It does make sense, and for me, at least, it brings to mind some examples that might at first seem a bit disconnected. But the key phrases here are, first: it's not just that they want Sam to be the big hero because they love him, but because that would say something about life that validates the way they see life. And then: if they're right that this is what a particular story is saying, then they're right about the world.
We might be talking slightly at cross purposes, here, and if I'm misreading you I apologize. But what's intriguing me here is the whole phenomenon of people being unable to assimilate threatening world-views. When I was an undergraduate, I tried to take an economics course and recoiled from it. It just seemed full of poisonous and evil assumptions! I absolutely could not tolerate it or get into it at the time. Now I would see it just as an intellectual problem, a series of hypotheses or models worth testing empirically, even if I had emotional or moral feelings about their implications.
I also remember, late in college, talking with a friend about a third friend who was determined on a very high-powered business career. "He just wants to hang out with the people who run the world," I said, kind of facetiously. And the person I was talking to got very upset about that, was obsessed with denouncing the "falseness" of our mutual friend's ambition, insisted that there was no such thing as a category of people who had real economic power, who had to be reckoned with in that way. I can't really convey her argument because I never found it coherent, but it was clear that she was feeling very threatened and offended and hostile.
I just find this an interesting phenomenon. At a certain stage of life, perhaps a certain stage of personal development, ideas and empirical generalizations about the world can be highly threatening, or highly reinforcing, in a way that has little to do with their demonstrability, and more to do, perhaps, with one's urgent personal efforts to develop coherent and tolerable hypotheses about how the world works. I'm not judging or condemning; it's an interesting thing for what it says about human nature, and, thankfully for rational discourse, I think it's eventually transcended. But it's a phenomenon worth noticing and naming. And since we're sharing a fandom with a lot of very young people, it's an issue that comes up with time to time in critical analysis.
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Date: 2005-03-15 12:55 pm (UTC)We might be talking slightly at cross purposes, here, and if I'm misreading you I apologize. But what's intriguing me here is the whole phenomenon of people being unable to assimilate threatening world-views. When I was an undergraduate, I tried to take an economics course and recoiled from it. It just seemed full of poisonous and evil assumptions! I absolutely could not tolerate it or get into it at the time. Now I would see it just as an intellectual problem, a series of hypotheses or models worth testing empirically, even if I had emotional or moral feelings about their implications.
I also remember, late in college, talking with a friend about a third friend who was determined on a very high-powered business career. "He just wants to hang out with the people who run the world," I said, kind of facetiously. And the person I was talking to got very upset about that, was obsessed with denouncing the "falseness" of our mutual friend's ambition, insisted that there was no such thing as a category of people who had real economic power, who had to be reckoned with in that way. I can't really convey her argument because I never found it coherent, but it was clear that she was feeling very threatened and offended and hostile.
I just find this an interesting phenomenon. At a certain stage of life, perhaps a certain stage of personal development, ideas and empirical generalizations about the world can be highly threatening, or highly reinforcing, in a way that has little to do with their demonstrability, and more to do, perhaps, with one's urgent personal efforts to develop coherent and tolerable hypotheses about how the world works. I'm not judging or condemning; it's an interesting thing for what it says about human nature, and, thankfully for rational discourse, I think it's eventually transcended. But it's a phenomenon worth noticing and naming. And since we're sharing a fandom with a lot of very young people, it's an issue that comes up with time to time in critical analysis.