
It's very well written, and it's the first time I've physically reacted that much to the awkwardness of fictional characters.
The reality is far more boring; these horrific actions were perpetrated by someone that occasionally had bad breath.
Heidegger was an enthusiastic Nazi and Arendt also defended him. Some people see the "banality of evil" book as essentially being a defense of Eichmann.
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Hannah-Arendt
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Heidegger-German...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Heidegger
https://www.openculture.com/2017/05/the-love-letters-of-hann...
https://slate.com/human-interest/2009/10/troubling-new-revel...
Well that was clearly never Arendt's intent. Have people actually tried to interpret her work to rehabilitate Eichmann?
I find the similarities between the two shows fascinating: in particular the way they both revel in how flawed their central characters are.
(Admittedly, the next show)
Are we the baddies?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ToKcmnrE5oY
Every villain is the hero in their own story, after all.
Are you sure?
Above a certain point, disposable wealth turns very readily to evil if it's not accompanied by social responsibility, a point made by some extremely woke dude in the Bible.
I think back on my past and all the evil actions I have taken have all been fed by very low self-worth and insecurity.
When you think of yourself as below everyone else, trying to bring them down to your level with malicious acts can feel like quite reasonable. You're "punching up" so you can feel a sense of righteous justification.
It's only looking back that I realize I wasn't nearly as weak as I thought.
On a more serious note, this is also why I'm wary of the "punching up" or "punching down" rethoric, because it's often easy to downplay any form of violence as justified retribution.
My favorite that I use on a regular basis, from Tracy: "I can't change! I'm like a chameleon -- always a lizard."
I'm not sure I understand the focus on realism here.
I mean, there's absolutely nothing in any scene of The Thick of It that looks at all realistic to me. But it captures the essence of incompetence, corruption, and opportunism so completely that reading actual news stories inescapably brings to mind scenes from that series.
Interestingly this is a similar conclusion that the Unabomber came to in Industrial Society and its Future:
https://web.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/classes/188/materials/In...
Kaczynski called out low self-esteem as one of several foundational components in the psychology of his hated enemies (“leftists”), whom he believed to be the primary scourge of society (ironic, coming from a mass murderer). Modern analysis of incel culture also places low self-esteem at the center of the problem.
So mass murder was definitely the intent
Incels usually narrow it down to women whom are expected to have sex with them because men are owed sex.
Another breadcrumb towards a deep hole.
This is a much longer (and well worth the read) development of basically that.
It’s quite startling how often characters in sitcoms tend to demonstrate traits of these three disorders and for a long while I wondered why.
Then I realized the answer is very simple: it’s really funny (when it’s not happening to you).
https://www.reddit.com/r/Piracy/wiki/megathread/movies_and_t...
My takeaway from Eichmann was not that Eichmann _wasn't_ a horrible person. It's very clear that he is horrible, that he had full knowledge of what he was doing. Her characterization of him was actually comical. Totally irreverent of the man. (and, made the book quite a fun read)
But I think Eichmann made a deeper point. "Banality" described his self-conception. The way his place in society was created for him, and the way he used it, not even to justify and rationalize his actions, but to simply allow himself to work without thinking towards the evil that transpired. The way that Nazi society created a mechanism by which he could, by default and without effort, continue working, in spite of obvious evidence of cruelty. In fact, seeing the gas vans up close was disturbing to Eichmann, as it would be to anyone.
She generalized the mechanism beyond the Nazis (the controversy of the book was that it pointed out how closely the Jews of Europe assisted Eichmann with his work).
It is these "default", "without effort" positions that we take, in all of our daily lives, that ultimately are evil. Although Eichmann was a particularly stupid and egregious example, we all have little sayings that we say to ourselves that allow us to ignore the cruelty and evil that happens in front of our face as a result of the structures we find ourselves in.
And therefore: that it is our moral duty to see what's in front of us and reject wherever possible the "default" or "passive" position. Eichmann was notable because of his utter inability to do that. Nothing more. So, I think I disagree with the author, the root of evil is cowardice.
And the gas vans (and chambers) were already an deliberate effort to make mass murder more palatable to those committing it.
In the early stages, the Holocaust was done not with gas, but with bullets. But the Nazi leadership found that their troops could not stomach mass shootings, not even the SS. Many started to drink too much, or started to talk too much. A few reveled in it - which in turn was something the leadership could not stomach: they had framed the actions to themselves as distasteful but crucial to ensure the survival of the German people, they did not want it to be executed by homicidal maniacs.
Thus, gas chambers: the person pressing the button doesn't have to see people die, and the disposal of the bodies can be outsourced to local labor, even to future victims.
Much easier on the conscience.
Once the focus shifts to autonomous drones, I guess we'll get the next stage of that detachment, for the software engineers that developed those things. You can write a cool tech blog about how you designed the training pipeline for your killing machine...
But the hard truth is that value systems are objectively subjective, and people can be confused, ignorant, frustrated, angry, insane, devoid of empathy, people we don't like, or our enemies - but not evil. It's time to let that term into the dustbin of history.
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