Bad Guys and Ancient Knowledge

I’ve come to appreciate writers that don’t characterize immoral actors in their work as complete devils. Things that are considered immoral now, but commonplace in past times, is often depicted as being perpetrated by people of ill-character and worth. I’m willing to believe people who perpetrated bad “institutions” (nearly everyone) in the past were normal folk going along with the times. They were—just as we are today, and to a much greater degree thanks to technology—a participant in the brute, unavoidable, Rock of Gibraltar-slamming-force of social conditioning. This is why I think some people like a modern “bad guy” in a story more than a protagonist. The protagonist will be working off a template towards a goal; we know what he’s going to do and why. The bad guy, with all of his modern social conditioning speaking against his motivations, has to have a reason for his antagonizing, so his motivations are often times more thoughtful. Spreading good feels are enough for an audience to warm to a protagonist, but his opponent (not always thoroughly immoral, if a good writer has his hand in it) has a bigger burden to fulfill.

Somewhat related: you’re going to get a greater level or degree of truth from the people who are a bit “off” all the way up to some of the more outlying “dangerous” individuals. The reason is clear if you just listen to someone’s words when they parrot off a template belief system with rhetoric/language—i.e., anything that closely resembles something from programmed media, from the earliest radio commentaries up to and including clickbait article phenomenon—they’re really not going to be saying much. All that talk was crafted to avoid as much as possible uncomfortable but potentially useful elements of knowledge: paradox, contradiction, socially unacceptable language, etc. To fit in we avoid crimethink by the nature of social cohesion and order.

Here’s a good mental exercise that doubles as a quick and dirty test. Take the sentence beginning: “In this day and age,” and append to that any sort of belief or convention that would make sense after that phrase. Some of the more common conclusions to that sentence that spring to mind could possibly have its root in erroneous modern thinking—thinking that’s been sprouted into a nation’s consciousness only after. There’s a reason why people thought what they thought in the past, and it’s probably an epistemically “good” reason. Attributing “wrong” beliefs to the disembodied catch-all of “ignorance” is dismissive. The common ancient man may have not known “what we know now”, which for many of us amounts to surface knowledge of about a thousand disparate things, but what they did know they may have known very deeply and intimately. What are some of the things that they could have known in this manner?

When you have weirdos with wifi access and a Blogspot account, you’re going to get a shotgun-spray of crimethink, some of which is going to be truthful, mixed in with a lot of their personal preferences and cruft presented as truth. It can be easily parseable with a good dose of clear thinking, but how many of us are willing to do that? It might be difficult but the option of completely ignoring their claims because they aren’t doubleplusgood is the worse option.